Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick Page 12

  Such was life in the SF subbasement, even with the best editors. But Phil was gracious enough to give Gold credit for improving the ending of Phil's best fantasy story, "The King of the Elves," which appeared in the September 1953 Beyond Fantasy Fiction (a sister publication to Galaxy). Shadrach Jones, an old man in a desolate small town, offers shelter from the rain to a tattered troup of Elves, whose ailing King dies in Shadrach's bed. The Elves are battered from their fierce war with the Trolls; they badly need a new King and convince Shadrach to lead them. His neighbor, Phineas Judd, tries to persuade Shadrach that he is losing his mind-but Phineas is himself revealed, in a master stroke of paranoia become real, as the evil and ghastly Great Troll. At the end, with Phineas and his Trolls defeated in fierce battle, Shadrach abandons the throne. It was Gold's idea to have Shadrach change his mind and come back to lead the Elves. The ending, as Phil revised it:

  The little circle of Elf torches closed in joyously. In their light, he [Shadrach] saw a platform like the one that had carried the old King of the Elves. But this one was much larger, big enough to hold a man, and dozens of the soldiers waited with proud shoulders under the shafts.

  A soldier gave him a happy bow. "For you, Sire."

  Shadrach climbed aboard. It was less comfortable than walking, but he knew that this was how they wanted to take him to the Kingdom of the Elves.

  Efforts have been made to precisely distinguish the SF and fantasy genres; in 1981 Phil declared it "impossible to do": "Fantasy involves that which general opinion regards as impossible, science fiction involves that which general opinion regards as possible under the right circumstances. This is in essence a judgment-call [... ]" Back in 1954, the difference was clear enough to the young writer. He saw his fantasy characters as projected Jungian archetypes. "I had a term I used. Inner-projection stories. Stories where internal psychological contents were projected onto the outer world and became three-dimensional and real and concrete." In a September 1954 letter, Phil confided that fantasy was his own "private love" but that it was "disappearing from the marketplace." "[A] writer doesn't work in a vacuum; if people don't want or don't like what he's doing, the fire seems to go out of it."

  "Impostor" was the only story of Phil's ever purchased for Astounding (June 1953) by the then-doyen of SF editors, John W. Campbell, Jr. Earth is at war with the Outspacers, and Spence Olham, a defense researcher, is under suspicion of being an Outspacer "humanoid robot" (Phil would later adopt the term "android") that has killed the real, human Spence. There is a "U-Bomb" implanted in the robot triggered to explode when a certain phrase is spoken. The robot "would become Olham in mind as well as the body. He was given an artificial memory system, false recall. He would look like him, have his memories, his thoughts and interests, perform his job." And so Security is out to kill Spence, who can't convince them that he's really human. And he really isn't-and that realization sets off the U-Bomb. The implanted-memory theme remained one of Phil's favorite means of exploring the possibilities of "fake" reality.

  In "Impostor," robot Spence wins the reader's sympathy far more than do his calculating human pursuers. In "Human Is" (Winter 1955 Startling Stories), an alien also takes over a human form. Lester Herrick was a jerk to his wife, who prefers the gracious and loving alien soul now occupying his body-she saves the alien's life when the authorities track it down. Phil wrote of "Human Is":

  I have not really changed my view since I wrote this story, back in the fifties. It's not what you look like, or what planet you were born on. It's how kind you are. The quality of kindness, to me, distinguishes us from rocks and sticks and metal, and will forever, whatever shape we take, wherever we go, whatever we become. For me, "Human Is" is my credo. May it be yours.

  Editor Campbell presided over Astounding for the unheard of duration of 1937 to 1971. His "archetypal sf story": "I want the kind of story that could be printed in a magazine of the year two thousand A.D. as a contemporary adventure story. No gee-whiz, just take the technology for granted." Campbell, Phil recalled, "considered my writing not only worthless but, as he put it, `Nuts.' " Campbell also told Phil that he viewed psionics (e.g., telepathy, telekinesis, and precognition) as a "necessary premise for science fiction." While Phil did write stories during this period-notably "A World of Talent" (1954) and "Psi Man" (1955)-that utilized psi powers, his interest in them did not peak until the sixties, when psi powers played key roles (as unexcelled plot devices to multiply realities) in masterworks such as Martian Time-Slip, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and Ubik.

  Before taking leave of Phil's stories, mention must be made of "Beyond Lies the Wub," the very first to appear in print (July 1952 Planet Stories). It is a lovely parable about a hoglike Martian creature-the "wub"-a slobbering, ungainly creature with a kind, enlightened soul. An Earth spaceship is short on provisions, and Captain Franco (a dig at Spain's Generalissimo) decides that wub meat would make good eating. The wub, eminently urbane, objects: "Eat me? Rather you should discuss questions with me, philosophy, the arts-" Captain Franco does kill and eat the wub, which emerges triumphant by taking over the Captain's human form. Sixteen years later, in a story called "Not by Its Cover," Phil again employed the services of the unstoppable wub. An Earth publishing firm sells classics bound in "gold-stamped Martian wub-fur." Too late, the firm learns that the wub-furs are still alive, and changing the texts of those classics to proclaim the truth of eternal life.

  By 1954 Phil's attention had turned to novel writing-SF and mainstream-on a full-time basis. The great pulp exfoliation was withering away. Its deathblow was strictly business. American News Company, a giant distributor, handled most of the pulps. But ANC was liquidated by a financial raider, who saw that its warehouses were far more valuable as real estate than as overhead against magazine profits. SF writer Frederik Pohl describes the chaotic aftermath:

  The publishers came running to the offices of the various Independents [competing distributors], hats in hands, tears in their eyes. Most of them were turned down flat. There was just so much volume that each Independent was capable of handling, and they picked and chose. Life and Time they were glad to take. But who wanted to bother with some bimonthly pulp about spaceships and monsters? Especially if the publisher was rather inadequately financed and in the habit of hitting up his distributors for advances to pay the printers?

  SF stories, even at the rate at which Phil produced them, didn't bring in much income. With Kleo's part-time jobs, they only just made ends meet. For Kleo, the shortage of cash was no grave concern. Her stories of how they scraped by are whimsical:

  Movies were a little difficult. The Roxy Theater near University and San Pablo was an artsy theater that showed strange, foreign films we wanted to see, but we didn't always have the money. So we would go into the lobby-the manager ran the candy counter but went upstairs to count the money a few minutes into the second feature-and we'd sneak in. But every once in a while our timing was off and Phil would be acutely embarrassed and make a big show of saying good-bye to me and buying my ticket and going home-he didn't think it would look right for me to go home too.

  For Phil, poverty was far more difficult. Not that he craved luxuries. Poverty was a humiliation, the stigma of his inability-and unwillingness-to act the part of a wage-earning American male. Phil knew that his vocation was as a writer, but knew also that his writing allowed him to hide from the world. To daughter Laura he wrote, in May 1978, as to why he could not attend her high school graduation:

  I really don't dress very well and am uncomfortable in formal situations. I suppose the roots of this is that I have always been poor, and ashamed of it. At one time my wife [Kleo] [...] and I ate dogfood. I did not go to college but worked in a radio and TV store. I have an enormous knowledge along certain lines, such as literature and theology and classical music, but in other respects I am ignorant. [...]

  I am uncomfortable around power and money, and am happy in what we call the street. [... ] My only ambition has been fulfilled: my wri
ting, about which I am very proud. I have been successful in the terms by which I define success for myself, but outside of my writing my life has been something of a failure.

  This is Phil in the downcast mode he often employed in letters warding off travel. But his shame over his early poverty (by 1978 Phil was no longer in want) was genuine enough. It reappeared in the 1980 "Introduction" to The Golden Man. Phil tells of purchasing the "dogfood" referred to above:

  So anyhow there I am at the Lucky Dog Pet Store on San Pablo Avenue, in Berkeley, California in the Fifties, buying a pound of ground horsemeat. The reason why I'm a freelance writer and living in poverty is (and I'm admitting this for the first time) that I am terrified of Authority Figures like bosses and cops and teachers; I want to be a freelance writer so I can be my own boss. [...]-and all of a sudden, as I hand over the 35¢ to the Lucky Dog Pet Store man, I find myself once more facing my personal nemesis. Out of the blue, I am once again confronted by an Authority Figure. There is no escape from your nemesis; I had forgotten that.

  The man says, "You're buying this horsemeat and you are eating it yourselves."

  Kleo points out that the pet shop sold horsemeat to humans with no questions asked, and that broiled horsemeat is very nice. As to Phil's sense of humiliation: "All I can do is tell you that at that time he was not humiliated. We had worked out a modus vivendi which, after all, continued for almost eight years. So much of this 'Oh how terrible it was to be so poor' is latter-day reconstruction."

  Phil had his wife, his house, his cat, his Magnavox, and his writing stints on into the night (usually to 2:00 A.M.). In the earlier part of the day he read voraciously-Flaubert and Balzac, Turgenev and Dostoevsky, metaphysics and Gnosticism, the latest SF by Bradbury and Van Vogt. He could manage his way through German verse and was (from his Ojai days) a reasonable Latinist. Phil admired, above all other prose models, the plain style and intensity of Xenophon's Anabasis. And he was enamored of Joyce's Finnegans Wake, for which he devised numerous interpretations, such as the text's being Earwicker's dream from which he is, at novel's end, awakening. Says Kleo, "In symbolic terms, Philip would have liked to be James Joyce-and not blind."

  To interviewer Gregg Rickman, Phil recalled the time he told Kleo about his latest reading discovery, Moses Maimonides's Guide for the Perplexed (a medieval Jewish treatise probing the limits of reason in matters of faith): "She [Kleo] says, I talked to one of my professors and he says there's probably not another human being in the United States who's reading Moses Maimonides at this moment."

  Kleo does not remember this episode. Her explanation of Phil's way of telling it is one that many of his friends (in different words but very similar substance) offer:

  I shouldn't say it's not true. If we're talking about Philip, essentially it's true-it just didn't happen. This is a Philip construct of a situation that existed and it's a little way to describe that situation without strictly adhering to specifically real life data. But then, that's what he did.

  Or, as Phil might have said just now, that's what reality does.

  Kleo describes Phil as without formal religion but possessing a "strong sense of mystical unity with the universe." They shared an "animism" that made them watchful of, and easily delighted by, small daily events. Phil several times had the sense of leaving his body. In a 1977 interview he recalled one such instance: "Back at the time that I was starting to write science fiction, one night I was asleep and I woke up and there was a figure standing at the edge of the bed looking down at me and I grunted in amazement and all of a sudden my wife woke up and started screaming-she could see it too-and I recognized it and I reassured her by saying it was just me that was there, not to be afraid." Adds Kleo (in 1987): "And then I realized it was the reflection of the moon shining through the window over the stairs and onto the multipaned glass door to the bedroom." In the interview, Phil continued:

  That was, say, 1951, and within the last two years I've dreamed almost every night that I was back in that house and I have a strange feeling that back then in 1951-52 I saw my future self who had somehow in some way that we don't understand-I wouldn't call it occult, I would just say it was some way you don't understand-that I crashed backwards as my future self through one of my dreams now of that house, going back there and seeing myself again. That would be the kind of stuff I would write as a fantasy in the early Fifties.

  During his marriage to Kleo, Phil kept up his family ties-not only with Dorothy, but with Meemaw and his aunt Marion, who had married Joseph Hudner, a gifted sculptor who supported his family through work at the Oakland Ship Yards. Marion had demonstrated talent as an actress and a painter. In 1944, she gave birth to fraternal twins, Lynne and Neil, and was a warm and loving mother. In the late forties, Marion began to suffer disturbing episodes and was, at one point, admitted to Napa State Hospital, where she was diagnosed as a catatonic schizophrenic. By 1952, Marion's episodes had increased in intensity and duration.

  Dorothy recommended a somewhat unorthodox female physician, who, with Joseph and Marion's assent, took Marion into her home. Shortly thereafter, Dorothy told Phil and Kleo that Marion was having wonderful visions that compensated for the painful circumstances of her life. As with Jane's death, the seriousness of Marion's condition was not recognized. She would stand for hours on end and, when questioned, was fearful of being unable to breathe-a complaint Dorothy regarded as a symptom of her mental state. Lynne Cecil recalls: "At the time of her death Dorothy was with her. Marion said she couldn't breathe and Dorothy tried to calm her down and didn't realize until too late that for real she couldn't. Dorothy told me that. When she did realize what was happening, a doctor was called."

  Marion died on November 11, 1952. Phil was furious with Dorothy for her handling of the matter. He had long regarded his mother as a health-cult fanatic (her interests had included Reichian orgone box theory and Dianetics). The tragedy of Marion's death fueled the flames. It is by no means clear that Phil was correct in his accusations; both Marion and her husband had approved the course of treatment, and prior stays in hospitals had done her little permanent good. Dorothy attempted-in a journal entry written a week after Marion's death-to explain what had happened. Her focus on the "two worlds" of the psyche parallels Phil's fascination with the idios and koinos kosmos. Mother and son, perhaps despite themselves, were spiritual kin:

  [...] I do not believe we shall ever know what happened to her physically, and we already know what happened psychically: she decided not to live. [...] The attraction of that other world of hers, which contained all that we recognize as the creative one and much more besides, was so strong; [... ] she meant to keep it at any cost, but she thought she could do that and keep the actual, physical world around her too. [...] But the more I learn of other people's thoughts the more universally true it seems that each person has another world in him and that no one really belongs to the world as it is. In other words, we are all aliens. None of us belong to this world; it does not belong to us. The answer is to fulfill one's other world through this one; L... I

  Dorothy soon received a unique opportunity to achieve just such fulfillment. Before Marion's death, relations between Dorothy and Joseph Hudner had been cool. But Hudner, who was conscious of possessing unusual psychic gifts, received a message from Marion after her death instructing hiin, to his surprise, to marry Dorothy. Dorothy turned him down flat several times and then, in a sudden strange experience of her own, saw how it could be-her reservations melted away. They were married in April 1953 and spent eighteen happy years together. And Dorothy was at last the mother of twins, devoting herself to Neil and Lvnne's upbringing.

  Again, Phil's reaction was one of pain and anger. Phil saw Hudner as an interloper who had at last displaced Edgar and (through the twins) Phil himself. According to Phil's friend Iskandar Guy, a black writer and artist who with his wife rented a small cottage in the backyard of Joe and Dorothy's Berkeley house, "Joe was trying to find a place where he would be allowed by Phil to relate to
him. Phil would give him no place to do that." Phil would pay visits to Dorothy (paying little attention to Hudner if he was there) that were difficult on both mother and son: Phil would depart grumbling, and Dorothy would be worn and ashen for hours.

  There was no solace in Phil's relations with his father. Edgar had moved to Palo Alto, where Phil and Kleo paid him a visit. Aside from acrimonious debate-Edgar's staunch conservatism versus Phil and Kleo's Berkeley liberalism-their talk was lifeless. Recalls Kleo: "With Edgar, you wondered if he had any emotions. With Dorothy, you felt that she had them and that they were repressed." As the visit proceeded "there just didn't seem to be any contact points." Edgar never invited them back.

  But Phil had succeeded, with Kleo, in constructing his own world. He took walks down San Pablo Avenue, peeking into the cafes and shops and kicking the tires in the used-car lots. That small-time commercial strip (along with the Shattuck Avenue locale of Hollis's University Radio) forms the backdrop to several of the fifties mainstream novels. Phil also enjoyed sitting on the front steps watching the children at play across the street-until he became afraid of what his neighbors might think. (A similar fear arose during the early seventies, when Phil helped a neighborhood girl carry newspapers; whether or not he was abused in his own youth, Phil carried considerable guilt and anxiety on the subject.)

  As a published SF writer, he had no problems with celebrity. In 1953 Phil noted wryly: "Have finally arrived as a writer. Droves of small boys, all aficionados of science fiction, greet me on the street. Ah, Fame!" The Elves, Gnomes, Little Men's Science Fiction, Chowder and Marching Society was the most active Berkeley SF fan group. Phil would have none of it. He refused to dwell in the genre ghetto, though his saleable work was written for it. "The early fans were just trolls and wackos. They were terribly ignorant and weird people." But Phil did occasionally write for fanzines. His essay "Pessimism in Science Fiction" appeared in the December 1955 Oblique; in it Phil declared, with respect to the "dour tone" of post-nuclear holocaust SF: "In science fiction, a writer is not merely inclined to act out the Cassandra role; he is absolutely obliged to-unless, of course, he honestly thinks he will wake up and find that the high-minded Martians have sneaked off with all our bombs and armaments, for our own good."