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

  While friends and Wolfson recall Phil as a bright student, Phil would often portray himself, in retrospect, as a tormented rebel who couldn't hack even basic coursework. In a 1974 letter to daughter Laura-written in response to her complaints about school-he tried to cheer her up by painting a portrait of himself as the ultimate fuck-up: "It was super hard for me in high school. I got an F minus on a geometry test. I flunked Latin and P.E. I hated every minute of it. I learned nothing. Finally I fell behind in my grade and into a Z type group of the previous grade, including English." In truth, Phil never flunked a class. In gym he got mostly B's; in academic subjects it was all A's and B's. He even joined the literary magazine and the chess club. What made high school "super hard" was the vertigo. From May to September 1944 Phil was beset by recurrent attacks and was forced to drop several classes, setting back his progress toward graduation.

  That same summer, George Kohler contracted polio. Phil had recovered sufficiently from his attacks to pay his friend frequent visits. Kohler recalls his kindness and also the worry that crossed Phil's mind: "I wonder if I have a mild case of polio." He did not, but Phil's bouts with asthma, tachycardia, and now vertigo had instilled what would remain a lifelong consciousness-and dread-of ill health.

  But Phil could always offset his dreads with exuberant passions. Gerald Ackerman and Dick Daniels shared his consuming interest in classical music. Phil later wrote: "I began to study and grasp huge areas on the map of music; by fourteen I could recognize virtually any symphony or opera, identify virtually any classical tune hummed or whistled at me." Ackerman recalls marathon talks in front of Phil's Magnavox, with topics including not only music but also Phil's favorite SF stories in the latest pulps. Phil had not yet turned to the mainstream classics, a lack of taste that Ackerman deplored. But Phil was already suspicious of cultural pretensions. He would convince Daniels that a recording was by Tchaikovsky (whom Phil knew Daniels disliked), get him to fulminate about it then reveal the composer to be Berlioz. "Phil was constantly devising tricks and situations in which his friends could be embarrassed. That was simply part of his style and made life fun." But Phil was not without his own bristling pride. "He had an amour propre suitable for a Spanish hidalgo."

  Daniels, who accompanied Phil to the San Francisco Symphony the night of his terrible attack, did not witness any difficulties on Phil's part. But neither Daniels nor Ackerman could convince Phil to cross the Bay again. Daniels recalls: "He would back out because of a terrible fear of being stuck in the middle of a row, in the middle of an act, having to urinate and not being able to get out without embarrassing himself. He had the same fears when it came to riding the train to and from San Francisco. It was a point of contention: I didn't tend to take his phobic responses seriously, and that would offend him."

  Phil's bathroom fears were genuine-they persisted on into his early twenties. But Daniels found himself nonplused not only by Phil's phobias but also by his tendency to take offense easily: "He could have an astounding array of complaints against you. He would also characterize things that happened to him as the responsibility of others, mostly malign. Phil took personal responsibility for himself at an early age-but he had that way of reading the world, deriving motives out of thin air, believing that people intended to do him harm."

  If Phil had his fears, he also possessed considerable charms. These did not, however, include a stylish appearance. Phil had lost his baby fat but paid little attention to his clothing ("a walking trash can," Daniels concedes), and often, as a neophyte shaver, missed scraggly whiskers. But he did possess smooth, intelligent features and penetrating blue eyes. And he had a line of gab quick and funny enough to intrigue when he was in the mood. But Phil kept to a small circle of friends. Crushes came and went, but he didn't date much or find anything like a steady girl.

  Which left a lingering pain. In "Schizophrenia & The Book of Changes," Phil used the sexual rejections of high school days as a metaphor for the battle between the sheltered individual ("idios kosmos," or personal consciousness) and the external world ("koinos kosmos," or shared social consciousness). The sly koinos kosmos tempts the idios kosmos out of its lair by tactics that include sexual desire. "This bipolar internal war goes on endlessly; meanwhile the actual girl has no idea you're alive (and guess why: you're not)." Yes, it reads funny, but there's no doubt rejection was hard for a boy with a hungry heart who was just learning to shave.

  Phil later accused Dorothy of instilling in him, during high school and immediately after, fears over his manhood due to her persistent concern that he would turn gay. (Edgar's disparaging comments, in earlier years, as to Phil's poor athletic skills also contributed here.) But Dorothy's concerns arose in part from Gerald Ackerman's youthful discovery of his own homosexuality. Ackerman recalls his flirtatious high school days this way:

  I was, at the time, the only one among us who had the idea that he was gay. [... ] At times I even tested or used their naivete. I touched all of them rather continuously, [... ] and even, at times, took one of their hands in mine while walking. [... ] Once Phil told me that his mother had complained about the practice; [... ] He told me rather matter of factly about this, without scandal or admonition, as if it had no special import, even in the interpretation his mother might have given to the incident. Even so, [... ] it happened only this once-it didn't appeal to him, and he submitted only out of friendship, perhaps a little curious and a little flattered as well.

  As this incident shows, Phil was neither gay nor a homophobe. But calm as he may have seemed to Ackerman, Phil was intensely fearful of discovering gay tendencies in himself. The acceptance he bestowed on gay friends was taboo in his own case.

  Like his classmates, Phil expected to attend U Cal Berkeley someday, though he seemed less enamored of college and career than most. But the pressure of achieving good grades produced a classic case of final-exam anxiety that (in perfect Phildickian fashion) induced an epiphany he cherished all his life.

  It was a physics test. Phil was screwing up very badly. He couldn't remember the key principle behind displacement of water, on which eight of the ten exam questions were based. Time was nearly up, and Phil started to pray. Just as all seemed lost, a voice within explained the principle in simple terms-and Phil got an A. In a 1980 Exegesis entry, Phil pointed to this incident as a starting point of his spiritual life:

  This shows the hauntingly eerie paradoxical (almost seemingly whimsical or playful) nature of enlightenment: it comes to you only when you cease to pursue it. When you totally & finally give up. [.] Yes, emerging from this maze of paradox & mirrored opposites, of seeming, of infinite change, here, finally, is the answer I sought, the goal I sought. & it is where I started from back in high school in my physics final when I prayed to God, the Christian God-who was always there, leading me to him.

  Phil did not identify this voice (which spoke to him far more frequently in the seventies) exclusively with the "Christian God." In the Exegesis he also termed it the "Al Voice" (for Artificial Intelligence), "Diana," "the Sibyl," "Sophia" (Gnostic goddess of wisdom), the "Shekhinah" (divine feminine principle of the Jewish kabbalah), and many names more.

  If Phil was not, in high school, the heroic rebel figure he later invented, he certainly did go through something like hell and come out of it a writer. During his senior year, Phil experienced intense attacks of agoraphobia, claustrophobia, and vertigo. Earlier difficulties with eating in public returned. On one occasion, he developed extreme panic while walking down the aisle of a classroom-the floor seemed to be tilting away from him. These attacks forced Phil, in February 1947, to withdraw from Berkeley High; he graduated in June by working at home with a tutor.

  Throughout the 1946-47 school year, Phil received weekly psychotherapy at the Langley Porter Clinic in San Francisco. To acquaintances, he explained these frequents trips as his participation in a special study of high-IQ students. Phil was more frank with friends like George Kohler, who recalls terrible bouts of dizziness that forced Phil t
o lie in bed, unable even to raise his head. Phil described it at the time as "vertigo." Kohler (now an M.D.) conjectures that the dizziness was caused by labyrinthitis, an inflammation of the inner ear. Kohler further stresses that "at no time was he mentally confused."

  For two years, Phil recalled, he kept up weekly sessions with a Jungian analyst who "overworked" Phil's "intuitive processes." Phil's attitude toward therapy included a healthy dose of anger. The phobias had temporarily disabled him, but they hadn't diminished his intellect. Phil didn't like being told he was crazy. In this 1977 interview, genuine defiance cuts through the add-on story polish:

  I remember I was in my teens and I saw a psychiatrist-I was having trouble in school-and I told him that I had begun to wonder if our value system-what was right and what was wrong-were absolutely true or whether they were not merely culturally relativistic. And he said, "That's a symptom of your neurosis, that you doubt the values of right and wrong." So I got ahold of a copy of the British scientific journal "Nature," which is the most reputable scientific journal in the world. And there was an article in which it said virtually all our values are derived essentially from the Bible and cannot be empirically verified, therefore must fall into the category of the untestable and the unprovable. I showed this to him, and he got very angry and said, "I consider this nothing but horseshit. Horseshit, I say!" Here I was, a teenager in the '40's, and here he was, a psychiatrist; now I look back and I see this man was cemented into a simplistic mode. I mean his brain was dead as far as I could determine.

  A 1970 letter provides this account of a 1946 Rorschach test: "the tester in her report said that the strongest drive in me was to refind my twin sister who died about a month after she and I were born [... ]" This drive may have contributed to the psychic state that allowed for Phil's awareness of a voice during his exam-yet another of his names for the voice, in the Exegesis, was "Jane."

  According to Phil, his Jungian therapist pronounced him "agoraphobic." Another diagnosis that Phil himself often employed with respect to that time was "schizophrenia." He confided to third wife, Anne Dick, that he had been so diagnosed in high school-whether this diagnosis was made by his Jungian therapist or another source is unknown. In any event, his use of the term does not necessarily render it accurate; as Anne Dick points out, "Phil was hypochondriacal about his mental condition."

  The key factor in Phil's ability to weather these storms was his employment-which had begun at age fifteen, while he was still in high school-as a clerk at University Radio and later at Art Music, two Berkeley shops owned by one Herb Hollis, who became the father figure Phil needed.

  It was within the confines of his job as salesclerk for Hollis-the only job, aside from SF writer, that Phil ever held-that he fought his successful rearguard action against the phobias that beset him in academia. Not that selling radios, TVs, and records to the public was without its anxieties, but Phil blossomed under Hollis's tutelage and the daily music debates, soulful revelations, and silly banter with his fellow employees.

  The values Hollis and his strange crew embodied-craftsmanship, loyalty, independence of spirit, the little guy over the soulless corporate cartel-formed the social credo Phil held to through all the otherwise shifting realities in his fiction. The Berkeley of Phil's youth was a hotbed of political activity left and right. No one who knew Phil in the late forties regarded him as politically engaged. He was liberal, a Henry Wallace supporter in 1948, an admirer of C. Wright Mills's leftist sociological critiques of capitalism. But at the heart of Phil's thinking on the big issue of how the world ought to be run were lessons under the wing of driven, eccentric, droll, protective, autocratic dreamer and small-time finagler Herb Hollis.

  Hollis was originally from McCloud, Oklahoma. His personal identification with his retail operations was extreme. He was a perfectionist who worked six or seven days a week, a hands-on boss who installed fixtures when customer traffic was slow. Recalls Kleo Mini, "Phil always admired anybody who could control the outside world to any extent. That meant picking up a hammer as much as anything else." Customer service, product selection, and employee loyalty were matters of honor as well as mere economics. The epitome of the loyalty ethic was Eldon Nicholls, a dwarfed, hunchbacked accountant who had been with Hollis from the beginning and served as a kindly emotional buffer between the boss and his minions-the young salesclerks and repairmen who worked at the two stores.

  University Radio, located at Shattuck and Center, sold radios, appliances, records, and, beginning in the late forties, a new fad called television. There was a basement repair shop. Art Music was located much closer to the campus scene at Charming and Telegraph, just four blocks from Sather Gate, where soapbox oratory was commonplace-and where, in the mid-sixties, the Free Speech movement led by Mario Savio would win national attention. In the late forties and early fifties, Art Music became a Berkeley landmark, offering classical music, jazz, and (Hollis's own favorite genres) folk music and novelty groups.

  As a young man Hollis had hankered, in fantasy, for the life of a writer, and he always liked to surround himself with creative types; his employees were often budding artists from the Berkeley scene. He and his wife, Pat, never had children, and perhaps for this reason Hollis was susceptible to strays-faintly distracted, odd-seeming Berkeley idealistswho wandered into his orbit. One such was Homer Thespian, who went barefoot through the streets and was a crack repairman when he wasn't engaging his boss in surly philosophical disputes or disappearing for days at a time. Hollis kept him on the payroll without complaint.

  Phil, budding artist and stray, was a favorite of Hollis's from the beginning. Phil's first part-time job was breaking apart vacuum tubes and adapters to scavenge the parts (scarce during wartime) for reassembly. Menial as it was, the job may have been-at first something of a favor to a boy in need of a break. Phil would later say that working for Hollis was his first "positive validation." For a time, Phil had an innocent crush on Pat Hollis. For one of Phil's birthdays, Hollis's gift was a choice of any recording in the catalogue; Phil picked Bach's St. Matthew's Passion, featuring his then-favorite vocalist, Gerhard Husch.

  In a letter on his twenty-first birthday ("I am writing this on my own time," he states in the first line) Phil recounted how he had joined on in 1944. The letter was a paean (in a painfully self-conscious man-to-man tone) to Hollis's guidance:

  The first words I ever was addressed by you, were, "If you like both albums so much it really doesn't matter which you buy; you'll get them both, sooner or later." You were right, I did, within a week. I thought: what a smart fellow. I was fifteen. Six mo. later I went to work for you at AMC [Art Music] [...]

  [... ] You aided and abetted my mental growth, and also frightened me backwards occasionally, because I take everything you say seriously, then and now. [. . . ]

  At 15, 1 did everything wrong, at 21 you are at AMC and can't see what I'm doing. [.]

  I once made a series of pictures of you, which you seemed to like. They are still hanging up at UR&E [University Radio], and when I noticed them I am inclined to think that if I drew them again they would be exactly the same at 21 as I drew them at 16. Maybe you know what I mean. [.. ]

  Love,

  pkd

  As the letter indicates, Phil found it difficult, at first, to cope with the job. But the anxieties and vertigo attacks arose in connection with Berkeley High-not the Hollis stores. Life with salesclerks and repairmen could be fun, especially when you got the news (in 1945) that at long last the war was over:

  [W]e all piled into the store truck, grabbed a carton of professional-size firecrackers, picked up some GIs along the route, and turned on Berkeley by blowing it up. Later, everybody went across to San Francisco and we really tore it down for like ten days, roving about in armed bands menacing everything which walked. It was fun. Later in the year I was promoted from sweeping floors to emptying the ashtrays. All in all it was a good year.

  Dick Daniels (who also worked for Hollis for a time) recalls
the banter between Phil and his boss:

  Phil was never really loose around Hollis, but was instead in something like the position of the fool who jests in the king's court-but only within understood parameters. Phil played the fool and Hollis responded. The affection that Hollis had for him was Phil's repayment-that is, that Hollis let him get away with it. Hollis was the first older person with whom Phil had that kind of relationship.

  Hollis sponsored and supplied records for a folk-novelty program on local FM station KSMO in San Mateo in the late forties. Phil wrote DJ patter and Hollis shop commercials for the programs. He claimed, in later years, to have hosted a classical music program on KSMO, but no one who knew Phil at the time can recall his having been on the radio. But he must have paid frequent visits to KSMO: The ambience of an FM station is captured in fine detail in his 1956 mainstream novel, The Broken Bubble of Thisbe Holt, and the genial manner of a small-time DJ is touchingly embodied in Walt Dangerfield, whose broadcasts from the Earth-orbiting satellite (in which he is trapped until he dies) are of great solace to the postnuclear war survivors in Dr. Bloodmoney (1964). A few pages of Phil's writing for KSMO survive. Already he had the ear for American sales shuck that would, in his SF, sound so strangely right coming from the mouths of aliens. Here Phil pitches those newfangled TVs: