I just found out about this, though he actually died on or about July 5th. He was 68 years old. He seems to have had a bad time over the last few years. His partner of 30+ years, poet Charles Naylor, had died after a long struggle with cancer. His home in Barryville , NY, (close to the Pennsylvania border) had suffered badly through water damage from burst pipes (an endemic problem of northeast winters) and was unlivable. He'd been fighting the eviction efforts of his landlord. From what I can tell from different blogs, his health hadn't been good either.
He shot himself.
I have been a big science fiction reader since I was 11 years old. At this point, it's probably the one genre that I read consistently. Some times it's the only thing I read. I read Disch's Camp Concentration some time back in the 70s. It wasn't much like anything I'd read then, even given that this was the height of the New Wave, when there was a real attempt at writing science fiction. Before then, scifi writers seemed most concerned about getting the ideas down on the page and let characterization and style pretty much take care of itself. Which meant cardboard characters and flat (at best) style. I know that I only have five readers, but just in case someone wanders in and wants to start up a spirited defense of writers like Robert Heinlein or Isaac Asimov, let me say this.
Howdy visitor! I've read and reread these guys for years. They were fountains of invention, coming up with more ideas in a single book than some scifi writers do in a lifetime, but good writers? Please.
Ok, now that that's over. Disch was a good writer. I'd say he was a great writer, but I haven't read him lately so let me get back to you on that. But the thing that impressed me back when I first read Camp Concentration and when I've read it since is his style and his literacy. His style was the style of someone who loved and cared about words. I only found out many years later that he was a poet, but it wouldn't have surprised me had I known at the time. Often when people say that an author's style is poetic, they mean flowery; they mean elaborate; they mean fussy. When I say Disch's style is poetic, I mean that he was precise and his words carried me into an oppressive, hallucinatory world. The literacy? How often do you find a genre book that has Marlow's Faust at the center (not Dr. Faustus as some blog had it) and has a character sing Gershwin's "I'll Climb a Stairway to Paradise"?
I don't think I've read much of his poetry, though for years I've treasured his Castle of Indolence, which is a acid attack on the institutionalization of poetry - the workshops, the hermetic world of public poetry - and not a few poets. His critique of Alice Walker still makes me wince, not for her, but for my own laziness as a reader. He was not lazy.
He also wrote The Brave Little Toaster and according to someone on Daily Kos, was responsible for the idea that became The Lion King. He got $5,000 for it.
He died, leaving us all a lot poorer. One person who will not be poorer though is his landlord, who had been trying to get Disch out of the rent-controlled apartment since Naylor died. The landlord had just won a decision to evict Disch because the apartment had originally been rented in Naylor's name. With Disch out of the way, this Union Square apartment that had rented for $1200 is going to be worth three times that.
You know that if they'd been a heterosexual couple, even unmarried, this would never have happened. Can you see a landlord being able to evict a 68 year old widow?
Right.
This is why we need same sex marriage, to protect the Thomas Dischs. Not because he was one of the most brilliant scifi writers ever. But because no one should feel that they have to kill themselves as a solution to having their home, their family home, taken away because their decades long relationship somehow isn't real enough.
Oh, but he was brilliant and you should read him.
Best Obits
Daily Kos
Reluctant Habits (which is where I cribbed the portrait)
The Independent
