The Search for Philip K. Dick (8 page)

Phil’s plan was to write two novels a year, spending three months on each. During the three months between he would think about his next novel. The first draft of a novel took him six weeks to write and six weeks to revise. (Later in his life, he once wrote a novel over a long weekend.) In between novels, Phil worked in the garden, read, and listened to music. He didn’t take many notes. His memory was so good he didn’t need to. Very occasionally, at 3 a.m., he would switch on the bedside lamp and write a few sentences in a small notebook. When I first saw him sitting in the big armchair in the living room in the middle of the day looking vague, I asked him, “What are you doing?”

He replied in a very definite and slightly annoyed tone of voice, “I’m working.”

I tiptoed away.

Some days, he’d take a chair outside and sit under the walnut trees for an hour gazing at Black Mountain. He hated being interrupted. “Beware of the person from Porlock,” he told me, and recounted the tale of how Coleridge had been interrupted as he was writing the most perfect poem in the English language, “Kubla Khan,” by someone knocking at the door and asking, “Can you tell me the way to Porlock?” He discouraged friends or neighbors from dropping in and could be quite rude if someone unexpectedly came to our door.

After he finished a first draft he liked to do all his own rewriting. His first drafts were virtually complete and needed such a small amount of revision that I suggested that he hire a typist for his second draft and use his energy for creative work. He wouldn’t hear of this “I don’t want anyone else to touch my manuscript.”

Phil had an enormous store of recondite knowledge. He skimmed through research books quickly, picking up the main theme and remembering everything. He didn’t read much but he browsed a lot. He loved his never-updated
Encyclopedia Britannica
, which he had bought as a teenager. When he wrote, he blended together a complex network of disparate parts. His talent for mimicry created dialogue that brings the people we knew in the early sixties back to vivid life when I reread the novels of those years. He said that he wrote about “little” people and small events and saw himself as a “nice little fellow.” I saw him as brilliant, talented, and dashing. Phil would discuss his characters with me when he was planning a new novel. He talked about the people he was imagining and what was happening in their lives, but the completed novels never read at all like what he’d told me.

It didn’t matter what sort of spot he got his characters in, he could always write them out of it. Although he produced great quantities of rapidly written first-draft material, he also mined old material, patching in bits and pieces. He was a master at making invisible bridges, and the text flowed as if it had all been written at the same time. He used events, artifacts, characters, and names from everyday life, scrambling names and people. There often would be a complex train of associations that linked the name to the person. For example, Emily Hnatt in
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
was based partly on me. Phil was part of Richard Hnatt, her husband. Richard had been my previous husband. Mike Hnatt, a friend, was the model for Charley Hume in
Confessions of a Crap Artist
. Charley was Fay Hume’s husband.

Phil amused himself with his work as well as using his novels for therapy. He used them to communicate his political, philosophical, sociological, psychological, and theological ideas. He attracted attention, entertained, and made some money with his writing. His novels were dream fantasies of what he would like to do, what he would like to have happen, or what he thought had happened. I suspect he even used his novels to make things come true—like a form of sympathetic magic or else he had precognition. More than once he wrote about the events of his life before they occurred.

His novels are an autobiography written in the language of dreams. When he felt he was revealing too much about himself, he would switch to another theme or change the sex of a character. I don’t think he realized how much he was telling in the novels of the early sixties, or perhaps he thought he was such an obscure writer that no one would connect what he was saying with his personal life. Maybe he didn’t care. Maybe, even, he would have liked his more perceptive readers to know everything.

Phil never let me read his work-in-progress, but the day he finished a first draft of a novel he brought it to me to read. I was pleased and excited to be the first person in the world to read this new work of his. He liked me to copyedit as I read and to note small faults of logic or inconsistencies of time, place, or character—but actually there was very little for me to do. I had been a “bookoholic,” all my life, sometimes reading more than one novel a day, and I brought this reading experience to my editing job for Phil.

Phil encouraged me with my own creative impulses. I had become interested in doing welded sculpture, and he didn’t mind that I kept my welding tanks in the dining room and burned holes in the dining room table. I would stop working when he came home for lunch and make him a hamburger and some kangaroo-tail soup while I would sip Metrecal, a horrible diet drink in vogue back then. Afterward, he would trim a Corina Lark or perhaps an Anthony and Cleopatra cigar and smoke it while we talked. He had become enthusiastic about cigars and might give a dissertation on how cigars were made. Luckily, I could soon get him on other topics. We would discuss cybernetics, astrophysics, natural science, music, or game theory. Phil became fascinated with cars and read every
Road and Track
and all the other car magazines and “droned on” (his own words) for months about the merits of various car models. At the time we were thinking of buying a second car. Finally, we bought a used Peugeot. Phil claimed it was the best car buy of that year.

Even before we were married we had decided that we wanted to have a child. When I became pregnant after trying for one whole month Phil was excited and worried. He continually urged me to eat brewer’s yeast, wheat germ, soy protein, and other Adelle Davis food recommendations. We had just read her first book. He stuffed me like a Strasbourg goose, so that at the end of my pregnancy I had gained fifty pounds and weighed as much as he did. He himself went on a vitamin regime, tossing large quantities of every kind of vitamin down his throat. His tongue turned black. A physician friend told him that this condition had been caused by an overdose of vitamin A. After that, Phil never took another vitamin in his life, and began saying that all health food “nuts” were “fascists.”

Phil took me to the doctor at monthly intervals. One day, in the waiting room, he said to me, quite seriously, “I wish I’d become a gynecologist; if I’d only realized …”

Phil finished
Confessions of a Crap Artist
at the end of that happy first summer and brought it to me to read. When I finished it I sat for a while with the book on my lap, feeling puzzled and uneasy. “What a strange, uncomfortable novel,” I thought, “so close to reality in some ways, so far in others. Was I really like Fay? I hoped not, because I didn’t like her at all. No I wasn’t like Fay. I guess this is what fiction writers do.” I swept any problems the novel hinted at out of my mind. I had tremendous faith in Phil as a writer and tremendous faith in our relationship. Call it denial if you will, but perhaps faith is the other side of the denial coin and faith can move mountains.

The setting of the novel, the house, the sheep, the children, the details of our lives (like my sweeping up the scattered children’s toys with a broom) are accurate. In the novel, Fay sweeps Nat off his feet, not vice versa, as in real life. I wondered why Phil wrote it that way. Like Fay, I was put out that Phil cooked big breakfasts that made me gain weight. My late husband’s ashes really were sent to the Palace Market. I was outspoken and direct, but not that crude, and not devious. I’m afraid that Phil was the devious one. If Fay was a portrait of me, it was not one of warts and all, but all warts. Phil portrayed Fay as needing a husband for herself and a father for her children, so she acquired Nat. He had internalized Dr. A’s idea. It never seemed to occur to Nat that Fay loved him.

In spite of my confused and uneasy feelings, I could see that it was a good novel, well written, unusual, and full of color. I told Phil this and then asked him, “Why didn’t you tell me you didn’t want to when I asked you to go to the store to buy some Tampax?”

Charley Hume wasn’t at all like Richard. Richard was quiet and withdrawn, an anxious, sensitive person although he had an athletic, healthy look. Phil had more sympathy for Charley than for Fay, a typical fifties male attitude. In his novel, it was Fay’s fault that Charley hit her. I guess she was supposed to have some mystical control over his motor nervous system.

I was amazed many years later when I read the introduction to the Entwhistle Press edition of
Confessions.
Phil goes on at length about what a wonderful fellow Jack Isidore is, obviously identifying with that weird, provincial, sexless fellow whose head was filled with fantasy. The Phil I knew was as much like Jack Isidore as a bird of paradise is like a bat. The French movie
, Barjo,
portrayed the dark side of that novel, and it did a great job portraying Jack. It was fun to see a beautiful French movie star playing a role that had been based on me even though the woman portrayed in the movie was a cold, demanding, manipulative bitch—and not like me at all
.

Confessions of a Crap Artist
didn’t sell. It wasn’t published until 1975 and then by a small private house. The editor’s introduction states, “Shortly after completing it, he married the woman who had inspired him to create Fay Hume, and they lived together for the next five years. “I could have sued him if I were a litigious type of person
.

A friend called me from Los Angeles in 1976 and said, “Phil sure got even with you by writing that novel.” She didn’t know that it had been written during our blissful honeymoon. A young fan of Phil’s said to me
, “Confessions of a Crap Artist
should have been a warning to you.” But it wasn’t like our everyday life at all. Some readers have taken this novel literally. Several Philip K. Dick fans have been surprised to learn that I was already a widow when I met Phil. Two Philip K. Dick scholars from Switzerland came to Point Reyes to visit me and talk about Phil. One of them was struck dumb as he sat in the living room staring at me. Finally he told me he was fascinated by meeting “the real Fay Hume.” “Thanks a lot,” I said. It turned out that he actually liked Fay Hume!

Perhaps if back then I could have understood the dark side of Phil’s nature, that underlying mistrust and fear, things might have turned out differently, but I had no idea that anything was wrong, surrounded as I was in everyday life with this man’s love. He had as great a talent for loving as he did for writing. I believed completely in the self that he presented to me and still do. In those days I thought his novels were fiction.

Phil’s agent submitted the
Confessions
manuscript to Knopf. Alfred Knopf personally wrote to Phil saying he was interested in publishing the novel if Phil would rewrite the last third to make the female character more sympathetic. He compared Phil’s writing to that of Salinger, Roth, and Mailer, the three top novelists of that time. We were both thrilled—but Phil said, “I
can’t
rewrite this novel. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s that I’m not
able
to.” This is a big clue to Phil’s writing. At the time I was disappointed that Phil wouldn’t or couldn’t take advantage of this fantastic opportunity, but it was his novel, his career, his decision. Of course Knopf didn’t buy the novel.

Phil went to work on a new novel and again wove it around his everyday life. We had read about Leakey finding the skull of Nutcracker Man in Tanganyika. We got into a great discussion about Neanderthal Man, Peking Man, and the Piltdown Hoax, a discussion that turned into a friendly argument that lasted weeks. I brought home various books from the library to prove my point. (Phil never went to the library.) The gist of the argument: was Neanderthal Man a vegetarian or a meat eater? Phil contended that he was a vegetarian. He said “The way Neanderthal Man’s teeth were formed proves it. Those were teeth formed to crack and grind seeds and grains, not tear meat.”

I was quite sure Phil was wrong. “What about all those weapons for killing animals? What about those animal bones in their caves?” I said. Phil was sure he was right anyway. He told me crossly, “Be quiet, or I’ll unplug you.” I laughed so hard I almost fell off the couch.

The next day I found a book at the library that stated definitively that Neanderthal Man was a meat eater and brought it home and read it out loud to Phil. He was furious. He denigrated the authority of the writer. Then he started on his new novel,
The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike
, about a modern-day throwback to Neanderthal Man. In the novel Neanderthal Man was a vegetarian. He continued to make this point in later novels: the Neanderthal-like “chuppers” in
The Simulacra
.

We had a number of arguments like this one, competing with each other to be the authority on some subject or the other. I thought of these arguments as a friendly competition, a game like the ones I had played with my much older brothers. Phil didn’t seem to mind when I won. He was proud that I was well read, and he liked to argue, discuss, and theorize with and against me. He made his points and won his share of these discussions.

Phil finished
The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike
and soon brought me another novel to read,
In Milton Lumky Territory
. “Phil, you are so incredibly productive,” I told him, and sat down and read it.

“A strange novel, like a dreary tempest in a teacup,” I thought, “but well written, imaginative, and like other current literary novels, downbeat.”

A nice responsible, hard-working, intelligent, and attractive young man (whom Phil named after our next-door neighbor’s little boy) is seduced by a flaky older woman who is wearing my clothes. The young man has a tremendous mistrust of this older woman but he sticks with her and works hard in her business. He is ingenious, patient, and takes initiative, but she controls and screws up everything in an aimless manner. Although Phil presented the novel as one that he had just written, it really was one of a group of literary novels that he had written in Berkeley before he moved to Point Reyes Station. The main female character was probably based on his favorite high school teacher, Mrs. Wolfson, whom he’d had a crush on. He revised the novel somewhat in 1959, blending me slightly into the lead female role.