Remembering Thomas M. Disch

In his many dark, satirical, heretical books, the pioneering science fiction author contemplated death with elegant despair.

By Elizabeth Hand

Read more: Books, Death, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Books Features

July 11, 2008 | Few people make a successful career of contemplating death and suicide; fewer still approach the subject with the genuine ebullience and elegant despair of the prolific, criminally underappreciated writer Thomas M. Disch, who shot himself in his Union Square apartment, in New York, on the Fourth of July. Disch was a seminal figure in science fiction's New Wave, the iconoclastic 1960s movement that gave the genre a literary pedigree and popularized the term "speculative fiction." His books influenced writers such as William Gibson and Jonathan Lethem; his dystopias "Camp Concentration" and "334" are considered science fiction classics, along with his greatest novel, "On Wings of Song," a beautiful, dark meditation on the power and limits of transcendence through art.

An openly gay man for most of his working life, Disch wrote mysteries, historical novels and neo-gothic satires; children's books, including "The Brave Little Toaster" and its sequel; at least five collections of short fiction; 15 volumes of poetry, always as Tom Disch; plays and libretti; four volumes of nonfiction; screen adaptations, novelizations and one of the first interactive computer games. He edited anthologies; he wrote book reviews, theater reviews, art reviews, music reviews. He wrote collaboratively and pseudonymously; he kept a popular blog, Endzone, in which he shared new poems, some unpleasant post-9/11 screeds, and witty discourses on the meaninglessness and minutiae of life. In his most recent novel, he wrote in the voice of God, and on his publisher's Web site answered questions from readers. He wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote, for the sheer joy of it and for an even more primal impulse: to tell a story to the dark.

"Storytelling is just absolutely natural to me. It's my way of getting along with people, I guess," he told an interviewer at the Web site Strange Horizons in 2001. He'd call friends and, after an exchange of pleasantries, ask, "May I read you something?" The answer was always yes and his voice would lift as he read a sonnet or villanelle, or perhaps the section from "The Word of God" where Disch's deity wonders whether His father was in fact Thomas Mann.

He had a wonderful speaking voice, fluid and seductive. He sounded like John Malkovich, and he looked a bit like Malkovich too, in his prime. I grew up reading Disch's work, starting with "The Roaches" as a 12-year-old and devouring the novels as I got older. I first met him casually in the late 1980s, but only got to know him and his partner, poet Charles Naylor, during the last eight years or so -- far too brief a time. Tall and physically imposing, in public Disch could project a slightly threatening aloofness, with his shaved head, impressive tattoos, bodybuilder's mass. The silken voice that emerged from that intimidating form made him seem even more dangerous, one of those wizards who is subtle and quick to anger.

But then he'd dissolve in laughter and it would all suddenly seem to be a pose, a disguise, part of a vast elaborate joke that you were in on -- maybe. He could be irascible, scathingly dismissive; he held grudges and burned bridges. In recent years he'd put on weight, which exacerbated other problems: diabetes, sciatica, neuoropathy, depression. He had difficulty walking and was almost housebound.

And since the turn of the millennium he'd endured a Job-like succession of personal tragedies, beginning with a fire that severely damaged the apartment he shared with Naylor, his partner of 30 years; frozen pipes that caused a mold infestation at his house in Barryville, N.Y.; Naylor's long illness and eventual death from colon cancer; and, finally, eviction proceedings begun by the landlord almost immediately after Naylor's death.

During this siege Disch struggled with crushing grief and depression -- only a real deity would not -- yet he also had a humorous resignation that seemed very close to valor. He once said, "I am certainly a 'death of God' writer," and much of his work seems fueled by the rage and sense of betrayal of a former believer, as well as a refined sense of the ridiculousness of religious institutions, and the ultimate, absurd realization that we all die alone. His best work builds on Eugene Ionesco's dictum: "We are made to be immortal, and yet we die. It's horrible, it can't be taken seriously."

Death was the subject Disch returned to again and again, in his fiction and his poetry. Sometimes it was murder, spurred by passion or twisted religious or political fervor. Sometimes, as in his early novel "The Genocides," or his later satirical novel "The Sub: A Study in Witchcraft," it was simply a detached, clinical adjustment of the biological status quo, with untidy or unnecessary humans disposed of like irksome insects. He wrote often about suicide, nearly always without melodrama. "Laughter is just a slowed down scream of terror," he told Joseph Francavilla in a 1983 interview.

... thoughtful minds are free of pain
To the degree that they can think
And alchemize their thoughts to ink.
Happy the man who can declare
His angst with any savoir faire.

-- Tom Disch, "Waking New Year's Day, Without a Hangover," 1986

Born in Iowa in 1940, Disch spent his childhood and early teens in the Midwest before moving to New York, where he attended Cooper Union and New York University. He held the usual spate of desultory writers' jobs, most memorably a brief stint in "Swan Lake's" corps de ballet, where he encouraged the other male dancers to sing "I am, I am, I am a swan" under their breath while Margot Fonteyn expired as Odette. In 1962 he wrote his first story in lieu of studying for an NYU exam and promptly sold it to the science fiction magazine Fantastic. He subsequently dropped out of school to devote himself to writing.

A number of beautifully crafted stories date from these early years. Among the best: "Descending," in which a man steps onto a department store elevator that only goes down, forever; the much-anthologized "The Roaches"; and the Kafkaesque "The Squirrel Cage," in which a writer works feverishly, endlessly, on a horror story he cannot even see, and which no one will ever read: "The story has gone on far too long. Nothing can be terrifying for years on end. I only say it's terrifying because, you know, I have to say something. Something or other. The only thing that could terrify me now is if someone were to come in. If they came in and said, 'All right, Disch, you can go now.' That, truly, would be terrifying."

Next page: Raised a Catholic, Disch took the heretic's glee in attacking church hypocrisy