Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (8 page)

Dorothy enrolled Phil in the Countryside School in nearby Silver Spring, Maryland, which promised the "Newest methods and equipment in a charming home environment." Here he spent at least part of the 1935-36 year in first grade. (Phil would later describe it as a "Quaker" boarding school, an affiliation not stated in the school's brochure.) A "Self Portrait" written by Phil in 1968 gives this account of why Dorothy saw boarding school as necessary:

In Washington, summer is a horror beyond the telling of it. I think it warped my mind-warped that in a fine conjunction of the fact that my mother and I had nowhere to live. We stayed with friends. Year in, year out. I did not do well (what seven-year-old child would?) and so I was sent to a school specializing in "disturbed" children. I was disturbed in regard to the fact that I was afraid of eating. The boarding school could not handle me because I weighed less each month, and was never seen to eat a string bean. My literary career, however, began to emerge, in the form of poetry. I wrote my first poem thus:

I saw a little birdy
Sitting in the tree.
I saw a little birdy
looking out at me.
Then the kitty saw the birdy and there wasn't none to see,
For the cat ate him up in the morning.

This poem was enthusiastically received on Parent's Day, and my future was assured (although, of course, no one knew it. Not then, anyhow.)

That little poem already displays the humor and the edge that merge in Phil's finest fiction. But at this point, in the boy, the edge was dominant. He had lost Meemaw, his father, and his sister. He had nothing resembling a stable home, and now was forced to endure a strange new boarding school environment. Swallowing food was especially difficult for him in public places like the school cafeteria. Phil later attributed his eating difficulties at this time to "grief and loneliness."

Whether the above-quoted poem is actually Phil's first literary work is doubtful. Other poems (typed out and preserved by Dorothy) contend for the honor. A "Song of Philip-Five years old" (which places it in 1934, prior to the move to Washington) is remarkable for its subtle distinction between "God" and "spirit":

The spirit of God is a nice old man
Who lived when the days were young.
But when the prince comes riding by
God is nowhere to be seen.

God is the spirit of you and me
And when the God is gone you will see him no more
But the life of the spirit will go in the morning sun.

The poem attests to Phil's unusual independence of spirit-most children cling to God the "nice old man."

In two of his novels, Puttering About in a Small Land (written 1957, published 1985) and Now Wait for Last Year (written 1963-65 and published in 1966), Phil utilized the Washington, D.C., of his childhood as a significant setting. In Now Wait, the stress-ridden Virgil Ackerman, owner of the Tijuana Fur & Dye Corporation, has specially constructed a retreat called "Wash-35" (for Washington, D.C., 1935), which allows Ackerman to return to the world of his childhood. The "omphalos" of that world is 3039 McComb Street (Phil's address for most of his stay in the capital). Playing at the Uptown Theatre is Hell's Angels with Jean Harlow (with a negligee scene that jolted young Phil when first he saw it). Fondly remembered details abound in Wash-35, but the context in which they are placed-a "regressive babyland" designed to prop up the psyche of a war-profiteering industrialist-underscore Phil's disdain for a rosy-hued re-creation of his boyhood world.

Phil was deeply unhappy at the Countryside School, so for the 1936-37 school year Dorothy transferred him to the John Eaton School, part of the D.C. public school system. In addition, she hired a series of housekeepers who cared for the boy. A black woman named Lula remained in the household for two years. But Phil would often stand forlornly by the window, watching for the first glimpse of his mother returning home from work.

His feelings toward Dorothy at this point were necessarily complex. He blamed her for driving his father away and destroying the family. And Dorothy's efforts to ease the trauma of Jane's death were backfiring badly. Kleo Mini, Phil's second wife, recalls, "Phil said to me on several occasions that Dorothy had told him, as a child, that the wrong one had died. Now, she may or may not have actually said that-I find it hard to believe-but that was the feeling Phil got from her, whether she said it or not. "

On a more immediate level, Phil resented Dorothy for packing him off to the Countryside School and then leaving him in the care of housekeepers. And when she was in the house, Phil found her a difficult mother to please. If he resorted to tantrums, she confined him to his

bedroom-where he could vent his rage by tearing the place apart. But Phil was drawn to Dorothy's brilliance and composure. Later in life he would cite favorably her insistence on his accepting the consequences of his actions.

Their bond was intense, full of a feeling that the hateful denunciations of his later years cannot obscure. After all, Dorothy raised him after Edgar was gone. Phil would later avow: "I have a lot of faith in women. Perhaps because of that. My father was weak; my mother was strong." Dorothy taught him to "admire writing," while Edgar "viewed football games as transcending everything else."

But the conflict between them endured. Dorothy's own lack of writing success-she wrote copiously but published only a single piece in Family Circle magazine-must ultimately have provided Phil with a sense of achievement that Dorothy could not dispute. It was never enough. He wrestled tirelessly with her power.

Phil attended the John Eaton School from 1936 to 1938, for grades two through four. He was absent often, a pattern condoned by Dorothy. His report cards reflect good academic work on the whole, with one of his lowest marks, a C, coming in written composition. But a comment by his fourth-grade teacher was admirably prophetic: "Shows interest and ability in story telling."

One incident from Phil's third-grade year impressed the boy deeply. Indeed, one could say that by sheer empathic force it forged the soul of the writer-to-be, appearing in countless thematic guises in the stories and novels. Little boy Phil was tormenting a beetle that had hidden itself in a snail shell. But then, as Phil forced the beetle from its haven, the urge to cruelty subsided, replaced by the sense-the certainty!-that all life was one, and that all depends on kindness:

And he came out, and all of a sudden I realized-it was total satori, just infinite, that this beetle was like I was. There was an understanding. He wanted to live just like I was, and I was hurting him. For a moment-it was like Siddhartha does, was like that dead jackal in the ditch-I was that beetle. Immediately I was different. I was never the same again.

The satori was a window to a world Phil could not yet inhabit. The boy was drawn to things of the spirit, but not at the expense of the dazzling trashy lures of American pop culture. It would be Phil's achievement to forge a bridge between the two. But for now the child prevailed:

There then followed a long period in which I did nothing in particular except go to school-which I loathed-and fiddle with my stamp collection (which I still have), plus other boywise activities such as marbles, flipcards, bolobats, and the newly invented comic books, such as Tip Top Comics, King Comics and Popular Comics. My ten-cent allowance each week went first to candy (Necco wafers, chocolate bar and jujubes), and, after that, Tip Top Comics. Comic books were scorned by adults, who assumed and hoped they, as a literary medium, would soon disappear. They did not. And then there was the lurid section of the Hearst newspapers which on Sunday told of mummies still alive in caves, and lost Atlantis, and the Sargasso Sea. The American Weekly, this quasi-magazine was called. Today we would dismiss it as "pseudoscience," but in those days, the mid-thirties, it was quite convincing. I dreamed of finding the Sargasso Sea and all the ships tangled up there, their corpses dangling over the rails and their coffers filled with pirate gold. I realize now that I was doomed to failure by the very fact that the Sargasso Sea did not exist-or anyhow it did not capture many Spanish gold-bearing ships-of-theline. So much for childhood dreams.

But one childhood dream remained, intensifying through the years. Comic books and The American Weekly were Phil's first introduction to wild pulp "pseudo-science" adventure. If the beetle satori awakened his spirit, this heady mixture set that spirit on fire. Listen to the triumphant scorn Phil directs at "adults" who thought comics would "disappear." He took the same tone in defending SF against its intellectual detractors. Phil didn't read his first SF magazine until he was twelve, but he had already found the "literary medium" that was home to him.

In this medium the tyranny of imposed consciousness is overthrown. Anything can happen, the quicker and stranger the better. Spiraling dreams are as real as former wives lost in alternate worlds or God the Logos in the guise of your boss doing a TV spot for Ubik instant coffee. Characters can be saintly, silly, lonely, horny, brilliant, and crazed all at once in the same story, and you can't prove it isn't true. Just look around you.

In June 1938 mother and son returned to Berkeley. Except for a few very brief forays, Phil would remain in California for the rest of his life.

Dorothy's decision to leave the capital was an impetuous one. Sent off by the Children's Bureau to a meeting in Kansas City, she took Phil along and fit in a vacation to California. Once back in the Bay Area, she resolved to stay and arranged a transfer to the U. S. Forestry Department office in Berkeley. Dorothy then took an apartment at 560 Colusa Avenue, where Meemaw and Marion were again regular visitors: Marion painted pictures that delighted Phil and gave him books-notably, the verse of Irish poet James Stephens-that fostered Phil's lifelong passion for lyric poetry.

The timing of Dorothy's return was likely influenced by Edgar's relocation to Pasadena, well to the south, where he seemed to pose less of a custody threat. But Phil took great joy in being able-however occasionally-to visit with his father for the first time in four years. Dorothy was uncomfortable with these visits, still fearing Edgar would steal the boy away. Father and son attended the 1938 World's Fair in San Francisco together-Phil going to the science exhibition recommended by Dorothy while Edgar eyed the performance of stripteaser Sally Rand. And there was a day of fishing along the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers, during which Edgar taught him to clean fish. Despite the joy Phil took in these outings, Edgar emphasized that "you could see that a great change had taken place ... she [Dorothy] sort of ruled with an iron hand." Phil was a "lively" child, Edgar insisted, but "I want to use the right word ... he didn't seem to have that life in him, enjoyment of life. He had slowed down a lot, I thought.... I'll tell you the word I'd like to use. He gave me the feeling that he was trapped . . . that he couldn't break out."

Even with Edgar's threatening presence to the south, Dorothy must have found Berkeley a sort of haven after life in the socially conservative capital. Granted, Berkeley in the late thirties and forties was not yet the "Berserkeley" of the sixties and after. It was still a small town, but it had an outsized percentage of freethinking academics and bohemians who thrived within the U Cal radius. Dorothy's feminism and pacifism fit right in. Black-sheep refugees from respectable eastern families took up the artistic life in Berkeley-supported by their moneyed parents-in much the same manner as their counterparts had done in the Paris of the twenties. A trolley car passed up and down Telegraph Avenue, which was lined with elegant little shops and restaurants catering to the cosmopolitan tastes of the university intelligentsia.

But there was also a substantial working-class population, which had little to do with campus life. Down by the bay, in the vicinity of San Pablo Avenue, were the used-car lots, greasy-spoon cafes, repair shops, and bars where blue-collar workers (including black and Japanese populations) and their hard-pressed families passed their lives. It would be the Berkeley working-class milieu, not its academic circles, that provided the settings and characters for so many of Phil's stories and novels. The economic strata of Berkeley life were heightened by the city's topography: The poorer families lived on the flatlands, the more well-to-do in the Berkeley hills, with their terraces, parks, and creeks. Goats was young Phil's slang term for those wealthier students who lived in the hills and were able to coast on their bikes on the way to school.