Asimov's SF, April-May 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  After the reading there's a sort of group dinner in a bar/restaurant several blocks away. Tom could only walk there very slowly and effortfully and I lagged back with him. In the restaurant, all that bright energy had drained away, and if he didn't seem quite depressive, he seemed sort of sadly resigned to his luckless and seemingly terminal state.

  His career as a novelist, in commercial terms, was hopelessly in the shitter. Tachyon, a well-regarded small press with a literarily impressive list, was doing The Word of God and maybe other titles, but a small press like Tachyon paying minimal advances and offering no realistic hope of significant royalties afterward could only acquire such a list because other such literarily major SF writers could no longer place their books with the so-called majors. Tom seemed almost at peace with this as we discussed it in the restaurant—or perhaps more accurately in retrospect—had given up the struggle.

  And he had a tale of real estate horrors impressive even for New York. He and Charlie had long had a good rental apartment in an excellent location off Union Square in lower Manhattan and later a country place. The country place was destroyed by a flood. Union Square had become tres chic, in the advanced stage of yuppification, and the landlord there wanted to cash in on it by evicting his tenant by hook and/or by crook and selling the apartment as a co-op or condo for big bucks.

  Now just as there are many ways for a landlord in New York to squeeze a tenant out of a rental apartment in order to sell it, legally punctilious and otherwise, so there are many ways for said tenant to fight a delaying action and turn a would-be real estate blitzkrieg on the part of the landlord into a forever war at least as lengthy as the one in Iraq.

  But when I pointed this out to Tom, he shrugged it off, admitting he had no more fight left in him. His health was bad and getting no better, his career as a novelist had been shit-canned by the devolution of the publishing industry into condition terminal, and he was soon to be evicted, which in Manhattan where the chances of finding an affordable new apartment for someone in his financial circumstances are slim and none, that meant either out on the street, or way out in the boonies of the so-called “Outer Boroughs.”

  That was when Tom spoke quite calmly, rationally, and all too logically, of suicide.

  What he didn't mention in the laundry list of good reasons to kill himself was the fairly recent death of Charlie Naylor after a long, grim illness. Dona and I had been friends with Tom and Charlie when we had been together in the 1970s. We broke up and didn't come back together until 9/11, but Tom and Charlie had been together continuously for over three decades. Like Tom, Charlie was a published poet. Like Dona and I during both phases of our relationship, Tom and Charlie had another life together outside the pocket universe of science fiction. They shared many common interests. They loved each other. Though I do not really believe there is any such thing as the perfect couple, they came as close to it as any I knew.

  Tom wouldn't quite say it, so I said it for him. All that stuff is indeed terrible, but hardly the worst of it. By far the worst of it is the death of Charlie. You've lost the love of your life.

  Once I had acknowledged it, so did he. And under the circumstances what was really left to live for? Wouldn't suicide be a rational and logical act? And I could only sort of acknowledge that it was, realizing that he was seriously considering it, but not that he had already planned it out.

  But still, twice I had confronted friends seriously considering suicide. And twice I had talked them out of it and neither they nor I had ended up regretting it. So I told Tom what I had told Phil Dick under a similar circumstance.

  Phil and I had never met or even talked before when he called me one night from Vancouver, though I had read most of his novels and admired them greatly, and he had obviously read at least one of my stories.

  “This is Phil Dick,” he began as if we were old friends, “I'm in a bin in Vancouver, my girlfriend has left me, I'm very depressed, and I'm considering killing myself. But I read your story Carcinoma Angels and I want to ask your opinion first, because I've got an offer from a professor at Cal State Fullerton in Orange County to go down there and be taken care of. So tell me, be honest about it, in your opinion, should I move to Orange County or kill myself ?”

  “Well, Phil,” I replied in like mode off the top of my head, “personally I can't stand Orange County. But on the other hand, you can always kill yourself later.”

  “Yeah, that makes sense,” said Phil, and he moved to Orange County, remained there until his death from natural causes, continued with his writing, got married again, fathered another child, and became my good friend.

  I told this story to Tom Disch as a form of the same advice in the hope that he would follow it with similar results. “I can't go on, I'll go on,” as the famous line from Samuel Beckett has it.

  Instead, what I got from him was a totally unexpected reaction not to my argument against suicide but to Philip K. Dick.

  It was not complimentary and it was not very coherent. He had only met Phil once, and according to Tom over booze and a bong, and it had something to do with Phil writing a letter to the FBI tipping Tom as some kind of subversive or even a Communist or an agent of the KGB.

  Well, anyone who had even read Paul Williams’ long piece in Rolling Stone about, among other things, the break-in in Phil's apartment and Phil's rather paranoid opinion of American spy and security agencies and how they were out to get him, let alone knew Phil personally, could only find this ridiculously off the wall, and I just let it drop.

  Then Tom shot himself on July 4, Independence Day, as if to make the kind of poetic metaphoric point on the way out of which Thomas M. Disch was fully capable.

  And then I read The Word of God.

  * * * *

  What to make of this book?

  What could anyone make of this book if Thomas M. Disch hadn't killed himself shortly after its launch, in retrospect as part of its launch, indeed as the capper, indeed on July 4 as a deliberately timed Declaration of Independence from the karmic travails of his life, real and fantasized?

  I can't do that. And now nobody can. Tom saw to that.

  What can anyone who didn't know Tom and didn't know Phil make of this book?

  Obviously I can't do that either.

  The Word of God is not a novel. The Word of God is not a memoir. The Word of God is not a collection of previously published fiction and poetry. The Word of God is not a metaphysical and philosophical mediation on God, the Universe, and Everything, nor a satirical piss-take on same. The Word of God is not a post-mortem fond farewell nor an angry post-mortem score-settling.

  It is a jumble of all of these things together, formally incoherent yet philosophically and metaphysically erudite and cogent, bitterly ironic yet with a blithely humorous spirit, an angry bird flipped in the faces of whatever gods there be and an elegiac yet somehow upbeat series of meditations on Tom's own impending and apparently already planned death. And all of it beautifully and expertly written, proving, if nothing else, that yes, Thomas M. Disch was a writer great enough to do all these things at once, and in retrospect, that he had been doing it all along, that this is the story of his career, his legacy, his tragic legacy.

  First as tragedy, then as farce, as Karl Marx said of history repeating itself.

  With Thomas M. Disch, with the writings of which he was capable, with the story arc of his career, with The Word of God, his deliberately crafted swan song, it was and is both at the same time.

  There are fine poems in this book that maybe approach greatness, that at any rate have a clarity and lucidity that so much modern or post-modern poetry lacks. Tom Disch was a prolific poet and a well-regarded one, by my ignorant lights better than many with greater reputations in such circles.

  There is mean-spirited score-settling in The Word of God, with his ex-agent, with the world of publishing that failed him. There is high-spirited and hilarious score-settling with fundamentalist Christianity. There are serious and also satirical lear
ned philosophical and moral meditations. There is humorous autobiography with the jokes as often as not on himself. His love for Charles Naylor and the agonies and small triumphs of Charlie's long struggle with cancer are touchingly delineated.

  But the centerpiece of The Word of God, discontinuously embedded in all this, to which the plurality of wordage is devoted, is a bitchy, mean-spirited, utterly bizarre piece of apparently score-settling fantasy, in which the main characters are fictional avatars of Philip K. Dick, Thomas Mann, and Disch's own mother. And Disch himself as “God.”

  Difficult indeed to attempt to summarize this discontinuously presented tale, let alone make any literary sense of it, and I would be disingenuous if I did not admit that as both a friend of the late Phil Dick and an enthusiastic admirer of his oeuvre, I am appalled, and being a friend and admirer of the oeuvre of Thomas M. Disch makes it even worse.

  Philip K. Dick is in hell, Disch's concept of an appropriate Dickian hell; a domestic and serially endlessly repetitive nightmare reminiscent in that respect of Groundhog Day, with demonic persecution piled on. Why he has been condemned to hell in moral terms is to say the least unclear; for writing a lot of schlock in his earlier career to stay financially afloat maybe; for his unfortunate choice of a series of mates in life perhaps; for, uh, denouncing Disch to the FBI—or at least that's all that seems to be on the pages.

  Back in the 1940s, Thomas M. Disch's mother is hanging out in the lobby of a Minneapolis hotel where she is destined to have a one-night stand with an aged European gentleman that will produce the very author of this disjointed tale. A bit later in the narrative, Disch's would-be father is revealed as none other than Thomas Mann, the great German author, herein depicted in a not very favorable light, who, as in the real world, has sought refuge in the United States from Nazi Germany.

  Phil Dick, in an appropriately shape-shifting demonic incarnation, is sent back in time and to Minneapolis to prevent this from happening, to prevent Tom Disch from being born as the illegitimate son of Thomas Mann by killing Mann, which will somehow give the Nazis a second chance to win World War II, and make Satan, in the guise of Phil Dick, or vice versa, President of the United States forever, in place of George W. Bush, who will take his place in hell.

  Why?

  Because Disch stole the idea of Dick's alternate world novel The Man in the High Castle in which the Nazis did win the war and turned it into his novel Camp Concentration, turning it into “a Communist type of story,” which is also why, in our real world, chez Disch, Dick tipped him to the FBI and “got to be friends with J. Edgar Hoover.”

  Though to make this even crazier and more confusing, Disch, in a footnote, declares that Dick denounced him to Hoover in October 1972, after Hoover was already dead. Though of course, this footnote, like the rest of the Dick story where its fiction nature is obvious, could be, and probably must be, taken as fiction.

  Tom Disch, God in this literary creation, incarnates as a juvenile version of his then unborn self, and travels back in time to Minneapolis in the company of a murderous crook to foil this Satanically Dickian plot.

  In the denouement, at the end of much hugger-mugger, Mann is killed, Disch-as-God resurrects him, but nevertheless, it is not Mann who screws Disch's mother in the hotel room and may or may not have sired the author of this thing, but Disch's murderous companion.

  I am not making this up.

  Thomas M. Disch made it up in a book pretty clearly meant to be his last literary word on the brink of his pre-planned suicide.

  But why? Why would Disch leave such a mean-spirited and, it must be said, evil-minded, dissing of Philip K. Dick behind as a literary testament? Why would he drag in a bitchy portrait of Thomas Mann in the bargain? Why would he give such a parting finger to the memory of his own mother?

  Crazier still, or maybe in some twisted way not, included in The Word of God is a poem, “Ode on the Death of Philip K. Dick,” written in 1982, which is part snide commentary on Dick's life and legend, part attack on the film studio that, chez Disch, butchered Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? into Blade Runner, and part elegy which ends with:

  * * * *

  “Well, Philip, have I said it yet? The bitter,

  Insufficient truth? I love you. It's not a love

  To ease your feet from the concrete shoes

  Of your completed oeuvre, nor yet a love

  To warm your flesh or even earn you

  Royalties. But let me say, for all your fans,

  I love you, and I know that you'll re- turn,

  Our divo redivivus, each time your voice

  Is summoned from the earth to tell its tale.”

  * * * *

  Well, this may not tell us anything about why Thomas M. Disch felt the need to trash Thomas Mann or his own mother on the way out, nor can I even attempt to deal with that herein. But this poem just may be the key to his literary love-hate affair with his self-created virtual version of a Philip K. Dick he never really knew as a man.

  In the pages of this very magazine there once appeared an essay that I wrote called Sturgeon, Vonnegut, and Trout, an exploration of the relationship, in Vonnegut's own work, in Vonnegut's own literary psyche, between Kilgore Trout, the schlocko and perpetually impecunious science fiction writer who appeared in many of his books, and the real science fiction writer, Theodore Sturgeon, whom Vonnegut so openly proclaimed Trout to be the satiric avatar of by his choice of name.

  In Vonnegut's fiction, Trout is a pathetic figure churning out reams of literarily third-rate novels and stories at high speed to stay financially afloat, a failure in economic terms and in terms of literary recognition. Yet in the real world, the real Theodore Sturgeon was a great stylist and craftsman who produced his comparatively few works slowly, with difficulty, and was frequently blocked.

  In the real world, Vonnegut achieved fame, fortune, and literary acclaim, on a level that Theodore Sturgeon never even approached. In the real world, Kurt Vonnegut was indeed a great writer, deserving of all that fortune and acclaim. But in the real world, in terms of empathy, psychological depth, conceptual brilliance, loving wisdom, and the ability to touch the human intellect, consciousness, and spirit, Theodore Sturgeon was a greater writer still.

  And from the evidence of his work, from the literary nature of his obsession with Kilgore Trout, I believed then, and I still believe, that Vonnegut knew it too. The world-reknowned literary celebrity and best-selling success was envious of the relatively obscure science fiction writer who lived and died in relative penury.

  Envy, not jealousy. Not a mean-spirited envy, but a kind of affectionate, admiring, and wistful envy of Theodore Sturgeon, who despite a life of adversity, could persist in writing a level of fiction of which Vonnegut knew in his heart that he was not capable and indeed never really attempted.

  I do believe, on the evidence of “Ode on the Death of Philip K. Dick” and more in The Word of God, that Thomas M. Disch had something of the same sort of literary envy of Philip K. Dick.

  Disch was a fine writer, bordering on or perhaps achieving greatness. But as Sturgeon was a greater writer than Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick was a greater writer than Thomas M. Disch too, arguably the greatest metaphysical novelist of all time in any language, and certainly the greatest in terms of connecting metaphysical morality to the lives of his characters through empathetic caritas. Not a stylist on the level of Disch, but more complete in human terms.

  And, among many other things, Tom Disch was a literary critic, and a good one. It's hard to believe that on some level at least he didn't know this. And Disch, again on the literary evidence he has provided in The Word of God, must have felt something far more galling than the envy of Vonnegut for Sturgeon.

  Vonnegut's career was a public triumph that utterly eclipsed Sturgeon's in that realm. But the magic power of Hollywood has raised Philip K. Dick to posthumous permanent literarily stardom, while Thomas M. Disch's tragic fate was to see his career slide downhill through no literary fault of his o
wn into the commercial dead end of small press publication and public obscurity, leading him at least in part to write something like The Word of God as his own obituary for himself before declaring his surrender, his independence from the struggle, with a gun on the Fourth of July.

  But if that sort of reluctantly admiring envy explains Disch's love/hate relationship with Philip K. Dick, and his failing health, dead-end real estate situation and loss of the love of his life explains his despair with his personal life, neither really explains his terminal surrender to the “failure” of his writing career, which, it would seem on the evidence of The Word of God, was a necessary contributing factor to his decision to end it all.

  After all, others have lost the loves of their lives and been motivated to go on by transpersonal passions. Others have persisted in the face of even more dire financial circumstances. R. Crumb's wife once told me that her husband almost would prefer to be a “brain in a bottle,” and Steven Hawking produced his great work and took manifest pleasure in it in effect condemned to just such a worldly fate.

  Nor was Thomas M. Disch a “failed writer” in any but latter-day commercial terms towards the end of his career. Between The Genocides, published in 1965, and The Priest, published in 1995, over a dozen of his novels were published either by “major” SF lines or major mainstream imprints, as well as several short story collections, to general critical acclaim. And while none of them became big sellers that secured him fame and fortune, they did well enough to allow him to make an acceptable living as a novelist for three decades.

  He was also an accomplished poet of considerable serious reknown, prolifically productive to the very end, and a literary and theater critic. And while such writings are not about to earn anyone a living wage, as credits, especially when basketed with the novels, they would have been more than enough to secure Disch some kind of academic sinecure that would have rescued him from his practical dilemmas had he used his academic and literary connections to seek one out.