A resounding silence in my usual corners of the internet on the subject of Tom Disch’s suicide – on Independence Day, no less. I guess he’s not well known among poets here in the UK, but he has been a sort of emblematic American curmudgeon for so long that I’d have thought some folk awareness, at least, would have filtered over…
Also, some of my Baroque readers may be aware of the strange and wonderful cartoon The Brave Little Toaster? (It has become a kind of paradigm to me, often cropping up in some analogous form or other in my thoughtstream…) Well, Tom Disch wrote (as they say) the book. Also – though apparently the debate still rages in those cloisters between his adherents and those of Philip K Dick, another suicide and friend of Disch – a prolific and influential sci fi novelist. (Don’t ask me. Like I read sci fi.) And: “a brittle and brilliant ironist with a bright wit and no optimism whatsoever.” (Making Light)
But the obits are rolling in, and the internet is filling with information. I was shocked that he had done this last week; I had no idea till Wednesday, when someone from the LA Times emailed me about the post I had written some time ago about Disch’s blog – an email I’m sorry! I never answered. Too hungover and euphoric and tired, and not on my own computer, and not quite taking in the urgency of what he was asking me.
Lately Tom Disch – in his mid-to-late sixties – had been publishing most of his poems, if not all of them, straight to this dyspeptic blog of his, which I had flagged up here very briefly a year or so ago. (That was a short post, I seem to remember wanting to write more but being in some kind of rush, but I wanted to flag it up and come back to it. Well, here I am coming back to it. Careful how you do things, he’d have said.) I confess to reading the blog seldom in that time, and with a sort of pained fascination. The air of madness – or at least the heavy air of unthwartable, unstoppable personal imperative – or at least of darkening speed – hangs about it like one of those green pre-thunder skies. It’s a train wreck in slow motion. His lifelong partner Charles Naylor – he was gay – had died in 2005, and Disch holed himself up in their apartment in NYC to deal with his grief and increasing (I gather) depression. The rawness got more and more raw, the veneer of wit was cracked and got thinner and thinner… in short, it is a terrible, sad story.
Squandermania, an anecdote
And a long compendium of tributes and articles can be found here.
Disch’s poems are wonderful: bleak, black takes on the futility of everything, often very funny, gorgeously put together, original and real, and they click shut in your mind like a box. In the past week people have been reproducing things like the one where he talks about the beauty of the bullet, which weeps; or the ways in which writers die; the ones about his partner, the one where death comes to him and starts making plans… there’s a blog post from earlier in the year where he’s taking bets on who’s going to die in 2008. Sure, it’s morbid, and it’s also hard to imagine a mind so active, so busy, like a – like a – a brave little toaster.
Here’s one I liked:
Queen’s Gambit
A lovely pearl, milord, so luminous:
I thank you for it. Now please, get rid
of that wretched jester Yorick.
He isn’t funny any more. I can’t suppose
he ever was. People may split their sides,
but all their laughter is in deference
to you and to the sceptre that you wield.
What kind of influence is he
on little Hamlet? The boy repeats
his sly innuendoes and dirty jokes
He dotes on him! I know your brother
agrees with me. So do kill him, will you?
That’s a good king.
