Darkness and light

Tom is in the next room but one, calling out. He's working on his novelization of "The Prisoner" and wants to read a paragraph to me. November light pushes through my bay window to lie quietly expiring on the floor. Down in the yard I see the mounds of leaves he raked together earlier, then abandoned. Deciding to leave the Selectric running, I go up and down the three stairs, through the narrow hallway, to his office.

Thomas M. DISCH died, of suicide, this Independence Day. Recent years had been hard ones for him, I gather: a sense of lost readership, considerable physical pain such that he became virtually housebound in his New York apartment, an ever-deepening depression following the death of his partner, Charles Naylor. There at the end, Tom's bitterness, the ragged leading edge of the ambition that so animated him, seems to have broken through, though still liberally seasoned with wit and self-deprecation.

Endings are seldom pretty. Tom knew that. He knew that not very much is pretty, in fact, once you scrape the patina off.

Except the arts. Tom was a great patron not only of poetry and fiction but also of opera, music, painting and sculpture. I don't think he believed our arts would magically save us, but he was pretty sure they were our best bet, perhaps our only bet -- even if they, like everything else in life, might well be taken with a sprinkling of salt, a dash of cynicism, and half a cup of good-natured fun.

Searching for words here (in silence, without the hum of the Selectric these days), I remember our sitting on the porch in Milford discussing a change from "could" to "would" in one of his poems. I recall the growing list of "Hard Words" he kept over his typewriter for years, and I wonder if he ever got the chance to use them all. I remember him, Pam Zoline and John Sladek trading nonce words back in London, "epithesis" being a favorite. And later, his childlike joy at the sound of the word "micturation," his delight at our describing a lawn game to be played "with mallets and forethought."

Breakfast at our hotel in Notting Hill Gate, Tom on his way in from Turkey to settle a while, me having recently moved to London. Tom has just published "Camp Concentration" in New Worlds, and I've come to help edit the magazine. I remembered his stories from Cele Goldsmith's Amazing Stories and Fantastic, read his first novel. A correspondence ensued, and it was his example, a living, working writer, that more than anything else convinced me to give it a try myself, that such might be possible.