'And Talked Down Speechless Death'

In my November 1 post I asked, “Does anyone know anything about Edward Case?” I had stumbled on a gifted poet previously unknown to me who had died in 1985. This week I heard from his son James Case, an architect living in New Jersey, who briefed me on his father and his work. “He was one of the most interesting people I’ve ever known,” James told me.

 

Case died from leukemia at age sixty-two. Born in Manhattan, he had a book review column in the fifties, owned a company manufacturing gasket pumps and held ten patents. He befriended Hilton Kramer. He wrote for the Wall Street Journal and exchanged letters with the English novelist Joyce Cary. After Cary’s death in 1957, Case published an essay about his work in the Spring 1959 issue of Modern Age, in which he wrote:

 

“And then he died, and after the obituaries were written the makers of literary opinion continued to write about lesser artists, and there was no sign to indicate that anyone understood that one of the greatest creators in the history of the novel had finished his work.”

 

At the time of his death, Case had assembled a manuscript of seventy-five poems titled The Business of the Dancer, rhymed and unrhymed, metrically regular and free verse. “Minor Poet” is one of five poems by Case published in the October 1985 issue of The New Criterion:

 

“Saved by a line

Before he sank

    Into the nameless sea:

His sentence stayed,

His passage paid

    Home free.”

 

Case’s poems are serious, not solemn. With the years, they grew in terseness. Here is “A Voluntary for Doctor Johnson” in the Summer 1958 issue of Modern Age:

 

“Gentlemen, let us tie the tongue of talk

And be silent -- bid the trumpeter sound

A voluntary for Doctor Johnson.

 

“A voluntary for Doctor Johnson

Whose carcass gross as far-gone pregnancy

Concealed the fearful wonder of a child;

Who couched himself in the cushioned phrase

Of dogma and felt it creak against his weight

And pound of anguish;

Who cheered himself with the sound of voices

And tilted his tongue against his terror

And talked, talked, talked, till Despair herself despaired

And like a squelched woman bit her lips and schemed.

 

“Gentlemen, let us tie the tongue of talk

And be silent -- bid the trumpeter sound

A voluntary for Doctor Johnson.

 

 “A voluntary for Doctor Johnson

Who, in his fright, conversed against the night

And talked down speechless death.”

 

Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary defined the noun voluntary as “a piece of musick play’d at will, without any settled rule.”

 

James Case hopes to publish his father’s poems. He sent me a pdf of the manuscript, which I haven’t finished reading, but the quality is consistently high. Is there an enterprising editor/publisher out there who might want to read the poems and consider publishing Case’s work? Let me know at patrick.kurp@gmail.com. Case writes in his Cary essay: “When an artist is appraised at less than his true worth, he may fairly be said to be neglected.”