Less than two years after publication of Walter DeCasseres book of poetry, the St. Petersburg, Florida newspaper The Evening Independent reported on January 30th, 1928, that Hans Stengel, the cover artist for The Sublime Boy, committed suicide.
Sept. 26th, 1926 – Walter DeCasseres
SUICIDE’S POETRY FOUND ON BILLS
Discover of Laundry Tickets Reveal Tragedy of Descendant of Spinoza
VERSE NOW PUBLISHED
The recent discovery of a package of laundry bills, invoices and paper bags on which were scribbled a great number of poems, brings to light the life and death of the one of the last two descendants of Benedict de Spinoza, the great Dutch philosopher and descendant of Simon De Casseres of London, the famous wealthy merchant who was the close friend of Oliver Cromwell. The poet was Walter DeCasseres, born in Philadelphia in 1881, and who committed suicide by drowning in February 1900. His body was recovered by workmen at the foot of the Arch street wharf in Philadelphia five weeks afterward. He was identified by a library card found in his pocket. DeCasseres committed suicide for purely philosophical reasons. He has been called the “American Thomas Chatterton,” because like the English lad he committed suicide at an early age and also wrote great poetry. When the manuscripts were submitted to Professor Leonard Charles Van Hoppen, formerly Queen Wilhelmina professor of Dutch Literature at Columbia University he declared that the poems of DeCasseres are superior to any poems written by Poe, Keats, Shelley or Blake at that age. The rediscovered poems, which are published today by Seven Arts, under he title of “The Sublime Boy,” reveal similarities to the mournful mysticism of Edgar Allan Poe and the world weariness of the old testament poet who cried “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” Whereas Thomas Chatterron committed suicide for physical reasons–because he was starving–Walter DeCasseres was a spiritual suicide, who had a contempt for life and a horror of what se saw on this planet, although he was in perfect physical health, had a home, a loving family, and a good position in the proofroom of the Philadelphia Press, where he was a copyholder. DeCasseres’ poems were written between his sixteenth year and the time of his death at 18 years and nearly siz months. They were only recently found by his brother, Benjmin DeCasseeres. Many of them were only deciphered with the greatest trouble and after the lapse of considerable time. They were scribbled — sometimes in ink, sometimes in pencil–very carelessly on the first pieces of paper that come to hand–sugar bags, backs of bills and torn bits of white paper.
Two great Edgar Saltus books in one…
Edgar Saltus was a huge influence on Benjamin DeCasseres. You can read DeC’s biographical sketch of him on the Forty Immortals page.
This book expounds upon many of the intellectual roots of Benjamin DeCasseres’ writing, giving sketches of a number of thinkers DeC frequently mentions as well as some of the oriental and occidental foundations of his more pessimistic thought.
Drinks!
Two social column mentions connecting DeCasseres to booze, natch…
One of the natty drinks of the moment is a pink concoction, served in small tumblers and of a melon pink coloration with trimmings of sliced fruit. It is called a “Ward Eight” and is simply a whiskey sour–Ben deCasseres’ favorite tipple–with a pony of grenadine instead of the customary powdered sugar. It is said to have gotten its name from the point of origination–the 8th Ward in Boston, Mass.
-from “New York Day by Day” column, by O.O. McIntyre.
Published in The Poughkeepsie Star-Enterprise, Friday, Sept. 25, 1936
Another high-powered concoction was Joel’s Blue Moon cocktail, the ingredients of which no one seemed to know bu Joel and Ben DeCasseres, and they would never tell. when mixed it was a Prussian blue and had a velvety chestnut taste.
-from “New York Day by Day” column, by O.O. McIntyre.
Published in Daily Sentinel, Rome, NY, Wednesday Evening, April 14, 1937
“The Wizards” by DeC, from The Judge, 1917
from The Judge, October 27, 1917
THE WIZARDS
ALL children are poets. Their minds are great wells of imaginative fancy. Their little heads are fairy caves. Their eyes are the windows of a palace of magic delights.
They do not see the external world as it is, but as they modify it. A house is not a house to them, but is the abode of a goblin or a fairy.
Strange beings dwell in everything. Everything has a soul, and you cannot make a child believe otherwise. Their imagination creates life where life is not; they infuse into each inanimate object the superabundance of their own minds.
They relate the most extravagant stories with an air of truth. It is their truth. To them their dreams and visions are the only real things in life. They have no use for a cheerless, stupid fact. Their minds carry a finer secret.
Yes, a secret! A great secret! A marvellous secret is theirs! They live in a Kingdom of Secrets which we older ones, world-weary and task-laden, can never enter.
They—the smiling children with the dreamy faces—have the key to the door of Truth. It is they who see behind the masks that things wear; it is their newer souls that see things truly.
The craving for tales of adventure, for romance, the thirst for fiction of all kinds are the attempts of the grown human being to force entrance once again into that Palace of Endless Delight—the mind of the child.
—Benjamin De Casseres.
New Anarchists…
Nouvelles anarchistes
La création littéraire dans la presse militante, 1890-1946
Édité par Vittorio Frigerio
INTRODUCTION
L’IMAGINAIRE DE LA VIOLENCE
Méténier, Oscar, « Libre »
Chaumel, « Le Meurtre »
Méric, Victor, « Les bandits tragiques. Comment fut pris Garnier »
Sterne, Hermann, « Tant pis pour eux ! »
Mercereau, Brutus, « Le rat »
Savanier, André, « Un provocateur »
Armand, Émile, « Le paragraphe treize (Récit d’un cauchemar) »
PARABOLES ET ALLEGORIES
Richepin, Jean, « Triptyque »
Bertrand, Pierre, « Légendes du futur – Ils étaient trois »
Vandérem, Fernand, « Le 3 mai »
Multatuli, « Providence »
Upward, Allen, « Karos, Dieu »
Sans nom d’auteur, « Le philosophe facétieux » (traduit du sanskrit par R. D.)
Southall, Joseph, « Fable »
De Casseres, Benjamin, « Aristophane sur le Calvaire »
Devaldès, Manuel, « Au royaume des Borgnes »
Mirbel, Xavier, « Conte de Jadis. La fin d’Énaus »
Ryner, Han, « Le Père Diogène »
The Fountainhead Advert. 1946
Feb. 18th, 1946
Walter DeCasseres in “Masquerade” book…
MASQUERADE
QUEER POETRY IN AMERICA
TO THE END OF WORLD WAR II
SELECTED AND EDITED BY JIM ELLEDGE
WALTER DE CASSERES (1881-1900)
The Battle of the Passions 135
Phantoms 136
The Suicide 136
“Nocturne” in French
Archived from: http://tresors.oublies.pagesperso-orange.fr/EnDehors/DeCasseres-Nocturne.htm
Nocturne
Il fait nuit.
Le voleur, éternel représentant de l’humanité, reprend son poste de guet au coin de la rue.
La prostituée, voyante et sybille, la première-née de Dieu, avive ses lèvres d’une teinte de rouge avant de descendre à la recherche de son repas.
Les cafés, les théâtres, les cinémas, avec leurs milliers de milliers de lumières commencent à marcher à la conquête de cet univers amorphe : l’ennui.
Dans les hôpitaux un vague mal-à-l’aise aiguillonne les corps des patients et les pensées, comme de noirs parasols, s’ouvrent en leurs cerveaux.
Dans des vêtements de soirée impeccables, les millionnaires — ces yoghis de la chair, parcourent de long en large els mille allées des jardins des établissements de luxe à la recherche de leurs ondulants Nirvanas.
Un poète, qui redoute davantage son propriétaire que le Très Haut, allume sa lampe sans abat-jour et commence une ode merveilleuse à la gloire du Renoir des Cieux.
Un mendiant, des yeux duquel la Faim a châtré le courage, demande qu’elle lui paie un café à une riche madame que son courage héroïque a mis pour toujours à l’abri des atteintes de la Faim.
La lune, momifiée dans un éternel sommeil — coprolithe gelé de la terre, — gravit, à l’Orient, les échelons de l’Espace, tel un reptile.
Il fait nuit, et le Cela, le « Ce qui est » aux yeux multiples et auxquels n’échappe rien, s’éveille de sa sieste subtile pour tenir sous sa surveillance le sous-monde des humains.
Benjamin DeCasseres
L’En-Dehors n° 331-332, Juin-Juillet 1939
“GET IT AND HOLD IT” July 3rd, 1931
Archived from: http://yesteryearsnews.wordpress.com/tag/benjamin-de-casseres/
“GET IT AND HOLD IT,” PHILOSOPHY OF MAN IN STREET
Mason City Globe Gazette (Mason City, Iowa) Jul 3, 1931
The philosophy of the man in the street is “get it and hold it,” in the belief of Benjamin de Casseres, poet and ironic philosopher, who says that after all this may be the most workable system for those to whom abstract theories are no more than the “Einstein theory to a gnat on a derby.” The article is one of a series on “what’s going on in the world today.”
By BENJAMIN DE CASSERES.
(Copyright 1931, by the Associated Press.)
NEW YORK, July 3. (AP) — Philosophy — which is, literally, the love of wisdom but which is in reality the art or science of explaining the how and why of things — has never had much of a vogue in America. Today less so than ever for the American cares very little about the how and why of things. His one question is: Will it work out?
He doesn’t philosophize on the current depression of his jobless condition or the contraction in stock values. He is not concerned, if he is a wet, how prohibition came on us. Nor will he take any steps, either personally or thru his legislative representatives, to prevent future moves of a like nature. He philosophizes thus: Here it is. Let’s dodge it if we can’t get out of it.
Philosophy In Way.
This attitude is, I suppose, a philosophy in a way — a lazy, do-nothing, good natured philosophy founded on the ineradicable and inherent optimism of the expansive soul who calls the state in which he happens to be born “God’s own country” and who believes “everything always comes out right in the end.”
That’s the philosophy, anyhow, of the man in the street. Of abstract thot he has not a glimmer. Theories of the universe, psychological problems and philosophical aphorisms and rules are no more to him than the Einstein theory to a gnat on a derby. His “wisdom” is “get it and hold it.” And I’m not sure that it isn’t the profoundest, the only and most workable system of philosophy so long as the world is peopled by practical, down-to-the-ground beings.
Boast Two Men.
In the regions of pure philosophical thot we boast of two men who have profoundly affected thot in Europe — Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James and one political philosopher whose influence has been universal, Thomas Jefferson.
Emerson and Jefferson, both advocates of extreme and aggressive individualism, and, theoretically at least, idealist — anarchists, are as dead in the country of their birth, so far as the public go, as prohibition in Hoboken. We move toward the standardization and destruction of all individual rights into pure capitalistic bolshevism, in which moloch-state becomes the absorber and keeper of all personal values.
Fits America.
William James, who gave us the philosophy of pragmatism — or what have you? — comes nearer to the ideal American philosopher, fits more neatly into the American character, than either Emerson or Jefferson.
Pragmatism is really a great and universal individual philosophy which makes the workableness — or “cash-down value,” as James calls it — of a thing the criterion of its truthfulness. He is, in a manner, the enemy of abstract thot. His antithesis is Remy de Gourmont, who said, “thots are to be thot, not acted.”
Does Not Exist.
Philosophy in the grand sense in American does not exist today. There is no love of thot for the pure gymnastic of cerebration. No one cares a hen’s molar about why anything happened or whether it will happen again.
All I can see ahead in America is Karl Marx, who was neither a philosopher nor a thinker, but a sensational utopist with a diabolical scheme for extinguishing the individual.
After all, what is wisdom? I think it is just to stand aside and watch the show. I, who am a philosopher, get a great kick out of it.