The Search for Philip K. Dick (2 page)

Thanks to the Scanner Darkly Kids, for trusting me and for sharing your past.

Thanks to old enemies for taking a risk, laying down old animosities, and helping me clear up the debris of my past. Thanks to Dr. Sam Anderson and William Wolfson.

A special thanks to Karen Pierce, who came to type my tape-recorded, dictated manuscript on the computer and, when I was close to despair, taught me that my early awkwardness and incoherence were all “part of the process.” Karen helped without intruding, became my copyeditor and editorial consultant, and in the process acquired new motivation for her own writing.

Thanks to Heather Wilcox, Allan Kausch, Elizabeth Story and James DeMaiolo for the copyediting, proofreading, and vetting of the current Tachyon edition.

Thanks to Professor Samuel Umland of the University of Nebraska at Kearney for his interest in Phil and in this book. He went through it with me chapter by chapter and helped me revise it for Mellen Press for the hardcover 1993 library edition.

I could not have finished the 1993 revision without the help of my jewelry business manager, Craig Bailey, who processed the manuscript several times, struggled with an obsolete software program, fixed small errors, added italics, etc. (He’s still here, correcting the 2009 revision.)

Thanks, Father Tim West, for opening a door for me when I felt perhaps I “should not” write about many of these events.

I would also like to thank all the other people mentioned in this book but not mentioned specifically in these acknowledgments.

Thanks in memoriam to Vince Lusby, Bill Christensen, Edgar Dick, John Gildersleeve, Bill Trieste, Margaret Wolfson, Jerry Kresy, Pat Jambor, Dorothy and Joe Hudner, Alys Graveson, Ben and Anita Gross, Neil Hudner, Avram Davidson, Henrietta Russell, Avis Hall, Willis McNally, and Jack Newcomb.

P
HILIP
K. D
ICK
still haunts us. A quarter century after his death, as our evermore wired and dystopian times look more and more like a Philip K. Dick novel, the story of Phil Dick’s life fascinates critics, fans, and followers almost as much as what he wrote. Perhaps this is because his long, strange trip is as enthralling as any of his novels. But this distinction, between Phil’s life and his fiction, has always been blurred. Avid fans see Phil Dick in each of his world-weary protagonists, grappling with the pain and uncertainty of the universe — very much the way Phil appears in this memoir.

During Phil’s recent literary ascension, which coincided with his inclusion in the prestigious Library of America series, critics took to publications like
The New Yorker
and
Newsweek
to dispassionately list the litany of bummers in his life: poverty, multiple failed marriages, drug abuse, battles with panic attacks, and agoraphobia. As a result of our media’s obsession with the alleged connection between artistic genius and madness, Phil Dick was introduced to mainstream America as a caricature: a disheveled prophet, a hack churning out boilerplate genre fiction, a speed-freak. None of these impressions of Phil, taken without awareness of the sensationalism that generated them, advances our understanding of his life and work. Today the myth of Philip K. Dick threatens to drown out what evidence remains of his turbulent life.

We can never fully understand Phil Dick. He, like Walt Whitman, contained multitudes. Instead, we have to content ourselves with studying Phil through a series of lenses. Like his novels that shift from character to character between the chapters, we must examine Phil’s life from the vantage point of the people who knew him. We may never be able to assemble a complete image, but the impressions that he left on the people that he loved, and that loved him, help in getting a sense of the man.

The extensive research Anne did for this book is impressive. The interviews she conducted have become an important source for all of Phil’s biographers, but perhaps more importantly, the small details from his daily life provide a more intimate picture than any of Phil’s other biographies. The fact that Phil chose the old, battered shoe as his avatar whenever the family played Monopoly gives us a sense of him. Even though I never met Phil, after reading Anne’s memoir, he feels familiar to me. Of course, this picture is incomplete, but Anne’s memoir captures, in vivid recollections, Phil at the top of his game as a writer. But her memoir also depicts a man whose creative drive and need to make a living is burning him out.

While Phil certainly had other prolific periods in his life, he produced some of his best work in rapid-fire brilliance during his years with Anne. Between 1959 and 1964 he wrote a dozen novels, including
Confessions of a Crap Artist, The Man in the High Castle, Martian Time-Slip, Now Wait for Last Year
, and
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
.

When Phil moved to Point Reyes Station in 1958 and met Anne, he was finishing up his novel
Time Out of Joint
, a book that can be read as either science fiction or psychological fiction, depending on whether you believe the protagonist is sane. In this way the book combines Phil’s disparate ambitions: to be a mainstream writer—spoken of in the same sentence as Faulkner and Hemingway—and to provide a stable income for his family by churning out science fiction.

In 1959 Lippincott published
Time Out of Joint
as a hardcover, Phil’s first, and billed it as a “novel of menace,” marketing it without any of the usual science fiction trappings. This small literary success prompted Phil to try his hand again at mainstream fiction and this resulted in
Confessions of a Crap Artist
and
The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike
. While these novels were not successful in his lifetime, Dick’s reaction when his mainstream fiction remained unpublished for many years—including
Confessions of a Crap Artist
, which has since been recognized as one of his finer works—became a pivotal moment in his career.

Feeling like he was back at square one as a writer, Phil momentarily gave up on writing and helped Anne with her fledgling jewelry business, selling her pieces to stores in the Bay Area. When he inevitably returned to writing, he decided to again combine his two ambitions by incorporating highbrow literary elements into his science fiction. The resulting success, the Hugo Award winning
The Man in the High Castle
, set the stage for an unrivaled burst of creativity that lasted until he left Anne in 1964.

Phil’s writing became much more autobiographical during this period. Phil wrote in the introduction to his short story collection
The Golden Man
, that he wanted to “write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind.” And so Phil wove Anne into his fiction. Anne, a talented and forward-thinking artisan, became the model for some of Phil’s most heroic characters, the careful craftsman, the skilled artist, such as the jewelry maker in
The Man in the High Castle
and the ceramicist in
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich
, capable of producing an object that is not subject to the decay of the world; these objects serve as an antidote, in some ways, to the entropy so Ubikuitous in his writing. Artisans pop up again and again in Phil’s writing, but not until after he meets Anne in 1958.

Anne’s memoir makes it clear that Phil’s characters did not suffer alone; their plight was a reflection of their creator’s pain. I often find myself, upon finishing one of Phil’s books, wanting to hug him and thank him for dredging up so much, for giving so much of himself. Anne is to be commended for her willingness to take an unflinching and thoughtful look at her own life and her relationship with Phil, and for sharing her search for answers.

David Gill, a scholar who has studied the life and work of Philip K. Dick for over a decade, writes the Dick-centered Total Dick-Head blog (
TOTALDICKHEAD.BLOGSPOT.COM
) and teaches literature and composition at San Francisco State University
.

O
UR SMALL
E
PISCOPAL
church was half-filled for the memorial service that I’d arranged at the suggestion of Paul Williams. Nancy, Phil’s fourth wife, came, and Joan Simpson, who could have been his sixth wife, and Tessa’s sister (Tessa was his fifth wife). Kleo, Phil’s second wife, said she wouldn’t come, then tried to get a ride at the last minute but didn’t make it after all.

At the end of the service when Fr. Schofield said, “Into thy hands we commend thy servant, Philip K. Dick,” I felt my heart twist. “No, no,” I thought, “I can’t let Phil go.” I began asking questions I had put aside years ago. Why did Phil leave? Why didn’t he come back? If I’d been different, would he have left? What were his relationships with other women like? Had any of them had the same kind of experience I’d had? Had he loved me, or had he been a colossal fake? After eighteen years, I began again pulling off the petals of that infinite daisy: He loves me…he loves me not….

I didn’t have any false pride to preserve anymore. I didn’t have to tiptoe around Phil’s touchiness, so I decided to find out. I started phoning, writing, and visiting all the people who had known Phil. I compiled so much information that I began to think of writing a book. I’d call it
The Five Wives of Philip K. Dick
. I gave up that idea when I couldn’t locate Phil’s first wife, Jeannette Marlin (Phil’s father, Edgar Dick, believed she was dead), and Tessa Busby Dick, his fifth wife, declined to be interviewed.

I spent the next two years interviewing wives, an extensive list of serious girlfriends, male friends, family members, psychiatrists, and lawyers. (Phil was always terrified that his ex-wives would get together and compare notes.) Other women friends of Phil’s—Joan Simpson, Kirsten Nelson, Kleo Mini, Nancy Hackett, Linda Levy, Mary Wilson, Betty Jo Rivers, “Sheila,” and “Cindy”— shared memories with me.

I had a lot of help from Phil. I researched when his works were written rather than when they were published and compiled a chronology. Then I read through the thirty-six science fiction novels and the 120 short stories in the sequence they were written. It was so fascinating to read Phil’s science fiction as a whole, an oeuvre (or “irve,” as my friend David Gill calls it) that I read through it twice, sometimes laughing out loud as Phil’s novels took me back to the events of our life in the early sixties. Those books were unbelievably revealing. In effect, Phil had made notes about our life together for me. His complete oeuvre was a surrealist autobiography. Reality and imagination flicker back and forth in his fiction as it did in his everyday life, Phil playing all the roles and predicting his own future.

Search for Philip K. Dick
was the first biography of him to be completed. The manuscript revealed a side of Phil that some of his friends and followers couldn’t accept. Besides loving Phil, some of them had also been well primed by Phil to believe a version of his life in which I had no credibility (to put it mildly), even though at the same time he was telling them he was being watched by the KGB, the FBI, and the CIA. (Some of them believed that, too.) One of them, a dear young man, fiercely loyal to his late friend, threatened to sue me after he read my manuscript. A group of his young male followers supported his other biographers, all male, heartily. It’s interesting to me that the women who read my manuscript understood it immediately, but some men took a little longer.

I discovered many new aspects of Phil’s writing that I hadn’t perceived when, as his first reader during his Point Reyes period, I proofread his novels. My goodness, the anti-heroines of the Point Reyes novels, more or less based on me, were always murderesses, adulteresses, and sometimes schizophrenic. In the books written at the end of our marriage, they also became drug addicts. I don’t even take aspirin. Then there were the books with a theme of divorce and reconciliation, written while we were separating. I hadn’t read these until after Phil’s death. If I had read them in 1965, would our lives have turned out differently? We had to have bought the white Jaguar before Phil wrote
We Can Build You
, because that car was in the book. The ad in the
Baywood Press
that inspired us to buy a spinet piano was in that book also.
We Can Build You
told about our family’s trip to Disneyland and Phil’s fascination with the Lincoln robot there.

My children, now grown, were a great help in dating events: “That happened the year I was in third grade.” “That was the month I fell and chipped my tooth.” “That happened right after my birthday party, the one where the cake had yellow icing and seven white candles.”

When I learned about the later part of Phil’s life, I felt sad. I worried about chronicling it, even though Phil left similar information for biographers in his letters and other documents. At times, I felt that something must be terribly wrong with me that I had loved a person who was (to my way of thinking) involved in such a terrible life at one period. But he had also been my best friend as well as a good husband—he played the role beautifully for a while—and a good father to my children. He was lots of fun, too. And he was a writer. I was a lifelong reader. I love writers.

Besides his books, there was the immense amount of material that had been written about him. His life and writing existed on so many levels that I couldn’t possibly cover what one critic called “the vast reality of Philip K. Dick.” I have made no attempt to consider literary, political, sociological, or theological ideas. Phil’s voluminous letters are a huge research project in themselves. Besides thirty-six science fiction novels and 120 short stories, Phil left nine unpublished literary manuscripts and a one-million-word theological rumination,
The Exegesis
. When I was writing this book in 1984, at least seven other books were being written about Phil. He’s been compared to Kafka, Dickens, Borges, and Blake. Blake? I was astonished. I hadn’t followed Phil’s career after our divorce (in fact I had ignored it) and was unaware of his great success.