Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (7 page)

But Phil's consuming playtime passion was the all-American choice: cowboys. His parents bought him a complete cowboy outfit: hat, vest, chaps, holster, gun, and boots. They must have made mention by this time, in some manner, of Jane's death, for Tessa Dick, Phil's fifth wife, relates that during his cowboy games

[Phil] used to pretend he had a sister named Jane, and she was a cowgirl. He would dress up in his cowboy suit and "ride horses" with Jane. Jane was small, with dark eyes and long dark hair. She was also very gutsy, always daring Phil to do things he was afraid of, helping him to get into trouble.

Bear in mind this description of cowgirl Jane. It embodies the look and character of the "dark-haired girl"-Phil's anima and obsession-that guided him persistently in his choice of wives and lovers and in his depiction of the ambiguous (fiercely brave/waywardly evil) heroines that appear in so many of his novels.

Neither Edgar nor Dorothy regarded themselves as religious, but they did send Phil to Sunday school for a time. Phil's stubborn insistence on understanding just what was being said, even in that pious setting, gratified his father. Edgar recalled that during a group sing Phil "got out of his seat and walked up and asked for a psalm book. He said he couldn't sing unless he had a book. Right in the church ... it shows how natural he was."

Formal religion was not important to Phil in his boyhood. But one incident-an act of spontaneous kindness, and of faith-stayed with him always. While out for a walk with his parents, they met a "great bearded white-haired old beggar." Edgar gave four-year-old Phil a nickel to give to the poor man, who in turn pressed upon the boy "a little pamphlet about God." In the Prologue to Radio Free Albemuth (written in 1976), Phil retold this incident with the intent of identifying this beggar with the prophet Elijah.

As to more everyday questions of right and wrong, Edgar prided himself on dealing with Phil on an "adult" basis. "If I scolded Philip, he'd analyze it and come back and tell me. We'd talk it over. I'd admit it when I was wrong." Phil was "irritable" as a boy, and Edgar felt that his calm approach-as opposed to Dorothy's stricter style-gave the boy "a little lift." Between Phil and his father grew a conspiratorial bond against the mother. Even before the divorce, Edgar feared that Dorothy was somehow seeking to exclude him from Phil's upbringing, so he fought back by courting the boy with movies and trips to the country. When Dorothy would come along on trips, Phil would lock the car doors and urge his father to drive off before she could get in. And there were strictly father-son events-such as trips to nearby ranches that Edgar knew through his work-that promised, and sometimes delivered, adventure.

Edgar was afraid of rattlesnakes and taught Phil how to recognize them. One day they visited a friend of Edgar's with a pet bull snake that slept on the open front porch. While the adults were talking inside, Phil came in to announce a "jingle snake on porch." Assured that it was a bull snake, Phil kept to his story. At last the two men checked-and found a thirteen-rattler, the largest ever seen in that area, which they killed. On another nearby ranch, Edgar had noticed rabbits kept in an exposed cage without food or water. One Sunday, while the ranch owners were off at church, lie and Phil freed the rabbits. Of their own volition, the rabbits returned to their cage. Undaunted, the two engineered a second great escape, this time transporting the rabbits by car twenty miles away.

But Edgar failed flat out in his attempt to win Phil over to football. Unlike Edgar in his youth, Phil was not an active boy. Together they attended a U Cal football game when Phil was about six (the divorce was final by this time). Recalled Edgar: "That was a show in itself, him [Phil] seeing those people running and chasing each other. He thought they were chasing each other and it was hard for him to see why in the world they were doing things like that."

Underlying the affection between father and son was a persistent ambivalence in both. Edgar saw Phil as "physically lazy" and perhaps resented his son's status as Dorothy's possession. Phil was often sick-he had asthma attacks throughout his childhood-and, for the most part, Edgar left the health concerns of the child to his mother. "Dorothy took great care of Philip, though she was too involved with Phil's glasses and his teeth and various medicines," Edgar recalled. Among Phil's medicines was aphedrine (an amphetamine) in pill form, which he took for the asthma.

Phil's own ambivalence is manifest in a much-anthologized 1954 short story, "The Father-thing." The basic plot: A young boy, Charles, discovers that his father, Ted (Edgar's familiar name), has been killed and replaced by a malignant alien life form:

He was a good-looking man in his early thirties: thick blond hair, strong arms, competent hands, square face and flashing brown eyes. [.]

Ted jerked. A strange expression flitted across his face. It vanished at once; but in the brief instant Ted Walton's face lost all familiarity. Something alien and cold gleamed out, a twisting, wriggling mass. The eyes blurred and receded, as an archaic sheen filmed over them. The ordinary look of a tired, middle-aged husband was gone.

The new Ted-unlike Edgar with his alleged "adult" approach to child discipline-has no qualms about spanking young boys who are overly quizzical of apparent reality. Phil later wrote of "The Fatherthing": "I always had the impression, when I was very small, that my father was two people, one good, one bad. The good father goes away and the bad father replaces him. I guess many kids have this feeling. What if it were so?"

One strange aspect of the story is Charles's composure: After a brief cry, the eight-year-old becomes a methodical avenger. The "good" father is innocent of the deeds of the "bad" alien impostor-a device that not only skirts anger (implicit in the killing of the alien) but also parallels the Gnostic view that our world is created by an evil demiurge-and not by the benign supreme deity who has cosmically absconded. Phil's adult fascination with Gnosticism may have stemmed in part from a need to make intellectual sense of the enduring pain caused by Edgar's flashes of anger and his all but total departure (absconding) from Phil's life.

Edgar and Dorothy were divorced in 1933, at the height of the Depression. The National Recovery Administration had asked Edgar to open an office in Reno, Nevada. Dorothy refused to move and consulted a psychiatrist, who assured her that divorce would not have a detrimental effect upon Phil. The psychiatrist was dead wrong: To Phil it felt as if his father had abandoned him, and the scar endured. As for Edgar, his first response was incomprehension. "It came out of the clear blue sky," he recalled fifty years later.

What finally drove the couple apart? Lynne Cecil, later Dorothy's stepdaughter, observes: "Part of the problem was that as Dorothy grew up she just `matured away.' But the main reason was that Edgar was extremely jealous. She couldn't stand it-he would be jealous if somebody looked at her." At this time, Dorothy was slender, with shoulder-length brown hair and features resembling those of the cinema's reigning beauty, Greta Garbo. But Phil never spoke of Dorothy's having lovers during his childhood and adolescence, or even of any polite courtships.

The freedom Dorothy craved was not sexual but psychological: autonomy, the right to raise her son by her own lights.

After their separation, Dorothy moved into a Berkeley apartment with Meemaw (again on hand in time of crisis) and Marion. For a year, Edgar would pay regular visits there to see Phil. But then the battle for control over their son broke out in full force. In 1934, Edgar threatened to seek sole custody of Phil on the grounds, as Dorothy explained it, "that he was better off financially and could `do more' for you. When I refused to give you up he wrote that he would forget you, then, and wanted nothing more to do with either of us. [... ] I made a colossal mistake, taking the advice of a psychiatrist who told me to let you forget your father, never to mention him at all, to ignore his existence."

Dorothy had her reasons for fearing Edgar's legal threats. With a newly found secretarial job, she could barely provide an adequate livelihood for the new household; of necessity, Meemaw took over full-time care of Phil. Dorothy saw that Meemaw "supplied the kissing and cuddling, the indulgence, and the cookies that I withheld." Tessa Dick relates that "When Phil got into trouble, she [Meemaw] would shake her head and say, `Oh, Philip,' very quietly. That used to have more effect on Phil than all his mother's scolding."

But there was a darker side to the new living arrangement. Meemaw's husband, Earl, had, at this time, circled back to his wife to stay (he died three years later, in 1937). Phil recalled him as "a big man with flaming red hair" who "used to go around the house, waving his belt and saying, 'I'm going to whip that boy.' " During or shortly after his stay in Earl and Meemaw's home, Phil developed severe swallowing difficulties. Barry Spatz, a psychologist who worked with Phil in the late seventies and early eighties, speculates in interview that those symptoms may have been induced by physical abuse or sexual molestation on Earl's part. Phil drew a blank when asked by Spatz, during therapy, if he could recall such incidents.

Spatz points out that Phil's life history shows tendencies characteristic of child incest victims, such as difficult relations with family; drug abuse; repeated suicide attempts; significant memory gaps; low selfesteem accompanied by guilt; a chaotic, crisis-oriented lifestyle; and pervasive mistrust, especially toward the opposite sex, alternating with strong attachments. These are certainly descriptive of aspects of Phil's life that will be detailed in this book. But such tendencies can and do manifest themselves in persons who have not suffered from abuse.

The evidence simply does not allow for certainty. Almost forty years later, in 1964, Phil broached the subject with his third wife, Anne, during the worst of their marital difficulties:

[O]ne day, just before going to church, Phil said he had something very serious to tell me; something that would explain why he couldn't function properly in life. I... I He could function just fine. Why did he have to go on as if he couldn't? [... ] Phil told me, "When I was quite small I was molested by a homosexual neighbor. This is what has made me so inadequate." I told him he should tell this to his psychotherapist.

In this version, a neighbor-not Earl-is the abuser. Was it a ploy for sympathy, as Anne took it at the time? Why didn't Phil tell Spatz about it during their lengthy sessions? To Tessa Dick, Phil recalled being sent, at age six, to a psychiatrist who suggested that his problems had to do with homosexuality. Tessa states that at one of the boarding schools Phil attended (Countryside in 1935, or Ojai in 1942-43) there was a molestation incident that worried Dorothy. But Phil was not personally involved.

Ultimately, one can do no more than to raise the possibility-and to duly note that eating and swallowing phobias remained with Phil, intermittently, throughout his life.

Whether or not molestation occurred, there can be no doubt that at that time Phil was beset by intense insecurity. He especially liked to play inside boxes and cartons, enjoying the sense of safety they provided. This foreshadows the agoraphobia that would emerge in Phil's high school years. It also parallels the yearnings of Mike Foster, the boy in Phil's excellent 1955 story "Foster, You're Dead." (Edgar had an infant brother, Foster, who died at age one.) In this story, Phil modified the anxieties of his own childhood to render an intensely believable portrait of a boy who is shaken to his soul by the psychological terrors of the cold war.

Mike Foster lives in a world (Phil's own fifties recast in an SF "future") in which every child is taught to expect imminent nuclear attack. When Mike's father scrapes up the money to buy a heavily advertised bomb shelter, Mike can feel safe at last:

He sat down on the floor, knees drawn up, face solemn, eyes wide. [... ] He was in a little self-contained cosmos; everything needed was here-or would be here, soon: food, water, air, things to do. Nothing else was wanted. [...]

Suddenly he shouted, a loud jubilant shout that echoed and bounced from wall to wall. He was deafened by the reverberation. He shut his eyes tight and clenched his fists. Joy filled him.

In early 1935, spurred by a desire to escape Edgar's custody threats, Dorothy moved with Phil back to Washington, D.C., and took an editorial job with the Federal Children's Bureau. For Phil, the separation from Meemaw was wrenching. Dorothy deplored that "you had at 4 the loss of your original mother because I went to work and at barely 6 the loss of the loving mother, Meemaw." But as a strategy to retain custody of Phil, the cross-continent move had its desired effect. Within two years, Edgar remarried. Dorothy remained single for eighteen years, though she confided on occasion that, had she known what poverty she and Phil would face, she would never have divorced Edgar.

Her editorial job with the Children's Bureau paid poorly. But she enjoyed the task of writing pamphlets on child care. In the sixties, Phil spotted one on a neighbor's bookshelf. "My mother wrote this book," Phil told her. "Ironic, isn't it, that she was a rotten mother and didn't like kids at all."