Read The Search for Philip K. Dick Online
Authors: Anne R. Dick
In “Colony,” everything in that world is out to “get” the colonists, from pseudo-microscopes to pseudo-spaceships. In “Expendable,” the bugs are out to get everybody (except for the spiders). Eventually, the spiders will win, but it’s too late for our hero. (Phil loved spiders and was always telling me that spiders were mankind’s friends. He would have liked to have a tarantula for a pet.) In “Paycheck,” Jennings I foresees and engineers, by use of a time scoop, the successful escape and job rehabilitation of Jennings II, whose memory has been destroyed.
Lots of worlds in ruins (in “Breakfast at Twilight,” the worst weapon is a woman) or worlds soon going to be in ruins. Foster in “Foster, You’re Dead” was named after Edgar Dick’s youngest brother, who died as small child. In “Service Call,” a swivel will control men’s thoughts in order to prevent atomic war. “The Impossible Planet” tells the story of an old lady who wants to return to the planet of man’s birth; she does return, but can this bombed-out, grey ruin be the fabled green Earth? “Elwood Builds an Ark” in his backyard. “Prominent Author” writes the Bible. “The Father-Thing” was a forerunner of Jack Finney’s
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
.
In July 1955, Phil and Kleo took a car trip to Colorado, Kansas, Wyoming, and Montana. The Hudners were in Mexico that year, and when they came back they stayed at Phil and Kleo’s house while looking for a place. Kleo said, “Dorothy insisted on moving out on the day that we returned. She said she didn’t want her twins, Lynne and Neil, in the same house as a young married couple.” It wasn’t long before Kleo fell out with Dorothy and Joe.
In spring, Betty Jo Rivers returned to Berkeley. She found that the Phil of 1956 was different from the Phil she had dated in 1949:
He had been published and made a name for himself; he could at least walk down the street comfortably; his sense of humor seemed more developed. Phil and Kleo immediately asked me to come over, which made me feel happy. I was struggling when I arrived in Berkeley, with two children and a third on the way, and not much money. It was two months before my husband [black artist Heywood Rivers] could join us. Both Phil and Kleo asked if the children and I wanted to come and stay with them. I thought this was a far cry from the person who couldn’t have people around him.
My impression was that Phil and Kleo were happy and that Kleo was protective of him. The only strain I saw was that it was obvious that Kleo wanted children and Phil made it plain that he didn’t. She took wonderful care of him, tried to keep the whole place a studio for him. When we did find a place, they gave us kitchen equipment—I still have a Phil and Kleo Memorial Frying Pan….
Marge and Jerry Hirsch, whom I had known in Paris, lived across the street from Kleo and Phil in a tiny fifty-dollar-a-month cottage. Jerry was a psychology professor…. Marge was pregnant. Phil wrote the story “Human Is” with the Hirsches in mind. It bothered Phil a lot that the pulps would axe his work any way they wanted. He would send them three hundred pages, and they would print one hundred fifty. He had no control over the editing. The story “Foster, You’re Dead” had already become an international classic at this time. I felt the little boy, Foster, who wanted to live in a bomb shelter, mirrored Phil’s worst neurosis.
Phil told me about the time he was listening to KPFA discuss the lead story in a Russian magazine [that was] equivalent to
Life
magazine in this country. It was “Foster, You’re Dead.” Phil thought he was having a hallucination. “Foster, You’re Dead” was reprinted in many countries, but Phil received no money for it because of the copyright laws or rather because of the lack of copyright laws. It was a story that could have been construed as pro-red, talking about American terror tactics.
I was apprehensive driving to a lower-income, black neighborhood in Oakland to interview Maury Guy, now Iskandar, but I ended up pleasantly surprised. Maury and his wife lived in a pleasant old frame house at the end of a dead-end street, a charming place filled with plants, books, and interesting fabrics. Both Maury and his wife worked in a drug-intervention program. Maury talked so much about Phil and about Joe and Dorothy that he filled up three tapes on both sides
.
In 1956, Maury Guy, a tall, black intellectual and poet, moved into the Hudner’s rental cottage, which was located behind their Hearst Street bungalow. He became close to Joe and Dorothy and he and Phil became close friends. Phil confided things to Maury that he didn’t tell anyone else.
Maury told me:
[Joe and Dorothy] had a tragic cast to their lives…. Both of them were somewhat melancholy—writers—artists who had been forced to give up their careers. I remember Joe, inhaling an inch of his cigarette with the first draw … doing semi-humorous political cartoons. Dorothy had a terrible kidney problem. Joe was a marine machinist, had a horrible job working in oily bilges, but he didn’t have the inner strength to get his talent off the ground. Both of them had magnetic charm. Phil was terrified of his mother. He painted her as the “dark witch of the universe.” I could never make out how Phil could see Dorothy this way. Phil blamed all his problems on his mother. He would come over and bawl his mother out because he couldn’t leave the house.
Phil never turned on his charm to work me. I didn’t get all that shuck and jive. I remember the day I met Phil on the gravel path at the back of Dorothy and Joe’s house. Phil was wearing jeans, scuffed oxfords, a lumber jacket, and a grumpy expression on his face. He had just been quarreling with Dorothy. Dorothy and Joe were great parents, supportive, marvelous people, but both Phil and Dorothy were prisoners of the holy agony—they loved each other, but their relationship was filled with pain.
Phil told Maury that he felt that he had been crippled psychologically and it was because of his mother and his father. He told Maury that, when he was eighteen, he had started to lose his mind the last year of high school. The forces of evil were overwhelming him and he suffered such anxiety that he had to quit school, and after this he felt he was handicapped. He told Maury that it wouldn’t do any good for him to get psychiatric help and that he had a sense of shame when he had to go to Langley Porter Clinic. He had planned to go on to college to study math, philosophy, or piano but was unable to.
“He felt anger, bitterness, pain, all unresolved. He had no psychiatric care, no religious discipline. Everything boiled up in the direction of his mother. He was trying to work it out with his mother and it didn’t work. Phil was afraid his mother was going to ‘get’ him. Why, I don’t know.”
Phil told Maury that he wanted to write about the nature of man and the nature of reality, and if he couldn’t get his serious literary writing published, he would “‘do it in science fiction.’”
In 1958, Dorothy and Joe bought a cabin in Inverness. Phil and Kleo drove out occasionally to spend the night or a weekend there. The couple liked the West Marin area so much that they decided to move there. Phil wanted to grow things, get close to the soil. In the past his family had been farmers and he, himself, had grown all kinds of small crops in Berkeley. Also, there was less pressure from people out in the country. At the end of summer, Phil and Kleo sold their Berkeley place and bought a small house in the town of Point Reyes Station.
Just before they moved, Meemaw, Phil’s grandmother, died in the hospital in Berkeley only half an hour after Phil and Kleo had visited her. Dorothy was furious that they hadn’t stayed, that they weren’t there when Meemaw died, but the two of them had no idea that Meemaw was going to die at that particular time. Kleo had loved Meemaw and she and Phil had visited her frequently in the hospital.
Maury Guy visited Phil and Kleo at their new home in the country. He thought they seemed idyllically happy and that, finally, Phil had found a point of equipoise. The new house was on the corner of Manana and Lorraine streets. Soon, Phil and Kleo met their neighbors: Avis Hall, across the street on one side, and Jerry and June Kresy, on the other. Some mornings, Phil stopped by Avis’s house to have coffee with her and then walked with her to the post office to get his mail.
Kleo and Phil were sitting at the table in their kitchen early one evening two months later, early October 1958, when there was a knock at the front door.
“I wonder who it is?” said Kleo. “Tell them to go away,” said Phil. “I don’t want to see anybody.”
“Oh no, we want to meet people in this area,” she told him.
A
FTER PHIL LEFT
,
I began to question the very concept of identity. He didn’t seem to have a fixed identity, or did he have several? If he were the person I had thought he was, he couldn’t possibly have acted the way he did. (Do we ever know anyone, including our own selves?) Is it possible that our identities shift and change continually—sometimes so slightly and slowly that it is unnotice-able—but occasionally, in someone like Phil, rapidly and dramatically? Could identity be a myth our parents had about us when we were small, a myth that we became? Phil was a psychic shape-shifter. He was also a great actor. He would have been a great spy. He changed his personality with every woman he related to. He changed it every time he changed his life situation. He changed it every time he was interviewed. He was a powerful influencer, with his great verbal ability, his modest-sounding words, and his ability to read people. He played with all our lives as well as his own, turned us into fictional beings, and melded us into universes of his own creation.
A lot of young men idolize the Phil they meet in his writing. I think men need to preserve a little wildness, something that gets more or less stamped out by our culture and by domesticity. If it weren’t for women, men would live very different lives. Phil stayed wild, although on the surface he seemed very civilized. He knew some important things about relating to other people and influencing them: First, be nonthreatening; second, become everything they want you to be and more. Underneath his modest manner, he was a forceful, powerful person (who felt very weak and who was very sorry for himself). My commitment to our relationship empowered him, too, something he didn’t understand. (Women are usually small atomic-energy machines for their special man, who may not even perceive this.) Still, it was very stressful for him to fill the role of husband and father in a middle-class family. The financial aspects of his writing life evidently put a great deal of stress on him, too, something I realized when I did the editing for this
2009
edition of
Search
(almost a half-century later). But with all his talent, Phil didn’t know how to get women to stay around. Underneath his immense charm, he didn’t have any model for hanging in there.
A frequent view of a male writer or artist is that it is difficult for him to function in a bourgeois marriage—the house, the children, the grocery shopping, the car, the Bluebirds troop, going to church, going to the beach, birthday parties, the children’s colds—but Phil seemed to love all this and used it happily in his writing.
Many people have never experienced an intense romantic love; they don’t even believe in it. Perhaps a close childhood relationship with a parent is a prerequisite. For some persons, the door into the Room of Love dissolves behind them. Loyalty and commitment don’t seem to be as strong values in the United States as they once were. Commitment can be a good thing for two partners and their children; things don’t always go well at the moment, but if you hang in there, they work out in the long run. My romantic commitment to Phil—most of what I knew about relationships came out of novels—wasn’t easy, but it made me transcend my earlier self.
In Point Reyes Station, Phil wrote mostly novels. He wrote a few stories, but nothing like the quantity he had written in Berkeley. Two significant Point Reyes short stories became parts of
Ubik
and
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Phil was just finishing
Time Out of Joint
when he met me, but it was mostly written in his Berkeley period.
The Game-Players of Titan
, one of the early books written in Point Reyes, also came largely from notes and ideas that had originated when he lived in Berkeley. The novels written or developed in Point Reyes were
Confessions of a Crap Artist, The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike, The Man in the High Castle, We Can Build You, Martian Time-Slip, Dr. Bloodmoney, The Simulacra, Now Wait for Last Year, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
, and, as we were separating,
Clans of the Alphane Moon, The Crack in Space, The Zap Gun
, and
The Penultimate Truth
.
1. I
N FRONT OF
the Palace Market, a young, handsome Phil is holding his racing bike in one hand and with his other holding the hand of a slender blonde girl dressed in a dirndl skirt and sandals. I, my present self, tries to talk to him, to tell him who I am. He gazes intently at me, puzzled, trying to understand. The young blonde woman is motionless, fixed in the dream space like a figure in a tableau.
2.
Phil and I are in a hotel room. He is very ill. I call room service for a doctor. A stout German psychiatrist arrives and, taking the situation in at a glance, phones for an ambulance. The ambulance attendants arrive and take Phil away on a gurney. The hotel room suddenly has an inch of water on the floor. (“I am made of water” is the first sentence of
Confessions of a Crap Artist.)
Later, the German doctor brings back a small Phil, big-headed, bald, and curled up like an embryo in a small, square wooden box. The hotel room expands into a great cathedral, and suddenly a throng of real people, Phil’s fictional people, and creatures are all around: My daughters Hatte, Jayne, Tandy, and Laura; Lord Running Clam; Kirsten; Juliana Frink; Mr. Tagomi; Joan Simpson; Tim Powers; Pete Freid; Leo Runcible; Maren Faine …