Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick Page 16

  Later that year, while eating lunch with Anne after their marriage, he suddenly told her: "I had a perfectly good wife I traded in for you." Within a short time, Phil and Kleo had resumed amicable relations. As Kleo says: "You don't throw away good friends, and Phil and I were best friends." But nearly two decades later, in the Exegesis, Phil retained a sense of guilt: "I am punished for the way I treated Kleo."

  Anne and Phil made plans for how to make their money last while Phil pursued his mainstream ambitions. He still dabbled in SF, expanding two mediocre novelettes of the fifties into Dr. Futurity (1960) and Vulcan's Hammer (1960), each appearing as half of an Ace Double. Ace was "the lowest of the low pulp publishers in New York," he told Anne. Once, when her dinner guests asked what he wrote, Phil refused to answer, later insulting them so that they never returned. If a genre label was required, he preferred "fantasy writer."

  But the mainstream was what he wanted. And if the young couple utilized carefully Phil's house-sale proceeds and his annual SF earnings (roughly $2,000), plus Anne's $20,000 from the Rubenstein estate, maybe they could make it for a while-Phil computed it, based on his Berkeley-days budget, at twenty years. Anne recalls: " 'You know,' said Phil, 'it takes twenty to thirty years to succeed as a literary writer.' He was willing to make this long term effort! I thought this attitude was great! However the word 'budget' wasn't a part of my vocabulary."

  Anne was no raging spendthrift-her standards of the "good life" were no different from those of her Marin County neighbors-but there were three daughters, a house, a horse, banty chickens, and black-faced sheep, and, yes, an occasional luxury. Enchanted as she was by Phil, confident as she was of his talent, Anne worried about money. And that struck fear in Phil, who knew damn well what the chances were of his talent bringing in the big bucks.

  Still, it was a lovely life for a time. At Anne's request, Phil changed over his late-night writing hours into a nine-to-five labor, in order to be with the family in the evening. Come lunchtime, he would emerge from the study, light up a Corina Lark, and he and Anne would talk. She writes:

  We got so involved with our conversations that I often burnt the first two cheese sandwiches that were in the broiler. We talked about Schopenhauer, Leibnitz, monads, and the nature of reality-or Kant's theories as applied by Durkheim to the culture of the Australian aborigines-or Phil would hold forth on the Thirty Years War and Wallenstein. Light topics like these. Germanic culture had had a great influence on Phil. Phil told me he was one-quarter German and a sturm and drang romantic.

  His lineage was English and Scotch-Irish, but that's love. These lunch talks were warm-ups for the novels to come. The Kant-Durkheim theory, for example, shaped Phil's depiction of the Martian aboriginal tribe of Bleekmen in Martian Time-Slip (1964).

  Phil began a correspondence with Eleanor Dimoff, an editor at Harcourt, Brace. Harcourt had turned down Crap Artist but on the basis of that novel's promise offered Phil a contract: $500 down, $500 more upon acceptance of a new novel he was to write. He could smell the mainstream. In his February 1960 letter, Phil was suitably suave:

  We're forty miles from San Francisco and we get in now and then, to eat in Chinatown or have coffee out around Broadway and Grant or visit friends on Potrero Hill. I nearly always manage to drop by the City Lights Bookshop and pick up thirty dollars worth of paperback books. My wife buys oriental rugs with holes in them from a rug dealer she knows, and if we can make it out to the Fillmore District we pick up a good supply of Japanese dishes from a little Japanese hardware store, there. If there's time to spare I stop along Van Ness and drive various new foreign cars, which is my favorite pasttime. And of course I pick up a supply of Egyptian cigarettes, if I have the money. If you think all this types me, consider that-before they tore down Seals Stadium-I went to S.F. primarily to see baseball.

  It wasn't only Anne who enjoyed the good life. They were flush, and Phil was out and about and having some fun. Anne wasn't even aware that he had suffered from agoraphobia in the past. Except for one thing: Harcourt wanted Phil to come out to New York to confer with Dimoff on the new novel. No way. Not for Captain Video in the fifties-not even for the mainstream now.

  There was one gaping omission in his self-portrait for Dimoff (did he fear she would think his mind couldn't be on his work?): Anne was pregnant. Within the month, on February 25, 1960, Laura Archer Dick-Phil's first daughter, Anne's fourth-was born.

  Phil was nervous as hell in the months before the birth, urging Anne to eat Adelle Davis recipes and devising a vitamin-intake plan for himself that turned his tongue black. (A physician diagnosed the cause as an overdose of vitamin A; Phil mistrusted health food "nuts" ever after.) Before picking Laura up at the hospital, Phil scrubbed the old Ford station wagon for six hours-"l mean, even the lights," says Jayne.

  Anne recalls that when Phil first looked into Laura's face he said: "Now my sister is made up for." And when, on their first day home, Dorothy and Joseph Hudner came out to see their grandchild, Phil allowed them a single minute and then rushed them out of the room.

  The Harcourt contract didn't pan out. Phil submitted The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike (w. 1960, p. 1984) and Humpty Dumpty in Oakland (p. 1987), a 1960 rewrite of his 1956 work, A Time for George Stavros. Harcourt rejected them both; they are discussed in the Chronological Survey, and they have their moments.

  But the best mainstream novel Phil ever wrote is Confessions of a Crap Artist, written in the summer of 1959, in the flush heat of his romance with Anne-a time she regards as their "honeymoon." Knopf almost bought it in 1960, but asked for a rewrite instead. The Meredith Agency told him it was his big chance. "I can't rewrite this book!" Phil explained to Anne. "It's not that I don't want to, it's that I'm not able to."

  Crap Artist was published, at last, by Entwhistle Books in 1975, which eased the pain.

  Just maybe the reason Phil couldn't rewrite Crap Artist is that it didn't need rewriting. Crap Artist is Phil's first novel to put multiple narrative viewpoints to wild work. He had described his earlier mainstream novels to Anne as "borderline surrealism." But there is nothing truly resembling surrealism until Crap Artist. What Raymond Chandler did for the neon-lit Los Angeles of the forties, Phil did for the Bay Area teetering on the brink of the sixties. Instead of the whiskey poet Philip Marlowe, we see through the eyes of Jack Isidore-"a schizoid person, a loner" and "one of God's favored fools," as Phil later described him.

  Crap Artist is, beneath the shifting narrative realities, a hell of a novel about the male psyche at war with its demons. Isidore is named after Isidore of Seville, Spain (560?-636), whose Etymologiae was regarded as a universal compendium of knowledge during the Middle Ages. But the modern-day Isidore is drawn to pulps like Thrilling Wonder Stories-reading tastes shared by young Phil. Fay Hume, Isidore's sister, is a wiry, aggressive, seductive woman unhappily married to Charley Hume, a fall-guy American businessman who pays the bills, suffers a heart attack, and is driven to killing the household animals-and himself-by his wife's demands and betrayals. Nat Anteil is a passive, collegeeducated intellectual whose low-rent life with loving wife Gwen is swept aside by his passion for Fay, which he starts to regret as soon as it happens. But it's too late for regrets when you've found what you always thought you wanted.

  In a copy of Crap Artist inscribed for friend Chris Arena in September 1980, Phil made a series of notes on the novel's narrative techniques and autobiographical sources. Like Charley, Phil feared falling victim to a heart attack. More fundamentally, Phil acknowledged the link between himself and both Jack Isidore and Nat Anteil: "Jack is a parody on myself as a teen-ager; his instincts and thoughts are based on my own when I was about 16 years old." He added: "Nat is based on me but as an adult, whereas Jack is my stunted adolescent side. Nat is mature, but he is psychologically weak, and falls under Fay's control."

  And Fay was based on Anne. Phil told her so when he gave her the manuscript to read during their "honeymoon" period.

  In Chapter 3, Charl
ey hauls off and sucker punches Fay because he is humiliated by her having sent him to buy-publicly ask for-Tampax at the local store. In "real" life, Phil bought Tampax for Anne without comment. When Anne read the novel, she asked Phil why he hadn't said if he minded buying them for her? In the seventies, Phil would tell male friends about the time he hauled off and slugged Anne after having to buy her Tampax. By 1963, four years after Crap Artist was written, there was occasional, minor physical violence on both Phil and Anne's part. Crap Artist had known it was coming. Precognition-Phil claimed, in the seventies, to have displayed it in some of his novels. Listen to Nat:

  I wonder if I'll wind up hitting her, he thought. He had never in his life hit a woman; and yet, he already sensed that Fay was the kind of woman who forced a man into hitting her. Who left him no alternative. No doubt she failed to see this; it would not be to her advantage to see this.

  Chapter 11 begins with Nat wondering if Fay had "gotten herself involved with him because her husband was dying and she wanted to be sure that, when he did die, she would have another man to take his place." Nat recognizes intellectually that Fay picks out husbands as she would soap-Dr. X's joke-but is incapable of acting on his insight. By 1963 Phil was telling friends that Anne had killed her first husband and was trying to kill him.

  Fay is not only Nat's lover-wife but also Isidore's sister. And Nat/ Isidore "laminated together" (to borrow a phrase Phil used in the Exegesis when conjoining characters or ideas) are the man-child confronting a wife who arouses their worst childhood fears:

  I went to so much trouble, he [Nat] thought, to break away from my family-in particular my mother-and get off on my own, to be economically independent, to establish my own family. And now I'm mixed up with a powerful, demanding, calculating woman who wouldn't bat an eye at putting me back in that old situation again. In fact it would seem perfectly natural to her.

  How would the "old situation" be reinstated? Maybe by Fay/Anne telling Isidore/Nat/Phil to chuck Thrilling Wonder Stories and get a real job. Charley Hume says of Fay: "The sharp contempt in her voice made him shiver. It was her most effective tone, full of the weight of authority; it recalled to him his teachers in school, his mother, the whole pack of them." In 1980, Phil noted that "Fay's speech patterns are authenticbased on those of an actual person."

  In her Search for Philip K. Dick, Anne says of Fay:

  I was blunt and direct; but not that crude, and not devious like Fay. If Fay was a portrait of me it wasn't 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. It seemed never to occur to Nat that Fay loved him.

  One can imagine Phil smiling now: the proof of his subjective truths borne out by placing side by side his novel and Anne's memoirs. The nature of their love-and their differences-is exemplified in their feeling for Isidore. In a January 1975 letter Phil wrote: ". . . Jack Isidore of Seville, California: more selfless than I am, more kind, and in a deep deep way a better man." Writes Anne, in response to that letter: "Jack Isidore that weird, provincial, sexless fellow with a head filled with garbagy science-fantasy! Phil was about as much like Jack Isidore as a bird of paradise is like a bat. Phil was Nat!"

  Phil tried to blend strict writing discipline with the new demands of family life. He worked during the day and spent evenings with Anne and the kids. As a good provider, he would keep to a pace of two novels per year-each novel taking six weeks for the first draft and another six weeks for the second (retyping and minor copy editing). Between each novel would be six months devoted to thinking out the next plot. He warned Anne never to interrupt him when it seemed that he was only sitting quietly. "Beware," he would say, "of the person from Porlock"-the stranger who, knocking to ask the way to Porlock, shattered the composition of Coleridge's dream vision "Kubla Khan."

  Once a novel was under way it moved swiftly. Phil still had his awesome typing speed. He told Anne: "The words come out of my hands not my brain, I write with my hands." Phil might make preliminary notebook entries, but the novel took true shape only in actual composition:

  The intuitive-I might say, gestalting-method by which I operate has a tendency to cause me to "see" the whole thing at once. Evidently there is a certain historical validation to this method; Mozart, to name one particular craftsman, operated this way. The problem for him was simply to get it down. If he lived long enough he did so; if not, then not. [...] The idea is there in the first jotting-down; it never changes-it only emerges by stages and degrees. If I believed that the first jotting-down actually carried the whole idea, I would be a poet, not a novelist; I believe that it takes 60,000 words for me to put down my original idea in its absolute entirety.

  The intense writing bouts had their physical cost. Some weeks after Laura was born, Phil was hospitalized by chest pains (shades of Charley Hume). He remained cheerful: "I'm either going to die or else I'm going to have a baby," he told Anne. The diagnosis was pyloric spasms; the doctor told Phil to reduce his coffee intake and to meditate. Did the subject of Semoxydrine ever come up? By now it was a steady fuel for the writing.

  For Phil, one of the great joys of his new "good life" was sports cars. They bought a used Peugeot, then traded it for a '53 white Jaguar Mark VII saloon with a mahogany dashboard, gray leather upholstery, and a sun roof. Phil cranked it out to 96 mph on the freeway. But it broke down, and in the autumn rains the sun roof leaked and the blue carpet sprouted mushrooms. When Phil refused to help build a garage, Anne traded the Jaguar for a new Volvo. Phil was furious.

  Petty quarrels like this arose frequently. Sometimes it was mere sparring-spirited competitions to establish who had authority. But more often the fights were heated. Growing up under Dorothy, Phil had never known loud arguments, and life with Kleo had been peaceful. Shouting and profanities were new territory for Phil, and he enjoyed it at first: "We're just like a Mediterranean family, everyone waving their hands and yelling." Then Anne upped the ante one day, flinging half the dishes they owned. Repentant, she suggested a peacemaking family trip to Disneyland.

  Phil Dick in Disneyland . . . He was fascinated by the Abraham Lincoln "simulacrum," as he termed it in We Can Build You, a novel written in 1961-62 that combined SF and mainstream elements. And the trip did the family good. A new era of peace began. They purchased a spinet, on which Phil played classical pieces. He also had occasional out-of-body experiences (as in the Berkeley days): seeing himself in the living room, or at his own bedside. He also saw the ghost of an elderly Italian man who he suspected had lived on the site of their wonder house.

  In autumn 1960, Anne became pregnant again. Convinced that they could not take on a fifth child, Anne told Phil that she wanted an abortion. In interview she recalled:

  I felt it was the only way to go. The doctor thought it might be bad for Phil-maybe Phil had told the doctor he didn't want me to have the abortion-but I persisted because I wanted it. It must have been extremely disturbing to him, looking back now and realizing that We Can Build You was about that experience and look at the woman [Pris Frauenzimmer, a "schizoid personality"] in that novel. Demonic, right?

  We couldn't cope as it was with four children. Financially, I think he knew he couldn't stand the responsibility of being father to this complicated middleclass family. That was my instinct.

  Phil would certainly state his viewpoint strongly if it came to some theoretical intellectual topic-he could be adamant even when he was wrong, so he wasn't any milquetoast. He finally did think it was for the best-he said, "I agree"-and then we went up to Seattle, went to this nice restaurant-it's all in We Can Build You-in the novel Pris kills a little robot with her high heel. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

  I think the abortion may have brought back his awful birth experience with his sister [Jane] dying. One of my daughters says, "He takes this stand against abortion when he didn't raise his own children."

  As Anne points out, We Can Build You, written in the year following the abortion, includes a n
aked psychological account of Phil's enduring love-and poisonous hatred-for his wife. In Build, protagonist Louis Rosen undergoes psychiatric treatments that employ hallucinogens to induce fugue states. During these, Louis lives out multiple fantasy lives with Pris. At last, in one fugue, they have a child together, and Louis is ecstatic: "Across from them I sat, in a state of almost total bliss, as if all my tensions, all my anxieties and woes, had at last deserted me." But in his normal consciousness, Louis realizes that Pris is "both life itself-and anti-life, the dead, the cruel, the cutting and rending, and yet also the spirit of existence itself."

  In a February 1960 letter to Harcourt, Brace editor Eleanor Dimoff, Phil had acknowledged-even prior to Build-his difficulties with female characters in his mainstream novels: "I tend to take it for granted in a novel that a man's wife is not going to help him; she's going to be giving him a bad time, working against him. And the smarter she is, the more likely she's up to something." The "evil woman problem" (as Phil termed it) preceded his marriage to Anne. The source of his rage was mother Dorothy. But despite Phil's apparent awareness of the problem, evil women continued to proliferate in the SF novels of the sixties. Many resembled Anne in life details and speech patterns. The high-water mark of the "problem" came in Phil's 1974 short story "The Pre-Persons," which reflects Phil's deeply felt antiabortion stand. The vehemence of its woman-hate is extraordinary. Father explains to son about aborting women: "They used to call them 'castrating females.' Maybe that was once the right term, except that these women, these hard cold women, didn't just want to-well, they want to do in the whole boy or man, make all of them dead, not just the part that makes him a man." It is as if female fetuses did not exist.