The Search for Philip K. Dick (7 page)

Richard’s friendly, sixteen-year-old bay quarter horse was still out in our field. Phil acted like he was a little afraid of him although he wouldn’t admit it. He would drive the horse away with a broom when he went out to feed the ducks.

Phil wanted an owl for a pet. There were dozens of owls in the cypress trees surrounding our house. They hooted all night long. Once we saw a large owl taking a shower bath in the first rain of the year, turning, twisting, even raising his wings and washing his wing pits. At night when we heard the owls, sometimes we went outside and hooted back at them and they would always answer.

In mid-April, I brought in a newborn lamb who was too weak to get up and nurse. We warmed him, gave him some milk, and kept him in the bathroom overnight. Phil wrote about this in
Confessions of a Crap Artist
.

On April 22, Claudia Hambro and her two daughters went out on a hill to wait for the flying saucers to come and pick them up. Shortly after this the flying saucer group broke up. Claudia cut off both her long hair and that of her daughters and moved away.

As spring progressed and the irises and roses started blooming, Phil began to spend more time at his old house, gardening. I wanted our house to be his main concern, and we had our first quarrel. I am assertive. When I get angry, my voice gets louder and I talk fast. I thought this was just a little argument and was shocked when Phil went back to his old house to stay. I went over with the girls and we all sat on the front steps. Finally, Phil came out on the porch and said, “All right, all right,” and came back home with us.

After thinking about this incident, I came to the conclusion that it would be better for our marriage if Phil sold his other house. He agreed and put it on the market and it sold almost immediately. When he received payment for it he said, “I know I should give Kleo half of this money, but I’m not going to.” It disturbed me to hear him say this, but his relationship with Kleo was his business. The money from the sale of the house went into our bank account and was spent on living expenses.

That year we planted a large vegetable garden and bought a large freezer. I made jams and jellies, and froze fruit that we bought in bulk from nearby orchards. When summer came, I sunbathed naked on the patio. At first, Phil thought this was wonderful. Then he became apprehensive and kept hurrying to the front of the house to see if the milkman was coming. After that I put on a bathing suit although we were so isolated it didn’t really seem necessary.

Phil listened to music all day long: Orlando Gibbons,
The Flying Dutchman
, Bach, Beethoven, Handel. He might as well have been plugged in to his Magnavox or my hi-fi. He knew so much about recorded music he could have made a career as a music critic, and in fact some of his Berkeley friends became music critics for the
New York Times
and the
Village Voice
.

His musical tastes were eclectic. He bought Marais and Miranda records because I liked folk songs. When Marais sang, “Oh how lovely is my wife…. I will love her all my life,” I thought, “Just like us.” He also bought records of Paul Robeson singing old American songs for the girls. He played almost his entire collection of records for us, giving wonderful lectures as the music played. He played the Fisher-Diskau recordings of Schubert’s songs so frequently that I learned them by heart. He taught me about Gilbert and Sullivan, whom I came to love, and that it was okay to like Tchaikovsky whom I secretly liked anyway. Our favorite record was the small-orchestra, Dublin version of Handel’s
Messiah
.

Not long after we met, Phil took me to meet his mother, whom he called Dorothy, and his stepfather, Joe. The Hudners lived in a modest 1920s bungalow on Hearst Street in Berkeley with Joe’s twin teenage children, Lynne and Neil. Lynne and Neil were Phil’s stepsiblings as well as cousins, as Joe had been Dorothy’s sister’s husband. When Phil was in his early twenties, a year after Marion’s death, Joe and Dorothy had married.

Phil was still disapproving of this match and regarded the circumstances of Marion’s death suspiciously.

He never had a good word to say about his mother but sometimes, when they were together, I could see such a closeness between them that it was as if one nervous system were directing both bodies. Dorothy doted on Phil and was very proud of his writing. After he sold his house she and Joe gave him a vacation cabin they owned in Inverness, thinking that he might need a place away from home to write in.

Dorothy was fifty-two, but looked much older. She was a thin, white-haired lady who walked with difficulty, having had the nerves in her legs crushed by an operation that was in vogue when she was younger. It was supposed to improve circulation in people who had kidney ailments. Eventually she would die from the results of this operation. Dorothy had Bright’s disease as a young girl and all her life she had suffered from kidney infections.

Like her son, Dorothy was verbal and had great charm. She was intelligent and gentle, although others said that there was iron inside her velvet glove. I, personally, never saw this. Her manner was a little melancholy. She spoke of Jane, Phil’s long-dead twin, as if Jane had died only yesterday. She was loving and kind to me and enjoyed my children.

Joe Hudner was a muscular, small man, a second-generation Irishman with a brogue he had cultivated that was thicker than if he had just stepped off the boat from Dublin. He had been a blacksmith and collected old Indian recipes for forging and tempering steel. He dressed like a laboring man, but he was also an intellectual and an excellent carpenter and cabinetmaker. A warm, kind man, he built Philippine mahogany desks for all three older girls, a little footstool for me to sit on in the bath when later I became pregnant, and a rolling bookshelf for Philip.

Dorothy wrote; Joe wrote, engraved guns, and had made a large body of interesting sculpture. He had been in the labor movement and worked as a welder in the shipyards during World War II.

The couple kept a comfortable, orderly, modest household. When they moved they always had money enough to buy another small house for cash. The two of them were liberal, leftist, and pacifist but too independent and individualistic to be members of any particular organization or political party. They read widely, and followed all the current trends in political and philosophical ideas, and kept up with current trends in art and literature. Neither Joe nor Dorothy had gone to college; they were completely self-taught.

I hadn’t taken the negativity Phil expressed toward his mother seriously. I was family-minded and initiated a lot of visiting back and forth. The Hudners responded to my invitations, and we enjoyed many pleasant family times and holiday celebrations together. Phil took part seemingly without any reservations. At holidays and on birthdays, Joe and Dorothy gave the children lovely presents, often books. The family relationships seemed to be stable and normal, there to last forever. Dorothy told me, “You and Phil are so well matched.”

Like Phil, Dorothy doted on cats. At her house, her two cats sat in chairs at the dinner table with the rest of the family. Joe and Dorothy talked to these cats with great respect and affection. The cats had more status than anyone else in the household.

After Phil finished correcting the proofs for
Time Out of Joint
and sent the manuscript off to his agent, he would read avidly the book-review sections of
Time
magazine and the
New Yorker
when they came, hoping to find a review of this book. All his previous novels had been issued in paperback, some back-to-back with another writer’s science fiction novel. For these piggyback editions he received only $750 in royalties.

He told me, “Most of my novels have been published by Ace, the lowest of the pulp publishers.” It surprised me that Phil was so embarrassed about writing science fiction. When we invited the children’s modern-dance teacher and his boyfriend over and were driving around sightseeing, they asked Phil, “What kind of writing do you do?” He absolutely would not answer them. Later, when we were all having dinner together, Phil insulted them in such a cold and sarcastic way that they never spoke to us again. Phil didn’t even read science fiction at that time except for Kurt Vonnegut’s novels. He said, “I’m really a fantasy writer.” He referred to his novels as “borderline surrealism” and styled himself “a proletarian writer.” When he said this he would stand and look exactly like a proletarian writer should look. Later he told me, “I really want to be a literary writer.”

“Why don’t you write what you want to, Phil?” I responded. “Successful literary writers have a lot of prestige and make a lot of money.” I saw Phil’s talent and drive and expected great things from him: fame—worldwide of course—and lots of money.

We talked about how we could manage on my small income and Phil’s meager earnings. At that time, Phil was writing two science fiction novels a year that sold for $750 to $1,000 each. Once in a while he would get $1,500. Earlier novels would sometimes be reissued and pay a second $750 or $1,000. Tiny sums came in from foreign rights. I remember how pleased Phil was when the Japanese edition of
Eye in the Sky
came in the mail. He got $30 for it. It was an attractive, small, shiny white book and read from back to front. I was to receive $10,000 from my late husband’s estate and the girls would inherit an additional $10,000. Phil thought we could make this money last for the next twenty years. I was dubious.

I tended to worry about money, a trait I inherited from my mother. When I was growing up during the Great Depression we lived with Oriental rugs, mahogany furniture, and old silver and china that had survived from better days. My mother worried about money and feared a further reduction in status. She seemed to think that we were imminently going to a poorhouse just like those in Dickens’s novels.

Phil told me, “It takes twenty to thirty years to succeed as a literary writer.” He was willing to make this long-term effort. I thought his attitude was terrific. However, the word
budget
wasn’t one I understood.

I wanted to invest the money I had inherited in rental property and persuaded Phil to look at apartment buildings in lower Marin County. We looked at an eighteen-unit apartment complex in Mill Valley that we could have bought for $20,000 down (the building is worth many tens of millions of dollars now), but Phil didn’t want to be a landlord. The capital I’d inherited was used for living expenses over the next two years, and we were right back where we had started from.

To work out Phil’s writing plan, we agreed that while Phil wrote I would run the house and keep up with my outside activities, the Bluebird troop, the PTA, the school library, and a political group that was trying to get a new high school located nearer the center of population rather than in the middle of a faraway cow pasture. I would work on my sculpture when I was at home. Every day I drove carloads of children to lessons, clubs, and other after-school activities. In summer, I daily drove the children and their friends to Shell Beach—where all the mothers gossiped with each other and the children played together and swam. During August, Red Cross swimming lessons were held there. My daughters attended and one year I helped the instructors teach in the very cold water while the dense August fog swirled around us.

One afternoon not long after the discussion about Phil’s career, we were lying on the bed in the study, our arms around each other. We had just made love and I was feeling happy and relaxed. Phil started laughing and laughing. He said, “I have a great idea for a novel. It’s about this guy, Jack Isidore. I’m naming him after an early encyclopedist, Isidore of Seville, who collected weird bits of knowledge. The novel will be in the first person. The opening line Jack Isidore says is, ‘Let me tell you about myself. The first thing is: I’m a pathological liar.’” (In the published version it is, “I am made out of water.”) And Phil laughed and laughed some more. For some unknown reason I felt a little chill of unease, but nevertheless I smiled encouragingly. Phil began working on this novel,
Confessions of a Crap Artist
, during the honeymoon period of our relationship.

P
HIL TOLD ME
, “The function of the writer as a chronicler is very important. The chronicler creates the culture he writes about. A culture without a chronicler doesn’t exist.” He was a fluent writer, and his work came easily to him. He said that the idea for a novel came to him in one intuitive flash, but he couldn’t tell it “in under sixty thousand words. The words come out of my hands, not my brain. I write with my hands. I type 160 words a minute, the rate of a really good legal secretary, and I’m accurate.” One day he told me that he had typed sixty original manuscript pages without an error.

I learned with surprise when I interviewed Phil’s friends Jerry and June Kresy, and Lois Mini after his death that back in the sixties, Phil was telling them that he felt pressured by me to write, and was exhausted from working so hard. He never said anything like this to me or showed any signs of fatigue. He seemed to love his work. He set his own schedule and the rate at which he worked was completely up to him. He actually didn’t write as much as during the years he lived in Berkeley. I would have never dreamed of telling him how he should work, or how much he should do, except that I wanted him home in time for dinner
.