Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (5 page)

Joseph Edgar Dick was born in 1899, the second oldest of fourteen brothers and sisters in a Scotch-Irish family. He spent his first sixteen years on two different small farms in southwestern Pennsylvania. In 1969, when he was seventy, Edgar wrote an autobiographical reminiscence, As I Remember Them, which includes careful character studies of his parents.

Edgar clearly preferred the warmth of his mother, Bessie, to the hard lessons of his father, William, who once whipped Edgar and fellow siblings for mimicking the way he gargled to treat a cold. Of Bessie, Edgar wrote like a son in love: "She would cry and laugh at the same time, just like an April shower when the sun was shining." Bessie's love for animals became a guiding principle for Edgar-after World War II, as a lobbyist in the California legislature, he would sponsor important animal protection legislation.

Did the young Phil hear, through Edgar, rhapsodic tales of this ideal mother who through the hard times managed to keep her many children healthy and well fed? Bessie's influence can be seen in the ideals of motherhood that Edgar and Phil shared, and in their judgment of Dorothy as falling short of them.

From his father, Edgar received the American work ethic tinged with fear and hellfire. The Bible according to William taught that it was a sin not only to be lazy but also to be poor, like the neighboring coal-mining families. But Edgar outgrew any belief in hell, and he never cared for the churches that spread fear of damnation while doing nothing for the needy in their midst.

Discomfort with religious institutions, the exaltation of simple human kindness over the uncaring functionary-these impulses, fundamentals of identity, Edgar passed on to his son. And something more.

There is, in the midst of Edgar's settled narrative, a single sentence that mirrors the worlds of Phil's SF novels-novels that Edgar never much cared for. "We had a difficult time," he recalls, "learning to know and understand the strange actions of creatures called people." You can see it in the struggles Edgar had with the church-with the world as it was, compared to the world insisted upon by his father. A sense of strangeness. Nothing could be assumed. Reality had to be eyed carefully.

Edgar enlisted shortly after America entered the war in 1916. The previous year the family had moved from Pennsylvania to homestead dusty government land at Cedarwood, Colorado. At seventeen, Edgar was fed up with farm chores and eager to see the world. Just before going off to Europe, he met Dorothy Kindred, from the nearby town of Greeley. There was a spark of sorts, but Edgar and Dorothy didn't correspond during the war. "You kind of got away from civilian life entirely," he later said. "I did."

Edgar described himself in Europe as "a corporal like Napoleon and Hitler." He showed considerable heroism carrying messages by night within range of the front lines. His Fifth Marines were the shock troops, Edgar recalled proudly, and he had marvelous stories to tell. Though he conscientiously avoided gore, he showed young Phil his military souvenirs: his uniform and gas mask, sundry photographs. These stories, reinforced by Edgar's taking him to the 1931 film All Quiet on the Western Front, struck Phil deeply:

[Edgar] told me how the soldiers became panicstricken during gas attacks as the charcoal in their filtration systems became saturated, and how sometimes a soldier would freak and tear off his mask and run. As a child I felt a lot of anxiety listening to my father's war stories and looking at and playing with the gasmask and helmet; but what scared me the most was when my father would put on the gasmask. His face would disappear. This was not my father any longer. This was not a human being at all.

Edgar returned to Colorado after demobbing in 1918, and he and Dorothy renewed their courtship. Dorothy was the middle child of three in a family of English descent. (As an adult, Phil would sometimes claim to be one-quarter German, due to his love for German opera and poetry, but Scotch-Irish-English is his lineage.) Earl Grant Kindred, Dorothy's father, was a lawyer whose financial fortunes fluctuated wildly. Earl's boom-or-bust economics could trigger drastic consequences for his children; in two different downswings he had their pets shot to save on feed money.

Edna Matilda Archer-the Meemaw who hid with baby Phil in the bathroom when the nurse came to visit-married Earl in 1892. Dorothy was born in 1899. When Dorothy was in her early teens, Earl announced that to make his fortune he would have to travel. What it boiled down to was walking out on his family. When he did circle back now and then, Meemaw took him in gladly, which disgusted Dorothy. When Earl was gone, Meemaw and Dorothy's younger sister, Marion, looked to Dorothy for support, both psychological and economic. Harold, her older brother, who was considered the wild one in the family, ran away at this time. At fifteen she went to work. A year later she met Edgar, and while he was off to war Dorothy grappled with a family in disarray. Throughout her life Dorothy would rue how she constantly found herself having to take care of people.

Edgar was likely a welcome source of support when he came home from the war. They married in September 1920, then moved to Washington, D.C. After graduating from Georgetown University in 1927, Edgar took a livestock inspection job with the Department of Agriculture. During this time, Dorothy's health began to deteriorate badly. Just after the move, she had come down with typhoid fever. Then came the onset of Bright's disease. One doctor told her she hadn't long to live. Dorothy survived to age seventy-nine, but suffered from kidney problems for the rest of her life. Later years brought on circulatory ailments and a consciousness of illness that some found obsessive or hypochondriacal (complaints Phil did not raise against her, perhaps because too often he found himself fending off similar charges).

The Department offered Edgar a post in Chicago, and, though both he and Dorothy hated Chicago winters, he took it. It was an advancement of sorts, and with Dorothy expecting, it seemed time to build for the future.

It is common medical knowledge today, as it was not in 1928, that of all the risks posed by a multiple pregnancy, premature birth is the leading cause of death of one or both twins. Psychological studies made in the past decade have further confirmed that, for parents and the surviving sibling alike, the death of a twin is a trauma with unique dimensions.

For the parents, the grief, guilt, and anger may be intensified due to the emotional magnitude of giving birth to twins. Researcher Elizabeth Bryan notes that society treats the birth of twins as a "special event," and cites findings that "a prolonged or abnormal grief reaction was more common amongst those mothers who had a single surviving twin than amongst those who had lost their only baby." Part of the anguish lies in "the difficulty of mourning a death and celebrating a birth at the same time." Overprotective fears can arise with respect to caring for the surviving twin. And there may be resentment, conscious or not, in the feelings of the parents toward the surviving child.

What is known of Edgar and Dorothy's reactions to Jane's death does correlate with these findings.

In Edgar's case, overprotectiveness showed in what Dorothy called his "germ phobias." He forbade Dorothy to kiss the baby or to allow him to crawl outside of his crib for his first eleven months. Dorothy sought to evade the first prohibition by kissing Phil "in places I thought I couldn't contaminate, like the back of the neck." She managed to obtain crawling freedom for Phil by agreeing to Edgar's condition that it be limited to an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon-if the entire apartment was first thoroughly vacuumed.

In Dorothy's case, the grief reaction was pronounced. In the first months of Phil's life, she kept a journal on his growth and behavior that testifies to her love for the baby and nowhere focuses upon the death of the twin. But Dorothy's enduring anguish showed clearly in letters and conversations over the years dwelling on Jane's death and her role in it.

The relationship between Phil and his mother, in its painful duality of extreme, dependent closeness and rage over errors and omissions in loving, was mirrored in every love relationship Phil ever had with a woman. Those who saw Phil and Dorothy together were often struck by the degree of resemblance between them-both were at home in selffashioned systems of abstract thought, both read voraciously and felt the writer's vocation (though Dorothy failed at her efforts at a writer's career). Throughout his life Phil turned to her for money, advice, even critical response to his manuscripts, and Dorothy never faltered in her encouragement of Phil the artist.

But Dorothy was a difficult mother for Phil to bear: physically undemonstrative, emotionally constrained, watchful and reproving, forbidding all demonstrations of anger, weak from pain and often bedridden. She gave Phil, as he grew, a respectful individual freedom, treating him like a little adult (by his early teenage years he called her "Dorothy"), yet somehow-in Phil's sense of things-she withheld approval, warmth, maternal affection, and protection from the world.

She was incapable of loving her children, Phil believed. She had proved that by letting Jane die. Later in life he accused Dorothy of having tried to poison him and so complete the destruction of her children.

Studies of surviving twins point to a sense of incompleteness that can make relationships, particularly with the opposite sex, very difficult. There is also the guilt of having survived, and a fear of death that causes the survivors to be overly concerned with health and safety or, paradoxically, to place themselves in difficult situations. These are all generalities that could be applied to Phil (including, of course, both of the paradoxical choices). What the studies fail to touch upon is the possibility of dwelling upon how it could have been different-to the point of sheer rage.

Cut to: Phil on the couch during a November 1974 interview with writer Paul Williams for Rolling Stone:

PKD: Yes. I get very mad when I think about my dead sister.

PW: Really?

PKD: That she died of neglect and starvation. Injury, neglect and starvation.

PW: How do you know?

PKD: My mother told me. I get very hostile when I think of it. [... ] 'Cause I was a very lonely child, and I would love to have had my sister with me, all these years. But my mother says, "Well, it's just as well she died, she would have been lame anyway, from being burned by us with the hot-water bottle." In which case I suppose- It's like Heinrich Himmler saying, "Well ... she made a good lampshade, you know, so I guess it worked out all right." You see what I mean?

In his grade school years, Phil invented an imaginary playmate-a girl named "Teddy" (according to fifth wife Tessa) or "Becky" (according to third wife Anne)-or perhaps there were two, or more. He played with them because he knew of Jane and yearned for her to be there, and if that seems strange-how could what happened at his birth affect him so?-it can be corroborated by the testimony of anyone who has lost a twin. It is a bond that causes nontwins to be skeptical because it is, in truth, a bond beyond the telling.

Jane's death was a tragic affair, which neither Dorothy nor Edgar intended and from which both suffered. The facts as known do not serve to explain Phil's exclusive focus on Dorothy as the guilty party, if guilty party there must (for Phil) be. His feelings toward Edgar were attenuated-even resentful-for most of Phil's life. But he placed the responsibility for practical nurture upon women. It was only the love of a woman that could quell Phil's fears and, more basically, render the world safe and real. Dorothy failed to provide such a love, as would, ultimately and perhaps inevitably, every woman in Phil's life. In a 1975 Exegesis entry he wrote:

I think I fear that death is something one allows to happen more than it being something one does, i.e. one does not kill but fails to provide life. Thus I must think that life comes to one (to me) from outside, a child's view; I am not yet on homeostasis, on intrinsic. Of course, life originally comes from the mother; but this symbiosis ends. After that, life is sustained from God, not through any woman. Tessa is right; I am still a child.