John Crowley's LJ (RSS Feed)
08-01-2008, 06:40 PM
The Weekly Standard, a right-wing generally orthodox Catholic paper where Tom Disch reviewed gallery shows for a time, ran an obituary or memorial notice which can be found here:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/313ixmcd.asp?pg=2 (http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/313ixmcd.asp?pg=2)
Read this first, if you will, and then the response which I sent in -- responses were invited but mine at least doesn't appear to have been published, which is why it's posted here, very slightly edited:
One of the lesser griefs of having a close friend die — especially suddenly and wilfully, as Tom Disch died — is that you can’t relish with him the obituaries, the press coverage, and the memorials. I’d very much like to have heard his response to Joseph Bottum’s remarkably mean-spirited remembrance of someone he apparently thinks of as having been a colleague. I can almost hear Tom’s gleeful dissection. It certainly would have been rich in the acid-sweet irony of which Tom was a master, the faux-naif wonderment at human foolishness and presumption, his own included. (Bottum is apparently immune to such complexity of mind, and can quote Tom’s remark about genius being enough for any man as sincere self-regard). Certainly — as a master of the style himself — Tom would have noted every invidious word-choice: how he hadn’t just spent most of his money (he was of course a freelancer whose income depended on sales) but “frittered away most of the money he made,” which is not true in either formulation. His “cosseted” (not disabling or unfortunate) ill health. A “lifetime of books and papers now abandoned” — rather than destroyed by fire and water — and which in any case he did not abandon: he astutely sold his papers to the Beinecke Library at Yale for a handsome sum not long ago, and his best, undamaged books are in safe-keeping. “His unhappy homosexuality” – I’m not sure how an abstraction can be unhappy, but Tom’s unhappiness in his homosexuality derived entirely from the social hindrances and sanctions placed on it. He was a partner in a decades-long relationship he regarded as spousal, and the great grief of his late life was the lingering and painful death of a man he loved and needed, as anyone might suffer the death of a cherished spouse. Above all, he would have delighted in Bottum’s utter misunderstanding of a life lived in art. About many trades and businesses it can be said that a man wasted his chances or didn’t fulfill his early promise — “If it wasn’t for the drinking and whoring, just think how much more journalism he could have produced!” — but an artist’s life consists of exactly what that life was capable of producing. The things that limited Tom Disch’s production — in amount or in worth — are of a piece with what enabled it. Tom was acutely, shrewdly, objectively aware of exactly what he had achieved, its limits, its reception, and just how far he had come in his art before seeing that he could, very likely, do little more that would get him closer to the ideals he was painfully aware of. This is the special death of the artist, and not an experience he was likely to share with his sometime editor. Rather than Bottum’s banal conception of a grandiose despair, a suffocated desire to return to the arms of Mother Church (!), and supposed feckless degeneration and decline, it was what brought him, even more than other sorrows, to consider suicide. Impulse, depression, pain, and that gun were only the proximate causes.
(Original Post) (http://crowleycrow.livejournal.com/93998.html)
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/313ixmcd.asp?pg=2 (http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/313ixmcd.asp?pg=2)
Read this first, if you will, and then the response which I sent in -- responses were invited but mine at least doesn't appear to have been published, which is why it's posted here, very slightly edited:
One of the lesser griefs of having a close friend die — especially suddenly and wilfully, as Tom Disch died — is that you can’t relish with him the obituaries, the press coverage, and the memorials. I’d very much like to have heard his response to Joseph Bottum’s remarkably mean-spirited remembrance of someone he apparently thinks of as having been a colleague. I can almost hear Tom’s gleeful dissection. It certainly would have been rich in the acid-sweet irony of which Tom was a master, the faux-naif wonderment at human foolishness and presumption, his own included. (Bottum is apparently immune to such complexity of mind, and can quote Tom’s remark about genius being enough for any man as sincere self-regard). Certainly — as a master of the style himself — Tom would have noted every invidious word-choice: how he hadn’t just spent most of his money (he was of course a freelancer whose income depended on sales) but “frittered away most of the money he made,” which is not true in either formulation. His “cosseted” (not disabling or unfortunate) ill health. A “lifetime of books and papers now abandoned” — rather than destroyed by fire and water — and which in any case he did not abandon: he astutely sold his papers to the Beinecke Library at Yale for a handsome sum not long ago, and his best, undamaged books are in safe-keeping. “His unhappy homosexuality” – I’m not sure how an abstraction can be unhappy, but Tom’s unhappiness in his homosexuality derived entirely from the social hindrances and sanctions placed on it. He was a partner in a decades-long relationship he regarded as spousal, and the great grief of his late life was the lingering and painful death of a man he loved and needed, as anyone might suffer the death of a cherished spouse. Above all, he would have delighted in Bottum’s utter misunderstanding of a life lived in art. About many trades and businesses it can be said that a man wasted his chances or didn’t fulfill his early promise — “If it wasn’t for the drinking and whoring, just think how much more journalism he could have produced!” — but an artist’s life consists of exactly what that life was capable of producing. The things that limited Tom Disch’s production — in amount or in worth — are of a piece with what enabled it. Tom was acutely, shrewdly, objectively aware of exactly what he had achieved, its limits, its reception, and just how far he had come in his art before seeing that he could, very likely, do little more that would get him closer to the ideals he was painfully aware of. This is the special death of the artist, and not an experience he was likely to share with his sometime editor. Rather than Bottum’s banal conception of a grandiose despair, a suffocated desire to return to the arms of Mother Church (!), and supposed feckless degeneration and decline, it was what brought him, even more than other sorrows, to consider suicide. Impulse, depression, pain, and that gun were only the proximate causes.
(Original Post) (http://crowleycrow.livejournal.com/93998.html)