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

  Despite his objection to "trolls and wackos," he did attend the 1954 Science Fiction Worldcon, where he met a young fan named Harlan Ellison; he and Phil would later become close friends. He also met A. E. Van Vogt, an introduction that struck him deeply at the time; The World of Null-A (1948) was one of Phil's favorite SF novels, laden with ideas on superior mutant intelligences, general semantics, and (one of Phil's favorite themes) implanted false memories. In his 1964 story "Waterspid- er," Phil incorporated Van Vogt's response-back at the 1954 Worl- dcon-to Phil's question about plotting novels: "Well, I'll tell you a secret. I start out with a plot and then the plot sort of folds up. So then I have to have another plot to finish the rest of the story." Phil made this method his own. What Kleo recalls is that Van Vogt was wearing the first polyester suit they had ever seen. "The suit glowed. We were both impressed."

  One fellow Berkeley SF writer with whom Phil formed a close bond was Pout Anderson (for a time they considered collaborating on an SF novel). Together, they could talk over the facts of SF life: editors chopping stories, lousy royalties, no recognition outside of fandom. Recalls Anderson:

  I bitched, and so did everyone else. You have to remember that in those days a science fiction writer-unless he was Robert Heinlein-was really at the bottom of the totempole. If you wanted to work in the field you had to make the best of what there was. But we didn't feel put upon. I don't recall that we ever went into self-pity, the most contemptible emotion there is. We were young then, and there was always tomorrow. Okay, you get shafted this time, but there was always more where that had come from.

  When the talk was on books, Phil championed Nathanael West and admired Tolkien's The Hobbit. His sense of humor showed itself by deadpan assertions that left listeners wondering whether he was joking or revealing a strange new truth-Phil's favorite effect.

  Of all the old Art Music crowd, Phil remained closest to Vince Lusby, who, by a recent marriage, had an autistic son. Phil and Kleo baby-sat for the boy, and he strongly influenced the character of Manfred (an autistic boy trapped in a schizophrenic "tomb world") in Martian Time-Slip. Phil tended to avoid parties but felt comfortable at the loose bohemian gatherings held at the Lusbys' house. Virginia Lusby, who married Vince in 1954, remembers: "Phil analyzed everything, and he was good at it. He didn't resent interruptions, but once he got started he was rarely interrupted-you just sat and listened. I think he was brilliant, really brilliant." But one Lusby party proved disastrous. Allan Temko, an architecture critic, confronted Phil with a drunken song-and-dance parody of the kinds of people who wrote SF. Says Vince Lusby: "It was a horrible experience even if you weren't Philip Dick." At another party, Phil met mainstream writer Herb Gold; Phil later recalled that Gold "autographed a file card to me this way: 'To a colleague, Philip K. Dick.' I kept the card until the ink faded and was gone, and I still feel grateful to him for this charity. (Yes, that's what it was, then, to treat an SF writer with courtesy.)"

  One of Phil's neighbors was Jacquin Sanders, a mainstream novelist who came over to watch the McCarthy hearings with Phil and Kleo. When Sanders returned to New York, he bequeathed them his 1952 Studebaker, with a unique wraparound window design that made it hard to tell front from back. Phil loved it and decided to learn to drive, taking lessons from several volunteers-including an FBI agent investigating his and Kleo's possible Communist ties.

  FBI surveillance and questioning were not unusual in McCarthy-era Berkeley. Sather Gate was the usual site for political speech of all persuasions-more often than not, to the left. FBI agents up on the rooftops would photograph the crowds, just as they did during the Free Speech Movement a decade later and just as they do to the present day. Kleo, who enjoyed taking in all sorts of viewpoints, was a Sather Gate regular. Phil never joined her and seldom attended political meetings of any kind.

  Nonetheless, one day in 1953 or 1954 FBI agents George Smith and George Scruggs knocked on the door. "They were dressed," Kleo recalls, "in gray suits and Stetson hats-like nothing in our world." Politely they asked the couple to identify faces in Sather Gate surveillance photographs; Kleo pointed out some obvious Berkeley political luminaries and then herself. Then Phil and Kleo asked questions of their own, fascinated by the agents' knowledge of splinter parties. There were more visits; Kleo describes Phil and herself as "nervous, not threatened-they were obviously just fishing." Scruggs became friendly and took Phil for driving lessons. Says Kleo: "We would have socialized with Scruggs but he was quite a bit older. Really, they could see [Kleo bursts out laughing] that we were a couple of dips and didn't want much to do with us." But there was something the agents wanted. They offered Phil and Kleo the opportunity to study at the University of Mexico, all expenses paid, if they would spy upon student activists there. Phil and Kleo found the offer attractive except for the spying, and refused. The visits petered out after that.

  For Phil, the lasting importance of these visits is unquestionable. From 1964 on, he frequently believed himself to be under FBI or other agency surveillance; the Berkeley "Red Squad" (as he came to call Scruggs and Smith) provided a vivid foundation for that belief, which caused him great anxiety and was central to the events of 2-3-74. Phil later claimed that the agents had asked him to spy on Kleo. Kleo regards this claim as highly unlikely.

  At least Phil had finally learned to drive. They swapped the Studebaker for a Plymouth and, in typical fifties fashion, set out to see the U.S.A. In 1956-57, they took two separate driving tours-Phil's only time off from writing during their marriage-which included a return visit to Ojai (Phil hated the school but loved the mountains) and wanderings through the Rocky Mountains (Cheyenne, Wyoming, is a vital capital in many of the SF novels because Phil loved driving through it) and as far east as Searcy, Arkansas, where the women still wore poke bonnets. They disdained "sights" like the Grand Canyon. "We weren't interested in anomalies," Kleo explains. "We wanted to see the country." For the first time, they considered moving from Berkeley.

  Phil's old love from his pre-Kleo days, Betty Jo Rivers, returned to the Bay Area in 1956 and found him a far more assured person than she had known in 1949. He could walk down the street comfortably, and his sense of humor was more developed. Kleo was protective of Phil and tried to keep the house as a studio for him. Phil had become fascinated with sports cars and swapped the Plymouth for a Renault.

  But Phil still found public settings difficult. When Kleo purchased tickets to Beckett's new play, Waiting for Godot, Phil could not bring himself to go. Even dinner guests in their home had to be carefully chosen. These frustrations fueled the blasts of anger he leveled so often at Dorothy. Iskandar Guy recalls Phil's telling him that "to the extent that he was in any way crippled or enfeebled psychologically, it was because of his mother and father. It was as if he'd been treated like a feral child."

  It was standard medical practice in the fifties to provide amphetamine analogues such as Semoxydrine for patients who complained of anxiety or depression. The extent to which Phil used amphetamines while in Berkeley just isn't clear. On at least one occasion, Phil obtained Semoxydrine samples from Kleo's physician father. Iskandar Guy recalls that Phil took it regularly in low, commonly prescribed 5 mg doses and possessed a sophisticated pharmaceutical knowledge. But Kleo insists that, other than the Semoxydrine sample from her father, Phil took no drugs but Serpasil (a muscle relaxant) for tachycardia and an aspirin and a teaspoon of soda every night before bed.

  There came, at last, a buffeting of the tranquil marriage. In 1957, after seven years of marriage, Phil had his first affair. The woman was a friend of Lusby's who was unhappily married and had children. She was dark-haired and sensual, and possessed a sunny disposition and an unashamed directness. When Kleo learned of the affair, she took a bus trip to Salt Lake City to let Phil think things out. "We both had to know if he wanted to do something else, and if he did . . . I didn't think ahead." When Kleo returned a few days later, Phil was confused-his relations with the woman had declined, and Kleo's calm frustrated hi
m. "He'd hoped I'd make the big traditional scene." Instead, Kleo had dinner with the woman, who confided to her: "I never feel like I know a man unless I go to bed with him."

  The affair was never a serious threat to the marriage, but it was intensely gratifying for Phil. In the early sixties, during his marriage to Anne, this woman paid several visits to their Point Reyes home. Phil would be proud, Anne recalls, that "his ex-mistress was on the way." Most importantly, she served as inspiration for the seductive Liz Bonner in his finest mainstream novel of the Berkeley fifties, Puttering About in a Small Land (written in 1957, published in 1985).

  Oh yes. While all this was going on, Phil wrote, from 1951 through 1958, eighty-odd stories and thirteen novels-six SF, seven mainstream. The six SF novels were all promptly published, but the seven mainstream novels languished.

  It was an anguish to him. And out of that anguish, his best work would come.

  Phil never gave up writing stories; in truth, his finest achievements in that form were to come in the sixties and after. Nor did he ever abstain from writing novels; even in 1952 and 1953, while producing SF stories at white heat, Phil finished two novels, a massive mainstream work, Voices from the Street, and a fantasy, The Cosmic Puppets, and started a third, the mainstream Mary and the Giant. (See Chronological Survey.)

  But from 1954 on, there was a distinct shift: From this point, Phil would devote his main energies to writing novels. In his 1968 "Self Portrait" lie confessed:

  With only a few exceptions, my magazine-length stories were second-rate. Standards were low in the early '50s. I did not know many technical skills in writing which are essential ... the viewpoint problem, for example. Yet, I was selling; I was making a good living, and at the 1954 Science Fiction World Convention I was very readily recognized and singled out ... I recall someone taking a photograph of A. E. Van Vogt and me and someone saying, "The old and the new." But what a miserable excuse for "the new"! [...] Van Vogt in such works as THE WORLD OF NULL A, wrote novels; I did not. Maybe that was it; maybe I should try an sf novel.

  For months I prepared carefully. I assembled characters and plots, several plots all woven together, and then wrote everything into the book that I could think up. It was bought by Don Wollheim at Ace Books and titled SOLAR LOTTERY [1955]. Tony Boucher reviewed it well in the N.Y. Herald Tribune; the review in Analog was favorable, and in Infinity, Damon Knight devoted his entire column to it-and all in praise.

  Standing there at that point I did some deep thinking. It seemed to me that magazine-length writing was going downhill-and not paying very much. You might get $20 for a story and $4,000 for a novel. So I decided to bet everything on the novel; I wrote THE WORLD JONES MADE [1956], and later on, THE MAN WHO JAPED (1956). And then a novel which seemed to be a genuine breakthrough for me: EYE IN THE SKY [1957]. Tony gave it the Best Novel of the Year rating, and in another magazine, Venture, Ted Sturgeon called it "the kind of small trickle of good sf which justifies reading all the worthless stuff." Well, I had been right. I was a better novel-writer than a short-story-writer. Money had nothing to do with it; I liked writing novels and they went over well.

  So Phil Dick the SF writer became Phil Dick the SF novelist. The above account includes the usual Phildickian inaccuracies and omissions: The Meredith Agency had received the manuscript of Solar Lottery in March, before the 1954 Worldcon and Phil's meeting with Van Vogt. But the essence is true. From 1954 on it was novels that he wrote and as a novelist that he identified himself.

  SF novels were not his first love, however. His mainstream efforts were so important to him that in 1956-57 he abandoned SF altogether. Says Kleo:

  Publishing a mainstream novel would have been his dearest dream. Not mainstream, necessarily, but just non-science fiction. He didn't really expect it-it would have been the gift of the gods. He knew that his unpublished serious novels were in no way popular fiction and that they didn't fit into any particular category. But some of the stuff out of New York then was wonderful. Styron-Phil loved Lie Down in Darkness-Malamud, Sigrid DeLima. It gave us a hope that someone would pick up on his work.

  Iskandar Guy recalls Phil's struggle to balance mainstream ambition and a sense of dignity as to his SF work:

  I got the impression at that time that he was writing science fiction because that's what was happening-but he just hoped to Christ he could get some serious work published. Science fiction was what he did. It was a format in which a few ideas were presentable, but he didn't think of it as the format for serious intellectual inquiry-no way. Who the fuck ever paid attention to paperbacks?

  When he finally accepted that he could write about society and the denigration of men's minds in science fiction, he felt free to do that. He would tell what was going on-good, bad or indifferent. Sometimes it was so had ... it's hard to hold on to clarity and vision when it gets that painful and kicks up everything you remember. But you can try.

  Phil would talk about the Vedas. The world was what you create with your mind. Mind pretty much sets up reality as it exists. And he made no bones about that, especially when he said screw it, I'm not sure I can make it as a straight writer so I'm going to put everything I know in science fiction.

  If Phil felt ashamed of his genre, he was by no means uncertain of his talent. Throughout his life, Phil displayed remarkably little ego when it came to awards or critical acclaim. He seldom suffered from professional jealousy of his fellow SF writers, even when they pulled in considerably higher advances than he did. At the same time, Phil showed a certain cockiness about his own talent. Fellow writer Lusby (with whom Phil exchanged manuscripts) states that Phil "had this complex feeling about perfection-he thought the books were perfect. There were certainly flaws and defects, but he never discovered them."

  John Gildersleeve, a copy editor at the University of California Press, served as a volunteer reader for some of the mainstream novels. The logical plot holes distressed him: "His so-called serious writing would go on beautifully, and then he'd fall back on one of the tricks he'd learned in writing science fiction." Phil could be prickly; Gildersleeve recalls a threat to make him a character in one of the novels, "and I wouldn't like it one bit." There was a protean aspect to Phil's talent that Gildersleeve recognized: "My God, the way he could type! He would compose at eighty to a hundred words per minute-making up his story as he typed it out, and he typed so fast he had to keep one jump ahead of himself on one side or the other."

  Just how boastful or bashful Phil was about his SF career depended, in part, on just whom he was around. When The Man Who Japed came out in 1956, Phil proudly made a special visit to display a copy to Dorothy. But Chuck Bennett, a crony from the Art Music days, recalls a surprise visit by Phil in which he made his entry by flipping a paperback across the floor:

  And I looked at him, at this strange behavior, and he came on in and he ignored the book that he'd thrown away. And I walked over and picked it up and saw it was a science fiction novel by Philip Dick.... "What is this?" "Oh yeah," he said, "I had that published, I got that published." You know, as though that were the last thing in the world, that this elaborate, almost grotesque ploy, you know, of throwing this book-with this total indifference-halfway across the room and then walking on past it.

  Bennett remembers it as being Phil's first published book, which would make it Solar Lottery. If so, the story fits. Kleo recalls that when copies of the Ace paperback first arrived, Phil told her: "Isn't it a hell of a thing that this is the one they picked up first?" Now, Solar Lottery is a pretty good SF adventure in the Van Vogtian tradition, written when Phil was twenty-five. It didn't deserve the abuse Phil gave it, but the hurt of the mainstream works gathering dust was too great.

  Since Phil saw his SF and mainstream writing as, in essence, two separate careers, it may be wise to follow separately his progress in each.

  As to SF novels, the major influence within the genre was Van Vogt, as opposed to the "hard"-science approach favored by Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke. To Phil, a focus
on scientific probability-as opposed to plot possibilities-meant that the writer wasn't doing his job. Phil's approach to technology was, simply, to make up whatever gizmo he needed to keep his characters' realities in suitably extreme states. Science aside, the shift from stories to novels involved a definite change in narrative strategy. For Phil, the startling "What If?" premise lay at the heart of SF. Stories could develop such premises without detailed characterization; but novels required sympathetic protagonists. In 1969 Phil wrote:

  It is in sf stories that sf action occurs; it is in sf novels that worlds occur. [... As a writer builds up a novel-length piece it slowly begins to imprison him, to take away his freedom; his own characters are taking over and doing what they want to do-not what he would like them to do. This is on the one hand the strength of the novel and on the other, its weakness.

  Because SF stories are preeminently SF "action," Phil was often able to cannibalize parts from old stories for his novel plot engines. (The Chronological Survey traces these genealogies.)

  During the fifties there were only two real players in the (strictly paperback) SF novel market: Ace and Ballantine. But Ballantine didn't put out as many SF titles as Ace's two a month (in one "Ace Double"), overseen by Don Wollheim. Ballantine paid slightly better, but it wasn't until 1964 that Ballantine finally purchased one of Phil's novels, Martian Time-Slip. All told, twenty of Phil's SF novels and story collections were first published by Wollheim-at Ace and then DAW (Wollheim's initials) Books. It's a fact: Phil's bread and butter for the first two decades of his writing life was Wollheim's love for his work.