To compound the paradox and the complexity around Dorothy, Neil remembered Dorothy with a deep love that had no reservations. He told me, “My mother, Dorothy, was a wonderful person. There were never any problems between me and her. All my friends liked her, too. But Dorothy had a love-hate relationship with Phil. Dorothy always loved Phil but he sometimes hated her.” Dorothy maintained an excellent relationship with her second husband, Joe Hudner, for many years until his death.
Phil, as an adult, referring to Dorothy, called her “a rotten mother who didn’t like kids at all.” He thought that Dorothy was responsible for all his problems. Mothers of that generation were blamed for everything. But Dorothy was loyal to a fault to Phil. All during the Depression she worked hard, holding the same government job for years to support herself and Phil. Perhaps divorcing Edgar was a mistake, perhaps not. Despite our considerable social skills, Laura and I weren’t able to sustain a relationship with him.
In 1929, Dorothy, Edgar, and baby Phil took a trip back to Colorado to visit their families. Dorothy decided to stay for a while. Edgar had to go back to Chicago to work. Little Phil was already talking at eight months old. Dorothy also had him wearing finger restraints to prevent thumb sucking, a common practice at this time.
Dorothy, an observant mother, wrote a detailed notebook about her baby:
Phil weighed 16 lbs. 9 1/2 oz. today. He will be 8 months old in six days. It’s amazing how he can kick. He loves to lie on the big bed and kick while he watches the curtain blow. As soon as he sees it move he begins to talk—so sweetly—to it…. Yesterday morning Phil stood up, on his feet…. [H]is voice is bigger every day. He opens his mouth and roars, just for the entertainment of it. He doesn’t cry; he shouts. It’s like his earlier “talking” only much magnified…. He has a funny way of answering to his name. It reminds me [of] the way the kitty answers when I call him—a kind of little funny “Heh?” He has known his name since he was 3 weeks old…. His “eighth” birthday. Weighed 16-13 again…. His fourth tooth is through…. He spends a lot of time on his calfskin now and is learning ever so much about turning over and reaching…. I … take him on my lap at the piano while I labor over the Missouri Waltz. He watches and listens, ducking from one side to the other suddenly, and leaning forward to try to hit the keyboard with his own hands, and then all at once he leans back with his little hand against my breast and looks at me wonderingly with such a funny little grin—as if he wants to be sure it is a game for his amusement. As if he’s now suddenly suspicious that I might be, after all, doing it for my own amusement…. He doesn’t like it when he sees me sit or lie down and leave him to his own devices…. We took him to Greeley a few days ago, visiting, and he loved it. He had never got so much attention before and he thought it so lovely—laughed & talked to everyone. He liked to be right out with the gang.
It’s hard to believe that the loving mother who wrote this detailed account was also the person who created such emotional damage in Phil.
In August 1930, Edgar was promoted to director of the western division of the NRA (Roosevelt’s National Recovery Act), with headquarters in Reno. Dorothy and Phil moved to Berkeley and Edgar planned to commute from Berkeley to Reno.
In Berkeley, Phil grew to be a tiny, handsome child. His father remembered, “He loved life and sparkled with energy. He was not argumentative, but he was competitive. He had a temper, but it flashed and then cooled off.
“He loved to play hide-and-go-seek and had a navy in the nearby creek. He had the old men in the neighborhood competing with each other to make toys for him. Phil had a lot of pride. In the woods, one day, he fell over a root and hurt himself. He went behind a tree to cry so people couldn’t see him.”
Dorothy joined a Berkeley group that started one of the first preschools in the country, an experimental program sponsored by the University of California. Phil was a leader there. Edgar said, “He would even call the nursery school parents and talk to them on the phone like another adult. He amused the other children at nursery school by putting a slice of bread on his head at lunchtime.”
The Institute of Child Welfare, the university preschool, sent a report on August 12, 1931, to the Dicks at 931 Shattuck Avenue:
Phil is a friendly and happy youngster. He is always busy. He seems to know just what he wants to do and without waiting for outside suggestions proceeds to do it. He is a lover of peace and often steps aside rather than have an argument. This is natural, normal behaviour and should cause no concern. When Phil feels his rights have been encroached upon, he is capable of protecting them. There have been occasions when he has held onto a treasured toy, protesting loudly when another youngster challenged his right to it. Phil’s play is constructive and he shows fine powers of concentration. Sawing is one of his favorite occupations and he stays with it for long periods, shouting as each fragment is severed and drops to the ground. He talks remarkably well for his years, has intellectual curiosity and a keen interest in everything about him. He cooperates well with both children and adults and is a splendidly adjusted child.
When Phil and I were first married, I made an attempt to get together with Edgar. Phil had told me that he and his father had a falling out over politics in the mid-fifties and they hadn’t communicated since. Hoping to mend the rift between them, I urged Phil to invite Edgar and his wife, Gertrude, to visit us. Edgar accepted—but at the last minute he phoned and said he was having trouble with his teeth and couldn’t come. Phil said disgustedly, “That figures.”
When I drove down to Menlo Park to interview Edgar, I found him outside, gardening. He told me about a wild squirrel he had tamed and what all the local birds had been doing. We went inside but it was hard to talk because of his fourteen-year-old cocker spaniel bitch’s relentless barking. Gertrude said that Edgar wanted her to train the dog, but when she tried, Edgar would say under his breath to the dog, “Bark. Bark.” Then he would tell Gertrude, “Give the dog some beefsteak,” and she would get out a dog biscuit.
Edgar was built like Phil and stood like Phil. Gertrude showed me a photo of him in his prime when he was still playing football. He had been a big, athletic-looking man and very handsome. Now a cheerful octogenarian, he told me, “I live for my dog.” He spoke in a kind of rural patois that must have been useful to him in his line of work as executive secretary of the California Cattlemen’s Association. He had lobbied almost four hundred bills through the California legislature. He was especially proud of one that protected wild horses and burros. Gertrude said that Edgar had been a workaholic who came home only every ten days. That day, Laura came over to Edgar’s house from Stanford and we all went out to lunch. However, Edgar would never go out with us on subsequent visits; he had seen a program on television about people choking in restaurants and felt it wasn’t safe to eat and talk at the same time. Several months later, Laura and I took Isa to meet her grandfather. Edgar was quite taken with her and made it immediately clear that Isa, not Laura, was now his favorite. Later, when Isa didn’t come to visit him again, he called me up to say he wondered who was “keeping her away,” and implied that it was me.
Edgar wrote a pamphlet, a piece of Americana, about his family and about his experiences in the Fifth Marines in World War I. He was the principal, the only resource for information about Phil’s early years except for what Phil and Dorothy had told me many years ago.
Even after fifty years, Edgar expressed a bitter animosity toward Dorothy and blamed her for Phil’s problems. He himself, he said, wanted Phil to be free, “free as a bird,” but Dorothy wanted to put Phil “in a box.” Later, in the formal interview situation when he was being taped, he spoke about what a good mother Dorothy was.
As an adult, Phil remembered that his early relationship with his father was a good one. He had liked his dad before his dad “left.” He remembered Edgar’s stories about World War I. “My father was a hero in World War I,” he said. Edgar showed little Phil his gas mask from World War I. It scared Phil. The face that Phil sa
w in the sky in Point Reyes in 1963 resembled this mask.
Phil got Edgar to take him to a radio station that broadcast a cowboy program. Phil wore his little cowboy suit and went with great anticipation. When they got there, there were just records, no cowboys. Edgar said, “I had to lie a little.”
Edgar taught Phil to always tell the truth. “If I scolded Phil, he’d analyze it and come back and tell me. We’d talk it over. I’d admit it when I was wrong.
“When Phil was little, he was irritable. I would explain things to him. He needed a little lift. I was second oldest of fourteen, and I knew how to handle little children.”
Father and son visited a friend of Edgar’s who had a pet bull snake that slept in the basket on the porch. Edgar, who was afraid of rattlesnakes, had taught little Phil how to recognize them. Phil came in from playing outside and said to his father, “Jingle snake on porch.” Edgar’s friend laughed and said, no, it was her pet snake. But Edgar went out to see anyway and found that it was a thirteen-rattle rattler, the biggest ever killed in that area.
On another occasion, love of animals led Edgar and Phil to take matters into their own hands instead of calling the authorities. The people at a nearby ranch kept some rabbits in a cage in the sun with no food or water. Phil wanted to set these poor animals loose, so while the family was at church on Sunday, Edgar and Phil went to the ranch and let the animals out. But the animals returned and were put back in the cage. The next time, Edgar and Phil drove them twenty miles away and then let them out. “Phil was so pleased,” he told me.
When Phil had to have his tonsils out, Edgar explained the operation to him in advance. He took him to the hospital on the bus. Phil said, “I’ll see you later on today,” confidently. “Dorothy took great care of Phil,” Edgar said, “though she was too involved with Phil’s glasses and his teeth and various medicines.”
Did Dorothy and Edgar compete for the love of this charming and brilliant child? Did Phil, precocious in his ability to influence people, play them against each other? Edgar remembered one time when Phil wanted to go for a ride in Edgar’s car. They were in the car waiting for Dorothy to come when Phil rolled up the windows and said, “Let’s go, let’s go, Daddy. Let’s not wait for Momma.”
Dorothy was the disciplinarian. Later, when the two of them lived alone and Phil had a tantrum, Dorothy would shut him in his room. Then he would tear his room and all his possessions apart. Dorothy taught him to take the consequences of his actions. In later years, Phil spoke approvingly to me of this aspect of his childhood.
In 1933, the Institute of Child Welfare, the University of California preschool that Phil attended, reported: “Philip has made excellent progress since his previous test. His highest scores are memory, language, and manual coordination. His reactions are quickly displayed, and just as quickly reversed. His independent initiative and executive ability are shown in rapidly varying techniques which are frequently replaced with strongly contrasting dependence. It might be well to guard against the development of this degree of versatility at his age.”
Dorothy told Edgar she wanted a divorce. He said, still astonished fifty years later, “It came out of the clear blue sky. There was no discussion or anything.” After Dorothy told Edgar she wanted a divorce, he asked her, “What about the boy?” Dorothy told him that she had consulted a psychiatrist, who said that the divorce wouldn’t affect Phil.
When I was married to Phil, I had asked Dorothy about her divorce. She told me that Edgar was always suspicious of her whenever she went out, suspicious of “other men,” except that there weren’t any other men. She got tired of this. However, she said, she probably wouldn’t have divorced him if she had realized how poor she and Phil would be afterward. Shortly after the divorce, Phil came to visit Edgar at his office, but he was restless and had to be taken home. In later years, Phil told Lynne, his stepsister, that he held the divorce against his mother.
It seemed odd to me that Phil had told me so much about his past when we were first married, but never had mentioned his grandfather, who had lived in Dorothy’s Berkeley household for a while. Kleo told me, “Phil was afraid of his grandfather.” Phil frequently expressed a strong hatred of old men. He told me on several occasions that there was “bad blood” in his family. I didn’t know what to make of this odd statement. It seemed to me to be a very self-denigrating thing to say about your own family.
Years later, in a letter to Mark Hurst, his editor at Bantam Books, Phil wrote, “The other side of this DNA memory business, as you may already know, is that these DNA gene pool structures acquired from our ancestors determine our life script…. [M]y script, for instance, was ‘written’ most likely by my mother’s father, and it programs me on a subliminal level and causes me to live the particular life … which has been plotted out for me, against my will and knowledge.”
After Dorothy sent Edgar away, she and her mother, Meemaw, began living together in Berkeley. Meemaw would take care of Phil and do the housework and Dorothy would be the breadwinner. Then Meemaw’s husband and Dorothy’s father, Earl Kindred, the wanderer, showed up. Meemaw must have persuaded Dorothy to take him in as the former had always done in past years when he returned from his wanderings. Although as a teenager Dorothy had been furious when Meemaw let Earl came back home, this time, for unknown reasons, she let him stay. Did she think that Earl would be a father substitute for Phil and tell Phil this? (“The Father-Thing”.)
Earl wasn’t the only man who “wandered” in the early 1900s. Life could be bleak, and some people in rural areas suffered psychological isolation as well as economic hardship. The men who wandered in the early years of the twentieth century, prefiguring the hobos of the thirties, were often seeking a life as well as a living.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch was written on the eve of Phil’s departure from Point Reyes. Palmer Eldritch, a supernatural being coming from deep space back to Earth after a long absence, passes “something” to each person he comes into contact with—like a vampire. Then each one of them becomes a Palmer Eldritch (palmer is an old word for “wanderer”). The “something” continues to be passed from person to person, and, finally, there are many Palmer Eldritches.
In 1982, Phil commissioned Gregg Rickman to be his biographer. Phil died a month later. Gregg spent the next twelve years of his life researching the life of Philip K. Dick and wrote three books about him. He became troubled by some of Phil’s actions, especially political ones, that didn’t mesh with everything else he had found out about this man whom he admired so much. He did extensive research. He has detailed a circumstantial case about a childhood trauma when Phil was four years old in his book To the High Castle, Philip K. Dick: A Life 1928-1962 (Valentine Press, 1989).
Some Philip K. Dick scholars think that the loss of his twin sister at birth created Phil’s psychological problems. Dorothy “went on” about this, Phil told me, and it wasn’t good for him. There must have been some effect on Phil’s psyche, perhaps more from his mother’s talk than the actual event.
In 1935, when the Great Depression was in full blast, Dorothy moved with Phil to Washington, D.C. She had obtained a job as an editor in the Children’s Bureau. There she wrote a government pamphlet on raising children. She put Phil in a Quaker boarding school at Sulphur Springs, Maryland. Phil told me, “I had trouble swallowing, didn’t eat, and started to lose weight. This was due to grief and loneliness. My mother had to take me out of this school.”
Phil attended day school, and the school reports from this period are uneventful. At times, Dorothy had housekeepers; at other times Phil was a lonely latchkey child, watching out the window of their apartment for his mother to come home.
Earl Grant Kindred died in San Francisco in April 1937. Later this year, eight-year-old Phil and his mother returned to Berkeley, and Dorothy became personnel director of the U.S. Forestry Department, a job she held until she retired. Meemaw lived with them again and took care of Phil.
The Berkeley that Dorothy c
ame back to was like Athens during its Golden Age. Large, attractive homes on the hills overlooked the bay, across which the towers of San Francisco glittered in the clear air, Mount Tamalpais in the background. Light-colored stucco houses blended with frame and shingle houses on tree-lined streets that curved around the hills. In the pleasant climate, exotic trees, bushes, and flowers grew everywhere. Even the small bungalows down on the flat areas had their avocado and lemon trees.
Dorothy, always frugal, had managed to save a little money and wanted to buy property in Concord. Phil had a fit. He said he wouldn’t ever live way out there. Vince Lusby said, “Dorothy lost a million-dollar opportunity, the way Concord land values went up in the next few years.”
Berkeley was a special place. Professors and students from the great University of California dominated the cultural scene, creating an environment of fine art, music, and literature. Classical music stores stocked every record ever made. Bookstores, used and new, sat side by side on Telegraph Avenue, each with their own specialties. Avant-garde art galleries, movie houses, and coffee shops were scattered throughout the community.
At the political rallies being held at Sather Gate, intellectuals, students, and teachers from all nations and races mingled. The University of California at Berkeley was thought then to be the greatest university in the world. Every idea that made waves during the sixties and seventies was fermenting in Berkeley during the late thirties and early forties when Phil was growing up. There were many active members of the American Communist Party living in the community. The U.S. national presidential ballots of those years listed a Communist Party candidate for president as well as candidates for the Socialist and Socialist Labor parties.
Special programs were created for the children in the public schools and in the many parks. A club where the children could play chess, checkers, ping-pong, and pool was just down the street from Phil’s house. When he and his friends hiked up the hill to Tilden Park, they went past the Berkeley Rose Garden, past the Greek Theater, and past the world’s first cyclotron, where world-shaking breakthroughs in physics were occurring almost daily. Music was very important to Phil and to a number of his friends. One boy had a beautiful music room in his house, the closets and drawers bulging with sheet music by every conceivable composer. Another friend, down the street, was the son of a professor in the music department. Although Phil and his mother were poor, the culture he lived in was very rich.
The Search for Philip K. Dick Page 26