Benjamin De Casseres


Benjamin De Casseres was an American journalist, critic, essayist and poet. He was born in Philadelphia and began working at the Philadelphia Press at an early age, but spent most of his professional career in New York City, where he wrote for various newspapers including The New York Times, The Sun and The New York Herald. He was married to author Bio De Casseres, and corresponded with prominent literary figures of his time, including H. L. Mencken, Edgar Lee Masters, and Eugene O'Neill. He was a distant relative of Baruch Spinoza and was of Sephardic descent.

Writing career

At the age of sixteen, De Casseres started working as an assistant to Charles Emory Smith, editor of the Philadelphia Press, for $4 per week. At the Press, De Casseres rose from his position as an assistant to become a "copy boy," editorial paragrapher, dramatic critic, proofreader, and city editor. During his ten years at the press, De Casseres had a few publications, including one of his first signed editorials, an article that appeared in Belford's Magazine praising Thomas Brackett Reed.
In 1899, De Casseres moved from Philadelphia to New York, he worked as a proofreader first for The New York Sun until 1903 and then for the New York Herald, where he remained until 1916. Although his employment at The Sun lasted for only four years, he continued to have periodic letters, poems, and reviews published in the book review section. He also wrote reviews for The New York Times and The Bookman.
De Casseres' first notable work was an article on "Thomas Hardy's Women," which was published in the October 1902 issue of The Bookman. Upon receiving a copy of the article from De Casseres, Hardy wrote back and thanked him "for writing so sympathetic an article." By 1904, De Casseres was starting to receive notice in newspapers and magazines as having "an aptitude for saying clever aphoristic things." An essay on Hawthorn written in the same year and published in The Critic received a fair amount of attention, with portions of the piece being reprinted in various other publications such as the New York Times Book Review, and was cited in a Hawthorn bibliography published the following year. In 1922, some of De Casseres's early essays were collected in his book Chameleon: Being the Book of My Selves.
In 1915, De Casseres published his first book, a collection of poetry titled The Shadow-Eater, to mixed reviews. Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff called the volume "a welcome tribute to individualism and defiance" and the poems themselves "metaphysical meteors, searching, cataclysmic and rich in satire." A review in The New York Times favorably compared De Casseres to Walt Whitman, claiming "if his alien, highly individual genius remains unrecognized, criticism will lie upon the public, not upon him." Others, however, received it less favorably. Clement Wood, writing in the New York Call, mocked both De Casseres' book and Wagstaff's review, writing, "It must be admitted that Mr. De Casseres often uses good rhythms; what they are about is another thing. They are mainly about Nothing, as far as we can gather." By 1923, when the book was reissued by the American Library Service, a reviewer for Poetry wrote that De Casseres had lost "the simple sincerity of utterance which is the birthright of the true prophet."
Starting in 1918, De Casseres reviewed books for The Sun, the editor of which described him as having "a dramatic gift" as a reviewer. During the same period, he reviewed books for The Bookman, which advertised that "the best of Mr. De Casseres's work appears in the Bookman" – to which The Sun responded with the claim that "the most glorious book review ever published on any page was Mr. De Casseres's in Books and the Book World, of Broome Street Straws by Robert Cortes Holliday." De Casseres also wrote humorous articles and reviews for the New York Herald and The New York Times.

Politics

De Casseres was interested in politics from an early age. His first signed editorial, published in 1890 when De Casseres was 17, praised the administrative changes Thomas Brackett Reed had recently made as Speaker of the House.
De Casseres described himself as an individualist anarchist, and supported private enterprise though he opposed both capitalism and socialism. In October 1909, a letter to the editor of The Sun in which De Casseres called socialism the "illusion of the twentieth century" sparked a series of responses in the same publication and others. His frequent comments against socialism peppered the articles that he wrote for popular magazines and journals as well. As a Hearst columnist, De Casseres routinely railed against socialism, communism, and other forms of collectivism, and he excoriated those who promoted such political structures, including H. G. Wells, Upton Sinclair, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
De Casseres was also a staunch opponent of Prohibition. He used his position as a well-known editorialist to criticize, often satirically, prohibition policies. In particular, he wrote about the effect of Prohibition on New York City, especially its ineffectiveness of actually preventing drinking. De Casseres was widely reported as the first person to take a legal drink after the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment, he having previously arranged to receive a "flash" telegram from Utah, the last state to ratify the amendment.
At various times De Casseres defended free speech. In 1909, he signed onto a petition calling out the police departments of New York City, Brooklyn, Yonkers and East Orange for their respective activities in preventing anarchist Emma Goldman from speaking in those cities.

Personal life

De Casseres met Adele Mary Jones in 1902. They were both staying at the same boarding house and only saw each other a few times before Bio moved West with her husband Harry O. Jones in early 1903. Over the next 16 years, De Casseres and Bio Jones corresponded frequently, developing a long-distance romantic relationship, until Jones divorced her husband in 1919 and married De Casseres the same year. They remained married until De Casseres' death in 1945.
In 1931, De Casseres published a collection of letters the couple sent each other during their courtship, titled The Love Letters of a Living Poet, which highlights the unusual nature of their relationship. In one of the letters, De Casseres describes a dream in which "after thirty years together we were both cremated and our ashes mixed inextricably" and "cast into the depths of the sea" where eventually they are "returned to the ecstatic hermaphroditic union of a great biological-mystical fable."
De Casseres died at his home on Manhattan's Riverside Drive at the age of 72. After his death, Bio De Casseres published his final collection of essays, titled Finis, for which she wrote a brief preface. She also authored several works of her own.

Social influence

De Casseres held "an aggressively individualist form of anarchist politics derived primarily from a discomfiting reading of Nietzsche." His views on the idea of the Superman were influential on contemporary writers such as Eugene O'Neill, who called De Casseres an "American Nietzsche" in the foreword to , and Jack London, who wrote that "no man in my own camp stirs me as does Nietzsche or as does De Casseres." In The Mutiny of the Elsinore, London named a character with a nihilistic point of view "De Casseres" based on their mutual admiration for French philosopher Jules de Gaultier.
According to Marie Saltus, writer and philosopher Edgar Saltus would read the newspaper immediately each morning only if it contained a book review or an article by De Casseres, although the two never met.
Artistically, De Casseres has been described as adopting proto-Dada rhetoric as early as 1910.

Short works