Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (20 page)

Standing there at that point I did some deep thinking. It seemed to me that magazine-length writing was going downhill-and not paying very much. You might get $20 for a story and $4,000 for a novel. So I decided to bet everything on the novel; I wrote THE WORLD JONES MADE [1956], and later on, THE MAN WHO JAPED (1956). And then a novel which seemed to be a genuine breakthrough for me: EYE IN THE SKY [1957]. Tony gave it the Best Novel of the Year rating, and in another magazine, Venture, Ted Sturgeon called it "the kind of small trickle of good sf which justifies reading all the worthless stuff." Well, I had been right. I was a better novel-writer than a short-story-writer. Money had nothing to do with it; I liked writing novels and they went over well.

So Phil Dick the SF writer became Phil Dick the SF novelist. The above account includes the usual Phildickian inaccuracies and omissions: The Meredith Agency had received the manuscript of Solar Lottery in March, before the 1954 Worldcon and Phil's meeting with Van Vogt. But the essence is true. From 1954 on it was novels that he wrote and as a novelist that he identified himself.

SF novels were not his first love, however. His mainstream efforts were so important to him that in 1956-57 he abandoned SF altogether. Says Kleo:

Publishing a mainstream novel would have been his dearest dream. Not mainstream, necessarily, but just non-science fiction. He didn't really expect it-it would have been the gift of the gods. He knew that his unpublished serious novels were in no way popular fiction and that they didn't fit into any particular category. But some of the stuff out of New York then was wonderful. Styron-Phil loved Lie Down in Darkness-Malamud, Sigrid DeLima. It gave us a hope that someone would pick up on his work.

Iskandar Guy recalls Phil's struggle to balance mainstream ambition and a sense of dignity as to his SF work:

I got the impression at that time that he was writing science fiction because that's what was happening-but he just hoped to Christ he could get some serious work published. Science fiction was what he did. It was a format in which a few ideas were presentable, but he didn't think of it as the format for serious intellectual inquiry-no way. Who the fuck ever paid attention to paperbacks?

When he finally accepted that he could write about society and the denigration of men's minds in science fiction, he felt free to do that. He would tell what was going on-good, bad or indifferent. Sometimes it was so had ... it's hard to hold on to clarity and vision when it gets that painful and kicks up everything you remember. But you can try.

Phil would talk about the Vedas. The world was what you create with your mind. Mind pretty much sets up reality as it exists. And he made no bones about that, especially when he said screw it, I'm not sure I can make it as a straight writer so I'm going to put everything I know in science fiction.

If Phil felt ashamed of his genre, he was by no means uncertain of his talent. Throughout his life, Phil displayed remarkably little ego when it came to awards or critical acclaim. He seldom suffered from professional jealousy of his fellow SF writers, even when they pulled in considerably higher advances than he did. At the same time, Phil showed a certain cockiness about his own talent. Fellow writer Lusby (with whom Phil exchanged manuscripts) states that Phil "had this complex feeling about perfection-he thought the books were perfect. There were certainly flaws and defects, but he never discovered them."

John Gildersleeve, a copy editor at the University of California Press, served as a volunteer reader for some of the mainstream novels. The logical plot holes distressed him: "His so-called serious writing would go on beautifully, and then he'd fall back on one of the tricks he'd learned in writing science fiction." Phil could be prickly; Gildersleeve recalls a threat to make him a character in one of the novels, "and I wouldn't like it one bit." There was a protean aspect to Phil's talent that Gildersleeve recognized: "My God, the way he could type! He would compose at eighty to a hundred words per minute-making up his story as he typed it out, and he typed so fast he had to keep one jump ahead of himself on one side or the other."

Just how boastful or bashful Phil was about his SF career depended, in part, on just whom he was around. When The Man Who Japed came out in 1956, Phil proudly made a special visit to display a copy to Dorothy. But Chuck Bennett, a crony from the Art Music days, recalls a surprise visit by Phil in which he made his entry by flipping a paperback across the floor:

And I looked at him, at this strange behavior, and he came on in and he ignored the book that he'd thrown away. And I walked over and picked it up and saw it was a science fiction novel by Philip Dick.... "What is this?" "Oh yeah," he said, "I had that published, I got that published." You know, as though that were the last thing in the world, that this elaborate, almost grotesque ploy, you know, of throwing this book-with this total indifference-halfway across the room and then walking on past it.

Bennett remembers it as being Phil's first published book, which would make it Solar Lottery. If so, the story fits. Kleo recalls that when copies of the Ace paperback first arrived, Phil told her: "Isn't it a hell of a thing that this is the one they picked up first?" Now, Solar Lottery is a pretty good SF adventure in the Van Vogtian tradition, written when Phil was twenty-five. It didn't deserve the abuse Phil gave it, but the hurt of the mainstream works gathering dust was too great.

Since Phil saw his SF and mainstream writing as, in essence, two separate careers, it may be wise to follow separately his progress in each.

As to SF novels, the major influence within the genre was Van Vogt, as opposed to the "hard"-science approach favored by Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke. To Phil, a focus on scientific probability-as opposed to plot possibilities-meant that the writer wasn't doing his job. Phil's approach to technology was, simply, to make up whatever gizmo he needed to keep his characters' realities in suitably extreme states. Science aside, the shift from stories to novels involved a definite change in narrative strategy. For Phil, the startling "What If?" premise lay at the heart of SF. Stories could develop such premises without detailed characterization; but novels required sympathetic protagonists. In 1969 Phil wrote:

It is in sf stories that sf action occurs; it is in sf novels that worlds occur. [... As a writer builds up a novel-length piece it slowly begins to imprison him, to take away his freedom; his own characters are taking over and doing what they want to do-not what he would like them to do. This is on the one hand the strength of the novel and on the other, its weakness.

Because SF stories are preeminently SF "action," Phil was often able to cannibalize parts from old stories for his novel plot engines. (The Chronological Survey traces these genealogies.)

During the fifties there were only two real players in the (strictly paperback) SF novel market: Ace and Ballantine. But Ballantine didn't put out as many SF titles as Ace's two a month (in one "Ace Double"), overseen by Don Wollheim. Ballantine paid slightly better, but it wasn't until 1964 that Ballantine finally purchased one of Phil's novels, Martian Time-Slip. All told, twenty of Phil's SF novels and story collections were first published by Wollheim-at Ace and then DAW (Wollheim's initials) Books. It's a fact: Phil's bread and butter for the first two decades of his writing life was Wollheim's love for his work.

There could be no more dyed-in-the-wool veteran of the pulp SF wars than Wollheim. He sold his first SF story to Wonder Stories in 1934 at age nineteen. In 1936 he organized the first World SF Convention (nine guys attended) in Philadelphia. He was also a charter member of the Futurians, a New York-based fan club whose members included future SF writers Frederik Pohl, Cyril Kornbluth, and Isaac Asimov. The first SF magazine Phil ever bought, Stirring Science Stories, was edited by Woliheim, as was the first-ever paperback SF anthology, The Pocket Book of Science Fiction (1943). Wollheim recalls: "That was the first book to carry the words science fiction on the cover. They wanted to call it The Pocket Book of Scientific Romances, which would have been death." In 1952 pulp magnate A. A. Wyn installed Woliheim as editor in chief of Ace Books and revealed to the young editor the esoteric art of blurbing. "The secrets Wyn taught me still work. I can't tell everything. Part of the secret is-you don't summarize a story or novel, you give a bit of a tease, let them guess."

Wollheim recognized Phil's talent from the first:

I am a science fiction fan, I know what Phil was doing and I love his work. Other editors don't. They look at it like any writing, not science fiction. Phil was always unusual. He had a great technique. In the first two or three chapters, you meet two or three people who apparently have no connection with each other. By the time the book is finished, they all become entangled with each other-I love that technique. And of course his viewpoint of the future world was always so different from the stock science fiction viewpoint. It was marvelous stuff-I loved his work. He was one of those I was really happy to publish. Phil and [Andre] Norton and [Samuel] Delany were my favorites.

The first and only time Phil and Wollheim met was in 1969, by which time their professional relationship had spanned fourteen years. "Gee, I thought you'd be seven feet tall," Phil said to the slight-framed Wollheim, who was one of those "Authority Figures." As with Hollis, Phil's dominant feeling was admiration-Woliheim was a scrappy businessman whose love for SF redeemed the rough edges (such as nasty letters demanding editorial changes).

Life with Ace Books was tough, even with Wollheim's backing. Wollheim recalls that "Wyn was not a generous man. That was always my handicap at Ace-he never quite got over his pulp mentality." Wyn, who died a multimillionaire in 1969, utilized one key tactic when dealing with writers: They always need money, and you can earn their pathetic loyalty by paying them a piddling advance promptly. Royalties might or might not show up later, but that only served to keep writers writing. Wollheim recounts the standard Ace deal:

We'd buy your novel as part of an Ace Double, pay you maybe $750 or maybe $500, and you'd get a royalty of 3 to 4 percent. It wasn't a good deal, but it was the only game in the business. Later, when we got into singles, you got more-about $1,200 or $1,500, a royalty of maybe 5 percent. [...] I think I can remember instances where books came within $2 of earning royaltiesand then nothing. It's ridiculous. I... I In one case we had a double book in which one title sold more [according to Ace's royalty statement figures] than the title on the other side.

Ace Doubles, now cherished by collectors, were two twentythousand-word novels smacked together cheeseburger-style into one book with title covers on both sides. The cover art kept to classic pulp themes: bug-eyed aliens, rocket ships, strong men and screaming women. Wollheim routinely changed Phil's titles: Quizmaster Take All to Solar Lottery (1955), Womb for Another to The World Jones Made (1956), With Opened Mind to Eye in the Sky (1957), and A Glass of Darkness to The Cosmic Puppets (1957). Of the early novels, only The Man Who Japed (1956) came out as Phil named it.

Wollheim insists that he did not meddle with Phil's plots:

The editing was done by me, or my secretary. Just spelling and punctuation. I don't believe we ever changed any plots of his-just the titles. I wouldn't have dreamed of telling him what to write. He was what he was. He had such an unusual mind-l think it would have turned him into another hack-it couldn't be done.

In fact, Wollheim called for substantial changes in Solar Lottery, The World Jones Made, and Vulcan's Hammer (1960). Phil paid attention, though he did not always accede to Wollheim's demands. Sometimes the changes were insisted upon by Wyn. It was Wyn who raised objections to Eye in the Sky, Phil's self-termed "breakthrough" novel, to which Wollheim paid the ultimate tribute-publication as a "DoubleSize" book all its own.

Eye is Phil's first novel to pose successfully the "What is Real?" theme that obsessed him. His approach to this theme, by the time he wrote Eye in a blistering two weeks in early 1955, was philosophically sophisticated in the extreme. He had absorbed Hume's argument that we cannot verify causality (that B follows A does not prove that A caused B), Bishop Berkeley's demonstration that physical reality cannot be objectively established (all we have are sensory impressions that seem to be real), and Kant's distinction between noumena (unknowable ultimate reality) and phenomena (a priori categories, such as space and time, imposed upon reality by the workings of the human brain). From Jung he adopted the theory of projection: The contents of our psyches strongly color our perceptions. As a coup de grace, Phil's study of Vedic and Buddhist philosophy led to a fascination with maya: True reality is veiled from unenlightened human consciousness. We create illusory realms in accordance with our fears and desires. Small wonder that Phil's original title for Eye, which set out to delineate the structure of those realms, was With Opened Mind.