Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (23 page)

You have no idea how much your phone call affected me. For an hour (more like two) afterward I was in a state of what I would in all honesty call bliss-unlike anything I've ever felt before. Actually, the walls of the house seemed to melt away, and I felt as if I were seeing out into time and space for an unlimited distance. It was a physical sense, not a mere intellectual thought. A genuine state of existence new to me. Evidently my not having heard from you for a couple ofd,-.vs had had the effect of starting into motion a sense of separation from you [...] Then when you called, this distance was abolished, and the return of you as a physical reality caused a genuine transformation in me, as if I had stepped from one world to another. [... ] This is no doubt similar to the religious experience of conversion, and in a sense, I did undergo conversion upon hearing from you. There is a direct relationship between my hearing you, and the religious person who, after the traditional isolation and fasting and meditation, "hears" the voice of "god." The difference is that you exist, and I have sonic deep doubts about that fellow god.

Phil went on to "introspect" as to his own character. He conceded to a strong streak of "intolerance":

I'm violently partisan and sectarian, and I have the word of god with me-or haven't you noticed? [... It's not that I'm holier than thou, but that I'm filled with the moral wrath of the godly-admittedly a dreadful thing, and a cause of much human suffering. My image of myself is this gentle saint-like sage, full of bookish wisdom-and in actuality I'ni more like some minor Communist official getting up and attacking the "slug-like blood-swilling depraved homosexual lice of the whiskey-infested West." In theory I'm a relativist, but in many situations I'm an absolutist, and unfortunately your circles and your views bring out the latter as often as not. [...] There is some virtue in this moral wrath, too, in that it permits me to act out, carry out, certain strong convictions that run contrary to practical gain-it gives me the psychic energy necessary to actually being an idealist, rather than merely thinking idealistic thoughts. Beethoven was the same way.

Three days later, in a letter to a high school friend, Phil saw fit to paint a guarded picture of life as usual with Kleo. He added that, as to the highly publicized San Francisco Renaissance, ". I'm favorably inclined toward On the Road, but not the poetry & jazz...." Phil felt little attraction for the Beat social scene, though he later recalled meeting Gary Snyder and Robert Duncan (his McKinley Street housemate in 1947) during this period.

Anne returned from St. Louis with a financial settlement, and all continued to fare well. Phil got on splendidly with Anne's three daugh- ters-Hatte, age eight; Jayne, six; and Tandy, three. They called him "Daddy" (Rubenstein was their "first father"). Phil cooked breakfast for them, played "monster" and baseball with them in the pasture-sized backyard, gave scary nighttime readings of Lovecraft stories, and quoted by heart from Winnie the Pooh and When We Were Young. (Phil refrained from adopting them so as not to create a barrier to payments from the Rubenstein estate.) The newly formed family played typical American games: In "Life," Phil never took the path through college; in "Monopoly," his marker was always the old shoe.

When Phil at last moved into Anne's "swank" house, his possessions (aside from cherished pet cat Tumpy) were relatively few: a Royal Electric typewriter, the faithful Magnavox, an enormous quantity of records and books, and complete collections of Astounding, Amazing, F & SF, Mad, and Mandrake the Magician comic books. While Phil shared with the girls his love of pulps, he was also concerned that they read good books. "He'd say, `Don't read crap,' " Jayne recalls. "He'd make jokes about his books-he'd say, This one I wrote in a week-it's crap, too.' " The girls received daily lessons in music appreciation by way of the Magnavox: Wagner, Bach, Beethoven, Handel, and Gilbert and Sullivan filled the house. One of his obsessions was the Fischer-Dieskau recordings of Schubert's songs (quotations from these songs occur often in the SF novels of the sixties).

Phil did have one additional collection when he moved in: a wide variety of pills and medicines, which he kept in a large closet and prescribed from when the girls had colds. Phil was taking two Semoxy- drines a day (they'd been prescribed years ago, he told Anne), as well as quinidine for his recurrent tachycardia (he warned her that he could "drop dead" from taking quinidine). Phil was fearful of germs and fretted intensely when any of the girls fell ill. Jayne recalls: "He'd tell me adults don't feel well very often. He'd tell me about life in a roundabout way-being an adult wasn't too great, kids have a better time of it."

In late March of 1959 Phil and Anne drove down to Ensenada, Mexico, and found a judge; they were married on April Fools' Day. On the drive back, Phil confessed to Anne-fearful that she would cease to love him when she knew-that he had a hernia. Anne suggested medical treatment, but Phil couldn't face the idea of a hospital. At the border, Phil decided not to declare the gallon of tequila they'd purchased for the equivalent of thirty cents and hidden under their luggage. Twenty miles on into the U. S. they heard a siren and Phil went pale, recovering only when the cops passed on.

The marriage prospered. Phil was grateful when Anne made no objections to his growing a beard. He helped with the cooking and cleaning and knew how to make excellent martinis-two each night for Anne, while Phil sipped wine (he loved Buena Vista's Zinfandel). They raised ducks, guinea fowls, and banty chickens. Phil was a bit afraid of Anne's quarter horse and yearned for an owl as a pet (the title of Phil's last projected novel, which he did not live to write, was The Owl in Daylight). They had their first real fight over Phil's continuing to tend his old Mariana Street house. Anne wanted their home to be his primary concern. Phil sold the house. Afterward, he felt guilty about not giving Kleo half the proceeds.

Later that year, while eating lunch with Anne after their marriage, he suddenly told her: "I had a perfectly good wife I traded in for you." Within a short time, Phil and Kleo had resumed amicable relations. As Kleo says: "You don't throw away good friends, and Phil and I were best friends." But nearly two decades later, in the Exegesis, Phil retained a sense of guilt: "I am punished for the way I treated Kleo."

Anne and Phil made plans for how to make their money last while Phil pursued his mainstream ambitions. He still dabbled in SF, expanding two mediocre novelettes of the fifties into Dr. Futurity (1960) and Vulcan's Hammer (1960), each appearing as half of an Ace Double. Ace was "the lowest of the low pulp publishers in New York," he told Anne. Once, when her dinner guests asked what he wrote, Phil refused to answer, later insulting them so that they never returned. If a genre label was required, he preferred "fantasy writer."

But the mainstream was what he wanted. And if the young couple utilized carefully Phil's house-sale proceeds and his annual SF earnings (roughly $2,000), plus Anne's $20,000 from the Rubenstein estate, maybe they could make it for a while-Phil computed it, based on his Berkeley-days budget, at twenty years. Anne recalls: " 'You know,' said Phil, 'it takes twenty to thirty years to succeed as a literary writer.' He was willing to make this long term effort! I thought this attitude was great! However the word 'budget' wasn't a part of my vocabulary."

Anne was no raging spendthrift-her standards of the "good life" were no different from those of her Marin County neighbors-but there were three daughters, a house, a horse, banty chickens, and black-faced sheep, and, yes, an occasional luxury. Enchanted as she was by Phil, confident as she was of his talent, Anne worried about money. And that struck fear in Phil, who knew damn well what the chances were of his talent bringing in the big bucks.

Still, it was a lovely life for a time. At Anne's request, Phil changed over his late-night writing hours into a nine-to-five labor, in order to be with the family in the evening. Come lunchtime, he would emerge from the study, light up a Corina Lark, and he and Anne would talk. She writes:

We got so involved with our conversations that I often burnt the first two cheese sandwiches that were in the broiler. We talked about Schopenhauer, Leibnitz, monads, and the nature of reality-or Kant's theories as applied by Durkheim to the culture of the Australian aborigines-or Phil would hold forth on the Thirty Years War and Wallenstein. Light topics like these. Germanic culture had had a great influence on Phil. Phil told me he was one-quarter German and a sturm and drang romantic.

His lineage was English and Scotch-Irish, but that's love. These lunch talks were warm-ups for the novels to come. The Kant-Durkheim theory, for example, shaped Phil's depiction of the Martian aboriginal tribe of Bleekmen in Martian Time-Slip (1964).

Phil began a correspondence with Eleanor Dimoff, an editor at Harcourt, Brace. Harcourt had turned down Crap Artist but on the basis of that novel's promise offered Phil a contract: $500 down, $500 more upon acceptance of a new novel he was to write. He could smell the mainstream. In his February 1960 letter, Phil was suitably suave:

We're forty miles from San Francisco and we get in now and then, to eat in Chinatown or have coffee out around Broadway and Grant or visit friends on Potrero Hill. I nearly always manage to drop by the City Lights Bookshop and pick up thirty dollars worth of paperback books. My wife buys oriental rugs with holes in them from a rug dealer she knows, and if we can make it out to the Fillmore District we pick up a good supply of Japanese dishes from a little Japanese hardware store, there. If there's time to spare I stop along Van Ness and drive various new foreign cars, which is my favorite pasttime. And of course I pick up a supply of Egyptian cigarettes, if I have the money. If you think all this types me, consider that-before they tore down Seals Stadium-I went to S.F. primarily to see baseball.

It wasn't only Anne who enjoyed the good life. They were flush, and Phil was out and about and having some fun. Anne wasn't even aware that he had suffered from agoraphobia in the past. Except for one thing: Harcourt wanted Phil to come out to New York to confer with Dimoff on the new novel. No way. Not for Captain Video in the fifties-not even for the mainstream now.

There was one gaping omission in his self-portrait for Dimoff (did he fear she would think his mind couldn't be on his work?): Anne was pregnant. Within the month, on February 25, 1960, Laura Archer Dick-Phil's first daughter, Anne's fourth-was born.

Phil was nervous as hell in the months before the birth, urging Anne to eat Adelle Davis recipes and devising a vitamin-intake plan for himself that turned his tongue black. (A physician diagnosed the cause as an overdose of vitamin A; Phil mistrusted health food "nuts" ever after.) Before picking Laura up at the hospital, Phil scrubbed the old Ford station wagon for six hours-"l mean, even the lights," says Jayne.

Anne recalls that when Phil first looked into Laura's face he said: "Now my sister is made up for." And when, on their first day home, Dorothy and Joseph Hudner came out to see their grandchild, Phil allowed them a single minute and then rushed them out of the room.

The Harcourt contract didn't pan out. Phil submitted The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike (w. 1960, p. 1984) and Humpty Dumpty in Oakland (p. 1987), a 1960 rewrite of his 1956 work, A Time for George Stavros. Harcourt rejected them both; they are discussed in the Chronological Survey, and they have their moments.

But the best mainstream novel Phil ever wrote is Confessions of a Crap Artist, written in the summer of 1959, in the flush heat of his romance with Anne-a time she regards as their "honeymoon." Knopf almost bought it in 1960, but asked for a rewrite instead. The Meredith Agency told him it was his big chance. "I can't rewrite this book!" Phil explained to Anne. "It's not that I don't want to, it's that I'm not able to."

Crap Artist was published, at last, by Entwhistle Books in 1975, which eased the pain.

Just maybe the reason Phil couldn't rewrite Crap Artist is that it didn't need rewriting. Crap Artist is Phil's first novel to put multiple narrative viewpoints to wild work. He had described his earlier mainstream novels to Anne as "borderline surrealism." But there is nothing truly resembling surrealism until Crap Artist. What Raymond Chandler did for the neon-lit Los Angeles of the forties, Phil did for the Bay Area teetering on the brink of the sixties. Instead of the whiskey poet Philip Marlowe, we see through the eyes of Jack Isidore-"a schizoid person, a loner" and "one of God's favored fools," as Phil later described him.