Read The Search for Philip K. Dick Online
Authors: Anne R. Dick
Over the phone Phil told me, “I asked Bill Wolfson twice to drop the divorce action, but he refused.” I wondered what that meant.
My old enemy and now friend William Wolfson met me for a no-host lunch at a Larkspur Landing restaurant. I had the red, paperback Levack PKD bibliography tucked under my arm, and as soon as we sat down a beautiful dark-haired woman rushed over to ask me where I had bought that book. She wanted a copy for her ex-husband, who loved
The Man in the High Castle,
had begun writing a script for it, and was trying to buy the movie rights. When I got back home, the ex-husband phoned me and later I met him for lunch. He was one of the inventors of Dolby. He let me read his great beginning of a movie script, a sequel to
The Man in the High Castle.
Vince Lusby, Phil’s old friend and co-worker at University Radio, visited Phil at the Lyon Street house soon after Phil had moved in. Phil told Vince that the reason he was getting divorced was that I would buy every new car that came along and that he had to stop me before I lost the house. He told Vince that I had attacked him with a carving knife, that I had chased him around the yard with the white Jaguar (which we hadn’t owned for years), and that I had murdered my first husband. Vince was surprised at all this since he knew me. Then Phil told Vince seriously, “Anne has wired up my old Magnavox so that she can listen and spy on me here.”
When Vince told me this after Phil’s death I was so shocked I didn’t know what to say. We went on with the rest of the interview at his house in Richmond. At the end of my visit, Virginia Lusby gave me a bourbon and soda, and then I made the long drive back to Point Reyes Station. The next day I called Vince, still not quite believing what he’d told me. “Vince,” I asked, “when Phil told you his Magnavox was wired up so I could listen to him there in Oakland, was he kidding?”
Vince told me somberly, “No, he was serious.”
I asked Vince, “What did you say to Phil when he told you that?”
“I was shocked as hell. I didn’t say anything.”
I began to realize then that the situation back in 1964 was quite different than I had thought at the time—but then it’s also possible that Phil was playing a role
.
That spring Phil wrote “What the Dead Men Say,” a story that I didn’t read until after his death. Johnny Barefoot, the protagonist, hears booming voices over the radio, sees a blurred face on the TV, and hears gibberish and a far-off, weird babble on the telephone. Dead Louis Sarapis, from somewhere out in space, controls all the media and is planning to take over the country through his niece, Kathy Egmont Sharp, a psychotic amphetamine addict who is in a mental hospital for part of the story. When Johnny draws the straw that destines him to kill Kathy, his heart is leaden because once he had loved her. Sharp was my stepfather’s name. Phil’s protagonists had ex-wives named Kathy in several of Phil’s post-Point Reyes novels. At first she is a horrible character, but as the books go on she becomes more positive.
Phil wrote the science fiction novel
A Maze of Death
about this time also, a unique novel that seems to tell about a psychotic episode from within.
I drove to the science fiction book store, the Big Cat, that Ray and Kirsten Nelson owned in Albany. It was located just off San Pablo Avenue. There, I met Kirsten, a slender blonde lady with a Norwegian accent. Still very attractive, she must have been a raving beauty in 1964. It was a cold day, cold even inside the bookstore, and Kirsten kept her powder-blue parka on. We sat down at a cluttered desk in an unlit utility room at the back of the store and I untangled the wires of my tape recorder. With a flourish, Kirsten handed me a photocopy of a love letter Phil had written to her. Surprised, I took it. I hadn’t realized that she was such an important person in Phil’s life
.
Phil had written:
I love you, without as Grania phrases it, carnal intent but with love…. [B]elieve me; I love several people but that does not mean I want to go to bed with them; I love my sister Lynne and I also, and this sounds crazy, love Al Halevy and Jack Newcomb and several others, including Carol Carr, but of all of them it’s you I want to be with…. I just want to be where I can look at you and see that something in your eyes, that beauty and clarity (the trigram LI) and beyond that a thing about you I can’t name, because I’m not a poet; I only know how to write prose…. There is, in my life, all the sex (pardon the word, dear) that I can use; in fact too much; I want, I guess, life itself. I believe I can get it from a woman, THE woman. You are the woman…. I wish I could hold you for a moment…. I don’t want you to warm me; I want to breathe life into you, and Al, for all his faults, wants to, too. We love you together; others do, too; we love you in silence, unable to speak; as in Mozart’s ‘Magic Flute’, “Zuruck. Zuruck. Hier muss man zuruck.” (“Back, back; here one must go back.”) But I won’t, not until you say go away and leave me alone; not until you say, as Ottavio Rinuccini said in 1608 for Monteverdi’s great five-line madrigal: “Lascia te mi morire.” (“Now let me die. I suffer beyond hope of solace. Ah, let me die.”)…. How can anyone as lovely as you feel bad? But maybe you don’t feel bad; maybe it’s only me, thinking about you, imagining you; I hope so; I want you not to feel bad…. If anything that lives is sacred to me it is you.
I told her, “My goodness, back in 1964, I didn’t know anything about you.” She was apologetic in her manner and explained that her relationship to Phil was “all drama.”
She had met Phil at a party at her house soon after his car accident. He was in a body cast with his arm in a sling. “I found him to be romantic, exciting, fascinating, as did several other ladies there. He had fantastic charisma. He proposed to every woman he met. The jokes he would crack were so funny. Phil loved to fall in love; he was in love with falling in love.”
Phil talked to Kirsten for hours on the telephone. He had a special long telephone cord sent to her house so she wouldn’t have to sit on the cold stairs where her phone was located. He sent her a card saying “Happy Long Phone Cord Day.”
Kirsten observed that Phil was moody, upset, and emotional about the divorce. She said, “Phil was having all kinds of battles within himself over the breakup. It was like a battle of good and evil. He was feeling guilty and torn up, and if you feel guilty towards someone, you’re going to feel angry towards them. Phil felt inferior because of the beautiful, fancy house. Phil was writing all those novels and couldn’t make any money.
“Also he needed to feel in the midst of things and have a lot of people about him, a lot of activity. He needed and wanted excitement. The more exciting he could make things the better it was for him. He told me it was too quiet for him in Point Reyes. He had incredible ups and downs. Sometimes I wondered, who was Phil? Was he real? When was he playing a role? No one knew. But certainly his feeling for women, that tremendous ability to set up a closeness, was quite unusual. There was no one else like him.”
Two weeks after I had received the restraining order, Phil phoned and gave me his new unlisted number. I drove over to see him, still hoping to mend our relationship. On Sunday of that same week, the children and I went to a show at the Borzoi Club dog show in Oakland. On the way back, we stopped at Phil’s house at his invitation and had a rather formal tea party. Unbeknownst to me Grania was hiding in the closet!
On July 17, 1964, Grania wrote her friend, Cynthia Goldstone:
I do not believe that things between Phil and I can go on too awfully much longer … not because of a lack of desire or a lack of trying or a lack of love on either of our parts, but because he is so sick … and something will soon happen that will separate us. He will, in a self-destructive mood, go back to his wife whom he hates … or kill himself…. [H]e has begun to talk about it a lot … is showing all the signs; making symbolic suicidal attempts like slashing his hands with a knife … and has bought a gun, though I was able to dissuade him from getting ammunition (I think) … but who wants someone to stop him and show him another way out … which I have been able to do … SO FAR … been able to take away the knife and hide it … to comfort and love him … SO FAR … but I am not always there…. His wife is serving him with various writs and doing other nasty things like breaking into his little office and stealing his financial records…. He is separated from his children…. He is in constant pain from his shoulder … and helpless in many ways, can’t drive, can’t write, can’t wash, tie his shoes…. It is not all in his mind, you see…. [H]e has reasons … good mundane reasons for feeling as he does … except that there are the other things TOO … the things which ARE IN HIS MIND. which are added to his daily problems…. I can see symptoms growing … daily, growing and taking hold of him … until the dear, delightful, intelligent and interesting Phil turns into something utterly unrecognizable … MORE AND MORE EACH DAY…. This is what I fear … I don’t really think he’ll go back to his wife … I don’t really think he’ll commit suicide … these are just possibilities…. The real fear … the real PROBABILITY is that he is cracking up … possibly for good.
He looks to me for help … tries to deify me…. I really CAN’T help, the way he means…. I can only love and be sympathetic and try to understand and offer suggestions and smooth things … and as long as I can … but when I can’t … he flies into … rages…. Then I soothe him and assure him and tell him that he has not lost me, and we go to bed and all is well for a while, because we have diverted him from his real problems into an artificial one of losing me…. Or else he becomes frightened … chokes on his food and paints huge, horrible pictures of what will happen and how he can’t possibly go on and that the life is draining out of him…. And so it goes … and so it has gone for a couple of weeks now, lasting longer each day and getting worse…. [T]he only thing that can stop the cycle is sleep … [i]f he can be persuaded to go to sleep…. What I SHOULD do is leave for good … never come back…. But I love him … I really do, and I don’t know what he’d do if I deserted him … but when Ethan comes … I cannot expose Ethan to this sort of thing…. I CANNOT expose Ethan to this … and I CANNOT leave Phil…. What to do???
This letter was so melodramatic that Grania decided not to send it; instead, she crumpled it up and threw it in her wastebasket.
This letter, heavily creased but flattened out again, was found in Phil’s files after his death. He must have fished it out of Grania’s wastebasket. I obtained a copy from the Philip K. Dick papers in Paul Williams’s garage in Glen Ellen
.
A few days later, Phil and I met in court to determine the amount he should pay for separate maintenance. My handsome blond older brother Arthur, then a vice president of Goodrich Rubber, had come west on business and appeared with me at the hearing in his three-piece navy pinstripe suit. Phil came into the courtroom in his rumpled jeans, an elderly shirt with one empty sleeve pinned up, and his arm in a sling. His body cast was rather dingy by then, too. I was amazed when he walked up to me and kissed me on the cheek. For a moment the image of Judas slid through my mind. I introduced Phil to my brother. They shook hands, smiled, and each told the other, “Nice to meet you.”
The judge turned out to be a science fiction fan and was fascinated with Phil. My attorney was quite worried. But all the questions put by Wolfson seemed ridiculous to me: “Whose laundry was done in the washing machine, Phil’s child or the three older children’s? Who should pay for it?” I fielded these questions easily, adding counter-testimony to my answers. My brother was tickled. The judge awarded me $75 a month temporary support. Phil paid it once. I never wanted to pursue him aggressively for this picayune monthly payment, fearing it would drive him further away.
Back at Phil’s rental house in Oakland, Grania, despite her doubts, did stay, and her boy came up from Mexico to join her. Phil was lovely to the child and built him a sandbox in the back yard, but Grania became even more disturbed when Phil bought a small derringer, “because he was afraid of Anne.” Then he began to say that Ray Nelson was plotting against Kirsten and was going to kill her. Grania felt she couldn’t deal with these problems. Phil was staying up all night; she didn’t dare try to sneak the gun away, heaven knows what he might do. Finally, though, she did steal it and gave it to Ray to hide.
I asked Kirsten about this alleged plot of Ray’s, and she laughed heartily as she told me, “Well, that was because Phil was trying to get me away from Ray.”
Ray Nelson told me, when I interviewed him, that he didn’t take any offense back in those days at Phil being in love with his wife. Phil was just having an “intellectual romance.” He said, “Phil was just so darn charming you couldn’t get mad at him.” Then he asked me anxiously, “Do you think they had a real affair; did Kirsten say anything to you?” At the end of the interview, he asked, “Would you like to have an ‘intellectual romance’ with me?” Although we didn’t have an “intellectual romance,” we kept in touch in a friendly way over the years
.
Kirsten continued, “Then Phil told me, ‘I’m going to shoot myself,’” but she felt this kind of talk was mostly histrionics, Phil was amusing himself and his friends and fighting off depression and boredom. When Phil entered his house accompanied by Kirsten or other friends, he would search the house, saying, “The FBI and the CIA have bugged my cat box.” It was hilariously funny but nobody knew if he was kidding or if he was serious. They thought he was kidding but they weren’t sure.
In late summer, science fiction fans and writers came from all over the country to Oakland for the National Science Fiction Convention held on Labor Day weekend. Phil’s house was not far from the Leamington Hotel, where the convention was held. In late August, fans and writers from all over the United States were hanging around his house and he was having nightly parties. A lot of science fiction political intrigues were going on, in which Phil had become involved. Then, suddenly he would chase everyone away, lock himself up, and go into a hermit state for a couple of weeks.