“My hatred of you has turned to pity”

“I had been for the past year an editor of a new encyclopedia, and a hack who had been fired, after turning in several poor and inaccurate articles (he cribbed from older encyclopedias, and even his cribbing was mixed up, inaccurate, and disjointed) thought that I was the person who had been the cause of his losing his job. So he had called me at three o’clock in the morning, and attempted to hold a genial and intimate conversation, and when I told him I was trying to sleep, he asked if I had a woman with me! I hung up in anger, and he kept calling, night after night, until at last I told him how unkind he was to wake me up at that hour, and he replied, “My hatred of you has turned to pity,” but he had continued to call and then hang up without speaking.” –Delmore Schwartz, “The Track Meet,” 1959. Of the writers I truly admire, Schwartz might be the one whose power is most mysterious to me. There were moments when I felt I had successfully imitated him a little bit but never figured…