'A Great Euthanasia'

I can’t think of another poet who wrote so often or so amusingly about death as Thomas Disch. I once tried tallying his death-themed poems and lost count. Here’s a sample: “How to Behave When Dead,” “Symbols of Love and Death,” “In Defense of Forest Lawn,” “At the Tomb of the Unknown President,” “At the Grave of Amy Clampitt” (written a decade before her death) and “Death Wish IV.”

And then there’s the suggestively named Endzone, an online "LiveJournal" Disch kept from April 26, 2006 until July 2, 2008, two days before his death by suicide. Look at these titles from his final month: “Letters to Dead Writers,” “Back from the Dead!” “In Memoriam,” “Why I Must Die: A Film Script,” “Tears the Bullet Wept,” “Ding-Dong! The witch is dead!” When it comes to death poems, here is my favorite, from ABCDEFG HIJKLM NOPQRST UVWXYZ (1981), “The Art of Dying”:

“Mallarmé drowning

Chatterton coughing up his lungs

Auden frozen in a cottage

Byron expiring at Missolonghi

and Hart Crane visiting Missolonghi and dying there too

 

“The little boot of Sylvia Plath wedged in its fatal stirrup

Tasso poisoned

Crabbe poisoned

T.S. Eliot raving for months in a Genoa hospital before he died

Pope disappearing like a barge into a twilight of drugs

 

“The execution of Marianne Moore

Pablo Neruda spattered against the Mississippi

Hofmannsthal's electrocution

The quiet painless death of Robert Lowell

Alvarez bashing his bicycle into an oak

 

“The Brownings lost at sea

The premature burial of Thomas Gray

The baffling murder of Stephen Vincent Benét

Stevenson dying of dysentery

and Catullus of a broken heart”

 

I never sense morbidity behind Disch’s lines. That may sound ridiculous but Disch deems death a worthy opponent, deserving of our laughter. True laughter suggests sanity. Try reading aloud “The execution of Marianne Moore” and “Pope disappearing like a barge into a twilight of drugs” and not at least tittering. Read the following passage from Samuel Beckett’s Watt (1953) and see how Disch falls into his scheme:

“The bitter laugh laughs at that which is not good, it is the ethical laugh. The hollow laugh laughs at that which is not true, it is the intellectual laugh. Not good! Not true! Well well. But the mirthless laugh is the dianoetic laugh, down the snout -- Haw! -- so. It is the laugh of laughs, the risus purus, the laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding, saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs – silence please -- at that which is unhappy.”

 

Disch’s laughter and much of the laughter he inspires is the mirthless sort. Only occasionally does he supply us with a jolly good time. Consider this thought: “. . . to die of laughter--this, too, seems to me a great euthanasia . . .” That was written by the happiest, most mentally fit of writers, Max Beerbohm, in “Laughter,” the final essay in his final collection of essays, And Even Now (1920). The inability to laugh, or to laugh only as a gesture of social obligation (the robotic ha ha of the cocktail party or board meeting), is an ailment clinically associated with psychic constipation. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders  in its most recent edition glosses the condition as “tight-ass to the max; a real bummer.” A related symptom, according to the DSM-5-TR, is habitual use of the acronym LOL and in more severe cases, LMAO. Sufferers are to be approached with the utmost caution. Seek professional assistance.

 

That Disch committed suicide on July 4, 2008 -- Independence Day – has been interpreted by some as a gesture of contempt for the United States. I don’t agree. Some souls get worn out and tired earlier than others. For now, put aside Disch’s death and read his poems, novels and stories, and remember at least occasionally to laugh.