Is deep weariness and a longing for death a rational response to the general crappiness of things, or an illness requiring treatment with brain-zapping chemicals? In the US, certainly, the dominant idea is that if you're not permanently pumped up with enthusiasm for life you're completely buggo: there's even an ad on TV that demonstrates how your downer can spread to your dog - and you wouldn't want that, would you?
Personally, I think this militaristic insistence on maintaining an upbeat mood at all times may in itself be a contributing source to the great river of melancholy that, to judge by the quantity of uppers consumed, runs through so many American souls. Being enthusiastic all the time just ain't natural - which is one reason why I find Endzone, the poetry blog of Thomas M Disch, so refreshing. On an almost daily basis he resists the pressure to behave like a pumped-up member of the team, and instead takes his boredom, scepticism and doubt and turns it into some really quite exceptional verse.
So who is Thomas M Disch and why does he insist on corroding the optimism of his fellow Americans? Does he hate freedom or something? Perhaps his CV can offer some clues. Writing-wise he's done almost everything without ever quite attaining the laurels he (perhaps) deserves.
Beginning his career in the literary ghetto of science fiction in the 1960s, he immediately produced one of the best catastrophe novels of all time: The Genocides. In this cheerful little book, the entire human race is exterminated by an unseen superior life form that decides to use our planet to grow crops. Never before or since has the possibility of the extinction of our species seemed so amusing. Disch then became affiliated with the Michael Moorcock-led "new wave of SF" that sought to bring more "adult" themes into science fiction but which was ultimately a dead end: unable to attain recognition from the "respectable" mainstream and alienating the popular SF readership, its most talented authors eventually left the genre altogether.
Disch himself started writing horror and eventually scored a bestseller with The MD, but he never attained the popularity of a Stephen King or Dean Koontz, perhaps because his books were not "pure" genre, but rather very sardonic and fairly obsessed with death in a not-really-joking kind of way. He wrote a children's story that was made into a cartoon by Disney, but that career receded also. Finally, in the late 90s he had the mad idea that the world needed more critical volumes on poetry and science fiction. He produced a few excellent books and then vanished completely.
Being an admirer of Disch's prose, I often wondered what had happened to him. Then a few months ago, I stumbled upon Endzone. I knew he'd written poetry but, like most readers of his novels, I'd never read any of it. Immediately, I was hooked: the tone was simultaneously chilling and droll as Disch confronted ageing, death, loneliness and the state of his culture head on. He had lost none of the wit that had so distinguished his prayer for the annihilation of humanity in The Genocides.
Gradually I discovered in his occasional non-poetic postings that in recent years he had 1) experienced the death of his long-term partner; 2) seen his house crumble; 3) been fighting an eviction notice from the landlord of his New York flat; 4) apparently been dropped by his agent; and 5) faced sundry other late-career humiliations and personal struggles. If all this has sent him on a bummer then he is without question not ill but rather very sane, and his poetry articulates with skill and verve the attitude of one not raging against the dying of the light but rather quizzing it ironically, sceptically, with a wry despair that few writers would be honest enough to articulate. Waiting for death has rarely sounded so elegant.
Disch recently announced that he is about to publish a novel in which he will reveal that he is God. Until then those few who know about his blog will continue to enjoy regular postings of fine verse. A good start for anyone curious to sample some would be to visit his entry for October 6, The Curse, although many of the others are just as fine. Disch always writes like a man with nothing to lose. The Curse Nothing that I planted there will ever thrive. No book I wrote within those walls will long outlive me. The place next door produced two suicides. Even ivy died after a season's feeble growth. Chickadees who knew no better nested nearby for the sake of seeds in the feeder, but never birds with any songs left in them. The property was cursed. I must have known it from the moment we pulled up the drive and I said, "No way." But I bought it anyhow, with its asphalt siding its cinderblock chimney, its cramped interiors. It was cheap and we were poor, with all our luck already behind us. We thought we could make do. Instead we sucked up the poison from the soil and cell by cell distilled our little deaths, which dangle down, nooses of cobweb from the cellar's low beams.
