Thomas M. Disch as Elizabeth Hand remembers: “Few people make a successful career of contemplating death and suicide; fewer still approach the subject with … genuine ebullience and elegant despair.”
Thomas M. Disch: Cult Writer for the Next Generation
Several years ago, my copy of The Man Who Had No Idea got wet while I was out of town and it began to mold around the edges. I was then in an unpleasant financial situation — just buying the $2 old paperback gave me a great deal of anxiety at the used bookstore register. But instead of throwing it out, I took scissors to the offending bits. I read that book cover to cover except for the first sentence of every page that was cut away. The circumstance itself was pretty Dischian. His early short stories were about young people in a dumpy roach-infested apartments, who if forced to chose between food or books, would go to bed hungry. He was the sci-fi writer for the creative underclass.
As openly gay writer, Thomas M Disch wrote about being an outsider with authenticity. His imagination fueled a dozen vivid novels. And I’ve been a fan of his since I was 6: The Brave Little Toaster was the Wall-E of its day, the first cartoon to play at the Sundance Film Festival. From this post on Daily Kos, I learned, he’s also the man behind The Lion King. (Not that he made more that a few grand off of that one either.) But some good news, it sounds like the author of the post is working on a documentary about him.
Disch was unmistakably erudite. Indeed, a few of his books discussed intelligence. In 334, a character is pained by the low IQ scores that by government mandate prevent him from ever having children. In Camp Concentration, researchers experiment injecting a form of syphilis modified to make the patients geniuses. Championed by the likes of Howard Bloom and more recently, Ed Park, his is the most accessible science fiction for non-science fiction readers.
But fans of the genre should know his work too. His book The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, a long chronicle on how science fiction went mainstream, is so funny and illuminating. I just picked it up and randomly fell upon the line, “each dystopia, like Tolstoi’s unhappy families, is dystopic in its own way” — and that’s pretty representative of his humor.
Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and a poet and critic, told the New York Times, “The reason his science fiction is important is that he combined a kind of really dark Swiftian satire with a modernist, really postmodernist sensibility.”
While most science fiction writers are emotionally detached, Disch was highly self-aware. He so rawly described depression and general mental illness, it is no wonder so many of his most loyal readers first discovered him as teenagers. To the uninitiated, I’d almost suggest putting off reading his early short stories and Camp Concentration until you are enraged about something. People call him an angry writer, which is true, but angry as a reaction to frustrating circumstances, not in an annoying or unpleasant-to-read way. He wasn’t ranting like Harlan Ellison or Lewis Black. He wasn’t misanthropic, well…not really. He was angry with a composure.
And much of that has to do with his age while he was writing. He was 25 when The Genocides was published. Camp Concentration and 334 were published before he turned 32. That anger seemed to have subsided after he met his partner Charles Naylor. And On Wings of Song, written several years later, while no less wry and engaging, has a sweetness to it that his previous books didn’t.
But Charles Naylor grew sick and died in 2004. And the money ran out. And he was facing eviction. His Livejournal entries over the past few years show he was growing increasingly unhinged. I looked over The Word of God yesterday evening. There’s much in there about the afterlife, references to the “Kurt Cobain Expressway” and passages like this:
Part of the problem with suicide is that there seems no way to guarantee that one’s own passage to the other side will be so exquisitely catered as it is in Crespi’s or Keats’s or Wagner’s versions. I tried suicide just once, when I was eighteen, living in a sublet on West 16th, for no reason that I can remember. But what teenager, gay, penniless, and without friends needs reasons? Anyhow it was a sincere attempt: I shut the windows, stuffed a towel under the door out to the hall, turned off the gas burners on the stove, and went to bed. When I awoke a few hours later, I was astonished that I wasn’t dead, and after I’d opened the windows and returned the towel to the towel rack, I called Con Ed to complain. The man I talked to explained that Con Ed had long ago introduced an element into the gas that would make people nauseous before they could die, and that’s why one no longer reads of suicides discovered in their ovens.
Darkly humorous as that example is, it was too disturbing to give it a thourough reading. The last few lines of 334 similarly haunted me. The character Mrs. Hanson says, “I do want it. I want to die. The way some people want sex, that’s how I want death. I dream about it. And I think about it. And it’s what I want.”
He will get the audience he deserves. I see other gay writers as well as women and non-whites, and just about anyone who has felt like a genre misfit, really responding to his work and taking influence. Heck, “slipsteam” is already deeply indebted to him.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if one day his name is as popular among teenagers as Vonnegut’s. It is just too bad it didn’t happen while he was alive.
I was hoping someone would scan the old paperback copy of Camp Concentration, as it is one of my favorite covers in SF I’ve long since lost my original. Jeff VanderMeer has done so (he just picked it up at used bookshop this morning.) Plus he urges readers to buy up every copy they can and pass it along, “If you have the time, post a photo of the books you bought, and then post a link to your blog post on the last entry on Disch’s blog. It’s a little like laying flowers on a gravestone. A sign of respect and appreciation.” There’s no reason for a writer this good to continue on so long in obscurity. Ed Champion has posted his podcast interview as well a bunch of other things and wrote a tribute for NY magazine.
Thomas M Disch died Friday of an apparent suicide. This really breaks my heart. He never found the audience he deserved. I buy up Camp Concentration when I find it in used bookstores and pass it along to my friends. He is one of my top ten favorite authors, and I’d spent most of this weekend excitedly rereading his books preparing for a possible interview with him. Of his dozens of books, I haven’t encountered one that wasn’t richly imagined and beautifully written. More from Matt Staggs and Ellen Datlow.
Everything Thomas M Disch writes is amazing, especially Camp Concentration. Tom Moody points out he also made a video game in the 80s (and scripted The Brave Little Toaster.) I haven’t read the MD, but Moody explains it as “From childhood the evil protagonist spends his spare time building a personal world of torture and murder that grows increasingly baroque as he ages.” He’s got a new book coming out called The World of God, and is taking questions (as god) on his blog.
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