'Nothing Fats Him But Other Men’s Ruins'

I was asked to write something about a recently dead writer as part of a post-mortem Festschrift, and declined. I had never liked this guy’s work. As a newspaper reporter, I was obliged to meet him and write about him, and he quickly confirmed his reputation for unpleasantness. When I explained why I was turning down her request, the editor who sought my tribute was peeved and accused me of “insensitivity.” For once, that accusation was correct, though Schadenfreude may have been more on the money.

In his Anatomy of Melancholy, Burton relates this complicated and occasionally shameful reaction to envy and malice, and he may be correct. We feel “sorrow for other men’s good” and “joy at their harms, opposite to mercy, which grieves at other men’s mischances.” Burton adds: “His whole life is sorrow, and every word he speaks a satire: nothing fats him but other men’s ruins.” Perhaps, but of course I like to think I’m discriminating in my enjoyment of “other men’s mischances.” It’s not universal. I don’t rubber-stamp all deaths, all losses and suffering, with a big red “Good for him!” Only those who deserve it. I’m not proud of my occasional indulgence in Schadenfreude but neither am I much bothered. In 2009, a year after his death by suicide, Tom Disch’s “Funeral Games 1” was published in Parnassus:

 

“A friend, who shall be nameless, e-mailed

today to reprehend (again) my klutziness

in having said, ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’

This after having gone on at length

about the splendor of her father’s recent

obsequies. The bitch! But she was right:

I was not the least bit sorry. Maybe envious:

He’d lived to ninety-one, sired

four over-achieving brats, who stand to gain . . .

That went unsaid. Charlie, on the other hand,

died in penury and bitterness that shredded

his soul. No obsequies for him. Her loss?

Her pleasure, by the sound of it.

I am, as she found out, a hypocrite.”

 

The final rhyme is delightful. Disch was not unique in the way he relished Schadenfreude; merely more public in the way he enjoyed it. As La Rochefoucauld put it more than 350 years ago: “We have enough strength to bear the misfortunes of other people.”