He WAS a misunderstood prosodist living hand-to-mouth with a wily intelligence and a savage wit. He lived in New York, but his talents were largely ignored by the literary elite. His strikingly original books, spanning speculative fiction and poetry, were frequently confined to the mid-list dustheap. Many of his collections, such as "Burn This," could not find American publishers.
He'd lost his longtime partner to cancer. He was fighting to keep his modest apartment. He suffered from depression, diabetes and sciatica. He had written such blistering novels as "Camp Concentration" (1968) and "334" (1974); mainstream readers bristling from his tough truths could find a speculative compromise in his 1986 children's book "The Brave Little Toaster." But above all, he wanted to be known as a poet. He turned out prolific elegies on his blog (one posted less than two weeks before his death was titled "Why I Must Die: A Film Script"), but he had stopped sending these poems out to literary journals.
On Independence Day this year, Thomas M. Disch put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. He was 68.
It is difficult to plunge into Disch's posthumously published short story collection, "The Wall of America," without considering this act and Disch's insecure relationship with his homeland.
Performance artists, vampire hunters and cultural philosophers are just some of the marginalized misfits dangling over the rough edges of Disch's America. In the title story, an artist is pushed literally to the brink, hanging his paintings on a concrete divide bordering America and Canada, choosing "the least densely hung stretch that they'd offered him, not so much because his paintings needed room to sprawl but because he did." Disch's characters need love, money and other essentials that they can't seem to ask for. They toil in a nation that refuses to find a place for them.
Several of these stories feature telltale allusions to death. In "The White Man," the protagonist reports her suicidal tendencies to a medical official and is prescribed "purple pills as big as your thumb." In "The Owl and the Pussycat," a sweet and irreverent reimagining of Edward Lear, a woman kills herself by mashing up sleeping pills into rocky road ice cream. Many stories conclude with characters disappearing, lost to "the wilderness's own video arcade" or waning with corporate memos that "slowly faded from the page, like the smile of the Cheshire cat." In Disch's wicked wonderland, the underlying cause doesn't matter as much as the harsh reality. Make no mistake: People who don't fit into the grand scheme will be crushed. As the mother at the end of "A Family of the Post-Apocalypse" puts it, "It isn't anyone's fault. It's just the times we live in."
