Unqualified Offerings

Tom Disch is dead.

I got to meet him in the mid-90s at the West Chester poetry conference. The word "nice" would cover his general behavior that weekend, and his interactions with me specifically, perfectly well. I didn’t take a seminar with him, but I got to talk poetry and SF with him around mealtimes. We had a mutual friend in Frederick Pollack, or I’d have been even more nervous about striking up a conversation with him than I was. (His opinion of his old friend Samuel R. Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand was not nice. When I wondered when we would see the promised second volume, he suggested Never would be a good time.)

His suicide is a sobering reminder, if one were needed, that doing everything you bother to try well won’t necessarily make you happy. He wrote landmark science-fiction stories in the 60s and 70s. "Casablanca" haunted me in the months after the al Qaeda atrocities of September 11, 2001. "Descending" made all too much sense to me when I read it in my 20s and continues to make too much sense to me today. I treasure my volume of his poems that Johns Hopkins published in the 1990s. (The title of this post comes from "The Snake in the Manger," a Christmas poem that can best be described as "wickedly sweet." Plus, these three lines: "From the Red Sea to the Baltic / There is an action peristaltic / By which one swallows what one chews.") Over time he settled into a social-satire groove, often on "poetry inside-baseball" topics. He published "At the Grave of Amy Clampitt" years before Clampitt’s death. The poem tweaked her own propensity to write graveside memorials. Later, when he attacked Susan Cheever for the details on her father’s sex life she stuffed into an autobiography, the wind-up was an elaborate sequence of lines about how people cope with death, including, "And Amy Clampitt visits famous graves." ("And Susan Cheever sells her father’s shroud," was how it ended.) I’m quoting several of these lines from memory, and I’m glad to recall them, which means Disch was a very good poet. The fact that I can’t quote entire poems probably means he wasn’t a great one, but very good is a very good thing to be.

He also had an all-too-brief career as a mass-market horror novelist. The Businessman sold well for several years to people who buy their books in malls and don’t much care about landmark SF or poetry. My friends and I loved it. It’s best described as a horror story about a ghost being haunted by her living husband, a truly monstrous fellow. Her allies include the ghost of John Berryman, who tries to put the moves on her, mostly out of habit. Years later, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of was one of the first, if not the first, nonfiction works to declare what gunshy geeks had mostly been too self-conscious to notice: science fiction won. The world was ours. We had become mainstream culture. It’s a commonplace truth now, but Dreams came out before truck companies based commercials on Worlds of Warcraft and the NFL used Lord of the Rings motifs to promote playoff games. The book was by no means triumphalist, because Disch knew that we were Slans with feet of clay. His essay, "Pyramids for Minnesota," is the road national-greatness conservatism might’ve taken had it been more interested in genuine greatness and less in phlebotomy. He created a popular children’s-lit franchise.

And now he’s killed himself. I hope that, depression notwithstanding, there were at least a few moments over the years when he saw his career as his admirers saw it. If those moments ever came, they were plainly too rare. But the life Tom Disch ended over the long weekend was a damned accomplished one, and I’m grateful for it.