Thomas M. Disch - Eternity Interview

Eternity Issue 2, ?????? 1973

Interview, (by Stephen Gregg??)

Thomas M. Disch is one of the best authors writing today. His work continually astounds and amazes. And his latest novel, from what has been seen in the excerpts that have appeared in QUARK/ And NEW WORLDS QUARTERLY, is going to wipe a lot of readers out. He was born on Feb. 2, 1940, in Des Moines, Iowa, and attended high school in St. Paul, Minnesota. For a time he worked for an advertising company and wrote copy for liquor, luggage, electric organs, and VWs. At other times he has also held jobs that range from cowboy, to bank teller, to night attendant in a funeral parlor ($10 a week and an attic room over the embalming studio). He dropped out of New York University in 1962 after completing 2 ˝ years, had his first novel, THE GENOCIDES, published in 1965, and is currently teaching a course in fiction writing at the University of Minnesota.

Q: First, who is Thomas Disch and why does he find himself writing, instead of, say, selling shoes?

A: To answer the easier half of the question first - nobody in my family ever has sold shoes, that I can recall. Possibly my uncle Donald on my mother's side, who managed a little department store in Onamie, Minnesota, sold some shoes along with everything else, but you wouldn't have said, even so, that he was a "shoe salesman." My father was a travelling salesman, but never of shoes. He sold magazines, the Encyclopaedia Brittanica (the junior version and the real E.B. too), quonset houses, insulation, and asphalt driveways. My younger brothers, Greg and Jeff, are both involved in sales. Greg has a Glamorene franchise, and seems to be doing very well with it; Jeff sold timber products at a wholesale level, but he's left that and his present job has something to do with real estate and property management. I don't know what my brother Gary is doing right now. Nancy, the youngest in the family, works at a Montgomery Wards, but at the mail-order level; she doesn't deal with customers directly. Shoes just don't run in our family. Before I started writing full-time I worked at a number of jobs. As a kid I sold greeting cards and kitchen novelties door to door, and for a while when I was twelve or thirteen, I sold Realsilk hosiery. But I hated that job and managed to get a dishonorable discharge from it. During my college years I worked in a checkroom, but no one ever checked their shoes, and we refused to take their rubbers and overshoes. After college I was in advertising for a while, but the nearest I ever came to shoes then was handling the Hatmann luggage account. When I think of it, I don't think it would be very nice work. I mean, my feet are pleasant enough, but I expect a fulltime shoe salesman must have to be intimate with some rather nasty feet. Maybe not in the better stores, though. Perhaps it's vanity, but I think that on the whole my job is several cuts above clerking at even Church's or Lefcourt's.

As to the matter of who Thomas Disch is, I can only say, and I've said it many times, that I am Thomas Disch. Is that sidestepping? Often enough, I suppose, I have fantasies of being some quite different, with a different name, but I haven't really acted out those fantasies since the days I did a lot of hitchhiking and riding in Greyhound buses. And it's been years now since I was even in a play; the last time was the summer of '63, when I was in Minnesota. I was "Cowboy" in the Firehouse Theater's production of The Connection. I enjoyed being in the play, but the only review that mentioned me by name had nothing more to say than that my imitation of a Negro accent was unconvincing and uncalled for. I hadn't been trying to imitate a Negro accent, but I think the reviewer was probably right. I was imitating, not acting. Some day I might enjoy directing an amateur production, and a couple years ago I had fantasies of stopping writing altogether and Making Films. There's even a chance, the next time I'm in New York, that I'll be able to make a film. What a lark.

Q: You've worked at several divers occupations in your life, and you've lived in various parts of the world. How much effect has this had on the fiction that you write? Do you think there are some specific things in your past that have led you to write the sort of fiction that you do compared, say, to the more traditional sf written by people such as Heinlein and Clarke?

A: My employment history has had relatively little influence on what I write, though I've exploited the backgrounds of various jobs pretty systematically. Usually at the actual time I've been working at a job I've been too impatient with it (call it trapped) to see my situation objectively. Also the bottom of a pyramid is not a good position to appreciate the landscape.

I've profited more, I think, from travelling. A great many writers who begin to publish young use travel as a kind of experience accelerator. Or surrogate? Travel forces one to be a better observer. One is always forming and discarding theories, tastes, friendships. The danger of such liveliness is that one may lose touch with what is central, but one may lose that touch without even stirring from the shore of Walden Pond. Ultimately I suspect that one must strike roots, but I have yet to make up my mind where. The more I travel the harder that decision becomes.

As to your final question, probably what sets me apart from Heinlein or Clarke (once simple temperamental differences are taken into consideration) would be my own sense of what constitutes "the tradition". Every writer has a certain finite number of models - ideal stories, poems, whatever - which his own work will tend to resemble. Certainly I would include books by both Heinlein and Clarke among my imaginary templates. ECHO ROUND HIS BONES owes a considerable debt to "their" brand of sf, and I was very pleased when Larry Niven once gave that book his imprimateur, only taking exception to my notion of what would become of the moon in the last chapter.

It occurs to me that the easiest way to answer this is just to make a list of books and authors I've been reading since the start of this year (72). Janr Austen, Angus Wilson, Cannery Row, Raymond Chandler, Bartheleme, Deliverance, Mary McCarty, Wurthering Heights, Jean Rhys, Ringworld, and two novels by Mike Moorcock; a lot Wordsworth and about him; Leavis's The Great Tradition; Howard's Alone with America; The New Testament with a dull commentary; Bart and Buber; poetry here and there; The Pursuit of the Millennium; Brown's Love's Body; the first two volumes of Tolkein.

As you can see fiction and criticism predominate. Other times in the past there has been a larger proportion of history and non-critical non-fiction. There's no science, and I don't keep up with any journals, though I intend, when I have an address again, to subscribe to New Scientist.

Most of my friends would probably construct a similar list. In fact a preponderance of my own list is from the suggestions of friends. Mike Moorcock put me onto Angus Wilson and Leavis, Jim Sallis introduced me to Chandler and any number of good poets, etc.

By and large the sf writers of Heinlein's generation would not be reading the same things - or thinking about the same things - or aiming, when they write, at the same targets. Literature with a capital L didn't get much concern then: this was their strength when they were good and their downfall 90% of the time. If the old "brow" labels are still meaningful, Heinlein and Clarke (and Bradbury most of all) represent the movement of sf from lowbrow/gradeschool-educated pulps to middlebrow/highschool-educated paper-backs; the newer writers are moving from middlebrow to highbrow. This reflects a change in the sf audience at least as much as a change in the writers.

Q: I'll buy that. Obviously the people who read Tales of Galactic Gora in the fifties aren't, for the most part, the same people who read Dangerous Visions and Quark today in the seventies. But where is this taking us? Your latest published stories have been excursions into the near future. While depending on science-fictional elements, they have not been, really and truly, sf. They've been explorations of people and their interactions. They haven't been concerned with "What if" but "How do". Is this the future of sf? And, if so, doesn't this mean the death of sf as a separate field of literature? In fact, will it not be the end of science fiction?

A: Really and truly, those stories - and the others following in that series - are sf. If the science fiction element isn't just a décor in those stories, if the characters and their dilemmas aren't just lifted up out of a contemporary situation, then they are sf. It seems to me that that relationship - between the authentic "futureness" of a story and its contemporary relevance - is a problem central to the best sf being written now, and it is capable of many different solutions. No story completely escapes it own time, but no "time" is unitary either, and a writer has a great deal of freedom as to where his "future" intersects our present.

As an example. I remember Joanna Russ complaining in a review about the hero in Isle of the Dead sitting down to a steak dinner at some quite distant date in the future. Now, assuming this wasn't just laziness on Roger's part, one wonders what his purpose was in introducing so prosaic a detail. My theory is: reassurance. SF is par excellence a literature of anxiety. It posits world in which future shock is at a maximum. A steak dinner, whether in a Perry Mason mystery or a Zelazny space opera, is a prime reassurance. If a hypothetical reader has been feeling: "Geez, this is all so weird and confusing, I can hardly even identify with the hero"; then introduce a good rare steak. I mentioned that I'd read two of the Tolkein books. Well, that's the exclusive beauty of Tolkein. The preponderance of reassurance over threat is awesome. The hobbits are always sitting down in some pretty glade with a new friend and eating a nice dinner. Horrific wars produce lovely pastorals. People quite simply want to forget, and one function of literature is to help them.

But back to the point I've wandered from: the interaction between present and future. As stories age it's possible to see how they express their period in unconscious ways. It's what you mean when you say something has "dated". Old slang, of course, and obsolete customs. By the year 200, I expect, a steak dinner will be an obsolete custom, and so its presence in story will connect in with the past instead of the present. The fascination of Gernsbackian sf with means of transportation reflects a period when the automobile introduced a new sense of personal freedom.

Is there any way out of this bind? Is sf necessarily self-obsolescent? I don't think so, but of course only time will tell. But if it is to escape this fate, writers must be more conscious of how they connect their stories to the present: the link should be, in fact, part of the beauty of the story. This is where I think Mike Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius stories have been very important - and influential. Everything I've said so far is implicit in The Final Programme.

In the six stories in the "334" series I tried to accomplish the same thing in another way - by underlining the ways in which that future is only a paraphrase of the late 60s. The basic themes of the book and the problems that its characters come up against derive what force they have from their present urgency. Indeed, if you think about it, this has always been the source of any writer's appeal to his contemporaries.

Why science fiction then? Because it works better. I think sf actually accomplishes what Zola hoped for - naturalism: that it is "experimental" in the scientific sense. It is a method of isolating key elements from the hurly-burly of the tumultuous present and dealing with them in a chemically pure state. In other words, extrapolation. Extrapolations may be very simple, or very complex. I think Damon Knight was the first one to point out, in a review of Charles Harness, that the beauty of a complex, many-stranded extrapolation is that all its elements should interconnect. How that interconnection can be accomplished, however, takes me to the brink of incoherence. At that point theory leaves off and practice must take over.

You'll notice that I've said nothing new. But let me still repeat myself.

Take "Angouleme" specifically. The central notion - of a gang of grade-school kids - was the subject of an article in New York magazine. Such gangs already exist in New York. Kids less than ten years old cooperate in muggings and holdups. Upon reflection, such precocity isn't to be wondered at. Television is a great accelerator and despoiler of that part of innocence that consists simply in ignorance. Conservatives very wisely insist that teevee should commerce only in those lies that preserve a healthful state of ignorance in the body politic, and liberals are seldom willing to admit that the destruction of those lies is apt also to destroy the social fabric. An argument as old, at least, as Ibsen. Well, "Anglouleme" is set in a future in which even ten-year-olds have the sophistication of a member of SDS today. In ways this is a specious sophistication, as the story points out, but not in every way. I couldn't write the "334" stories in a contemporary setting, because too many of their elements are "shocking" or "controversial" as things stand now. And this gives them a false glamor.

Oh Lord, I could go on and on. Nothing I love so much as to explain my own excellence. It's a comfort to know it's a common failing. I was just reading Asimov's Opus 100. If I ever reach my century I want to do just the same thing.

The future of sf? It's never been healthier, has it? I mean, in terms of just the number of books published. It will remain "separate" exactly to the degree it wants to. Or rather, each writer will. Whether its marketed with or without the category label matters only to the writer and his publisher. For my own part I've never had difficulty recognizing sf when it was published without the label. I found Brave New World on a paperback rack when I was twelve and I bought it because was sf.

I'm pretty sure that the field will continue for a long time to come, but what may happen is that the best writers will be skimmed off the top. Indeed, this has been going on for a long time already, though haphazardly. Bradbury and Clarke haven't published much of their work in sf magazines for a long time. Vonnegut got out. Who would reuse a major league contract if it were offered them? What will preserve sf as a field is the simple fact that there isn't room at the top for everyone. And perhaps it takes extra-literary gifts to get there and stay there. How else to account for the fact that Sturgeon and Leiber aren't as well known outside the field as in it?

So, sf isn't dead, the novel isn't dead, poetry isn't dead - not so long as good writers write sf, novels or poetry.

Q: You explain that you use sf as a vehicle for your stories because of the opportunity for extrapolation. Does this mean that you have a specific theme, a specific cause you are espousing? Are you writing to put something across to the rest of us - or simply because you like to write? In other words, are the messages inherent or extra?

A: "Vehicle" implies that the story has the choice of climbing on to sf or not, as though it were a kind of wagon. Your first question seems to be reducible to: Do you write sf because of the opportunity for writing sf? I must say that I do.

I would like to think that I mirror themes more often than I espouse causes. Some of my themes I am conscious of, some I return to regularly. Occasionally I've had the pleasure of seeing someone find meanings in stories of mine that I'd never quite intended to be there, but which seem, thereafter, innate. Patrice Duvic, in the French magazine Galaxie, did a nice piece about my stories from what seemed to me an actively leftist point-of-view, and it was full of surprise, mostly agreeable.

I think your next question creates a false alternative. Writing in order to "put something across to the rest of you" smacks to me of condescension, of "putting something across on". If one posits an audience it should be an audience of equals. That would rule out the possibility of literature as a mode of instruction. It also rules out the manipulative extremes of persuasion. Or is all persuasion manipulative? But I hope this doesn't leave me "writing because I like to write". Of course I do like to write. But not enough to do books and books for the sheer pleasure. Nor would the lure of success account for it quite. Finally one is reduced to smiling meaningfully and saying "Because it's there". Parnassus!

In a good story messages are inherent; in a bad story they may be external, or trivial - often both. In fiction a statement can be wrung from the mass of the story which would be "its message", but as fiction approaches the condition of poetry, as it pares away all but esthetic intentions, then the medium is the message. Yea, verily.