"THOMAS M. DISCH, 1940-2008"
BOTTUM, JOSEPH
Casual THOMAS M. DISCH, 1940-2008 He sent me a note on July 2, just some jokey line about politics: nothing unusual, nothing portentous, nothing worth a call to see how he was feeling....
...Of course...
...All in all, it was a fi ne career—one with which nearly any popular writer would be satisfi ed...
...But the truth is that Tom Disch really was a genius...
...Whatever such men do, in the end, it cannot be enough...
...A member of the “New Wave” generation, he helped move science fi ction away from its pulp origins, but there was also something dark and off-putting in his work...
...He once told me that part of the reason he quit writing science fi ction was that, to deepen it into real art, “I would have to be like [the brilliant religious science-fi ction author] Gene Wolfe and return to the Catholicism that I barely got away from when I was young—and I can’t do that, of course...
...JOSEPH BOTTUM...
...Who else could have written comically lowbrow reviews for Entertainment Weekly, deliberately pretentious theater criticism for the Nation, wisecracking essays on art for THE WEEKLY STANDARD, and formal verse for First Things...
...And yet, it seems, in the fi nal analysis, strangely lacking...
...A pipe had burst in his farmhouse in upstate New York, and two years later, he told me this spring at lunch, he still hadn’t done anything about it: a lifetime of books and papers now abandoned, an inch deep in mold...
...By the time he sat down this summer to kill himself, he seemed to have frittered away most of the money he’d made...
...Two days later, according to the news reports, he sat down in his New York apartment and put a gun to his head—a July 4 suicide, the noise of the shot lost in the crash of the fi reworks above the East River...
...The prickly brilliance with which he thought himself down into a narrower and narrower trap...
...Or lacking, at least, in the works one would expect from a talent as prodigious as Tom Disch’s...
...Just because he was who he was, he got away with things that few other writers have managed...
...An image of waste and unbearable sadness...
...In 1980, he banged out a children’s tale called “The Brave Little Toaster: A Bedtime Story for Small Appliances” that became a popular Disney fi lm...
...The pistol he kept in gleeful defi ance of the city’s gun laws...
...That’s a terrible image to have left for one of the most talented and interesting people of his generation...
...He couldn’t, of course, because it’s not enough: The mad brightness of his arrogance burned against a background blacker than the grave...
...Only in 1999 did he fi nally win one of science fi ction’s Hugo Awards, and that for his nonfi ction history of the genre, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of...
...He was best known for the science fiction he wrote early in his career, from The Genocides in 1965 through On Wings of Song in 1979...
...The endless self-conceit that confi rmed even his despair as a great and cosmic thing: an arrogance against the universe, a point of deadly pride...
...His two volumes of essays about poets and poetry are the most lively of the last twenty years, and his own poetry was at its best in comic applications of fantastically diffi cult forms...
...In 1987, he penned a screenplay for Miami Vice: the weirdest episode of that television program, starring—if I remember correctly—the soul singer James Brown as an extraterrestrial and the gawky young Chris Rock as a hitman, with some inexplicable subplot involving peanut butter...
...I can picture it, unfortunately...
...There was nothing he couldn’t do with words...
...His homosexuality was always unhappy, and his life was always a mess, and he never escaped his escape from Catholicism, if that makes any sense: He never got over the proud feeling that in his unique genius he had broken his chains like Prometheus and was free to do anything...
...Casual THOMAS M. DISCH, 1940-2008 He sent me a note on July 2, just some jokey line about politics: nothing unusual, nothing portentous, nothing worth a call to see how he was feeling...
...Those ratty, rundown rooms in which he lived...
...The cosseted ill-health and the limp...
...He wanted, however, to be known as a poet, even changing his byline from “Thomas M. Disch” to “Tom Disch” whenever he published his verse...
...Here in old age,” he grandly announced when I saw him at lunch this spring, “I’ve fi nally decided that being a genius is enough for any man, and I’m just going to have to live with it...
...As the critic John Clute once observed, “Because of his intellectual audacity, the chillingly distant mannerism of his narrative art, the austerity of the pleasures he affords, and the fi ne cruelty of his wit, Thomas M. Disch has been perhaps the most respected, least trusted, most envied, and least read of all modern fi rst-rank SF writers...
Vol. 13 • July 2008 • No. 42
