Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick Read online

  Dorothy proved easily amenable to her son's second marriage at age twenty-one. But she never got on with Kleo, who seemed to Dorothy to be withdrawn in her company. Dorothy was quite right: Kleo did not like her, due to Phil's tales of childhood woes and to her own perception that "Dorothy was such a bright woman and made her own way but her relationships with people stemmed from a very bitter view of the worldone I didn't share."

  The little opposition to the marriage that arose came from Kleo's side of the family. When Kleo told her mother, Alexandra, the news, she burst into tears-Phil wasn't Greek. Her father, Emmanuel, a San Francisco physician, didn't learn of the wedding until after the fact because it was assumed that he would vehemently disapprove. But Phil soon got on splendidly with them both, talking medicine with Emmanuel and Greek drama and mystery religions with Alexandra, who had a B.A. in classics.

  The June 1950 ceremony took place in Oakland City Hall. Kleo recalls:

  The judge was very sweet to us. He took longer than priests usually do in more formal weddings and gave a nice talk reminding us not to get angry and to try to see each other's point of view. On the way home we had to transfer buses, and I was wearing this awful brown coat, and while we were waiting for the second bus a bird on top of a building made droppings right on the coat. And I asked, "What does this portend?" Philip laughed like hell and said his mother had sent the bird.

  Phil describes their two-story house just off working-class San Pablo Avenue in Radio Free Albemuth (1985): "The house was very old-one of the original Berkeley farmhouses-on a lot only thirty feet wide, with no garage, on a mud sill, the only heat being from the oven in the kitchen.

  His monthly payments were $27.50, which is why he stayed there so long. "

  His determination to be a writer held strong, despite a steady stream of rejections of his mainstream stories. It was still, as the decade began, the mainstream that held him. While his writing time was limited by his Art Music job, Phil was disciplined enough to pursue his craft in the late-night hours. He used the tiny dining room as his writing office; alongside his desk and typewriter were his Magnavox and record collection (he always wrote to classical music) and cats such as Magnificat, who would fall asleep and slide off Phil's file cabinets. Rejection slips were taped to the walls. Kleo swears that once seventeen manuscripts came back on the same day. "We had this little mailbox and they spilled out onto the porch. He just sent them right out again. We both knew Philip had talent. We also knew that didn't have much to do with whether his work would sell."

  In the living room was a large TV (Phil believed in the Hollis goods he sold), for which he built a protective plywood case. The roof leaked (they positioned buckets when the rains came), and mice nested in a gap in the kitchen ceiling. Says Kleo:

  We sat at our little kitchen table and looked up at the mouse tails. If you flipped its tail, the mouse would go away. When it got to four tails, we decided to rig up a trap in our little pantry-a coffee can propped up on a matchstick to which we tied a string. We caught thirty-two mice over several weeks, and would take them across to the vacant lots and let them go. Over the weeks the tails kept getting smaller and smaller, and we began to have bad feelings about it all. One of the last small mice was so weird and clever. We thought hard-and we just let him stay.

  Phil had been devoting his primary writing energies to mainstream fiction-the massive Gather Yourselves Together and at least two dozen stories that have not survived. His return to SF came through his meeting with William Anthony Parker White, a/k/a H. H. Holmes or (as the SF world knew him) Anthony Boucher.

  Under his real name of White, Boucher reviewed mystery novels in the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle. As Holmes, he wrote mystery novels and scripts for the Adventures of Gregory Hood radio show. As Boucher, he published SF and fantasy stories. Boucher's stories never influenced Phil, but his editing skills surely did. At age thirty-eight, in 1949, he had co-founded The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction with J. Francis McComas. F & SF stressed literary graces over the hard-science angle-usually pseudo-science in execution-favored by most SF editors. If that doesn't seem like revolutionary literary theory, it passed for it in the pulp climate of the early fifties.

  Boucher was a record collector and host of Golden Voices of the Opera on KPFA. It was at Art Music that Phil met him. Through him, Phil recalled in his 1968 "Self Portrait," "I discovered that a person could be not only mature, but mature and educated, and still enjoy sf." Phil was also struck by the man himself. Boucher was urbane and kindly, Catholic in faith and in intellect as well. Utterly devoted to books, Boucher read even as he walked along the Berkeley streets.

  Boucher taught a weekly writing class at his Berkeley home at 2643 Dana Street. Every Thursday night, anyone who paid a nominal onedollar fee (generally eight to ten students per night) could submit manuscripts to Boucher's exacting yet gracious scrutiny. He read them aloud in a voice resembling that of Dylan Thomas. A constant smoker, he kept an atomizer near to hand. Writer Ron Goulart, who attended Boucher's classes in 1951, recalls that he stressed this rule for SF and fantasy: "You were allowed one initial premise from which everything followed-you could have a person who walked through walls, but not another person in the same story who was invisible. He would quote H. G. Wells that a pig that could fly over hedges was fantasy, but if all animals could fly it became something else."

  Among the occasional students was Dorothy, whose efforts at mainstream fiction were having no more luck than Phil's. For all of his anger toward Dorothy, Phil often gave her his manuscripts to read. At her urging, Phil attended a few sessions, but soon felt twinges of the fear that so often marked his classroom experiences. Kleo would go in his stead and note down Boucher's comments on his manuscripts. At last came a breakthrough. The "Self Portrait" continues:

  The literary ones he did not respond to, but to my surprise he seemed quite taken with a short fantasy which I had done; he seemed to be weighing it in almost terms of economic worth. This caused me to begin writing more and more fantasy stories, and then sf. In October, 1951, when I was twenty-one years old, I sold my first story: a tiny fantasy to F&SF, the magazine which Tony Boucher edited.

  The story was "Roog" (originally titled "Friday Morning"), and Boucher forced Phil to go through several drafts before finally accepting it. In the tale, Boris the dog realizes that the garbagemen who haul away the trash are really alien Roogs who thrive on the food packed in metal "offering urns." Boris barks "Roog!" to alert his owners, but they are annoyed and plan to give him away. This human indifference helps the Roogs' cause:

  "Roog! Roog!" Boris cried, huddled against the bottom of the porch steps. His body shook with horror. The Roogs were lifting up the big metal can, turning it on its side. The contents poured out onto the ground. [...]

  Then slowly, silently, the Roogs looked up, up the side of the house, along the stucco, to the window, with its brown shade pulled tightly down.

  "Roog" was inspired by Snooper, an Australian shepherd next door, who barked every Friday morning during garbage collections. Phil lost sleep, but the story remained a favorite:

  So here, in a primitive form, is the basis of much of my twenty-seven years of professional writing: the attempt to get into another person's head, or another creature's head, and see out from his eyes or its eyes, and the more different that person is from the rest of us the better. [... ] I began to develop the idea that each creature lives in a world somewhat different from all the other creatures and their worlds.

  Phil always remembered with pleasure "that day a letter arrived in the mail, instead of a manuscript back with a rejection slip." Boucher had paid him money (seventy-five dollars) for a story that he could write (or rather type at breakneck speed, with Kleo copy editing) in the magical privacy of his own home!

  I began to mail off stories to other sf magazines, and lo and behold, Planet Stories bought a short story of mine. In a blaze of Faust-like fire I abruptly quit my job at the record shop, forg
ot my career in records, and began to write all the time (how I did it I don't yet know; I worked until four each morning). Within the month after quitting my job I made a sale to Astounding (now called Analog) and Galaxy. They paid very well, and I knew then that I would never give up trying to build my life around a science fiction career.

  Did Phil really quit his job on the basis of that first sale? No doubt he considered it, but Kleo recalls that Phil was fired due to his breach of the rigid Hollis loyalty code.

  In retrospect, the transgression seems ridiculously petty. Hollis had hired Norman Mini as a salesclerk for University Radio. Mini (who would marry Kleo a decade later, after her divorce from Phil) was a colorful Berkeley character, twenty years older than Phil, who once was a Communist party member. By the early fifties, Mini had renounced all party ties and even testified before the California State House UnAmerican Activities Committee.

  By the early sixties, Phil would speak in worried tones about unspecified "communist" activities on Mini's part that somehow had led to Phil's coming under surveillance. At the time, however, Phil admired Mini, who was one of the few men in Berkeley to wear three-piece suits and was commonly taken to be the owner of the shop. While Hollis could stand being upstaged, he could not tolerate what he regarded as disrespectful behavior toward female customers. The ax fell when one day Mini punningly responded, after a woman asked for an album by the Kunsthalle Orchestra, "Oh, you mean that all-girl orchestra from Germany?"

  Despite his agoraphobic fears, Phil (who had in the past made vehement protests against Hollis's autocratic style) testified on Mini's behalf at the unemployment hearing. Some months later, when Mini dropped by Art Music to visit, Phil spoke with him and was spotted by Eldon Nicholls, Hollis's second-in-command. Nicholls and Phil were fond of each other, but Nicholls's first loyalty was to Hollis, and he felt bound to report the unseemly fraternization. Hollis, outraged, fired Phil. The pain was considerable. (Phil later drew from his memories of Nicholls in creating Hoppy Harrington, a genetic freak whose fortunes rise in the aftermath of nuclear holocaust in Dr. Bloodmoney [19651.)

  SF story sales made Phil's firing seem fated in the long run. He gave the record store business two more brief tries. Shortly after being fired, Phil caught on with Art Music's leading competitor, Tupper & Reed. But he quit almost immediately. Phil later described this time as his second "nervous breakdown" (the first having been his flight from U Cal):

  I bought a house, I was married, and I felt like I should be leaving in the morning and going to work like everybody else. My unconscious just saturated me with anxiety when I got there, to the record store, and I couldn't comprehend why. And I started to faint.

  Now these are obvious [...I hysterical conversion symptoms, to get you out of a situation that you don't want to be in. Later I realized, my God, I would have been back in the retail record business [... ] But I was forced to go back to writing.

  Kleo observes that the formality of Tupper & Reed, after Phil's years of familiarity with Hollis, played a critical part:

  A sense of stuffiness was one of his major sensations during times of agoraphobic fear. Those breathing and swallowing problems-Phil would confuse the physical and social realms, or rather the social realm underlay those physical symptoms. During family dinners with his mother, he would have those sorts of physical manifestations and be forced to leave early. He could have casual dinners with three or four people he felt comfortable with. And stand-up parties were OK as long as you were free to come and go. But Tupper & Reed was too tight-it was up on a second floor, carpeted, and catered to a wealthier clientele. Phil couldn't handle it and he wanted to be home writing anyway, so he quit.

  There was one more try. In late 1953, Herb Hollis died, and his wife, Pat, asked Phil to help with the business. Phil gave it a try for a few days, but he had already tasted freedom. Again he quit. Phil would later mention an A & R (Artists and Repertoire) job offer made to him at this time by Capitol Records. It may be; Kleo doesn't recall it, and at any rate he turned it down.

  Phil could fantasize about cutting a swath in the big wide world. At heart, however, he was happy to let that world go by. Or rather, he imagined he could write in peace and have it to come to him. After all, he could sell SF stories.

  Which allowed him, with Kleo's help, to just scrape by.

  In 1946, in the aftermath of the wartime paper shortage, there were eight SF magazines appearing regularly. By 1950 there were nearly twenty; by 1953, the number had climbed to twenty-seven. They were readily distinguishable-by their bug-eyed-monster covers and pulpy titles like Thrilling Wonder Stories and Fantastic Story Magazine-from respectable "slicks" like Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post.

  What led to the SF boom? In part, the pulps rode with the economic good times of postwar America. But there was also a growing public fascination with the possibilities, wondrous and dreadful, posed by the threat of atomic destruction. Even before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this had been a frequent theme of SF writers. The convergence of the SF future and the American present lent a vitality to SF-it could be both glorious escapism and serious prophecy.

  Phil moved fast after "Roog." By May 1952 he had sold four more stories on his own. It was time to find an agent. Scott Meredith, who had just founded an agency, drew much of his clientele from regular pulp contributors. Phil first proposed that the agency represent only his mainstream work. Meredith insisted on the SF as well. Phil gave in, and the relationship endured (give or take a few severe bumps) for his entire career.

  The Meredith Agency's cozy contacts with New York-based pulp editors, plus Phil's amazing capacity for generating startling possibilities, produced an explosion in a market that was ready for one. SF historian Michael Ashley observes that by mid-1953 "Sf writers had never had it so good: with titles appearing daily, their writings would sell somewhere. New writers had ample opportunity to ply their wares and also to experiment."

  In 1952 four Phil Dick stories-fantasy and SF-appeared. In 1953 there were thirty, including seven in June 1953 alone. In 1954 he published twenty-eight more. In 1955 Rich & Cowan, a British publishing house, chose fifteen for hard-cover publication (an honor seldom accorded SF in the U. S. at that time) as A Handful of Darkness. A second collection, The Variable Man, was issued by Ace in 1957. Phil was prone to deride their quality in comparison to his later work, and it is hard to disagree. They were, at their best, trial runs for far more intricate Phildickian worlds. But a good many are very good indeed-suspenseful or funny as hell or both. Phil pounded them out at the rate of a story per week. From his "Afterthoughts" to the 1977 The Best of Philip K. Dick collection:

  The majority of these stories were written when my life was simpler and made sense. I could tell the difference between the real world and the world I wrote about. I used to dig in the garden, and there is nothing fantastic or ultradimensional about crab grass . . . unless you are an sf writer, in which case pretty soon you are viewing crabgrass with suspicion. [...] One day the crab grass suits will fall off and their true identity will be revealed. By then the Pentagon will be full of crab grass and it'll be too late. [...] My earlier stories had such premises. Later, when my personal life became complicated and full of unfortunate convolutions, worries about crab grass got lost somewhere. I became educated to the fact that the greatest pain does not come zooming down from a distant planet, but up from the depths of the heart. Of course, both could happen; your wife and child could leave you, and you could be sitting alone in your empty house with nothing to live for, and in addition the Martians could bore through the roof and get you.

  The closest Phil ever came to this crab grass story is a brilliant little horror tale in SF clothing called "Colony," which appeared in the June 1953 Galaxy, edited by Horace Gold; it was also adapted for the X Minus One radio program aired in October 1956. An overpopulated Earth needs worlds to colonize. Commander Morrison (a woman-highly unusual for fifties SF) pushes for approval of a new planet that passes all scientific test
s. Then Major Hall's microscope tries to strangle him. Hall is suspected of "psychotic projection." But the attacks continue, carried on by faked objects-the mimickry of the planet's malevolent life force:

  The towel wrapped around his wrist, yanking him against the wall. Rough cloth pressed over his mouth and nose. He fought wildly, pulling away. All at once the towel let go. He fell, sliding to the floor, his head striking the wall. Stars shot around him; then violent pain.

  Sitting in a pool of warm water, Hall looked up at the towel rack. The towel was motionless now, like the others with it. Three towels in a row, all exactly alike, all unmoving. Had he dreamed it?

  [...] His belt got him around the waist and tried to crush him. It was strong-it had reinforced metal links to hold his leggings and his gun.

  In the end, the entire exploration crew is gobbled up by a fake rescue ship into which they have all climbed naked (no longer being able to trust their clothes). Phil wrote of "Colony": "The ultimate in paranoia is not when everyone is against you but when everything is against you. Instead of 'My boss is plotting against me,' it would be 'My boss's phone is plotting against me.'!'

  For a time, Phil enjoyed a happy relationship with Galaxy editor Gold. During 1954 they corresponded as to their mutual agoraphobic difficulties, and Phil confided that he felt stuck at the "emotional age" of nine years and six months (when he and Dorothy moved from Washington to Berkeley). But Gold, in typical pulp fashion, felt free to substantially revise stories without consulting the writer. The practice drove many writers (financially dependent, to the tune of three to four cents per word, on Gold's good graces) to despair, Phil among them: "[D]espite the fact that Galaxy was my main source of income I told Gold that I would not sell to him unless he stopped altering my stories-after which [1954] he bought nothing from me at all."