“Fresh tears are running down my naked mind!”—Delmore Schwartz, Genesis: Book One
“People in hell want ice water.”—Rip Torn in Don Carpenter’s 1973 film Payday
“Plus tard, s’il y a un plus tard, je dirai un mot là-dessus. La pitiè est une sorte d’enfer.”—Flaubert (?)
Is pity a kind of hell! Did Flaubert in fact say that? Someone who would've surely agreed in any case was the poet Delmore Schwartz,
who died wretchedly alone in a New York flophouse in 1966, his body unclaimed for days. John Berryman judged his Genesis: Book One among "the greatest imaginative works of the century . . . with which in penetration, range, intelligence, no other American poem . . . can comfortably be compared." Over the top, as so often with Berryman—and what of uncomfortable comparisons? Should we pity Delmore because he felt himself a loser? Here now are his collected poems in a splendid edition of almost 700 pages. It's "the poems that count," their editor says.* A few great lines, many good ones, but countless that fall fatally flat. It's rather as Rossini said of Wagner: "de beaux moments, mais de mauvais quart d'heures."† Still, to have written a few great lines is more than most purported poets can claim!
It's okay to pity people once they're dead. Not safe, though, is self-pity, which is indeed a kind of hell. "I lie in the coffin of my character!"‡ Delmore laments. And we do pity him.
*The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz, edited by Ben Mazer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), xvi.
† Gioachino Rossini, letter to Emil Naumann, April 1867, in Naumann, Italienische Tondichter (1883), 4: 5.
‡ Schwartz, Genesis: Book Two, in Collected Poems, ed. Mazer, 427.