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The Wall of America.

Article Excerpt
The Wall of America, by Thomas M. Disch, Tachyon Publications, 2008, $14.95.

TOM IS IN the next room but one, calling out. He's working on his novelization of The Prisoner, and wants to read a paragraph to me. November light pushes through my bay window to lie quietly expiring on the floor. Down in the yard I see the mounds of leaves he raked together earlier, then abandoned. Deciding to leave the Selectric running, I go up and down the three stairs, through the narrow hallway, to his office.

Thomas M. Disch died, of suicide, this past Independence Day. Recent years had been hard ones for him, I gather: a sense of lost readership, considerable physical pain such that he became virtually housebound in his New York apartment, an ever-deepening depression following the death of his partner Charles Naylor. There at the end, Tom's bitterness, the ragged trailing edge of the ambition that so animated him, seems to have broken through, though still liberally seasoned with wit and self-deprecation.

Endings are seldom pretty. Tom knew that. He knew that not very much is pretty, in fact, once you scrape away the hype and patina.

Except the arts. Tom was a great patron not only of poetry and fiction but also of opera, music, painting, and sculpture. I don't think that he believed our arts would magically save us, but he was pretty damned sure they were our best bet, perhaps our only bet--even if they, like everything else in life, might well be taken with a sprinkling of salt, a dash of cynicism, and half a cup of good-natured fun.

Searching for words here (in silence, blink of the cursor having replacing the Selectric's hum), I remember our sitting on the porch in Milford...

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