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

  And so one night, during dinner, Sheriff Christensen came to the door with involuntary commitment papers signed by Dr. X. While the girls watched, Anne was hauled off for seventy-two hours of observation at Ross Psychiatric Hospital.

  Phil had made a rather definite decision as to what was real.

  Anne explains why she never stopped loving Phil during the ordeal to come: "I was rooted in my marriage. We had four children. I felt that, no matter what, you just had to try to work things out. Loyalty was a very strong value to me."

  The shrink at Ross believed Anne when she explained that marital fights were one thing and craziness another. But having come this far, she had only two options: a full-scale legal hearing on her sanity or two weeks of further evaluation at Langley-Porter Clinic. She chose the second, residing in a locked ward. Phil and the kids came to visit every day. Daughter Hatte (then thirteen) recalls that during one such drive Phil said: " 'I'm going to talk to the doctors today. I'm sure they're going to tell me that I'm the one who should be in there, not your mother.' On the way home he said: 'That's what they told me. I already thought that, myself.' Well, maybe it's true and maybe not-that's the kind of thing he'd say."

  The clinic records of her stay include (according to Anne's transcription) the following comments: Mr. Dick "was very unhappy-he says that he has never seen his wife looking worse. Mr. Dick feels that he is the mentally ill partner and should be hospitalized. He feels he may be schizophrenic." The recording male physician stated that Mr. Dick's problem was that he was "unable to control his wife."

  Anne was released after the two weeks. On the way home, Phil insisted that they pay a visit to Dr. X, who informed Anne that, LangleyPorter notwithstanding, she was manic-depressive. While in the clinic, Anne had spit out the daily Stelazine pill; her first day in, she had swallowed it obediently and been left logy. According to Anne, Dr. X now insisted that she keep taking them at home; Phil threatened to leave her if she refused. Phil's faith in Stelazine (a phenothiazine downer used to manage certain psychotic disorders and high anxiety) was sincere; he took it himself on occasion and found it beneficial. Anne's experience with a regular dosage: "They turned me into a zombie. Once I had taken them I didn't have sense enough not to take any more." Anne stayed on Stelazine for two or three months, suffering some impairment of memory. She and Phil began seeing a female marriage counselor who made little dent in what was happening. Anne, after her Stelazine haze, was furious but still determined to save the marriage. Phil had his doubts.

  In later years, Phil never alluded publicly to the commitment, though he continued to maintain that Anne was "schizoid," lacking in human kindness. Surely his lingering anger over the 1960 abortion played a part in these comments. But his reticence on the subject of Anne's commitment (as opposed to frequent and vehement accounts, in interviews, of the jewelry fiasco) does indicate a degree of discomfort. But while Phil kept a public silence on the real-life events, he drew heavily on his memories of the commitment in his SF novels. Phil made no secret of the fact that many of his sixties female protagonists were inspired at least in part by Anne. Three examples that cast some light here are Emily Hnatt in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (w. 1964, p. 1965), Mary Rittersdorf in Clans of the Alphane Moon (w. 1963-64, p. 1964), and Kathy Sweetscent in Now Wait for Last Year (w. 1963, rewritten, p. 1966).

  Emily, in Palmer Eldritch, undergoes E (for Evolution) Therapy along with her second husband, Richard (a name likely drawn from Anne's first husband). E Therapy is risky business. Subjects either evolve-with larger brains creating a "bubblehead" look-or regress to become husks of their former selves. As it turns out, Richard evolves and Emily regresses. Anne speculates that this was Phil's way of comparing their differing responses to Stelazine. Richard's higher vision affords a benign, enlightened view of the wife he loves. Emily's decline is an unavoidable sorrow. It should be added that the character of Emily was also likely influenced by second wife, Kleo. In particular, the regret felt by Emily's first husband, Barry Mayerson, over the end of their marriage parallels Phil's own sense that in Kleo he had lost a "perfectly good wife."

  But in the latter two examples, the figure of Anne clearly dominates. In Clans, hapless Chuck Rittersdorf and his brilliant psychiatrist wife, Mary, both undergo psychiatric-profile testing. The result: Mary is forced to admit that Chuck is "without a trace of mental disturbance" while she is a depressive type. She admits: "My continual pressing of you regarding your income-that was certainly due to my depression, my delusional sense that everything had gone wrong, that something had to be done or we were doomed."

  In Now Wait, love is put to the test. Dr. Eric Sweetscent is a confused but kindly artiforg (artificial organ) surgeon; his wife, Kathy, a consultant, is a brilliant, driven harridan, whose salary exceeds Eric's. Kathy loves Eric and tries to keep him even as he struggles to get out of the marriage. She becomes addicted to JJ-180, a hallucinogen with toxic side effects and looping time-travel properties. Kathy tricks Eric into taking JJ-180 to motivate him to discover an antidote. Despite Eric's loyal efforts, which Kathy hardly deserves, the truth is-as Eric's future self tells him during a JJ-180 trip-that Kathy suffers from Korsakow's syndrome ("pathological destruction of cortical brain tissue due to long periods of intoxication") due to narcotics use prior to JJ-180. The situation is hopeless; but, as the future Eric notes: "Under phenothiazine sedation she's quiet, anyhow."

  At the end of Now Wait, Eric has a talk with a flying cab on the meaning of caritas. As is often the case in Phil's SF, the machine speaks with soul:

  To the cab he said suddenly, "If your wife were sick-"

  "I have no wife, sir," the cab said. "Automatic Mechanisms never marry; everyone knows that."

  "All right," Eric agreed. "If you were me, and your wife were sick, desperately so, with no hope of recovery, would you leave her? Or would you stay with her, even if you had traveled ten years into the future and knew for an absolute certainty that the damage to her brain could never be reversed? And staying with her would mean-"

  "I can see what you mean, sir," the cab broke in. "It would mean no other life for you beyond caring for her."

  "That's right," Eric said.

  "I'd stay with her," the cab decided.

  "Why?"

  "Because," the cab said, "life is composed of reality configurations so constituted. To abandon her would be to say, I can't endure reality as such. I have to have uniquely special easier conditions."

  "I think I agree," Eric said after a time. "I think I will stay with her."

  "God bless you, sir," the cab said. "I can see that you're a good man."

  "Thank you," Eric said.

  The cab soared on toward Tijuana Fur & Dye Corporation.

  The worth of these novels does not depend upon the correctness of Phil's evaluation of Anne's mental state. He was a fiction writer, imagining and elaborating even the events of his life. But this cluster of husband-wife sanity bouts fairly indicates that, in committing Anne, Phil took action that he felt was necessary and, ultimately, loving. For the record, Anne does not suffer from insanity or brain damage, and after Phil left the marriage she built up a successful jewelry business while raising and educating four daughters.

  After the commitment, even after the Stelazine, the fights continued. In autumn 1963 Phil and Anne attended a party at a house on Mount Vision in Inverness. Anne recalls that, quite atypically, Phil downed several martinis. On the way home he swerved the car off the steep road-the front wheels hanging in air. Anne writes that as they waited for help, "Phil took my arm and tried to forcibly lead me into the driver's seat. He said, 'Get in and I'll push.' If he had pushed the car, it would have gone over the side of the mountain. Of course, there were trees to stop it from going very far."

  Late in 1963 tensions came to a head and Phil left, moving in with Dorothy in Berkeley. Before long Anne came to take him back, and Phil returned docilely, seeming flattered by this demonstration of her love. But there was no return to ha
ppy times. President Kennedy's assassination in November shocked Phil so severely that he dropped to the floor when he learned of it, then remained depressed for days. When Phil's beloved cat Tumpy disappeared they purchased twin Siamese cats, who died of distemper. Phil, who had lived with cats all his adult life, refused to consider finding replacements just then.

  Anne suggested that church attendance might help. They joined St. Columba's, an Episcopal church in Inverness, and attended "religiously" (as Phil liked to say) every Sunday. He would sometimes claim that this was due solely to Anne's social climbing: "She says, If we're going to know judges and district attorneys and important people, we have to be Episcopalian."

  But the primary force that led Phil to his brief involvement with the Episcopal Church was not Anne, but a horrific vision in the second half of 1963 that brought him to the point of spiritual crisis. In the late seventies, Phil recalled:

  There I went, one day, walking down the country road to my shack, looking forward to eight hours of writing, in total isolation from all other humans, and I looked up in the sky and saw a face. I didn't really see it, but the face was there, and it was not a human face; it was a vast visage of perfect evil. I realize now (and I think I dimly realized at the time) what caused me to see it: the months of isolation, of deprivation of human contact, in fact sensory deprivation as such ... but anyhow the visage could not be denied. It was immense; it filled a quarter of the sky. It had empty slots for eyes-it was metal and cruel and, worst of all, it was God.

  I drove over to my church [... I and talked to my priest. He came to the conclusion that I had had a glimpse of Satan and gave me unction-not supreme unction; just healing unction. It didn't do any good; the metal face in the sky remained. I had to walk along every day as it gazed down at me.

  The vision-not "really" seen but decisively encountered-endured for several days. Isolation and the anguish of his failing marriage were not the only causal factors. Phil had also been taking what he described alternately as "certain chemicals" and "psychedelic drugs." What drugs these were is unknown; Phil did indicate, in a 1967 letter, that LSD was not among them; amphetamines alone, in sufficiently high doses, could account for such a vision. By the seventies, his accounts of the vision no longer included mention of drugs, likely because his attitude toward drug experimentation had changed.

  However, at the heart of the vision lay not drugs, or even isolation, but rather memories of father Edgar putting on a gas mask as he told four-year-old Phil stories of World War I: "[T]he sight of him wearing his gasmask, blending as it did with his accounts of men with their guts hanging from them, men destroyed by shrapnel-decades later, in 1963, as I walked alone day after day along that country road with no one to talk to, no one to be with, that metal, blind, inhuman visage appeared to me again, but now transcendent and vast, and absolutely evil."

  The visage-which became Palmer Eldritch-was a psychic implosion on the order of Phil's classroom horrors. The difference was that now, as a writer, Phil possessed a means of response, of integration. Even so, the challenge was severe. Phil later said: "[W]e must have our idios kosmoses to stay sane; reality [the koinos kosmos) has to filter through, carefully controlled by the mechanisms by which our brains operate. We can't handle it directly, and I think that this was what was occurring when I saw Palmer Eldritch lingering, day after day, over the horizon."

  Phil did not tell Anne of the experience. She writes, "If he had I might have said to him, `You probably ate something that didn't agree with you.'

  For Christmas 1963, Phil and Anne gave their daughters Barbie and Ken dolls. That very month, Phil had published (in Amazing) "The Days of Perky Pat," a strange, hilarious story of life on a bleak, defeated Earth whose survivors are kept alive through the relief efforts of the Martian victors. To keep their sanity, the survivors play with dolls and models in elaborate "Perky Pat layouts" styled after Barbie and Ken wardrobes and accessories. Daughter Hatte recalls that Phil measured the proportions of Barbie dolls to confirm that they could not exist in the real world-their heads were too small for their bodies.

  A vision in the sky, Barbie dolls, memories of Edgar and the teachings of the Episcopal Church-all forming into a novel that Phil would start just after Christmas, in early 1964.

  The final touch was provided by the world-toppling theories of Gnosticism, a body of religious thought that has persisted through the centuries despite vehement persecution by the Catholic Church. Phil and Anne were taking confirmation classes at this time, and Phil grew fascinated with the doctrines of the Episcopal Mass and, most especially, of the transubstantiation of the Eucharist. This fascination led him to read, quite independently, Jung's essay on "Transformation Symbolism in the Mass." In it, Jung speculates that underlying the Christian view of Christ dying for our sins lies a Gnostic sense of the punishment fitting the crime-a divine being rightly punished for creating a flawed world. Jung concludes: "For reasons that can be readily understood, a satisfactory answer is not to be expected from orthodox Christianity. [... ] And from certain Gnostic systems it is clear that the auctor rerum [world creator] was a lower archon who falsely imagined that he had created a perfect world, whereas in fact it was woefully imperfect."

  For Phil, the Gnostic view that our world is an illusory reality created by an evil, lesser deity was utterly compelling. It could account for the suffering of humankind, as well as for startling phenomena such as a vision of "absolute evil" (the Gnostic god's true visage!) in the sky. Not that Phil would have labeled himself with conviction as a Gnostic. But as a fiction writer, Phil naturally gravitated to theories that spurred his imagination and provided a useful framework for his experiences-and Gnosticism fit the bill most excellently.

  Phil, Anne, and the kids were all duly baptized together in January 1964. But Anne recalls: "As we drove home Phil told me cheerfully, 'At the moment of my baptism I saw, slinking out of the baptistry, his tail between his legs, a small red devil, the classic type, with horns and a spiked tail.' "

  Palmer Eldritch, which Phil mailed off to the Meredith Agency in March 1964, came in the middle of an amphetamine-fueled writing streak that was torrid even by Phil's standards. In the twelve months that preceded Palmer Eldritch, Phil had written six SF novels: Dr. Bloodmoney, The Game-Players of Titan, The Simulacra, Now Wait for Last Year, Clans of the Alphane Moon, The Crack in Space. In the five months that followed it, he wrote three more: The Zap Gun, The Penultimate Truth, and the novelette-length The Unteleported Man. (See Chronological Survey.)

  Sure, he felt under the gun to provide for the family and wrote at the warp speed required of writers who sought a living from SF back then. But Phil was also at the height of his powers. Never again would he produce at this white-hot pace, even though the pitifully low advances for his novels-and the amphetamines-continued through the early seventies. Hell, the low advances never really changed.

  But with Palmer Eldritch the dam burst. Phil was through with playing to the mainstream. High Castle had won the Hugo. There were SF readers who gave a damn. And they let you have fun so long as you astonished them. Nothing easier than that.

  Phil's plots didn't require much in the way of fancy space-exploration gear. For the most part he plops his characters on the nearby Martian colonies or a post-nuclear holocaust Earth. His future technology consists largely of flying "flapples" and other talking homeostatic devices that try futilely to straighten out their hapless human owners' lives. When Phil really wants to shake things up, he introduces psi talents such as telepaths ("teeps") and precognitives ("precogs"), or aliens of sinister and saintly persuasion, or brand-new drugs that, regardless of what they promise, always make things ever so much weirder and worse. The characters confronting all this tend to be-as who wouldn't?-frantic, confused, fierce, broken, and sometimes even full of faith in human goodness. Voild! The Phildickian world.

  Palmer Eldritch is Phil's first SF novel to take the genre, shake it by the throat, and make it work his way. John Lennon read it, adm
ired it, and expressed interest in making a film of it. It was the book that, Phil said more than once, had the best chance of enduring out of all of his work. Valis (1981) is its superior in metaphysical and psychological brilliance; Ubik (1969) outdoes it in sheer pataphysical slapstick; A Scanner Darkly (1977) explores more convincingly hell's domains. But if you want to read a breathtaking page-turner about Earth being secretly invaded by alien forces beyond our comprehension while Barney Mayerson passes through numberless alternate realities trying to win back his exwife in one of them, just one, and desperate Martian colonists yearn for the bright, shiny world of Perky Pat, and Leo Bulero turns to the highly suspect Dr. Smile to help him escape the giant rat, and Palmer Eldritch proves to be everyone, at least for a while, and have it all add up-while you're not paying attention-into a moving parable on the nature of reality and the struggle for our eternal souls, then you'll have to read Palmer Eldritch.

  The novel takes place in the early twenty-first century. Earth is parched-the temperature in New York in May is 180 degrees Fahrenheit. Precog Barney Mayerson wakes up in a strange bed with a woman he doesn't recognize and immediately switches on his suitcase psychiatrist-Dr. Smile-that Barney hopes will help drive him crazy, thereby precluding his being drafted by the world government to live in the Martian colonies, where things are even worse. Dr. Smile explains to Barney that the woman is Rondinella Fugate, Barney's new assistant at Perky Pat Layouts, and that she wants his job.

  Perky Pat Layouts (PPL) is officially in the business of producing ideal miniaturized ("minned") "layouts"-penthouse apartments, sleek convertibles, glorious resorts-to which Martian colonist users of the illegal drug "Can-D" are "translated," during their all-too-brief intoxication, into the perfect bodies of Walt (for the guys) and Perky Pat (for the gals). When three couples sit together in a "hovel"-Phil named their bleak living quarters after his own writing "Hovel"-all three guys can be in Walt at once, and all three gals in Perky Pat. It's a mystery as unyielding as that of the triune God who is One. Here's a day at the beach Can-D layout style: