Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (4 page)

I am well aware that many of the quoted accounts by Phil of his life are very likely a mixture of fable and fact; but I am not unsympathetic to the value of fable in casting light upon Phil's spirit and character. My biographical approach must be, then, to provide alternative or clarifying accounts when I can, and for the rest, to let the reader (who may have some personal familiarity with the emotional magnifications-and deletions-of memory) beware and enjoy.

Second, let me confess that in this narrative I am arguing on behalf both of a life that I believe to have been remarkable and of a unique body of literary work that has been unjustly neglected. Much of this neglect is due to Phil's SF-genre identification and his prolific (and, admittedly, highly uneven) output. There is, however, a more personal negative factor at work: the reputation Phil acquired, particularly within SF circles, of being-to state it unadornedly-a drug-addled nut.

Phil was fully aware of this reputation. Indeed, he actively fostered it on many occasions, particularly during the sixties, when weird excess was the fashion even for far more respectable types than SF writers. But in the last decade of his life he came-not without humor-to regret it. His novel A Scanner Darkly (1977), a coda to the most painful years of his life, is a vehement antidrug testament that contains, in his typical way, some of the most hilarious scenes he ever wrote. Such as when Charles Freck, Substance D (Death) addict, decides to end it all by downing an overdose of reds with an expensive bottle of 1971 Mondavi Cabernet Sauvignon. But Freck is burned by his dealer, who instead passes him a weird new psychedelic:

Instead of quietly suffocating, Charles Freck began to hallucinate. Well, he thought philosophically, this is the story of my life. Always ripped off. He had to face the fact-considering how many of the capsules he had swallowedthat he was in for some trip.

The next thing he knew, a creature from between dimensions was standing beside his bed looking down at him disapprovingly.

The creature had many eyes, all over it, ultra-modern expensive-looking clothing, and rose up eight feet high. Also, it carried an enormous scroll.

"You're going to read me my sins," Charles Freck said.

The creature nodded and unsealed the scroll.

Freck said, lying helpless on his bed, "and it's going to take a hundred thousand hours."

Fixing its many compound eyes on him, the creature from between dimensions said, "We are no longer in the mundane universe. Lower-plane categories of material existence such as 'space' and 'time' no longer apply to you. You have been elevated to the transcendent realm. Your sins will be read to you ceaselessly, in shifts, throughout eternity. The list will never end."

Know your dealer, Charles Freck thought, and wished he could take back the last half-hour of his life. [. ]

Ten thousand years later they had reached the sixth grade.

The year he had discovered masturbation.

He shut his eyes, but he could still see the multi-eyed, eight-foot-high being with its endless scroll reading on and on.

"And next-" it was saying.

Charles Freck thought, At least I got a good wine.

Despite Scanner (or perhaps because of its pervasive humor and love, for all its antidrug vehemence), the reputation persisted. In a January 1981 letter, Phil accurately appraised the damage: " 'He's crazy,' will be the response. Took drugs, saw God. BFD [big fucking deal]."

Phil was surely not crazy by any standard that I would dare apply. For what it's worth, I have interviewed a psychiatrist and a psychologist who saw Phil during two of the most difficult periods of his life, and both declare him to have been as fully sane as the rest of us. In addition, it sticks in the craw to indulge in psychological name-calling in the case of a productive and disciplined artist who demonstrated an intelligence and imagination well beyond those of any of his detractors.

Phil's emotional and behavioral difficulties were, at times, extremely severe-causing considerable pain and suffering to himself and to others-and led him to write, at times, of his "three nervous breakdowns" and to level against himself diagnoses of "schizophrenia" and "psychosis." (On other occasions, he would vehemently deny that such terms had any bearing upon his life.) Phil's inner life was unremittingly intense. Perhaps he utilized extreme psychological terms to lend maximum drama to the forces that fueled him as a writer. Perhaps he said simply and directly what he believed, at certain times, to be the truth.

I am left with this compromise: to quote him faithfully, to acknowledge and probe the painful difficulties, but also to avoid, at all times, passing judgment on the basis of a simplistic and patronizing sane/insane dualism that would make a mockery of Phil's artistic and spiritual vision, and an ass of his biographer.

Finally, a note on the organization of the book. The sheer bulk of Phil's work-over forty novels and two hundred stories-makes detailed examination of the whole a practical impossibility. I have therefore focused, in the main narrative, on only the best of the stories and on those eleven novels-Eye in the Sky (1957), Time Out of Joint (1959), Confessions of a Crap Artist (w. 1959, p. 1975), The Man in the High Castle (1962), Martian Time-Slip (1964), The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), Ubik (1969), Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974), A Scanner Darkly (1977), Valis (1981), and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)-that are most exemplary of his themes. In addition, in the Chronological Survey I provide (in capsule review form) a guide to Phil's entire oeuvre in order of composition, affording the interested reader a tour of the themes weaving through the whole.

And now, returning to the quote of Phil's that opens this Introduction, let us-with every effort at retaining an objectivity Phil's own novels call into question-proceed to imagine the life of a writer "free and glad to write about an infinity of worlds."

Beginning, of course, with that "actual boyhood world" the power of which Phil sought to deny.

1

This Molts/ Coll (Dmmmber 1928 January 1929)

I can only be safe when sheltered by a woman. Why? Safe against what? What enemies, dangers? It is that I fear I will simply die. My breath, my heart will stop. I will expire like an exposed baby. Jane, it happened to you and I am still afraid it will happen to me. They can't protect us... .

PHIL, journal entry, c. 1971

"Now here's a number for Phil and Jane...."

Car radio in A Scanner Darkly (1977)

PHILIP Kindred Dick and his fraternal-twin sister, Jane Charlotte, were born six weeks prematurely, on December 16, 1928.

As was typical for her time, their mother, Dorothy, had no idea she was carrying twins. She and their father, Edgar, had just moved from Washington, D.C., to Chicago to accommodate Edgar's transfer within the U. S. Department of Agriculture. The birthing took place in their new apartment at 7812 Emerald Avenue. It was the dead of a very cold winter. The attending physician, chosen by Dorothy, was a doctor who lived down the street.

Phil was born at noon, twenty minutes ahead of his sister. Edgar, who had attended at many farmyard animal births, wiped the mucus from the babies' faces. They were frail things. Phil weighed four and one-quarter pounds and squawled loudly. Jane, a mere three and onehalf pounds, was quieter and darker than her blond-haired brother.

Dorothy, tall and gaunt, could hear the babies' cries but did not have enough milk for twins. Edgar kept busy at work and, in off hours, drew Dorothy's ire by joining a men's club to escape the domestic upheaval. But escape there was none: The twins grew more sickly by the day.

Nearly five decades later, in an August 1975 letter to Phil, Dorothy recalled the mounting horror of that winter:

For the first six weeks of your life, you were both starving to death because the (incompetent) doctor I had could not find the right formula for your food and because I was so ignorant I did not know how desperate your condition was. I did know things weren't right, but I didn't know how to get other help.

At the turn of New Year's 1929, Dorothy's mother, Edna Matilda Archer Kindred (known as Meemaw), came from Colorado to help the new parents. Meemaw was wonderful with young children, having raised three of her own, but the difficulties posed by two-week-old premature twins were unfamiliar and frightening to her. And then Dorothy, while attempting to warm the crib, accidentally burned Jane's leg with a hot-water bottle.

They learned, by chance, of a life insurance policy for the children that would cover the costs of an immediate home visit by a nurse. Dorothy's August 1975 letter to Phil continues:

She came with a doctor in a taxi, with a heated crib, and the doctor said at once that Jane would have to be taken to the hospital. Then she asked to see "the other baby." I went to get you. Meemaw snatched you up and ran in the bathroom and locked the door; it was a while before we could persuade her to open the door. The doctor and nurse left with both babies; Jane died on the way to the hospital; you were put into the incubator and given a special formula [...] You were within a day or so of death, but you began to gain at once, and when you weighed 5 pounds I was able to take you home. I could visit you every day in the incubator, and during the periods I was there I was given instruction in making up the very complicated formula.

Dorothy's letter is a self-termed "mea culpa" for maternal sins that Phil could not forget and would not forgive. The greatest of these sins, in Phil's view, was her negligence, or worse, leading to Jane's death on January 26, 1929.

When Phil was still very young, Dorothy tried to explain to him what had happened. Twin sister Jane, of whom Phil had no conscious memory, took vivid life within the boy by way of these explanations. Always they were colored by the anguish that shows through in her letter: It wasn't lack of love but ignorance, horrible ignorance, she hadn't been around little babies much, didn't know Phil and his little twin sister were starving away. Three decades later, Phil would confide to his third wife, Anne, that "I heard about Jane a lot and it wasn't good for me. I felt guilty-somehow I got all the milk."

The trauma of Jane's death remained the central event of Phil's psychic life. The torment extended throughout his life, manifesting itself in difficult relations with women and a fascination with resolving dualist (twin-poled) dilemmas-SF/mainstream, real/fake, human/android, and at last (in as near an integration of intellect and emotion as Phil ever achieved) in the two-source cosmology described in his masterwork Valis (1981).

Jane's death shadowed, and ultimately shattered, the newly created family of three. The marriage of Edgar and Dorothy-at one time the seemingly perfect couple, each tall, slender, and with sharp, intelligent features-would not long survive. And the divorce would take Phil's father away.