This is going to be an unavoidably personal essay, since it must deal with two great writers who happen to have been long term friends of mine, one of whom, Thomas M. Disch, recently committed suicide on the heels of, or indeed perhaps as a deliberate part of, the launch of his last novel, if novel it can be said to be, The Word of God, in which he trashes the memory of the other, Philip K. Dick.

Believe me, I didn’t want to have to write this, I thought I would just review The Word of God along with several other books in the same column, and leave it at that. But in the end, I realized I just couldn’t shirk this arduous and painful task because it simply has to be written, and the karma of it is that like it or not, and I really don’t, no one that I know of is in a position to write it but me.

Tom and his “significant other” Charles Naylor, and I and my “significant other” Dona Sadock, had a four-way friendship, a friendship of couples, not the most common of friendships, going back three decades. And Tom’s “significant other,” or “partner” or whatever other awkward terms will have to suffice for lovers living together until someone invents a good non-gender specific-term in English, equivalent to the French “compagnon” is a significant part of this story and of The Word of God, since the not-that-less-recent death of Charlie Naylor played a major part in Tom’s apparently carefully planned decision to end his life.

This I know for certain because the last time I spoke with Tom he told me so.

He also talked about suicide, and not in a jocular manner. At the time, I didn’t quite realize that it was imminent, but I did realize he was speaking seriously enough to discuss it seriously with him in an effort to dissuade him.

Though in the end, in retrospect, by my lights, and certainly by his own, Thomas M. Disch had rational reasons for choosing to write The Word of God as his not-so-fond farewell to the literary world, to the world of science fiction, and to choose its launching as the time to shuffle and soft-shoe his way off this mortal coil. If you’ve got good reasons to do it, and you’re going to do it, do it with style and class, and with a juicy finger pointed skyward.

Though on the other hand. . . .

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Just as I had somehow felt it would be getting ahead of things to read The Word of God before going to see Tom read from it at an event at New York’s South Seaport Museum. And upon reading it after the event, I was glad that I hadn’t. . . .

Though on the other hand . . .

The New York Review of Science Fiction sponsors a monthly series of readings by science fiction and fantasy authors at the Seaport Museum in New York. I have done readings there several times—I hadn’t seen Tom for years, hadn’t even spoken to him since Charlie’s death and neither had Dona. So for all these reasons, I decided to attend his reading to see him again and invite him to dinner.

When Tom arrived he was obviously in bad physical shape, walking with a cane slowly, haltingly, and seemingly painfully, and otherwise seeming in fragile health, and de-energized. He seemed depressed and somehow a bit out of it when we spoke briefly before he went on about our mutual publishing woes and the depressed state of so-called major SF publishing that had relegated him to small press author status,­ and about his terrible real estate woes which I would hear more of later.

But as soon as he went on to even introduce his reading from The Word of God, his demeanor and energy level went through a drastic positive transformation.

The conceit of The Word of God, if that is what you would like to call it and what it certainly was to Thomas M. Disch in literary terms, is that the book is not a novel, not a collection of stories and poems, but a confessional autobiography in which he reveals for the first time that he is God, presents His version of various Truths, and, good-naturedly though rather diffidently for the Deity, invites the reader and anyone else who might care to worship Him.

Well, any one who knew Tom Disch personally or who has read much of his fiction and particularly his novel The Priest, in which he gives what for to the Church and its clergy, will know that this is neither an attempt at piety nor sincere Divine Madness—indeed, not sincere at all, but a final massive dose of Thomas M. Disch’s peculiar knife-edged brand of superciliously tinged irony, or ironic superciliousness. It’s the sort of irony that allowed him to write a short story called “Feathers From the Wings of an Angel,” which is a deadpan and perfect fictional reproduction of a piece of prize-winning inspirational Christian fiction but not quite satirical at all.

It was in precisely this spirit that Tom introduced his reading, announcing his Godhood, inviting worship in a genial and undemanding manner, beaming and grinning with a not quite fatuous not quite uncomical deadpan demeanor, and lit up like, well, the proverbial Christmas tree, come fully alive with charismatic energy and seeming to be enjoying himself immensely—a brightness, good humor, and strength that continued throughout his reading.

Tom always was a powerful, humorous, well-schooled dramatic reader, who somehow made the listening experience all the more enjoyable by the way he so clearly enjoyed doing it himself—a reader with the talent of a Harlan Ellison who didn’t exactly take himself seriously, but wasn’t exactly taking the piss out of himself either—a mode that mirrored much of his written fiction, particularly his short fiction, and some of his poetry.

The section of The Word of God that he chose to read was a previously published short story called “The New Me,” in which the first person narrator, a nebbishy teacher, must change his personality to become more assertive for career reasons. This story was written long before The Word of God, but Disch neatly segues into it with a sequence of reminiscences about his one-time infatuation with Western gear and fashion, including the notion that if Jesus had been incarnated in our time, it would have been as the “Good Cowboy.” This is a perfect segue because a cowboy persona is the first one that the story’s narrator adapts, and the story itself has him ending up a born again cowboy Christian of a particularly sleazy and hilarious cheapjack type.

This will give you a hint of only one aspect of The Word of God, and not really the dominant one, the point here for present purposes being that Tom Disch went through his whole performance with such enjoyment and such high energy that even his physical impairments seemed to be magically burned away by it, along with his previous depressive state.

After the reading there’s a sort of group dinner in a bar/restaurant several blocks away. Tom could only walk there very slowly and effortfully and I lagged back with him. In the restaurant, all that bright energy had drained away, and if he didn’t seem quite depressive, he seemed sort of sadly resigned to his luckless and seemingly terminal state.

His career as a novelist, in commercial terms, was hopelessly in the shitter. Tachyon, a well-regarded small press with a literarily impressive list, was doing The Word of God and maybe other titles, but a small press like Tachyon paying minimal advances and offering no realistic hope of significant royalties afterward could only acquire such a list because other such literarily major SF writers could no longer place their books with the so-called majors. Tom seemed almost at peace with this as we discussed it in the restaurant—or perhaps more accurately in retrospect—had given up the struggle.

And he had a tale of real estate horrors impressive even for New York. He and Charlie had long had a good rental apartment in an excellent location off Union Square in lower Manhattan and later a country place. The country place was destroyed by a flood. Union Square had become très chic, in the advanced stage of yuppification, and the landlord there wanted to cash in on it by evicting his tenant by hook and/or by crook and selling the apartment as a co-op or condo for big bucks.

Now just as there are many ways for a landlord in New York to squeeze a tenant out of a rental apartment in order to sell it, legally punctilious and otherwise, so there are many ways for said tenant to fight a delaying action and turn a would-be real estate blitzkrieg on the part of the landlord into a forever war at least as lengthy as the one in Iraq.

But when I pointed this out to Tom, he shrugged it off, admitting he had no more fight left in him. His health was bad and getting no better, his career as a novelist had been shit-canned by the devolution of the publishing industry into condition terminal, and he was soon to be evicted, which in Manhattan where the chances of finding an affordable new apartment for someone in his financial circumstances are slim and none, that meant either out on the street, or way out in the boonies of the so-called “Outer Boroughs.”

That was when Tom spoke quite calmly, rationally, and all too logically, of suicide.

What he didn’t mention in the laundry list of good reasons to kill himself was the fairly recent death of Charlie Naylor after a long, grim illness. Dona and I had been friends with Tom and Charlie when we had been together in the 1970s. We broke up and didn’t come back together until 9/11, but Tom and Charlie had been together continuously for over three decades. Like Tom, Charlie was a published poet. Like Dona and I during both phases of our relationship, Tom and Charlie had another life together outside the pocket universe of science fiction. They shared many common interests. They loved each other. Though I do not really believe there is any such thing as the perfect couple, they came as close to it as any I knew.

Tom wouldn’t quite say it, so I said it for him. All that stuff is indeed terrible, but hardly the worst of it. By far the worst of it is the death of Charlie. You’ve lost the love of your life.

Once I had acknowledged it, so did he. And under the circumstances what was really left to live for? Wouldn’t suicide be a rational and logical act? And I could only sort of acknowledge that it was, realizing that he was seriously considering it, but not that he had already planned it out.

But still, twice I had confronted friends seriously considering suicide. And twice I had talked them out of it and neither they nor I had ended up regretting it. So I told Tom what I had told Phil Dick under a similar circumstance.

Phil and I had never met or even talked before when he called me one night from Vancouver, though I had read most of his novels and admired them greatly, and he had obviously read at least one of my stories.

“This is Phil Dick,” he began as if we were old friends, “I’m in a bin in Vancouver, my girlfriend has left me, I’m very depressed, and I’m considering killing myself. But I read your story Carcinoma Angels and I want to ask your opinion first, because I’ve got an offer from a professor at Cal State Fullerton in Orange County to go down there and be taken care of. So tell me, be honest about it, in your opinion, should I move to Orange County or kill myself ?”

“Well, Phil,” I replied in like mode off the top of my head, “personally I can’t stand Orange County. But on the other hand, you can always kill yourself later.”

“Yeah, that makes sense,” said Phil, and he moved to Orange County, remained there until his death from natural causes, continued with his writing, got married again, fathered another child, and became my good friend.

I told this story to Tom Disch as a form of the same advice in the hope that he would follow it with similar results. “I can’t go on, I’ll go on,” as the famous line from Samuel Beckett has it.

Instead, what I got from him was a totally unexpected reaction not to my argument against suicide but to Philip K. Dick.

It was not complimentary and it was not very coherent. He had only met Phil once, and according to Tom over booze and a bong, and it had something to do with Phil writing a letter to the FBI tipping Tom as some kind of subversive or even a Communist or an agent of the KGB.

Well, anyone who had even read Paul Williams’ long piece in Rolling Stone about, among other things, the break-in in Phil’s apartment and Phil’s rather paranoid opinion of American spy and security agencies and how they were out to get him, let alone knew Phil personally, could only find this ridiculously off the wall, and I just let it drop.

Then Tom shot himself on July 4, Independence Day, as if to make the kind of poetic metaphoric point on the way out of which Thomas M. Disch was fully capable.

And then I read The Word of God.

           

What to make of this book?

What could anyone make of this book if  Thomas M. Disch hadn’t killed himself shortly after its launch, in retrospect as part of its launch, indeed as the capper, indeed on July 4 as a deliberately timed Declaration of Independence from the karmic travails of his life, real and fantasized?

I can’t do that. And now nobody can. Tom saw to that.

What can anyone who didn’t know Tom and didn’t know Phil make of this book?

Obviously I can’t do that either.

The Word of God is not a novel. The Word of God is not a memoir. The Word of God is not a collection of previously published fiction and poetry. The Word of God is not a metaphysical and philosophical mediation on God, the Universe, and Everything, nor a satirical piss-take on same. The Word of God is not a post-mortem fond farewell nor an angry post-mortem score-settling.

It is a jumble of all of these things together, formally incoherent yet philosophically and metaphysically erudite and cogent, bitterly ironic yet with a blithely humorous spirit, an angry bird flipped in the faces of whatever gods there be and an elegiac yet somehow upbeat series of meditations on Tom’s own impending and apparently already planned death. And all of it beautifully and expertly written, proving, if nothing else, that yes, Thomas M. Disch was a writer great enough to do all these things at once, and in retrospect, that he had been doing it all along, that this is the story of his career, his legacy, his tragic legacy.

First as tragedy, then as farce, as Karl Marx said of history repeating itself.

With Thomas M. Disch, with the writings of which he was capable, with the story arc of his career, with The Word of God, his deliberately crafted swan song, it was and is both at the same time.

There are fine poems in this book that maybe approach greatness, that at any rate have a clarity and lucidity that so much modern or post-modern poetry lacks. Tom Disch was a prolific poet and a well-regarded one, by my ignorant lights better than many with greater reputations in such circles.

There is mean-spirited score-settling in The Word of God, with his ex-agent, with the world of publishing that failed him. There is high-spirited and hilarious score-settling with fundamentalist Christianity. There are serious and also satirical learned philosophical and moral meditations. There is humorous autobiography with the jokes as often as not on himself. His love for Charles Naylor and the agonies and small triumphs of Charlie’s long struggle with cancer are touchingly delineated.

But the centerpiece of The Word of God, discontinuously embedded in all this, to which the plurality of wordage is devoted, is a bitchy, mean-spirited, utterly bizarre piece of apparently score-settling fantasy, in which the main characters are fictional avatars of Philip K. Dick, Thomas Mann, and Disch’s own mother. And Disch himself as “God.”

Difficult indeed to attempt to summarize this discontinuously presented tale, let alone make any literary sense of it, and I would be disingenuous if I did not admit that as both a friend of the late Phil Dick and an enthusiastic admirer of his oeuvre, I am appalled, and being a friend and admirer of the oeuvre of Thomas M. Disch makes it even worse.

Philip K. Dick is in hell, Disch’s concept of an appropriate Dickian hell; a domestic and serially endlessly repetitive nightmare reminiscent in that respect of Groundhog Day, with demonic persecution piled on. Why he has been condemned to hell in moral terms is to say the least unclear; for writing a lot of schlock in his earlier career to stay financially afloat maybe; for his unfortunate choice of a series of mates in life perhaps; for, uh, denouncing Disch to the FBI—or at least that’s all that seems to be on the pages.

Back in the 1940s, Thomas M. Disch’s mother is hanging out in the lobby of a Minneapolis hotel where she is destined to have a one-night stand with an aged European gentleman that will produce the very author of this disjointed tale. A bit later in the narrative, Disch’s would-be father is revealed as none other than Thomas Mann, the great German author, herein depicted in a not very favorable light, who, as in the real world, has sought refuge in the United States from Nazi Germany.

Phil Dick, in an appropriately shape-shifting demonic incarnation, is sent back in time and to Minneapolis to prevent this from happening, to prevent Tom Disch from being born as the illegitimate son of Thomas Mann by killing Mann, which will somehow give the Nazis a second chance to win World War II, and make Satan, in the guise of Phil Dick, or vice versa, President of the United States forever, in place of George W. Bush, who will take his place in hell.

Why?

Because Disch stole the idea of Dick’s alternate world novel The Man in the High Castle in which the Nazis did win the war and turned it into his novel Camp Concentration, turning it into “a Communist type of story,” which is also why, in our real world, chez Disch, Dick tipped him to the FBI and “got to be friends with J. Edgar Hoover.”

Though to make this even crazier and more confusing, Disch, in a footnote, declares that Dick denounced him to Hoover in October 1972, after Hoover was already dead. Though of course, this footnote, like the rest of the Dick story where its fiction nature is obvious, could be, and probably must be, taken as fiction.

Tom Disch, God in this literary creation, incarnates as a juvenile version of his then unborn self, and travels back in time to Minneapolis in the company of a murderous crook to foil this Satanically Dickian plot.

In the dénouement, at the end of much hugger-mugger, Mann is killed, Disch-as-God resurrects him, but nevertheless, it is not Mann who screws Disch’s mother in the hotel room and may or may not have sired the author of this thing, but Disch’s murderous companion.

I am not making this up.

Thomas M. Disch made it up in a book pretty clearly meant to be his last literary word on the brink of his pre-planned suicide.

But why? Why would Disch leave such a mean-spirited and, it must be said, evil-minded, dissing of Philip K. Dick behind as a literary testament? Why would he drag in a bitchy portrait of Thomas Mann in the bargain? Why would he give such a parting finger to the memory of his own mother?

Crazier still, or maybe in some twisted way not, included in The Word of God is a poem, “Ode on the Death of Philip K. Dick,” written in 1982, which is part snide commentary on Dick’s life and legend, part attack on the film studio that, chez Disch, butchered Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? into Blade Runner, and part elegy which ends with:

       “Well, Philip, have I said it yet? The
           bitter,
       Insufficient truth? I love you. It’s not
           a love
       To ease your feet from the concrete
           shoes
       Of your completed oeuvre, nor yet a
           love
       To warm your flesh or even earn you 
       Royalties. But let me say, for all your
           fans,
       I love you, and I know that you’ll re-
           turn,
       Our divo redivivus, each time your
           voice
       Is summoned from the earth to tell
           its tale.”

Well, this may not tell us anything about why Thomas M. Disch felt the need to trash Thomas Mann or his own mother on the way out, nor can I even attempt to deal with that herein. But this poem just may be the key to his literary love-hate affair with his self-created virtual version of a Philip K. Dick he never really knew as a man.

In the pages of this very magazine there once appeared an essay that I wrote called Sturgeon, Vonnegut, and Trout, an exploration of the relationship, in Vonnegut’s own work, in Vonnegut’s own literary psyche, between Kilgore Trout, the schlocko and perpetually impecunious science fiction writer who appeared in many of his books, and the real science fiction writer, Theodore Sturgeon, whom Vonnegut so openly proclaimed Trout to be the satiric avatar of by his choice of name.

In Vonnegut’s fiction, Trout is a pathetic figure churning out reams of literarily third-rate novels and stories at high speed to stay financially afloat, a failure in economic terms and in terms of literary recognition. Yet in the real world, the real Theodore Sturgeon was a great stylist and craftsman who produced his comparatively few works slowly, with difficulty, and was frequently blocked.

In the real world, Vonnegut achieved fame, fortune, and literary acclaim, on a level that Theodore Sturgeon never even approached. In the real world, Kurt Vonnegut was indeed a great writer, deserving of all that fortune and acclaim. But in the real world, in terms of empathy, psychological depth, conceptual brilliance, loving wisdom, and the ability to touch the human intellect, consciousness, and spirit, Theodore Sturgeon was a greater writer still.

And from the evidence of his work, from the literary nature of his obsession with Kilgore Trout, I believed then, and I still believe, that Vonnegut knew it too. The world-reknowned literary celebrity and best-selling success was envious of the relatively obscure science fiction writer who lived and died in relative penury.

Envy, not jealousy. Not a mean-spirited envy, but a kind of affectionate, admiring, and wistful envy of Theodore Sturgeon, who despite a life of adversity, could persist in writing a level of fiction of which Vonnegut knew in his heart that he was not capable and indeed never really attempted.

I do believe, on the evidence of  “Ode on the Death of Philip K. Dick” and more in The Word of God, that Thomas M. Disch had something of the same sort of literary envy of Philip K. Dick.

Disch was a fine writer, bordering on or perhaps achieving greatness. But as Sturgeon was a greater writer than Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick was a greater writer than Thomas M. Disch too, arguably the greatest metaphysical novelist of all time in any language, and certainly the greatest in terms of connecting metaphysical morality to the lives of his characters through empathetic caritas. Not a stylist on the level of Disch, but more complete in human terms.

And, among many other things, Tom Disch was a literary critic, and a good one. It’s hard to believe that on some level at least he didn’t know this. And Disch, again on the literary evidence he has provided in The Word of God, must have felt something far more galling than the envy of Vonnegut for Sturgeon.

Vonnegut’s career was a public triumph that utterly eclipsed Sturgeon’s in that realm. But the magic power of Hollywood has raised Philip K. Dick to posthumous permanent literarily stardom, while Thomas M. Disch’s tragic fate was to see his career slide downhill through no literary fault of his own into the commercial dead end of small press publication and public obscurity, leading him at least in part to write something like The Word of God as his own obituary for himself before declaring his surrender, his independence from the struggle, with a gun on the Fourth of July.

But if that sort of reluctantly admiring envy explains Disch’s love/hate relationship with Philip K. Dick, and his failing health, dead-end real estate situation and loss of the love of his life explains his despair with his personal life, neither really explains his terminal surrender to the “failure” of his writing career, which, it would seem on the evidence of The Word of God, was a necessary contributing factor to his decision to end it all.

After all, others have lost the loves of their lives and been motivated to go on by transpersonal passions. Others have persisted in the face of even more dire financial circumstances. R. Crumb’s wife once told me that her husband almost would prefer to be a “brain in a bottle,” and Steven Hawking produced his great work and took manifest pleasure in it in effect condemned to just such a worldly fate.

Nor was Thomas M. Disch a “failed writer” in any but latter-day commercial terms towards the end of his career. Between The Genocides, published in 1965, and The Priest, published in 1995, over a dozen of his novels were published either by “major” SF lines or major mainstream imprints, as well as several short story collections, to general critical acclaim. And while none of them became big sellers that secured him fame and fortune, they did well enough to allow him to make an acceptable living as a novelist for three decades.

He was also an accomplished poet of considerable serious reknown, prolifically productive to the very end, and a literary and theater critic. And while such writings are not about to earn anyone a living wage, as credits, especially when basketed with the novels, they would have been more than enough to secure Disch some kind of academic sinecure that would have rescued him from his practical dilemmas had he used his academic and literary connections to seek one out.

And it can fairly be said that Tom Disch was a writer of passion for the work. His was a literary life, a life in literature, as creator and as critic, to the very end. Nor had his skills and literary powers burned out or his love for writing and his pleasure taken in it flagged. Even The Word of God, fragmentary, formless, deliberately self-indulgent, marred on a content level by bitter score-settling, what Brian Aldiss once called “a decent despair,” and envy of Philip K. Dick, displays all of Disch’s considerable literary powers and even high-spirited sense of sardonic fun.

He had good reasons to say “I can’t go on,” but he had one big reason to say “I’ll go on.”

So why didn’t he?

Thomas M. Disch also wrote two book-length critical screeds about science fiction, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World and On SF. Neither of these were exactly love letters to the genre. Both of them were written after he left “SF” for forays into “major mainstream publications” whose numbers in these dim days pretty much ended up destroying his commercial viability as a novelist even with so-called “major SF lines.”

Damned if he did, damned if he didn’t.

Thomas M. Disch wrote more speculative fiction than anything else, but he was never really an “SF writer.” His thematic and literary interests were far too deep, wide, and catholic to be comfortably contained in any genre. No devotee of  “the pulp tradition” was he, and his literary toolbox was far beyond “transparent prose.”

Yet struggle against it though he did, he was confined by the SF pocket universe, unable to successfully transcend his stereotyping as a “sci-fi guy” in the realm of publishing commerce, and to a lesser extent in the wider literary realm, to which he sought entry and where he really belonged.

The irony of it being that his very literary concerns were such that as “genre SF” was the only way that his earlier fiction could be published at all, and by the time he tried to “break out” it was too late.

The bitter irony.

For at the end of his career, major SF lines now being what they have become, there was no direction home. A writer like Thomas M. Disch was not deemed commercially viable by them either.

In the end, it was “SF” that abandoned him.

“What killed science fiction?” is a question often asked these days, and the answered offered are multiplex. But the question that is the title of this essay, in the end perhaps has a simple and stark answer.

What killed Tom Disch?

SF killed Tom Disch.

It killed what should have been his last hope, the last thing he had left to live for, and so killed his spirit, and left him with nothing left to do but follow it out of this world.

And yet. . . .

And yet while lying in bed brooding on such matters I experienced one of those glaring epiphanies that seem so obvious that you wonder why you have never seen it before. But on second thought, I understood what had blinded me to the obvious, and what had tragically blinded Tom Disch, too.

We writers of science fiction, of fantasy, of SF, are not like other writers. Most writers only meet their readers for a few moments in autograph sessions, via the occasional letters that reach them through publishers. But SF writers meet them by the hundreds, by the thousands, at SF conventions and on blog sites dedicated to our praise and/or the reverse maintained by these ingroup devotees. I have been told that Tom Disch did have some sort of blogsite that he read and posted to regularly. But I wonder what sort of people he reached on it, and more importantly, how wide a spectrum of the readers of his actual broad spectrum fiction reached him. We become embedded in the SF subculture, in fandom, unless we make deliberate efforts not to be, and even then. . . .

We end up believing that these are our readers, that what we leave in their memories, that how we affect their lives, is our legacy, whatever footprints we may leave in the sands of time. All too many SF writers seem to believe this. I suspect Tom believed it. I believed it.

I was wrong.

Perhaps it is only fitting that it was technology that showed me I was wrong.

The Internet. My own self-created and maintained web site, where I chose to embed an email link through which I can be reached directly, and Google, where a little hacking magic causes the web site with the email link to come up first when my name is Googled. Simple and geeky as that.

And the result is that I get emails, thank you notes from people who know nothing about me but something of mine that they’ve read, maybe everything, maybe only a single novel or story, that had positive meaning for their lives. They know nothing of the SF subculture, nothing of BookScan numbers, sales figures, marketing strategies, the commercial apparatus of the professional life of a writer, only what the work itself has meant in their own lives.

By sales figures, they are few, maybe a thousand or so over a year, but they are only the ones sufficiently moved to write, and of course I can never know how many others who don’t bother have felt the same thing.

In karmic terms, the bottom line is not the bottom line. We forget that. We are blinded not by the light but by the darkness. For is it not a greater thing than the numbers on royalty statements or the winning or losing of Hugos and Nebulas to have so touched the hearts and consciousnesses of even a few hundred people over the course of one’s life so deeply? It’s a gift of the nature of the work itself. How many people other than writers can be so blessed?

I am certain by the nature of his work that if Tom Disch had set up the same mechanism he would have received the same encouragement, the same blessing.

It’s enough for me.

Would it not have been enough to keep him going on?