Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (46 page)

The police, by contrast, are rendered nobly. Indeed, in February 1973 Phil wrote to the Department of justice to offer his assistance in "the war against illegal drugs" because "drug-abuse is the greatest problem I know of, and I hope with all my heart to accomplish something in this novel in the fight against it." Phil even proposed to dedicate Scanner to Attorney General Richard Kleindienst-a remarkable exception to Phil's otherwise implacable opposition to the Nixon administration. But in daily life Phil adopted a less adamant approach to drugs, even smoking an occasional joint or bowl of hash.

In the service of its antidrug theme, Scanner nails down the hazy, twisting weirdness of sixties doper dialogue perfectly. In novels such as The Soft Machine and The Wild Boys, William Burroughs employs a junkie patois that is part forties Times Square, part private eye, part laconic Beat Burroughs. Vivid and sharp, but not the way it sounded at the time. What it did sound like, when the dream devoured itself, is Ernie Luckman explaining to Fred/Bob Arctor a new idea for smuggling dope:

"Well, see, you take a huge block of hash and carve it in the shape of a man. Then you hollow out a section and put a wind-up motor like a clockworks in it, and a little cassette tape (...j and it walks up to the customs man, who says to it, 'Do you have anything to declare?' and the block of hash says, 'No, I don't,' and keeps on walking. Until it runs down on the other side of the border. "

"You could put a solar-type battery in it instead of a spring and it could keep walking for years. Forever."

"What's the use of that? It'd finally reach either the Pacific or the Atlantic. In fact, it'd walk off the edge of the Earth, like-"

"Imagine an Eskimo village, and a six-foot-high block of hash worth about-how much would that be worth?"

"About a billion dollars."

"More. Two billion."

"These Eskimos are chewing hides and carving bone spears, and this block of hash worth two billion dollars comes walking through the snow saying over and over, No, I don't.' "

"They'd wonder what it meant by that."

"They'd be puzzled forever. There'd be legends."

After this strange colloquy, a silence. Then:

"Bob, you know something ..." Luckman said at last. "1 used to be the same age as everyone else."

"I think so was I," Arctor said.

"I don't know what did it."

"Sure, Luckman," Arctor said, "you know what did it to all of us."

"Well, let's not talk about it."

Phil cried often during the long nighttime stints writing Scanner. In the spare bedroom at Quartz Lane, he would type until he collapsed from exhaustion, then sleep an hour or two and go at it again. In a 1977 Exegesis entry, Phil provided a fitting coda:

[. . .] I can see what I have done to transmute those terrible days into something worthwhile [... ] This is what God does; this is his strange mystery: how he accomplishes this. When we view the evil (which he is going to transmute) we can't see for the life of us how he can do it-but later on, & only later on, after it's done, can we see how he has used evil as the clay out of which he as potter has fashioned the pot (universe viewed as artifact).

Even as he worked on Scanner, public interest in Dick's work continued to mount. An admiring parody by John Sladek of Phil's pell-mell cosmic style-"Solar Shoe Salesman"-appeared in F & SF. In March 1973 the BBC came to Fullerton to shoot Phil acting out a scene from Counter-Clock World. That summer, the SF slick Vertex conducted an interview, followed in September by a French documentary crew who set Phil and Norman Spinrad to discoursing on Nixon and SF amid the whirling teacups at Disneyland. Then Entwhistle Books, a small independent publisher, announced plans to publish Confessions of a Crap Artist-the first of his fifties mainstream novels to make it. On French TV Phil's work was proposed for the Nobel Prize. The year closed with an interview by the London Daily Telegraph.

Alas, the subject of all this attention was near broke most of the time. To Ashmead and the Meredith Agency, Phil wrote citing the critical praise, hoping it would make a difference in the New York marketplace. It did not.

Worse yet, the new bout of writing productivity was jeopardizing Phil's health. In April 1973 he wrote to Nancy and Isa:

[T]he doctor says I have serious if not dangerous hypertension (physical high blood pressure, not psychological) and it must be controlled. So I'm on a goddam pill again, after having had no prescriptions for over a full year for anything. [...] After sending the novel [Flow] to my agent [...] I started another one [Scanner] [... ] (a) a 62-page outline; (b) 82 final pages to mail to accompany the outline for submission; (c) 240 pages more in rough. Add that up, for a period from February 20 to April 2, and how many pages of writing do you get? A fatal stroke, that's what. See? See??? I'm writing more and faster off chemicals than I was on. And-my blood pressure is higher. Does not compute.

One source of the intense pressure Phil was feeling was also a source of great joy: Tessa was pregnant. In April they were married. Tessa recalls:

I don't know why I married Phil. He asked, and I said I would think about it. We were already living together. I wanted to have a baby, although I didn't really care whether it was out of wedlock. The next thing I knew, Phil thought I had said yes. [... ] When he got a check in April, from his agent, he called a minister and had him come to our apartment and marry us. I was five months pregnant, my feet too swollen to wear anything but sandals, and I thought it would be a good idea to marry the baby's father.

On July 25, 1973, Phil's son, Christopher, was born. It was a relief to Phil, who had feared that twins were on the way. Life with a son changed things between Phil and Tessa, but differently from the changes that followed the birth of Isa. Tessa writes:

Phil was a model father. [...] He loved his son a great deal, probably more than he loved me. [...] Where Phil and I had been "partners in crime." pulling off little pranks and practical jokes, I found myself gradually cut out in favor of Christopher. It was wonderful, for me, to watch the two of them together. It was okay to be cut out, because I enjoyed seeing their relationship blossom.

There were two practical limits to Phil's parenting: He never did diapers, and he insisted on quiet while he wrote. Quiet proved elusive, as Christopher cried loudly through most nights.

For all his joy, Phil found himself in a deep depression. To Dorothy he wrote in September: "Right after Christopher's birth I had a post partum, and nearly did myself in (as I often nearly do). I contacted Orange County Mental Health, and their therapist pulled me out in three weeks." But the depressions recurred; later in the year, Phil considering entering the LaHabre Psychiatric Hospital, but family and finances precluded this move.

There was, that September, one bright moment of career recognition that actually translated into an immediate $2,000. United Artists picked up the film option on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and was interested enough to continue option payments for some years. Phil was excited and took to taping to the walls photographs of young actresses (such as Victoria Principal) who he felt would be right for the part of Rachael Rosen (ultimately played, in the 1982 film Blade Runner, by Sean Young).

Nonetheless, fears over the responsibilities of a new baby, coupled with an erratic income, troubled Phil sufficiently that he put forward, in another September letter to Dorothy, a self-justification that would address what Phil was certain she was thinking:

There is, in this country, a tendency to look down with contempt on people who are in financial trouble, who lose their house, their possessions; I fight that attitude and take pride in the fact that, for example, as I said in my previous letter, Stanislaw Lem considers me to be the sole artist working in the field. Who would there be, then, were I to quit?

The growing recognition of his work was a balm when Phil badly needed and deserved one. Just a few days before his self-justification to Dorothy, Phil had written to French critic Marcel Thaon in response to Thaon's queries on the direction of his future novels. Phil explained that he now saw "authentic reality as being amazingly simple: the rest, perhaps, has been generated by our own inner problems, and by the power aspirations of ruling classes."

Amazingly simple? Somewhere someone or something was laughing.

10

Annus Mirabilis: Information-Rich Pink Light, The Black Iron Prison
And The Palm Tree Garden Superimposed, Christopher's Life Saved, A
Meta-abstraction Of Ultimate Infinite Value-But Who KNEW What 7he Hall It
REALLY Meant? Not Phil, Not Even As It Beamed Out Nightly Dreams Explaining It All In Giant Books (February 1974-February 1975)

Religious experience is absolute. It is indisputable. You can only say that you have never had such an experience, and your opponent will say: "Sorry, I have." And there your discussion will come to an end. [...] And if such experience helps to make your life healthier, more beautiful, more complete and more satisfactory to yourself and to those you love, you may safely say: "This was the grace of God."

C. G. JUNG, Psychology and Religion

My life has divided this way: survival/cultural/spiritual/postmortem (resurrection as of 3-74)

PHIL, 1978 Exegesis entry

Who the hell knows? I don't want to go into this deeply but I've had weird dream experiences myself. God knows what's in our unconscious. What would Phil have said about it? He would have said six different things! I'll say this. Anybody who takes this without a laugh misses it all.

NORMAN SPINRAD, in interview

FOR all the subsequent confusion he sowed, Phil never really doubted that the visions and auditions of February-March 1974 (2-3-74) and after had fundamentally changed his life.

Whether or not they were real was another question. As usual. In seeking an answer, Phil hovered in a binary flutter:

Doubt. That he might have deceived himself, or that It-whatever It was-had deceived him.

Joy. That the universe might just contain a meaning that had eluded him all through his life and works.

This dialectic lies at the heart of the eight-year Exegesis (a largely handwritten journal, some eight thousand pages long, devoted to the solution of 2-3-74) and of Valis (p. 1981). And out of it burgeoned the theories-Phil's own and those posed by friends and critics. Many of them can explain almost everything.