Read The Search for Philip K. Dick Online
Authors: Anne R. Dick
I was never to see him again.
Goodbye, Phil
.
In November, Phil phoned Kirsten Nelson and told her he was coming to northern California to the Santa Rosa Science Fiction Convention. He planned to stay with the Nelsons. Phil told Kirsten that he had some unfinished business to take care of in Point Reyes. “I wondered,” she said, “reading between the lines, if there might be some sort of reconciliation with you, Anne, going to happen.”
Phil called later and told Kirsten that his son had an ear infection, and he couldn’t come.
He wrote a letter addressed to both Laura and me, on December 24, 1977:
I am enclosing a poem I recently wrote. When I was last up at Sonoma I had a friend feed my two cats, and he phoned me to say that Harvey, my big black part-Siamese tom, had fallen over the railing of my third-floor apartment patio, and evidently had been killed. I did not return to Santa Ana for five more days, and when I drove into the underground parking area of our building I heard him calling me. He had not only survived the fall, but had been smart enough to go down into the basement to wait for my return. His faith that I would eventually return deeply moved me; hence this poem.
On a Cat Which Fell Three Stories and Survived
Boldness is no virtue
If it causes the surprised organism
To fall a thousand years,
Wondering as he plunges
Where he went wrong,
Where error lay.
Little bodies coast on wind:
Spiders, for example, sail on strands
And cats (they say) align themselves according to the tides.
But humans and their like drop as iron would drop:
Crushing and crushed, amazed and smashed.
God seems to harbor an inverse ratio to size.
There was no road back, even had he lived. And yet he found it, crouched in basement darkness,
Terrified by cars and groaning noise.
First one day, then a next, then other days,
On and on: infinitudes of time within a little mind,
But mind devoted to remembered safeness:
Once a spot to eat and lie,
Once human friends, Once peace;
Now torn away and only roarings left
And knowledge of the doom of living things.
When I read this letter years ago, I regarded it as a self-pitying ploy from Phil to draw me back into his web, and from past experience I believed that as soon as I did he would pull the emotional rug out from under me. It was a nice poem, but the tone of self-pity put me off, and maybe it was just about his cat anyway. Pity is a degrading emotion to have toward someone. Self-pity is even worse and never to be encouraged
.
Be Spartan, I had been taught by my big brothers. I expected Phil to be Spartan, too. But the main problem was that he hadn’t honestly informed me about his life over the years, I knew very little about what had been happening to him since he had left me, and he had given me no basis to understand the message of this poem—that he really had been suffering for a long, long time. Now this poem makes me sad for him—twenty-seven years after his death, I understand a lot more
.
When Phil wrote the next letter to Laura on December 28, 1977, she was no longer living at home and sharing her letters with me:
I’m glad to hear you say that my letters brighten up your life; one of the main reasons I haven’t written to you is that I haven’t wanted to depress you. If I were to tell you what’s going on in my life … I’d have to cop out to a basically bummer situation…. I think being lonely is the pits, the absolute pits. That’s what I’m facing without Joan. However, my best friend, who is also a science fiction writer, is going to be moving into this building in a couple of days. We spend a lot of time together shooting the breeze. We’re engaged in a long study of a number of religions of the Greco-Roman-Celtic period. The research is basically for my novel-in-progress,
VALIS
, and we have uncovered some extraordinary things that few people know, even scholars. In fact we are discerning the outlines of a vast, buried, suppressed religion….
Another letter to Laura came on the same day:
I am really lonely, Laura, and I am reaching out to you, but at the same time trying not to be a bummer burden by laying my troubles on you. Christmas is not a good time to be alone, eating a frozen TV Mexican dinner. I’m glad I have my black cat, Harvey, back, though. Ever since his fall he’s been so subdued and thoughtful…. I guess he learned a lot. I wonder what his theory of the universe is now.
About this same time Phil finished
VALIS
—his autobiography, he said, of both his personalities. Horselover Fat, one of Phil’s personas, had also taken a trip to Sonoma. After he (they) comes (come) back to Santa Ana, unchronicled forces have healed the psychological split in him caused by Gloria’s suicide and allowed his two personalities to be healed and reunited. Fat/Phil no longer feels terrible guilt for not preventing Gloria’s death, but Fat/Phil now realizes he will never be able to restore Gloria to this world as he had longed to do. When she read this book, Nancy was puzzled by Phil’s intense feelings about Gloria’s suicide—she said that Gloria was a young woman whom they hardly knew.
Phil wrote Laura on January 3, 1978:
It’s been raining down here at last. I’m sitting around doing research for my new novel, as usual…. We’ve now gotten into research on Soviet microwave boosting of what are called “psychotronic” signals, which are actually telepathic signals. These psychotronic signals are amplified electronically and then beamed by the Russians to a satellite, whereupon the satellite emits them downward to United States cities, screwing up radio and TV reception (usually late at night when United States radio and TV transmitters cut their power down). The result is that the Soviets are able to include a lot of subliminal information (fired off at nano second intervals and received by peoples’ right brain hemispheres but not the left) in what we are consciously seeing or hearing. There is no international law prohibiting this (there was an article in the
L.A. Times
about it). We are probably doing the same thing to the Soviets, although the United States is far behind them in work with ESP. The Soviets got interested in telepathy as a medium of communication to reach distant satellites and spaceships because there is no time-lag with telepathic signals as there is with radio signals. They’ve done some enormously radical work in the U.S.S.R. that we know little about; for instance, there is a lab in Siberia run by the KGB (the Soviet secret police) which is off-limits to even Soviet scientists. What they are doing no one seems to know, except that a defector from it said that the work includes the influencing of minds by ESP, and that they’ve been successful. It’s all scary, but interesting.
In January, Phil, talking to Kirsten Nelson, again told her that he was thinking of moving back to Point Reyes. Laura was now the focus of his hopes for someone to love, someone to love him. Writing her in this same month he talks about a move to Sonoma: “An important matter to me is whether you’re going to be in the Bay Area during the next couple of years, since I am seriously thinking of taking over the house in Sonoma which Joan and I rented together and which she is living in. She’d move out, I’d move in, and then I could see you from time to time—IF you were still in the Bay Area. It’s an idea; as we say down here, ‘It’s a plan.’”
In the spring of 1978, Laura applied for admittance to Stanford University. I had told her, “It’s almost impossible to get in. If you do get in, where will you get the money to go to this incredibly expensive school?”
She told me, “That’s where I’m going.” And she was admitted, winning several scholarships. Phil was ecstatic. (As was I.) He told us over the phone he would send money to help with her expenses, money for clothes, and money for a hi-fi.
Shortly after this conversation, I discovered that my office manager, a young woman whom I had thought of as almost another daughter, had embezzled
$20,000
from my jewelry business, totally stripping it of working capital and leaving me in horrendous debt for payroll taxes, etc. I missed out on a free trip with the vaulting team to Europe to the International Vaulting Competition in San Moritz, Switzerland. I had to stay home and pursue a court case against her in the hopes of recovering the money (which I did). When I told Phil about this, he was very sympathetic. He said, “Maybe I should send the money that I’m going to send to Laura for college to you instead.” I thanked him but didn’t accept Laura’s college money. My vaulting team had a great European trip and did very well in the individual events.
Later that year, Laura invited Phil to come to Point Reyes to see her graduate from high school. Over the phone I also urged Phil to come and told him he could stay with us in one of our spare bedrooms. He was astonished. He said, “You mean you’d let me stay in your house?” We really thought he was going to come, but at the last minute he wrote Laura a long, sad letter saying that he couldn’t come—that all he had in his life was his writing.
Phil’s mother was quite ill all this year, and Phil talked for long periods on the phone to her. Lynne, Phil’s stepsister, said, “Phil was really tuned in to Mom’s illness.” The two of them resolved a lot of the problems that had existed between them over the years. Dorothy died in late summer. By happenstance, I talked with her on the phone the night before she died. She was to have an operation that might help her but was risky. She told me that she was totally unafraid. Phil was in touch with his second wife, Kleo, too, and talked with her about Dorothy’s death.
When he talked to me, he didn’t seem the least bit grieved. But Kleo was indignant that Phil was “so lugubrious” about his mother’s death after having had such a bad relationship with Dorothy his entire life. It seemed to me that there was a change for the better in Phil after his mother’s death. He seemed freer, happier.
Phil’s role playing, which almost amounted to putting on a different identity, was quite remarkable in other situations. Kleo and I both noticed that when Phil had been interviewed by such diverse publications as
Vortex Magazine, The New Yorker
, and
Rolling Stone
, etc. Phil played to and played with each interviewer, assuming a different persona for each one.
As well as having a versatile personality, Phil was generous with his praise and even with his writing. In a correspondence with a young science fiction writer, Daniel Gilbert, he heaped praise on Daniel’s efforts and gave him a free bit of manuscript to add to a story. In September 1978, he wrote: “Dear Daniel … I like the 7 pages of “Confessions of a Troublemaker,” which you sent me, and as regards these 7 pages you have my permission to make use of me in them by name as a character…. You’ll find enclosed a freebee little 2 pages that I tacked on to your 7 pages; you can use it all or any part…. [I]t’s a present to you.”
The text that Phil sent Daniel:
In the back of the bus an old wino in tattered clothing sat hunched over, holding a wine bottle ill-concealed in a brown paper bag. He seemed to be staring at me—in a listless and depressed sort of way—and I found myself returning his stare.
“Don’t you recognize me?” the old wino said suddenly. “No,” I answered, hoping his limited span of attention would wander away from me. But the old wino lurched to his feet, shambled over and seated himself beside me. “I’m Phil Dick,” he said hoarsely. “At the end of my life. Changed, haven’t I?” He chuckled, but without mirth.
“This is how a giant of the field winds up?” I said, amazed, distress filling me. “My life was an unending failure,” Phil said, and I saw now that it was, indeed, Phil Dick; I recognized the eyes, the sorrow-drenched but still proud glare of a person who had known torment but had not bowed to it. “Marriage after marriage down the rathole… money gone … my children and friends deserting me … all my hopes for a family and stability shot.” He took a covert swig from the bottle; it was, I saw, Ripple. “I may have been a success as a writer,” he continued, “but what does that matter really? Living alone year after year in a rented room, paying off the IRS and my endless child support, waiting vainly for the right girl, the girl who, when she finally showed up, merely laughed at me.” Tears filled his eyes. “Being a giant of science fiction is not all that much,” he rasped. “It’s like Goethe said: the peasant with his hearth and wife and children is happier than the greatest philosopher.”
From behind us a sharp laugh sounded. “I’m doing fine,” a needlelike voice penetrated at the two of us. Turning, I saw that it was Harlan Ellison, wearing a snappy suit, his face dancing with satisfaction. “Tough luck, Phil, but we get what we deserve. There’s a logic to the universe.”
“Okay, Harlan,” Phil murmured, clutching his wine bottle. “Lay off.”
“You may have wound up in the gutter,” Harlan continued, unabashed, “but I have my big house in Sherman Oaks; I have my library of all my thousands of—”
“I knew you when you were a twerp fan,” Phil broke in. “Back in 1954. I gave you a story for your fanzine.”
“And a crummy story it was,” Harlan said, with a smirk.
Falteringly, Phil murmured, “But you said you liked it.”
“I liked the name of the main character,” Harlan corrected. “Waldo. I remember exactly what I said; I said, ‘I always admire people named Waldo.’ I threw the story away.”
Slumped over in misery, Phil said nothing. The bus continued on; and, as I scrutinized the gloating, amused face of Harlan Ellison and the unhappy, defeated figure beside me I wondered what it was all about, what it was all for. Which of the two of them did I feel the most pity for? Gloating cruelty and triumph, or wretched despair? It was hard to say.
Phil’s letter to Daniel continued:
Meanwhile, due to all the money I’m making I’m experiencing a vast depression, mirrored by a decay in the reality around me. (1) The refrigerator makes odd noises. (2) There is CB interference on my TV. (3) The rear-end of my car is leaking oil. See?
Ubik
revisited. However, my girlfriend who has had cancer has been pronounced cured. I guess that’s good (boy, I AM depressed).