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

  But by December 19, Phil was begging her to move in with him. Nancy wanted to pursue painting and poetry; living with Phil would provide her the peace and quiet and economic support to do that, as well as the companionship of "Jack [Newkom] and 1, plus about one dozen fellas and their girls [... ] who are always in the back house." And then Phil had the guts to lay it right on the line:

  But mainly, as I said, I want you to move in here for my sake, because otherwise I will go clean out of my balmy wits, take more and more pills, get less and less sleep, eat worse, sleep not at all, be all hung up-and do no real writing. Since I left my wife I have done nothing of importance; I want to get going. and I need you as a sort of incentive and muse . . . someone to write for, because of . . . see? I want you to read my stuff as I write it and tell me if it's anv good; if you like it, then it's good, if not, then not; I need someone Out There to whistle back into the dark chamber. If you don't move in, I'm afraid I'll have to search for something else to keep me going. But what or wheregod only knows . . . it seems unlikely that it even exists. But one must try.

  Phil, with three marriages behind him, knew he was facing a long shot. In a Christmas Day letter to Carol Carr he confessed: "Someday she (Nancy] will break me. I love her too much."

  But braving the perils of love sure beats turning into a "windowless monad." By March 1965, Nancy had moved into the back cottage of East Gakville. In July 1966, they made it official.

  Smack dab in the middle of the sixties.

  A New Start, A Quiet Life, Then Everything Falls Apart Again-And

  Phil Can't Find The Handy Spray Can Of Ubik That Could Make It All Cohere

  (1965-1970)

  Philip K. Dick (...J lives now in San Rafael and is interested in hallucinogens and snuff. [...I Married, has two daughters and young, pretty, nervous wife Nancy who is afraid of the telephone. I...I Spends most of his time listening to first Scarlatti and then the Jefferson Airplane, then "Gotterdammerung," in an attempt to fit them all together. Has many phobias and seldom goes anywhere, but loves to have people come over to his small, nice place on the water. Owes creditors a fortune, which he does not have. Warning: don't lend him any money. In addition he will steal your pills.

  Pint., "Biographical Material" typed up in early 1968, presumably in response to a publisher's request

  What matters to me is the writing, the act of manufacturing the novel, because while I am doing it, at that particular moment, I am in the world I'm writing about. It is real to me, completely and utterly. Then, when I'm finished, and have to stop, withdraw from that world forever-that destroys me. [...]

  I promise myself I will never write another novel. I will never again imagine people from whom I will eventually be cut off. I tell myself this . . . and, secretly and cautiously, I begin another book.

  PHIL., "Notes Made Late at Night by a Weary SF Writer" (1968)

  Taken as directed, Ubik provides uninterrupted sleep without morning-after grogginess. You awaken fresh, ready to tackle all those annoying problems facing you. Do not exceed recommended dosage.

  Ubik commercial in Ubik (1969)

  THE sixties was a decade that made a lot of big promises to those who lived through it with an open heart. Peace and love were everyone's birthright. Drugs could expand consciousness without the fuss and muss of spiritual discipline. Politics was a domain of evil only because those in power had been raised to act out of greed and fear. If you taught your children well, a future generation would arise that would rule benignly. It was only a matter of time.

  It is easy, in retrospect, to deride the nave ideals of the sixties. More painful by far it is to contemplate what we have since become.

  One of William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell" goes: "The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom." For some, sixties excess did just that. For others, as Blake foresaw in his irony, it led straight to Hell.

  For a very slim few, it led to both-to Hell and back.

  Phil was of this number. And confusing times these were.

  For sometimes Hell seemed like Heaven.

  And sometimes it seemed like he'd never get back.

  Phil and Nancy, a loving new couple, each took joy in caring for the other. After all, they had both come through hard times in childhood.

  Nancy's father was an alcoholic who could be very charming or very abusive. Her mother ended the marriage and took custody of the three children, including older brother Michael and older sister Ann. Nancy was her mother's special favorite-the youngest whom she loved to spoil. Briefly, through a second marriage, there was a stepfather on the scenealso an alcoholic and abusive. Then, in 1955, when Nancy was twelve, her mother developed a brain tumor. Tragically, she remained in a coma until her death in 1961.

  These events dictated that Nancy's father resume custody. Fortunately, he had in the interim married Maren Hackett, who possessed great warmth and intelligence and took the children under her wing. But the marriage ended in divorce. Nancy, a good student but shy and withdrawn, was sent to a boarding school in San Francisco. She then attended San Jose State College. In her junior year she went abroad to study at the Sorbonne, where her classroom ordeals and those experienced by Phil at U Cal Berkeley seem to converge. Nancy recalls that, during that year, she experimented (as did most students in the sixties) with marijuana and other drugs:

  It was enough to make me more and more out of it. I quit school . . . I couldn't sit in a class. All of a sudden, you feel like you'll die or go mad or something, like a gripping scare for no reason at all. You just feel like you have to get out of there. The classes were so big, I didn't feel I existed-like I was melting. I remember taking a picture of myself to make sure I was there.

  Nancy was briefly hospitalized before returning to the States and moving in with Maren in her San Rafael home. (It should be emphasized that Nancy is today a successful career woman and loving mother. She no longer suffers from the difficulties that beset her before and during her time with Phil.)

  When Nancy first met Phil, in early 1964, her impression was "that he was just a really sad person. His head was hanging down like he was very depressed. But he looked distinguished with his long grey beard. I thought, he looks like a writer." It was at Maren's, late that year, that her acquaintance with Phil was renewed. And it was a far livelier Phil who pursued the courtship. Around Christmastime, Phil and Jack Newkom had Maren, Nancy, and Ann over for dinner. Nancy recalls:

  This time Phil was completely hyper-I think he had been taking a lot of amphetamines. The thing that struck me so much about him was he knew so much about psychology. I was so alienated from everything. It seemed like he understood-he had all these phobias too. We both had a lot in common with that so we got to be friends. I started staying there.

  In a Christmas 1964 letter to Carol Carr, Phil rhapsodized:

  She has an incredibly lovely body. I think she must be Celtic, a sort of miracle, something from the days of the lithe, tall hunters reborn into our world-she's five eight, and she stands with her firm, smooth legs always slightly bent, as if she's going to spring into the chase or fierce flight, out somewhere, out where it's wild and unknown; she will go anywhere; she has no fear of anything, even death, even absolute isolation and pain; she is sublime.

  There was a glee to their early months together. It wasn't only the two of them coming together, but also a brand-new family of sorts that included Nancy's sister Ann, brother Mike, and stepmother Maren. By February 1965 Phil's account to Carol of the latest doings was positively giddy:

  Tomorrow night Nancy's sister Ann is coming over to stay. Wowie! It's true! (Fun and games year here in East Gakville.) One night Nancy and her sister [...] wrapped me up in pink toilet paper and squirted me with Rise [shaving cream]. Then Nancy climbed the tree out front and got stuck. Then she [...] fell in a mud puddle. Ann and I had a pillow fight and I won [...] Everyone remembers things strange. But funishly.

  In March 1965 Nancy moved into the cottage which Phil had decorated for her, ev
en supplying paints (Nancy was attending Oakland Art College) and bookcases that he built himself. That spring, during a visit to Anne and the girls, he described himself proudly to his ex-wife as "Nancy's consort," and it seemed to Anne that the Phil she knew had "dissolved into a feckless 19 year old."

  The writing began to revive. Phil was working on the expansion into full novel length of The Unteleported Man, and the material he added was markedly influenced by his painful LSD trips. (For the story of the ensuing flap and the 1967 publication of a truncated version without the "trip" material, see Chronological Survey.) But Phil didn't need acid to write like Phil. As Nancy observes:

  He'd have experiences without LSD that were just as strange. He was always afraid of the Day of Judgment. I didn't believe in it. But he would be so terrified and talk about how terrible it was going to be-there was nothing I could do to calm him.

  When Judgment Day was not at hand, Phil and Nancy were enjoying something like domestic bliss. Ask Nancy if Phil was religious and she replies: "No, only humorous. He was only religious when he was scared." He called her "Snug" and she called him "Fuzzy." They doted on each other. Says Nancy: "We talked about psychology, how we saw things, what we wanted to do. We did a lot of joking and being silly. It wasn't as much of a romantic relationship . . . it was almost, I can't say like a father, but he was family or a strong hope for me ... I depended a lot on him, and he depended on me too, in a different way."

  They seldom went out. Phil's agoraphobia had begun to return in full force. After months of running with the Bay Area SF crowd, Phil was back in a steady relationship-mission accomplished-and well content to stay at home. Having flipped over the VW the previous summer, he tended to avoid driving. Eating in public was an ordeal. He declined, at the last minute, to take Nancy out for her birthday, sending sister Ann in his place. Even when company was to come to their house, Phil would often grow fearful and cancel out. The one social situation he most enjoyed was a perfect laboratory for Phil the writer: having over a few close friends for free talk on ideas, with lots of outright silliness thrown in.

  Anxiety did not prevent Phil from frequent trips to record stores. Though money was short again after his brief post-Hugo sales boom, Phil did not stint on classical albums. Back home he played them loud, listening raptly while seated in his armchair with assorted cans of Dean Swift snuff in easy reach (snuff, which Phil had taken up while with Anne, had now become a dominant passion) and his two cats, Horace Gold and John Campbell, on his lap. In such a posture, undisturbed by Nancy, Phil sat silently conceiving the novels to come, seldom reading or taking notes.

  He continued to consult the I Ching on a near daily basis-more frequently if he perceived a crisis at hand, which was fairly often. Miriam Lloyd, with whom Phil commenced an enduring friendship during this period, observes, "Phil was a crisis junkie anyway-he loved a crisis." The I Ching was a valued touchstone at such times, though Phil no longer consulted it for plot construction. It was during 1965 that Phil wrote the essay "Schizophrenia & The Book Of Changes," in which he argues that the Oracle can't predict the future-fortunately, since total knowledge would immobilize us (as a schizophrenic, whose idios kosmos is overwhelmed by the koinos kosmos, is immobilized). But it can reveal the gestalt from which the future will emerge. Part of the personal gestalt hinted at in the essay is the qualms Phil felt in living unmarried with Nancy:

  If you're totally schizophrenic now, by all means use the I CHING for everything, including telling you when to take a bath and when to open a can of cat-tuna for your cat Rover. If you're partially schizophrenic (no names, please), then use it for some situations-but sparingly; don't rely on it inordinately: save it for Big Questions, such as, "Should I marry her or merely keep on living with her in sin?" etc.

  Late in 1965 Phil and Nancy moved across the Bay to San Rafael. They rented a tiny, charming house at 57 Meadow Drive, alongside a canal. In a November 1965 letter, Phil wrote of Nancy's new post office job, which, at $2.57 an hour, paid more than he was making. He also told of talking down a friend during an acid trip: "[H]e suspected that I was trying to `prevent him from breaking free' or some such thing. I guess I am a party pooper at that." Phil dropped 75 mg, hoping for a trip with "more of a sense of reality." He succeeded: "I saw all manner of joyous coloration, especially pinks and reds, very luminous and exciting, and I had several great insights into myself (e.g. that I had had two attacks of schizophrenia, one when I was six, the other when I was eighteen, and that my basic fear was a return of this)." But Phil soon gave up LSD; memories of frozen hells prevailed.

  In the midst of Phil's social seclusion, one new friend of great importance emerged: James A. Pike, the Episcopal Bishop of California. In 1964 Maren Hackett had asked Phil to compose a dazzling letter to persuade Pike to address her American Civil Liberties Union group. The letter succeeded, and as an unexpected aftereffect, Pike (a married man) and Maren became lovers, with a secret apartment in San Francisco's Tenderloin district; for public purposes, Maren was his secretary. As Phil and Pike met at Hackett family gatherings, they drew ever closer-each admiring the other's capacity for startling theories on the true nature of Christianity.

  Both Phil and Pike were rapid-fire talkers who relished the scope and beauty of theological speculation. One subject that came up frequently was Pike's efforts, in 1966 and after, to contact his son Jim, who had committed suicide in February 1966, through seances and other psychic means. In Pike's "Foreword" to The Other Side (1968) (an account of these efforts-successful ones, Pike believed), he thanked Phil and Nancy for their assistance. Phil's involvement included careful transcription notes of a October 1966 seance held for the purpose of contacting Jim. Present were Phil, Nancy, Maren, and a medium, George Daisley, whose powers Pike respected. Phil was also impressed by Daisley's insights, including: "N. [Nancy] and P. [Phil] are passing through a phase of not being blessed by material things; this will change . . . spirits are taking care of P. and N. materially and spiritually. Spirits will use rebellious aspects of P.'s character." Phil's notes include experiences outside of the seance. The most striking: "While playing one of the lp's from J.'s [Jim's] collection, P. had a distinct impression of J. standing directly across the room from the phonograph, his head slightly to one side, listening to the music. He was wearing a soft brown unpressed wool suit. The presence was very substantial, rather than ghostly. (Later M. [Maren] verified that he had had such a suit. )"

  Phil was skeptical of psychic phenomena throughout his life. However broadly he theorized, he disliked "occult" explanations that eschewed rigorous analysis. Phil's stance toward the afterlife during this period is reflected in his February 1966 letter (which went through two careful drafts) to Pike and Maren after Jim's suicide. The following passage is included in both drafts:

  I have a feeling that in the instant after death everything real will become apparent; all the cards will be turned face-up, the game will be over, and we will see clearly what we have suspected only . . . and unfounded suspicions will be erased. [... ] Now it is a mystery to me, a black glass. [... ] Behold, Paul says. I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep. Or something like that. I believe that; in fact it is virtually all I believe. But even that, unproved, will have to wait for its test, like everything else. But even if I'm wrong and Lucretius is right ["We shall not feel because we shall not be"], I'll be content; I'll have no choice.

  Turning the cards face up, seeing reality whole-Phil had no deeper yearning than this.

  In July 1966 Phil and Nancy were married. Pike attended the ceremony even though it violated Episcopal canon law, since the marriage of Phil and Anne had never been annulled. But after the civil ceremony was completed, Pike pronounced a blessing over the marriage. Years later, in the Exegesis, Phil would confess to some pain that, though he was faithfully married to Nancy while Pike carried on an affair with Maren, Pike "was giving the very communion I could not receive!"

  Pike had a profound influence upon Phil. The most obvious eviden
ce of this is the inspiration Pike and the events of his life-including his relationship with Maren and the suicide of his son-provided for Phil's 1982 novel The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. But the in fluence went still deeper. Phil acknowledges in his "Author's Foreword" to A Maze of Death (1968) the "wealth of theological material" he learned of through talks with Pike.

  What was this "theological material"? The precise details are unknown. But Pike, who was making repeated trips to Israel to investigate the historical Jesus, was undergoing a crisis of doctrinal adherence. In a July 1974 letter Phil recalled:

  Jim was tried for heresy shortly before his death [the charge was ultimately dismissed], and later resigned as bishop. Whether it reached the newspaper pages or not, the basic issue, the basic fear about him, was not merely that he had denied the Trinity but that he had picked up Zoroastrian doctrines, probably while going over the Dead Sea Scrolls discoveries.

  "If I were not a Christian," I heard him preach in December of 1964 in Grace Cathedral, "I would be a Jew. And if I were not a Jew I would be a Zoroastrian." And then he delivered to the congregation what I know to be a Zoroastrian exhortation: "Come into the Light." (He extended his arms and open hands to them all.) "Come into the Light." And so forth. This is the doctrine of Ormazd (Mazda), the Persian God of Light, identified with the Sun.

  Speculations like these spurred Phil, in the Exegesis, to consider the possibility that the events of 2-3-74 may have included a cross-bonding of the spirit of Pike (who died in 1969) and his own.

  Phil was now emerging from the writer's slump that had plagued him ever since he had left Anne in 1964. If there is a dominant mood to his novels of the late sixties, it is that of a dark night of the soul. Not that any of the novels lacked humor-Phil was a black humorist par excellence, and besides, he couldn't help but laugh now and then at the loopy plots SF allowed him. Where the darkness lies is in Phil's despair at ever knowing what it all meant. The exhilaration of the "What is Real?" quest had begun to pall. In novel after novel he had posed ultimate questions on God and Truth. Where the hell were the ultimate answers? Hadn't he worked at them long enough? As he later wrote in the Exegesis, recalling this time: "I had nothing to say, nothing to offer because I knew nothing. Oh, & how I sensed this lack of knowledge!"