Almost 15 years have passed since Tom Disch’s death by suicide at age sixty-eight. As a kid I read his science fiction and still prize his 1968 novel Camp Concentration. Only years later did I discover he was a mordantly funny poet. In spirit, his work resembles Turner Cassity’s, another learned, contrary, intellectually raucous poet. In his 1992 review of Cassity’s Between the Chains, Disch writes:
“A poet so
consistently epigrammatic can be dismissed, by those incapable themselves of
wit, as unserious, though to be serious one must always be in a fog. Cassity
never writes a poem without knowing exactly what he means to say—crisply,
pithily, and, very often, cruelly. No contemporary poet of the first rank is
less politically correct.”
All true, of
course, for Disch as well. I happened on a comment at the Best American Poetry
blog from 2019: “A two-vol Disch set from the Library of America -- selected
short fiction, collected poems -- would be revelatory...” A good idea but
unlikely after Disch published “The Library of America” in The Paris Review in 2001:
“It’s like
heaven: you’ve got to die
To get
there. And you can’t be sure.
The
publisher might go out of business.
Or you
yourself might not be good enough.
The vagaries
of taste might swerve.
Suddenly,
leaving you disaudienced.
“Marquand.
Aiken. cummings. Mailer.
What are
their chances now, which once
Loomed so
large? Ubi sunt, as they say
In France,
while their language
Expires.
It's sad, this transience
We share,
but look on the bright side:
“It makes
us, even the snottiest,
Human, which
is a good thing to be.
And, in any
case, inalterable. We die.
Others
occupy our premises, decide
They don't
need so many bookshelves
And
redecorate. Every vanity
“Will be
deaccessioned, as Islam
Deaccessioned
Alexandria. Ubi sunt.
Cling as you
may, assert whatever claims.
Once you
have fallen into the public domain.
There's
precious little hope, and all that
Little is
reserved for those who had no doubts.
“The man who
carved the Sphinx’s nose:
What was his
name again? For centuries.
Millennia,
that nose was there, and now
It’s not. We
are—I am—like him
Ephemeral, a
million Ozymandiases
Drifting
about in a vast Sahara.
“Sift those
sands, you archeologists.
Number the
shards of the shattered nose.
Reprint the
words that once we shivered
To read, and
annotate each line. Still,
When we die,
we are certainly dead.
And only a
few of our books will be read.
“And then
even those will be forgotten.
Camp Concentration is a fine novel, but I've always thought that Disch fumbled at the goal line; the upbeat ending felt distinctly unearned.
ReplyDeleteI am always glad to see Tom Dish remembered. He was one of the few writers I've met in my long life whom I considered a genius. A doomed one, ultimately, but so full of energy and invention that every meeting with him was like attending an opening night. No critic yet has provided a full account of his vast productivity that occurred in different fields--science fiction, poetry, criticism, children's literature, and even theater.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Thomas Parker above that "Camp Concentration" is no masterpiece. None of Disch's novels are perfect, though all of them make fascinating reading. His short stories represented his best fiction. They have never been fully collected. (The later ones were not in a mid-career "collected" volume.) The same situation applies to his poems. There are even many poems I heard him read that were never published. His poetry is mostly the poetry of ideas, enlivened by his wit and ferocious candor.
I wish he and Turner Cassidy had met. They would have keep each other laughing.
Thank you, Patrick, for quoting this little known poem.