As our conversation developed, he began to talk about Phil in what seemed to me to be a nonfriendly way, speculatively labeling Phil with various psychiatric diagnoses and then saying he never could figure out what was wrong with him. I didn’t want to hear this psychiatric slander. I had thought Dr. A liked Phil. But after all I had invited him over to listen to him and he was a guest in my house. He went on and on. I didn’t know how to respond or even if I should respond. I listened for a long time and then finally managed to blurt out, “But I loved him.” Dr. A looked very surprised and left shortly afterward.
PART II: 1964-82
More and more of the past came back to me as I wrote about my personal memories. Events I had never discussed with anyone were now down on paper, not still stuck painfully inside me. Now, I wanted to know what had happened to Phil after his life with me. Would I be able to find out? Where would I have to go to find the people who knew him? Would they talk to me? How would I feel, learning about things I had ignored while Phil was still alive? My oldest daughter, Hatte, warned me, “Mother, don’t get lost in the world of Philip K. Dick.” There were times when I felt like an intruder, times when I was shocked, dismayed, grieved—but once I started, my bulldog self wouldn’t quit.
Five
BACHELOR IN OAKLAND
… a pulsating black presence beating like a huge heart, enormous and loud, going thump, thump, rising and falling in and out, and angrily burning out everything in me it disapproves of. And that seemed to be most of me.
—Philip K. Dick, Counter-Clock World
IN 1963, PHIL began a correspondence with Grania Davidson, who had written him an admiring letter about The Man in the High Castle. In 1969, Grania lived in Mexico with her husband, Avram Davidson, who was at that time the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
As the correspondence developed, she wrote Phil:
The idea of your being in love with my margin notes puts me in such a good mood, that I’ve decided to write you an Enticing Letter…. If you would like to fall in love with me … I would be pleased;…. I like your writings…. If you do not wish to come down here, you can wait and fall in love with me up there. We could have clandestine meetings by the sea. We could hold hands together surreptitiously in basement Chinese restaurants…. I like you, I am frankly drawn to you through your letters…. I hope that perhaps I might be able to help you fill your void … and that you might help me fill mine (er, how’s that for symbolism?)…. I look forward to your letters, these days, with the excitement of a giddy schoolgirl. I close now with, not love … but with the hope that such a thing might be possible…. P.S. I asked the I Ching what might happen between us and the answer was: … Hexagram #45, “Gathering Together.”
I’m glad I didn’t know about this letter back then. I have to admit that it’s a masterpiece of flirtation.
When Phil wrote Grania that the relationship with me was finished, she began writing to him in a more explicit vein.
In June 1964, she wrote:
… should it happen that we develop a rapport between us, it can stew and simmer quietly until you are quite sure what is best for yourself and others…. I am in no hurry … that is why it is certainly wiser for me to live in Berkeley, rather than West Marin…. [I]n Berkeley I have friends other than yourself … and will not become bored or impatient … though eventually I’d like to live near the sea, somewhat isolated, but not at first…. I’ve been isolated for much too long down here and am much in need of a fling.
In mid-June of 1964, Grania came up to Berkeley to meet Phil. She stayed at the house of her friends science fiction writer Marion Zimmer Bradley and Walter Breen. Grania was intelligent, charming, verbal, and confident enough of her femininity to overcome a serious weight handicap.
Many more surprises were in store for me when I interviewed Grania Davis, who had been Grania Davidson in 1965. Grania invited me to her house in San Rafael and served me a glass of Greek wine. Now much thinner, she had written and published science fiction novels, worked in a travel agency, and traveled extensively. An accomplished woman of great charm and great determination, Grania had an unusual voice with a slightly quavering timbre that gave the impression of great sensibility and sympathy.
Phil was still living near his mother, but he asked Grania to find him a house to rent. She found one on Lyon Street in Oakland. It had a small cottage in the backyard where she and her little boy, who would be coming soon to join her, would live.
About this same time Phil drove to Inez Storer’s house in West Marin in the secondhand white VW he’d just bought. Inez had asked Phil to write a piece of publicity for a show of her paintings. He had asked her in return to get a prescription for him. Phil told Inez that he was going to kill himself. He said, “I can’t live with Anne and I can’t live without her.”
Ray and Kirsten Nelson, both good friends of Phil’s when he moved back to Oakland, were both friendly and helpful while I was collecting the material for this book. I met with each one of them several times and have corresponded occasionally with Ray since. I was surprised to learn about Kirstens romantic relationship with Phil.
Ray also recovered a dim memory of meeting Phil briefly much earlier when Phil was married to Kleo. The Nelsons kept a connection with Phil throughout the rest of his life and Kirsten remained Phil’s confidant. Ray visited Phil in his Santa Ana condominium a few months before his death.
Ray thought that Phil was driven to despair by not being able to make money with his writing, even though he had won recognition for it. Ray wrote, “The key to understanding Phil’s life is … the economics of a writer’s life in these United States…. [Phil finally] having concluded that he could not make a living as a writer … saw his life as being dominated by an evil God.”
While Grania and Phil were moving their possessions into the Lyon Street house, Phil went too fast on a curve, totaled the VW and seriously dislocated his shoulder. He was in a body cast, his right arm pinned to the front of his chest, and he was unable to write for most of the time that Grania lived with him. He told his new friend Ray Nelson that he had tried to commit suicide but was such a failure he even failed at this. Ray asked him anxiously if he would try again. Phil told him, “Suicide is for the living.” He told Ray that, since he had made a serious attempt to die, he was actually dead even though the attempt had failed. He said he was a “walking corpse.”
Ray Nelson and Phil became close friends and soon began collaborating on a novel. Later, when I visited Phil at his house in Oakland, Ray was friendly and warm to me and we immediately got along well.
Although Phil was telling everyone “monster” tales about me, Ray didn’t buy them. He wrote me years later, “I knew that Phil had attempted suicide because he was convinced that he would never be anything but a drag and a liability to you and your children.”
Phil phoned me and told about his injury. I hoped he would come home and let me take care of him, but he didn’t give any indication that he was going to do this, although he wanted tons of sympathy. He gave me his address on Lyon Street and asked me to come visit him; I went almost immediately. The neighborhood was rundown, weedy, and filled with litter. It seemed incredibly dreary to me. How could he stand it after beautiful Point Reyes? Along the way there, though, I was cheered by the new ephemeral art form, the mud flat sculptures extending for miles along eastern San Francisco Bay. They were made of driftwood and other debris and were quite wonderful. Each time I drove by some of them had fallen down and new ones had spontaneously been built in their places. Phil had furnished his house with his battered old Magnavox, a few pieces of Salvation Army furniture, and several sheepskin rugs that we had had made from our own sheep. To my dismay, he had acquired two cats, which made me think he was going to be living permanently at this location. They had already ruined the sheepskin rugs, which they evidently preferred to their cat box. I don’t remember what we talked about, the mud flat sculptures, probably. I had become fearful of saying any
thing to him, he was so incredibly touchy. I didn’t know about the little cottage behind his house or that Grania was living there.
In their life together, Grania found Phil caring and domestic. He bought her an old Chevrolet and a Philippine wooden salad bowl. She noted that he was disciplined and orderly about the physical setup of his house. He ate regular nutritious meals, kept his house tidy, did his laundry, and generally kept himself physically together, but she found him to be extremely volatile—”too many mood swings and craziness and carrying on.” Phil never stopped telling her stories about his terrible ex-wife. He said he’d worked hard and written eighteen novels to make the money to support the sprawling household in Point Reyes. Later she wondered if Phil invented these stories in order to justify leaving his wife and four children. Phil also told Grania that he had been attracted to Hatte and he “was going to have to watch it.” Phil asked Grania to marry him. Grania said, “Phil’s idea was if you had sex with someone, you got married. He was serially monogamous.”
Grania noted that Phil had a whole drawer full of medications and was taking Elavil and Stelazine prescribed by Dr. A and many other strong tranquilizers. At times he was so agitated he would walk the floor all night listening to opera on the record player at high volume.
Back in Point Reyes Station I was faced with a legal situation in which I had to answer Phil’s divorce action or he would automatically get the divorce on his terms, which meant he would get half the house. Where would I raise my children? I felt very anxious about this, but still I couldn’t bear to file for divorce, so my attorney, Anne Diamond, found a little-used legal alternative, and I filed “for reconciliation.” This action surprised and dismayed Phil.
When I contacted retired attorney Anne Diamond after Phil’s death, she invited me to have lunch with her. I met her in her beautiful home in Ross, which was filled with a collection of antique Asian art. Anne had always been quite fond of me and was helpful with my search, gave me new insights about the divorce, and instructed her office to supply me with all the relevant records. She told me that the Anne and Philip K. Dick divorce was the worst case she had ever handled and she now used it as a model to teach young divorce attorneys.
Phil’s papers and manuscripts were still in the Hovel. My attorney asked me for a financial paper that happened to be there, and it made perfect sense to my pragmatic nature to go to the Hovel, saw off the lock, get the paper, and put on another lock. I was rather proud of the technical aspects of this small achievement. Phil; his attorney, William Wolfson (the husband of Phil’s favorite high school teacher); my attorney; and my psychologist all became hysterical. “Why?” I thought. “It wasn’t a paper of any importance.” Because of this incident, Wolfson served me with a restraining order that said that I couldn’t visit Phil anymore. Phil changed his phone and got an unlisted phone number; we were out of touch—until he phoned again a few weeks later.
To further complicate an already difficult divorce, my attorney, Anne Diamond, had been the attorney for Margaret Wolfson, William Wolfson’s wife, during their recent divorce, and Phil’s psychiatrist, Dr. A, and my psychotherapist, Dr. J, had a falling out over the monetary kickbacks. The divorce became a battle of the sexes. Unfortunately, Dr. A and William Wolfson believed Phil’s tales instead of helping him. (Mrs. Diamond, the wife of famous forensic psychiatrist, Bernard Diamond, repeatedly moaned, “Too bad he isn’t getting any decent psychiatric care.”)
Over the phone Phil told me, “I asked Bill Wolfson twice to drop the divorce action, but he refused.” I wondered what that meant.
My old enemy and now friend William Wolfson met me for a no-host lunch at a Larkspur Landing restaurant. I had the red, paperback Levack PKD bibliography tucked under my arm, and as soon as we sat down a beautiful dark-haired woman rushed over to ask me where I had bought that book. She wanted a copy for her ex-husband, who loved The Man in the High Castle, had begun writing a script for it, and was trying to buy the movie rights. When I got back home, the ex-husband phoned me and later I met him for lunch. He was one of the inventors of Dolby. He let me read his great beginning of a movie script, a sequel to The Man in the High Castle.
Vince Lusby, Phil’s old friend and co-worker at University Radio, visited Phil at the Lyon Street house soon after Phil had moved in. Phil told Vince that the reason he was getting divorced was that I would buy every new car that came along and that he had to stop me before I lost the house. He told Vince that I had attacked him with a carving knife, that I had chased him around the yard with the white Jaguar (which we hadn’t owned for years), and that I had murdered my first husband. Vince was surprised at all this since he knew me. Then Phil told Vince seriously, “Anne has wired up my old Magnavox so that she can listen and spy on me here.”
When Vince told me this after Phil’s death I was so shocked I didn’t know what to say. We went on with the rest of the interview at his house in Richmond. At the end of my visit, Virginia Lusby gave me a bourbon and soda, and then I made the long drive back to Point Reyes Station. The next day I called Vince, still not quite believing what he’d told me. “Vince,” I asked, “when Phil told you his Magnavox was wired up so I could listen to him there in Oakland, was he kidding?”
Vince told me somberly, “No, he was serious.”
I asked Vince, “What did you say to Phil when he told you that?”
“I was shocked as hell. I didn’t say anything.”
I began to realize then that the situation back in 1964 was quite different than I had thought at the time—but then it’s also possible that Phil was playing a role.
That spring Phil wrote “What the Dead Men Say,” a story that I didn’t read until after his death. Johnny Barefoot, the protagonist, hears booming voices over the radio, sees a blurred face on the TV, and hears gibberish and a far-off, weird babble on the telephone. Dead Louis Sarapis, from somewhere out in space, controls all the media and is planning to take over the country through his niece, Kathy Egmont Sharp, a psychotic amphetamine addict who is in a mental hospital for part of the story. When Johnny draws the straw that destines him to kill Kathy, his heart is leaden because once he had loved her. Sharp was my stepfather’s name. Phil’s protagonists had ex-wives named Kathy in several of Phil’s post-Point Reyes novels. At first she is a horrible character, but as the books go on she becomes more positive.
Phil wrote the science fiction novel A Maze of Death about this time also, a unique novel that seems to tell about a psychotic episode from within.
I drove to the science fiction book store, the Big Cat, that Ray and Kirsten Nelson owned in Albany. It was located just off San Pablo Avenue. There, I met Kirsten, a slender blonde lady with a Norwegian accent. Still very attractive, she must have been a raving beauty in 1964. It was a cold day, cold even inside the bookstore, and Kirsten kept her powder-blue parka on. We sat down at a cluttered desk in an unlit utility room at the back of the store and I untangled the wires of my tape recorder. With a flourish, Kirsten handed me a photocopy of a love letter Phil had written to her. Surprised, I took it. I hadn’t realized that she was such an important person in Phil’s life.
Phil had written:
I love you, without as Grania phrases it, carnal intent but with love…. [B]elieve me; I love several people but that does not mean I want to go to bed with them; I love my sister Lynne and I also, and this sounds crazy, love Al Halevy and Jack Newcomb and several others, including Carol Carr, but of all of them it’s you I want to be with…. I just want to be where I can look at you and see that something in your eyes, that beauty and clarity (the trigram LI) and beyond that a thing about you I can’t name, because I’m not a poet; I only know how to write prose…. There is, in my life, all the sex (pardon the word, dear) that I can use; in fact too much; I want, I guess, life itself. I believe I can get it from a woman, THE woman. You are the woman…. I wish I could hold you for a moment…. I don’t want you to warm me; I want to breathe life into you, and Al, for all his faults, wants to, too.
We love you together; others do, too; we love you in silence, unable to speak; as in Mozart’s ‘Magic Flute’, “Zuruck. Zuruck. Hier muss man zuruck.” (“Back, back; here one must go back.”) But I won’t, not until you say go away and leave me alone; not until you say, as Ottavio Rinuccini said in 1608 for Monteverdi’s great five-line madrigal: “Lascia te mi morire.” (“Now let me die. I suffer beyond hope of solace. Ah, let me die.”)…. How can anyone as lovely as you feel bad? But maybe you don’t feel bad; maybe it’s only me, thinking about you, imagining you; I hope so; I want you not to feel bad…. If anything that lives is sacred to me it is you.
I told her, “My goodness, back in 1964, I didn’t know anything about you.” She was apologetic in her manner and explained that her relationship to Phil was “all drama.”
She had met Phil at a party at her house soon after his car accident. He was in a body cast with his arm in a sling. “I found him to be romantic, exciting, fascinating, as did several other ladies there. He had fantastic charisma. He proposed to every woman he met. The jokes he would crack were so funny. Phil loved to fall in love; he was in love with falling in love.”
The Search for Philip K. Dick Page 13