This is a guest article written by the critic and artist Richard Kostelanetz, based on a piece that originally appeared in Rain Taxi #88. His website is at richardkostelanetz.com
Ever since New Association of Sephardi/Mizrahi Artists & Writers International appointed me one of its honorary fellows more than a dozen years ago, I’ve become more curious about Sephardic writers in America, more than once pointing out their omission from the standard anthologies of American-Jewish writing (except, of course, for Emma Lazarus, whose rhymes grace the Statue of Liberty).
Certainly the most substantial of these needlessly forgotten writers has been Benjamin De Casseres. Biographical information about him was spotty when I last wrote about him in 2017. Born in Philadelphia 3 April 1873, he didn’t go to college, instead becoming as a teenager a regular patron at the local Apprentice’s Library, incidentally founded by another Benjamin (surnamed Franklin). Starting as an office boy at the Philadelphia Press, he became at seventeen an editorial writer and theater critic. One source of Jewish genealogy identifies him as a descendent of Baruch Spinoza via the philosopher’s sister Rebecca de Spinoza, who gave birth to an earlier Benjamin DC around 1660. Variously is his surname spelled: DeCasseres, De Casseres, and de Casseres. I prefer Casseres or BdC, alphabetized under C.
An appreciation by his friend the writer and cartoonist Carlo de Fornaro (1871-1949), also Sephardic perhaps (much like my friend Arthur Fornari), places Casseres on the staff of the Sunday edition of El Diario, the Spanish-language newspaper that still exists. He contributed to Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work, which was the most prominent avant-garde magazine in pre-WWI America, and then occasionally to The Smart Set from 1914 to 1922 at least.[1]
BdC published poems and essays in many other smaller literary periodicals. One poem favored by anthologists in his own time was “Moth-Terror,” which is a sterling example of his apocalyptic prosy poetry in the tradition of William Blake (well before Allen Ginsberg):
I have killed the moth flying around my night-light; wingless and dead it lies upon the floor.
(O who will kill the great Time-Moth that eats holes in my soul and that burrows in and through my secretest veils!)
My will against its will, and no more will it fly at my night-light or be hidden behind the curtains that swing in the winds.
(But O who will shatter the Change-Moth that leaves me in rags—tattered old tapestries that swing in the winds that blow out of Chaos!)
Night-Moth, Change-Moth, Time-Moth, eaters of dreams and of me!
Doing a Google search, I discovered him remembered for this aphorism: “Progress is nothing but the victory of laughter over dogma,” which is charming but, to my senses, uncharacteristic of a writer otherwise more heavy than light! Other websites have this odd aphorism: “A mouse …running in and out of every hole in the cosmos hunting for the Absolute Cheese.”
Even in his critical reviewing, Casseres had a penchant for hyperbole. “Eugene O’Neill was the first true dramatic genius that America produced. He spun all of his plays out of his own bowels, lifting them up into the light of eternal cosmic and human laws.” Of one O’Neill play, BdC writes: “Marco Millions is the roots of O’Neill become a gorgeous flower. The black in O’Neill’s soul has become gold. Social venom is transmuted into ironic laughter of the mournful gods. Impotent melancholy bursts into the flame of philosophic wisdom, ‘Caliban’ has become ‘Hamlet’; ‘Yank, the Hairy Ape,’ has become ‘Kublai Khan,’ epicurean pessimist.”
About O’Neill himself, Casseres waxes with an abundance of opening appositives:
Beachcomber, adventurer, water-front bum, a “down-and-outer” with sailors and stevedores, a man fired from a hundred jobs, a nervous smash-up that landed him in a sanitarium; a man of melancholic, tragic temperament, having been at Gethsemane and having walked the fiery, alcoholic hells (a more tremendous feat than water-walking), Eugene O’Neill came out of the sanitarium like Lazarus newly risen.
BDC seems to have made literary alliances, first with Stieglitz, who dropped him however, and then with the playwright Eugene O’Neill, who wrote an introduction to Casseres’s book, Anathema! Litanies Of Negation (1925, Gotham Book Mark). BdC also wrote a short polemic about H. L. Mencken and G.B. Shaw that demotes the latter as inferior to the former, who incidentally published BdC in the American Mercury.
Dennis Rickard, a biographer of the American painter Clark Ashton Smith writes that the Providence terror author H.P. Lovecraft in 1925 and 1926 “made several efforts to gain a wider and, perhaps, more sophisticated and appreciative audience for Smith’s paintings. In 1926, he arranged for a sampling of twenty paintings to be shown to the distinguished writer and critic Benjamin de Casseres, in New York, in the hope that he could ‘bring them to the attention of some art authority of adequate standing.’ Apparently, this came to naught, or nearly so. Smith again gained a fervent and lifelong admirer in de Casseres,” Another website credits BDC with coediting the German film Das indische Grabmal (1921) for American audiences as The Mysteries of India (1922).
As unfortunate in his personal life, he spent years winning his last love, who had initially married someone else and moved to California before returning to BdC.[2] He lived in a single room while working odd jobs. On BenjaminDeCasseres.com is miscellaneous information including addresses. From 1933 to his death 7 December 1945, he lived with his wife at 593 Riverside Drive in New York City, which is between 136th and 137th Streets.
Why was he forgotten? His most remarkable work was certainly eccentric, if not unclassifiable. Most of it came from smaller, less visible publishers. His final publisher, Gordon Press, barely distributed its books. As a Jewish writer descending from earlier Sephardic immigration he did not appeal to the later generation of Jewish-American literary publicists, most of whom descended from Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europeans.
Searching for his rather unusual name on the Internet, I suspect he was related to an earlier BdC, Jr. (!), who is identified in The Occident and American Jewish Advocate (June 1848) as trying to establish in Curaçao a Talmud Torah. “He is assisted by the Rev. David Cardozo, minister of the congregation. The plan has been accepted with enthusiasm by the people, and many of the younger members of the congregation have offered their services as teachers. Mr. De Casseres is a merchant, and our correspondent presumes that he must suffer a loss in his business by the time he spends in this benevolent object.”
I also found this passing comment about the later BdC in an inventory of Jack London’s papers at the Huntington Library: “Six letters from Jack to Benjamin De Casseres deal with literary matters, and one especially interesting letter from the just-widowed Charmian to the same addressee, dated November 29, 1916, firmly disputes De Casseres’ apparent assertion that Jack was now ‘star-roving’ after death.” Whazzat? His Wikipedia entry states that, “De Casseres described himself as an individualist anarchist, and as such he was both a strong advocate of capitalism and a frequent critic of socialism.”[3]
Once known as “the greatest unpublished author in America,” Casseres found a patron, described by Fornaro as “a Harvard scholar and efficient businessman Joseph Lawren” to issue his uncommercial unpublished manuscripts, sixteen in sum. Three volumes collecting his shorter works appeared in 1935, perhaps self-published. Reissued as pristine hardbacks by the Gordon Press in 1977, these I own and treasure, even though they lack any prefaces or annotations.
More recently, Kevin I. Slaughter, the proprietor of a Maryland small press wittily named Underground Amusements, has published several BdC volumes, sometimes reprinting earlier books, more often new compilations of fugitive pieces, in handsome perfect-bound editions that are readily available. Slaughter’s website BenjaminDeCasseres.com collects information about BdC as well as numerous pieces of his writing.
Editor’s Notes
1 Like Smart Set’s editors H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, DeCasseres was a hard-drinking thinker (or vice versa). When Prohibition took effect in 1920, he tried to be “the last man in the United States to take a drink on the night the Volstead blight came upon the land. But along about 10:30PM, I got so busy tanking up that I forgot about my noble aspiratioin. I must have fainted. All I remember is that my elbow was stiff the next day.”
In 1925, in Mirrors of New York, he looked back fondly on his pre-Prohibition memories. James Traub quotes from this “thoroughly soused memoir” in his book The Devil’s Playground: a Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square: Times Square was “the central depot of a Grand Trunk Line of Booze” that stretched down Broadway, with the bar at the Knickerbocker Hotel as “the headquarters of the 42nd Street Country Club.” On the street outside, he said, “only one phrase could be heard: ‘Let’s have another!'”
DeCasseres vowed to be the first man in America to take a drink after Utah ratified the 18th Amendment, bringing an end to Prohibition. He arranged to have a telegraph terminal installed in a Manhattan bar so he could be informed the instant the ratification vote passed in Salt Lake City. “After it is all over, I shall return to my home and my literary work, ready to die when Satan calls. I shall have filled my immortal soul with ineffable joy.”
2 According a newspaper article from 1931, DeCasseres first saw Mary “Bio” Terrill in 1902 in the kitchen of the boarding house where was living. “From that November morning until she left in March 1903, I saw her only four times, each time only briefly. In that time, I never touched her hand. I — reputed to be a brilliant and dynamic talker — was a perfect idiot in her presence.” Mary married and moved with her husband to the West Coast. DeCasseres got her address, though, and for the next 15 years, the two corresponded almost daily. Finally, in 1919, she divorced her husband and married DeCasseres. “In our 11-year marriage,” he told the reporter, “the first 16 years were the hardest.”
3 To call DeCasseres an individualist is to put it mildly. He was extravagantly and irrepressibly individualist. “Every great individualist worthy of the name is a renegade,” he once wrote. In 1932, he announced that he was going to publish a magazine to be called DeCassere’s Magazine, which would be written entirely by him. It would, he declared, “be a magazine of aggressive individualism, because the individual is the unit of all values.” Yet, he promised, the magazine would “have the smack and tang of eternity.” Although Slaughter reprints the pamphlet DeCasseres published as a prelude, the magazine itself never saw the light of day. In his 1936 pamphlet, The Individual Against Moloch, DeCasseres wrote, in words that would have made Ayn Rand proud, “There is no common good except the development of the individual. The state has no other function than to protect its members against invasion and promote the will of the individual so long as that will does not force itself on the will of another individual”