From its beginnings, science fiction (bastard offspring of fantasy) has exerted a vulgar appeal. Some of its proponents have never shied away from this and, if anything, have celebrated the intelligent child’s outlook, as witness the career of Ray Bradbury. The majority of science-fiction writers have grown into an awkward adolescence in which conquering the universe provides an uneasy substitute for sexual identity and the avoidance of bankruptcy—a constant theme of Barry Malzberg. But there remain a surly few who refuse to settle for anything less than full maturity, that sterile condition where senility must ultimately replace the sense of wonder. Such apostasy has been the theme of Thomas M. Disch for some time: his goal is not to leave but to reform the genre.

Dark Verses & Light is a poetry collection that carries an endorsement by Thomas Fleming, who identifies Disch’s writing as “irreverent with a satire that is savage in its restraint.” Neighboring Lives is a novel about 19th-century writers, intellectuals, and artists back when it meant something to live in Chelsea. The M.D. is a horror novel drawing on much fantasy, a little science fiction, and the kitchen sink (or in this case, the scrub basin) to reach the reading audience that really matters: the fans of Stephen King, whose endorsement graces the back cover. Of the three, the most successful happens also to be the most commercial: The M.D. Interestingly, it runs afoul of the Disch theory of maturity as expounded in his 1991 article for the Atlantic, “Big Ideas and Dead-End Thrills.” In this piece, Disch takes T.S. Eliot’s unremarkable discovery of “a pre-adolescent mentality” in the works of Edgar Allan Poe and proceeds to criticize the embarrassingly breathless style of the horror and science-fiction stories that owe so much to youthful influence. The trouble with Disch as a critic is that he sabotages the foundations of his subject. Science fiction, fantasy, and horror are about excess. The weakness Eliot identified in Poe is actually the genre’s essence: abandonment to the “wonders of nature and of mechanics and of the supernatural.”

In The M.D., Disch is at his best when describing the childhood experiences of his main character and villain, one William Michaels. After Sister Symphorosa torments little Billy for believing in Santa Clans, the unrepentant child is visited by jolly old Santa; the visitor is actually the god Mercury, lending a certain credence to the bigoted nun’s outburst against celebrating pagan gods. He gives Billy a caducean symbol of the medical profession, the twin serpents traditionally associated with the ancient god, cobbled together from a twin-pointed stick and a dead sparrow.

As one might expect from a longtime practitioner of the craft of science fiction, Disch takes an engineer’s approach to the subject of magic and curses. The brutal equation of cause and effect means that his magic wand can cure illness as well as inflict it; but the first is paid for by the second. Before the career of the M. D. is over, he has cured AIDS but replaced it with an even worse plague, the airborne ARVIDS. The advantage to him personally is wealth and power. (The world only knows the good he docs.) But even as Michaels ascends to his throne, the god Mercury is planning ahead. Even the M. D. is mortal.

The strongest portions of this book are the most elemental and immature, in which the simple thrill of discovery in black magic is conveyed. The best dialogue is between the god and young Billy. These childhood scenes have the same evocative power found in Bradbury; it is as if a gulf separates Disch the critic from Disch the writer. It was the critic who bullied Bradbury in the New York Times for not being grown up enough; by contrast, Russell Kirk has praised Bradbury’s moral imagination (in Enemies of the Permanent Things) in language that equally well describes The M.D.

The two sides of Disch twine more closely in Dark Verses & Light. Blessedly Disch is not above rhyming and scanning as demonstrated in his lead poem, “The Snake in the Manger: A Christmas Legend,” a product of the author’s lighter side that is also shown in The Brave Little Toaster. Here the idea is that the various animals might have brought the Christ Child, with the snake facing the greatest challenge. The anachronisms are funny, as intended. Of the remaining contents, including a “Masque in Five Tableaux” and a short story, the greatest entertainment comes from a few poems by the redoubtable Joycelin Shrager, the story’s protagonist, in whom Disch sends up an all too common example of the modern poetess whose poetry can only be distinguished from prose by close scrutiny of the white space at the margins. Here again, Disch does not elude the claims of science fiction: the corny images and shallow sentiments are straight from the preoccupations of fandom.

The book that best serves Disch’s vision of literature is Neighboring Lives, published with an endorsement from Anthony Burgess. A rambling account of the literati of the Victorian era provides him (and his collaborator Charles Naylor) with an opportunity to practice that most mature of the novelist’s arts—gossip! So effective is the author’s technique that one becomes absorbed in the personal lives of the Carlyles, John Stuart Mill, Whistler, Rossetti, Swinburne, and even Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). The only drawback is that this remarkable cast of 19th-century luminaries is observed rather than used in any dramatically satisfying manner. The only personage who is portrayed as eccentric and egotistical enough to rise above the narrative is Thomas Carlyle, whose passions against everything from the piano to books like this one enable the reader to escape the tediously accurate portrayal of his times.

Admittedly, Disch and Naylor did not set out to write a novel of ideas in the manner of Chesterton or Wells. The disappointment is that Disch’s experience with science fiction did not creep up on him, providing a central metaphor or point of view by which his natural talents as a satirist could have made this a great novel. If Neighboring Lives is any indication, Disch the novelist may finally satisfy Disch the critic in his flight from the “callowness of youth” and “Big Ideas,” as he identified the problem in his piece for the Atlantic.

 

[Dark Verses & Light, by Thomas M. Disch (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press) 144 pp., $26.00]

[Neighboring Lives, by Thomas M. Disch and Charles Naylor (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press) 368 pp., $13.95]

[The M.D.: A Horror Story, by Thomas M. Disch (New York: Alfred A. Knopf) 384 pp., $22.00]