Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (64 page)

Creme's predictions were not so very far removed from Phil's Tagore vision. Phil was thrilled by the show and sent copies of Valis and the Tagore letter to Creme's Tara Center headquarters in Hollywood. He then followed up with the purchase of two Tara Center books, which Phil studied and thought excellent, and a $150 donation. In a February 12 letter to Childworld magazine Phil avowed the Creme teachings as truth: "The central doctrine of his new dispensation is that we of the industrial nations must take primary responsibility for feeding and caring for the poorer people, of the Third World per se; we must share the wealth, energy and resources of the world with all mankind. Our own lifestyles must become more simple; we must not only cease to hoard the resources of the world, we must also cease to waste them." To interviewer Gregg Rickman, he spoke at length concerning his faith in the coming of Maitreya; this interview appears in Philip K. Dick: The Last Testament.

Rickman writes that, when the interview was completed and the tape recorder shut off, Phil confessed to some doubts as to Creme's prediction of a new spiritual age. When he traveled to Europe he planned to investigate the matter further by checking up in Belgium and the Netherlands. Mary recalls these plans: "Phil said that even if you aren't sure it's true, it doesn't hurt to be included-he would rather be one of the bosses deciding who would pick beans than be one of the bean pickers. I think it was the scenario of his next book-I really do." The Exegesis confirms that Phil took Creme to task over the true nature of the divine invasion. And one 1982 entry suggests why Phil waited until the tape recorder was off to express doubt-such doubt might undermine his goal of exercising an influence on public opinion:

I've realized: I'm into power. In terms of my writing & in terms of what I do with the money I earn from my writing. The key term is: effective.

I am interested in only one thing: instead of society molding me, I mold it: (1) in my writing; (2) in what I do with the money; (3) in interviews; (4) in the movie [...j Vast thematic doctrines are emerging [...] This is what the whole opus adds up to: anticipation of the coming kingship of God. In other words, the kerygma.

To Gwen Lee, in an interview conducted in Phil's final week of consciousness, Phil blended the burdens of prophecy and the plot of Owl and confessed to great weariness:

I wanted to write about a guy who pushes his brain to its limit, is aware he has reached his limit, but voluntarily decides to go on and pay the consequences. I realized that this is simply a restatement of the whole prophecy thing. It could be the same with money, acquisition of property. It's really the striving-the person becomes aware that whatever he is striving for becomes the cost.

The cost is riding higher and closing the gap all the time. Eventually the cost line goes higher. This is something I didn't realize about myself. Although I think my writing is getting better all the time my physical stamina is nothing like it used to be. [... ] I can still write well but the costs-I can see the graph in my mind where the cost line is going to meet and then pass the use line. It's inevitable.

On the night of February 17, Phil called up therapist Barry Spatz. He was worried because during his interview with Rickman that evening he had frequently contradicted himself on and off tape, and not only with respect to Creme. He also was experiencing failing eyesight. Was this a psychological symptom-the avoidance of some truth he didn't want to see? Spatz advised Phil that these sounded like serious physical symptoms and that he should go to a hospital immediately. Phil promised to do so, but he didn't.

The next day a neighbor saw Phil pick up his newspaper. He had an appointment scheduled with Spatz, and he missed it. Mary tried to reach him by phone and couldn't. It was his neighbors Juan and Su Perez who found Phil unconscious on the floor of his apartment and called for the ambulance. In the hospital Phil was diagnosed as having had a stroke, but one from which he could, over time, recover. He could not speak, but he could smile and his eyes found the faces of the friends and loved ones who came to visit. But further strokes followed, accompanied by heart failure.

Phil died in the hospital on March 2, 1982. Age fifty-three.

The gravesite, chosen by Phil's father, Edgar, is in Fort Morgan, Colorado, a town Phil passed through as a baby boy moving with his family to California.

Buried beside him is sister Jane.

CHRONOLOGICAL SURVEY AND GUIDE

It is one of the cardinal errors of literary criticism to believe that the author's own views can be inferred from his writing; Freud, for instance, makes this really ugly error again and again. A successful writer can adopt any viewpoint which his characters must needs possess in order to function; this is the measure of his craft, the ability to free from his work his own prejudices.

PHIL in Double:Bill, SF Writers' Symposium (1969)

People have told me that everything about me, every facet of my life, psyche, experiences, dreams and fears, are laid out explicitly in my writing, that from the corpus of my work I can be absolutely and precisely inferred. This is true.

PHIL, "Introduction" to The Golden Man (1980)

PHIL Dick was far too prolific to allow for discussion of all of his works in the course of a biographical narrative.

This Chronological Survey offers a guide to the Phildickian world as a whole for those interested in exploring it further. The books are discussed in the order they were written. To ensure pointless arguments, I've rated each of the works that survive intact on a scale of 1 to 10. That scale is internally based: 10 equals the best work Phil produced, which is, in my view, very good indeed. May readers confronted by over fifty titles to choose from derive benefit thereby. Where the works have been previously discussed in the main narrative, I've provided chapter references.

Underwood/Miller provided a great service by publishing, in 1986, an elegant five-volume Collected Stories (which includes previously unpublished tales). Nonetheless, I've approached the stories in this survey by way of the separate collections-A Handful of Darkness (1955), The Variable Man (1957), The Preserving Machine (1969), The Book of Philip K. Dick (1972), The Best of Philip K. Dick (1977), The Golden Man (1980), and I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon (1985)-because they contain the best of the stories. (Phil helped with the selection process for Best of and Golden Man. )

In Only Apparently Real, Paul Williams chronologically orders Phil's novels based upon the dates manuscripts were received by the Scott Meredith Literary Agency (SMLA). I vary from Williams in estimating (on the basis of textual clues) the writing of Gather Yourselves Together as 1949-50 and Mary and the Giant as 1953-54. Both the estimated year(s) of writing (w.) and the year of publication (p.) are indicated where they differ.

1. Return to Lilliput (w. 1941-42). See Chapter 2. Williams reasonably speculates that "There are probably other early novels of which neither manuscript nor name survive."

2. The Earthshaker (w. 1948-50). See Chapter 4. It's possible, as Williams notes, that this is the "long ago straight novel" that Phil mentioned as a precursor of Dr. Bloodmoney. Another possible candidate is Pilgrim on the Hill, a lost 1956 mainstream novel that survives only in the form of an agent's synopsis on an SMLA index card. (Phil might have enjoyed this strange state of affairs.) See Pilgrim, below, for the synopsis.

3. Gather Yourselves Together (w. 1949-50). Three isolated Americans in a newly Communist mainland China find that their personal lives are devoid of genuine values. See Chapter 3 for further plot details. This is likely the first novel Phil completed. At 481 pages, it cries out for cutting. Young, innocent Carl keeps a notebook that prefigures the Exegesis. There's a dead-cat-as-indictment-of-Being story much like the one in Valis. And the first "dark-haired girl" in any of Phil's novels appears in a flashback reverie by Carl. One of Verne's past lovers, a woman named Teddy, was surely inspired by young Phil's imaginary sister Teddy (see Chapter 1). At the end of Gather America/Roman Empire and China/Early Christians parallels are tentatively drawn. But this novel isn't really about politics, despite the superficial plot framework. It's about sex, betrayal, and the slow, hard dying of love's ideals. Rating: Phil paying apprenticeship dues.

4. Voices from the Street (w. 1952-53). A young man, struggling with an unsatisfying job and a dreary marriage, falls into total despair when the supposed ideals of both politics and religion fail him. This unpublished mainstream novel meanders in its surviving 547-page draft form, but it features a strong set of characters. Jim Fergesson, the Hollis-inspired owner of Modern TV Sales and Service, has a paternal, quarrelsome relationship with salesman Stuart Hadley, a would-be dandy in his mid-twenties who is, for all his pretensions, a lost and frightened soul whom Fergesson nicknames "Stumblebum." Hadley's wife, Ellen, with whom he has a son, bores him; once he has even struck her. Hadley adores his beautiful older sister Sally, who would protect him from the world if she could (twin sister Jane figures in this portrait). His friends the Golds, a Jewish socialist couple, disgust him (despite himself) with their victimlike ways. Hadley is drawn to strong, extreme types like Marsha Frazier, the tall, gaunt editor of the fascist literary quarterly Succubus, and Theodore Beckheim, the charismatic black preacher who heads the Society of the Watchmen of Jesus. Hadley has a bitter affair with Marsha, who resembles mother Dorothy in physique and forceful temperament. Stuart Hadley is not Phil's self-portrait, but there are similarities: Both attended special schools in Washington, D.C., for example. Fergesson fires Hadley when he wanders off on an identity quest once too often. This spurs a drunken spree (likely influenced by the "Nighttown" sequence in Ulysses) and then disaster. Fergesson appeared briefly in Gather and returns along with Stuart Hadley (as a black man) in Dr. Bloodmoney (p. 1964). Hadley also shows up in The Crack in Space (p. 1966), where he and boss Darius Pethel parallel Hadley-Fergesson here. Rating: 2.

5. The Cosmic Puppets, originally titled A Glass of Darkness (w. 1953, p. 1956 in Satellite, p. 1957 in slightly expanded form as half of an Ace Double). A small Virginia town becomes the unexpected site of the battle for ultimate control of the universe. This is Phil's only pure fantasy novel. The original title was inspired by Paul's troubled observations in 1 Corinthians; twenty years later, in A Scanner Darkly, the metaphor returns in more striking form. Ted Barton's home town of Millgate is split asunder in the ongoing struggle between Good and Evil, as personified by the warring deities of Zoroastrian dualism: Ormazd and Ahriman. The book is blandly written and woodenly plotted, but it foreshadows ideas Phil would put to better use in later works. Barton must remind Ormazd (who dwells in Millgate in human form) of his divinity. The god who forgets his nature returns again as young Emmanuel in The Divine Invasion (p. 1981). And Mary, the wise little girl who assists Barton and is in reality Armaiti, the only daughter of Ormazd, is a precursor of Sophia in Valis (p. 1981) and Zina in The Divine Invasion-both youthful female incarnations of the divine spirit. In letters written in July 1974, Phil affirmed his then conviction that the events of 2-3-74 were Zoroastrian in spirit. Rating: 3.

6. A 'Handful of Darkness (w. 1952-54, p. 1955). Phil's first hardcover, a selection of early stories published by Rich & Cowan in London. At the time Phil considered his fantasy stories to be his best, but R & C held that fantasies were for children. Only two made it: "The Cookie Lady" (w. 1952, p. 1953), a variation on the Hansel and Gretel theme, and the haunting "Upon the Dull Earth" (w. 1953, p. 1954), Phil's take on the Orpheus legend, with a lover seeking to rescue his Eurydice from life-thirsting angels. For "Colony" (w. 1952, p. 1953) and "Impostor" (1953), the two best tales in the book, see Chapter 4. Rating: 4.

7. Solar Lottery, originally titled Quizmaster Take All (w. 1953-54, p. 1955). In the twenty-third century, anyone may become absolute leader of the world if the magnetic lottery bottle "twitches" his or her "power-card." But this random system, which is supposed to preclude undue concentration of power, fails miserably, and it's up to the disenfranchised working class to take desperate measures to regain their rights. This was Phil's first SF novel, half of an Ace Double. The 1955 British hard-cover, titled World of Chance, differs slightly in form due to editorial changes. Solar Lottery owes a great deal to the tilt-a-whirl societal-upheaval plots of A. E. van Vogt and just a tad to fifties gametheory strategies. Until Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, retitled Blade Runner, was reissued as a tie-in to the movie, Solar Lotteryat over 300,000-was Phil's biggest seller. Ace editor Wollheim explains that the limited number of fifties SF titles had something to do with that. The plot: Ted Benteley, like Ted Barton in The Cosmic Puppets, is an idealistic young man, with a straight-ahead quality that disappears in the sixties novels. His world is ruled by the despotic Quizmaster Verrick, who presides over a corrupt society (deprived of purpose by so much random bottle twitching) of exalted white-collar Classifieds and disdained blue-collar Unclassifieds. Leon Cartwright, the Phildickian repairman hero, replaces Verrick by rigging the bottle game, but his nerves can't take being stalked by the "Pellig-thing"-an android assassin powered in random sequence by a dozen different human minds in order to madden Cartwright's protective telepathic Corps. Meanwhile, the Prestonite cult (to which Cartwright belongs) tries to locate a "mythical" tenth planet discovered by its founder, cranky old astronomer John Preston. Flame Disc is the planet's name, and Preston's Flame Disc is the first of many book-within-a-book alternative realities in Phil's novels. Rating: 5.