In the case of the SF genre, the basic rule was, is, and always has been: Come up with a startling idea and set it loose in astonishing ways in a future world. The pulps didn't pay well but just enough ... if you had consistently startling ideas and could churn the stuff out at breakneck speed.
Phil was the man for the job. No one in the history of the SF genre-in which amazement alone buys new shoes for writers' kids-has been able to "What If?" as widely, wildly, and convincingly as Philip K. Dick.
He loved to tell the story of how he discovered SF:
I was twelve [in 1940] when I read my first sf magazine . . . it was called STIRRING SCIENCE STORIES and ran, I think, four issues. The editor was Don Wollheim, who later on (1954) bought my first novel ... and many since. I came across the magazine quite by accident; I was actually looking for POPULAR SCIENCE. I was most amazed. Stories about science? At once I recognized the magic which I had found, in earlier times, in the Oz booksthis magic now coupled not with magic wands but with science.... In any case my view became magic equals science ... and science (of the future) equals magic.
Phil read James Joyce's Finnegans Wake several times in his early twenties. Throughout his life the range of his reading was virtually limitless, from technical papers on physics to Binswanger's daseinanalyse to Jung, Kant, William Burroughs, the Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Bhagavad Gita. Influences on his work? Phil would frequently cite-before getting around to any SF authors-Stendhal, Flaubert, and especially Maupassant, whose tales, along with those of James T. Farrell, taught him how to structure the stories he sold for his livelihood in the early fifties: over seventy in three years, before the novels took precedence.
What I mean to say is that Phil was smart as a whip and fully capable of appreciating the finer literary things of life. So what did he need with the Lower Realm?
It was the SF genre, with its hospitable tenet of astonishment above all, that set Phil the writer free.
From what? The art of biography consists in tackling impossible questions about your subject that you couldn't answer about yourself, and I'll do my best to do that by book's end. But for now, just imagine yourself as a young writer able to type at an amazing 120 words per minute-and you can barely keep up with yourself when you're hot. Now consider the possibilities of a genre in which any psychological, political, sexual, or evolutionary premise is allowable so long as readers keep laying down cold cash for the lure of unknown worlds.
Phil wanted badly into the mainstream. As the years went on he knew damn well he was writing brilliant books that no one else could about his two obsessions: "What is Real?" and its frightening corollary, "What is Human?" But he also knew that the mainstream rules didn't much allow for the kinds of possibilities that tended to come to his mind. Knowing those things could make him feel outcast, angry, and blessed all at once:
I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. Okay, so I should revise my standards; I'm out of step. I should yield to reality. I have never yielded to reality. That's what SF is all about. If you wish to yield to reality, go read Philip Roth; read the New York literary establishment mainstream bestselling writers. [... I This is why I love SF. I love to read it; I love to write it. The SF writer sees not just possibilities but wild possibilities. It's not just "What if-" It's "My God; what if-" In frenzy and hysteria. The Martians are always coming.
But only in the pulps ("trashy pulps," as they are usually called). In April 1911, Hugo Gernsback wrote and serialized a novella, Ralph 124C41 +: Novel of the Year 1966, in his own magazine, Modem Electrics. The futuristic adventure tinctured by wild "What If?" extrapolations went over surprisingly well in a magazine previously devoted exclusively to practical fact. But it took until April 1926 for Hugo Gernsback to seize the idea of founding the first all-SF pulp in the English language: Amazing Stories. And it was Gernsback who, starting with the term scientifiction, at last anointed SF with the name that stuck.
Amazing was an enormous success until the Depression hit and Gernsback found himself in receivership. He lost control of Amazingothers bought him out and carried it on-and Gernsback never again set the course for SF. He has, however, been duly immortalized through the Hugo Awards, the highest SF literary honor, awarded by fan vote at annual Worldcons.
Phil Dick won the Hugo in 1963 for The Man in the High Castle, a novel that was published by Putnam with a dust jacket that betrayed no SF content within. It posits a post-World War II world in which Japan and Germany are the victors and the continental United States is roughly divided between them; Japan governs the western half, which includes the nominally futuristic San Francisco in which the novel is set. Phil devised the plot by consulting the I Ching, and several of the novel's characters-Japanese and conquered, culturally cowed Americans alike-consult that divinatory text, marking its debut in American fiction.
Phil thought, after over a decade of writing effort that had produced eleven mainstream novels (none published at that point) and seven SF novels (all but one published in pulpy-looking paperback by bottom-ofthe-line Ace Books), that at last, with The Man in the High Castle, he had merged the best of the Lower and Higher Realms by telling a very serious, beautifully written story about the nature of fascism and the Tao and (as SF allowed) reality going quietly haywire. But the Higher Realm turned its head away-there was no mainstream recognition for High Castle-even as the Lower Realm bestowed its Hugo honors.
Categories ... Phil never fit well into any of them, nor could he fit what he thought might be Real into them. This is not to say that Phil was impractical or otherworldly. The novels and stories testify to his detailed, sympathetic understanding of everyday work and marital woes and the value of craft in the former, of love despite all in the latter. And Phil managed, mark you, to make a living for thirty years writing books he wanted to write. He was a consummate professional.
But you can't make an omelette without cracking eggs, and you can't write of Mr. Tagomi seeing through a glass darkly in The Man in the High Castle-or of Barney Mayerson pleading with Mr. Smile the suitcase psychiatrist in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, or of Joe Chip warding off retrograde time with a handy spray can in Ubik, or of Fred/Robert Arctor the brain-damaged undercover narc informing on himself in A Scanner Darkly, or of Horselover Fat in Valis explaining to character Phil Dick (both know that they are really one and the same person) just how he encountered a vast One Mind that might be God or something else (". . . Fat must have come up with more theories than there are stars in the universe. Every day he developed a new one, more cunning, more exciting and more fucked")-you can't write of any of these souls without first confronting the terror and shaky hilarity of a world that cannot cohere. In 1981, looking back on his efforts, Phil wrote:
I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel & story-writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation. Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature of reality, &, for them, my corpus of writing is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an integration & presentation, analysis & response & personal history.
Unsurprisingly, then, strict categories worked against Phil. Take novels like A Scanner Darkly and Valis. They were marketed as SF, but if, say, William Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon, respectively, had written them, they would have been mainstream. Why? Categories. Borges's frequently anthologized story "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" (about an imaginary planet that gradually becomes our world) would be SF if Phil had written it.
Another Borges story, "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote," offers
a way out of the categorical maze. Menard, in the twentieth century, is writing an original work entitled Don Quixote in the exact same Spanish that Cervantes employed. Since Menard's is a different (modern) consciousness from Cervantes's, the effect of Menard's duplicate Quixote text upon the reader must be entirely other. Borges explains:
Menard (perhaps without wishing to) has enriched, by a new technique, the hesitant and rudimentary art of reading: the technique is one of deliberate anachronism and erroneous attributions. This technique, with its infinite applications, urges us to run through the Odyssey as if it were written after the Aeneid. [...] This technique would fill the dullest books with adventure. Would not the attributing of The Imitation of Christ to Louis-Ferdinand Celine or James Joyce be a sufficient renovation of its tenuous spiritual counsels?
All very well and good. But whom, in light of Borges's "deliberate anachronism" method, shall we posit as the author of the works of Philip K. Dick, in order to obtain for them the respect they deserve?
Phil would have enjoyed that question. Hell, he asked something very much like it often enough in the eight-thousand-page Exegesis (subtitled by him Apologia Pro Mia Vita to emphasize its central importance) he wrote night after night for nearly eight years in an attempt to explain to his own satisfaction (he never succeeded) a series of visions and auditions that seized his soul in February-March 1974 and held it to the end of his life. This biography incorporates the results of the first study ever made of the Exegesis in its entirety.
The 2-3-74° experiences posed, one might say, the ultimate startling "What If?"-or rather, a new and infinite range of them. On March 21, 1975, one year later, Phil wrote as concise and radiant a summary of the visions as he ever achieved:
I speak of The Restorer of What Was Lost The Mender of What Was Broken
March 16, 1974: It appeared-in vivid fire, with shining colors and balanced patterns-and released me from every thrall, inner and outer.
March 18, 1974: It, from inside me, looked out and saw the world did not compute, that I-and it-had been lied to. It denied the reality, and power, and authenticity of the world, saying, "This cannot exist; it cannot exist."
March 20, 1974: It seized me entirely, lifting me from the limitations of the space-time matrix; it mastered me as, at the same time, I knew that the world around me was cardboard, a fake. Through its power of perception I saw what really existed, and through its power of no-thought decision, I acted to free myself. It took on in battle, as a champion of all human spirits in thrall, every evil, every Iron Imprisoning thing. ~. . J
The 2-3-74 experiences, which so influenced Phil's final novels, are a rare and remarkable event in American literary history; how often has an American writer of any stature confessed to, and been obsessed by, such a subject? The title of this biography-Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick-pays homage to Phil's 1981 novel The Divine Invasion and, further, underscores the signal importance to his life and work of the above events. I do not wish to imply that any particular term (such as God) exclusively describes what Phil encountered in 2-3-74, nor that a Saint Phil emerged at last; Phil himself would have rejected both these notions.
But the core of the difficult truths that Phil held dear in his last years lay in 2-3-74. No one can pass upon the unanswerable question: Were those events real? Phil himself had no doubt that something had happened, though he always retained as a possibility-as his friend and fellow SF writer K. W. Deter observes-the "minimum hypothesis" that they were self-delusion. But for readers who would, in this skeptical age, readily leap to that conclusion, the cautionary words of William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience may be of value:
We are all surely familiar in a general way with this method of discrediting states of mind for which we have an antipathy. We all use it to some degree in criticizing persons whose states of mind we regard as overstrained. But when other people criticize our own more exalted soul-flights by calling them "nothing but" expressions of our organic disposition, we feel outraged and hurt, for we know that, whatever be our organism's peculiarities, our mental states have their substantive value as revelations of the living truth; and we wish that all this medical materialism could be made to hold its tongue.
Returning to the "deliberate anachronism" suggested by Borges, let us, for purposes of this biography, arbitrarily settle on Philip K. Dick himself as the author of numerous brilliant works that are SF or mainstream, as you prefer. And let us further, for the sake of clarity and courtesy, briefly set forth the rules of this biographical road for the gentle reader contemplating its course.
First off, Phil-who will, of course, be quoted more often and lengthily than anyone else as to the events of his life-was very fond of elaboration, extrapolation, reinterpretation, and outright putting people on. This is agreed upon by all who knew him. Now Phil placed a fierce value upon truth in both his writings and his personal relations. But he never was one to resist the fascination of a new, brilliant, complex theory of 2-3-74, or of anything else, and his capacity for generating such theories was limitless. In addition, being gracious and gregarious (when he was not in the throes of extreme depression and despair), Phil loved to tell stories and write letters that pleased-or matched the preconceptions of-the person addressed.
I am well aware that many of the quoted accounts by Phil of his life are very likely a mixture of fable and fact; but I am not unsympathetic to the value of fable in casting light upon Phil's spirit and character. My biographical approach must be, then, to provide alternative or clarifying accounts when I can, and for the rest, to let the reader (who may have some personal familiarity with the emotional magnifications-and deletions-of memory) beware and enjoy.
Second, let me confess that in this narrative I am arguing on behalf both of a life that I believe to have been remarkable and of a unique body of literary work that has been unjustly neglected. Much of this neglect is due to Phil's SF-genre identification and his prolific (and, admittedly, highly uneven) output. There is, however, a more personal negative factor at work: the reputation Phil acquired, particularly within SF circles, of being-to state it unadornedly-a drug-addled nut.
Phil was fully aware of this reputation. Indeed, he actively fostered it on many occasions, particularly during the sixties, when weird excess was the fashion even for far more respectable types than SF writers. But in the last decade of his life he came-not without humor-to regret it. His novel A Scanner Darkly (1977), a coda to the most painful years of his life, is a vehement antidrug testament that contains, in his typical way, some of the most hilarious scenes he ever wrote. Such as when Charles Freck, Substance D (Death) addict, decides to end it all by downing an overdose of reds with an expensive bottle of 1971 Mondavi Cabernet Sauvignon. But Freck is burned by his dealer, who instead passes him a weird new psychedelic:
Instead of quietly suffocating, Charles Freck began to hallucinate. Well, he thought philosophically, this is the story of my life. Always ripped off. He had to face the fact-considering how many of the capsules he had swallowedthat he was in for some trip.
The next thing he knew, a creature from between dimensions was standing beside his bed looking down at him disapprovingly.
The creature had many eyes, all over it, ultra-modern expensive-looking clothing, and rose up eight feet high. Also, it carried an enormous scroll.
"You're going to read me my sins," Charles Freck said.
The creature nodded and unsealed the scroll.
Freck said, lying helpless on his bed, "and it's going to take a hundred thousand hours."
Fixing its many compound eyes on him, the creature from between dimensions said, "We are no longer in the mundane universe. Lower-plane categories of material existence such as 'space' and 'time' no longer apply to you. You have been elevated to the transcendent realm. Your sins will be read to you ceaselessly, in shifts, throughout eternity. The list will never end."
Know your dealer, Charles Freck thought, and wished he could take back the last h
alf-hour of his life. [. ]
Ten thousand years later they had reached the sixth grade.
The year he had discovered masturbation.
He shut his eyes, but he could still see the multi-eyed, eight-foot-high being with its endless scroll reading on and on.
"And next-" it was saying.
Charles Freck thought, At least I got a good wine.
Despite Scanner (or perhaps because of its pervasive humor and love, for all its antidrug vehemence), the reputation persisted. In a January 1981 letter, Phil accurately appraised the damage: " 'He's crazy,' will be the response. Took drugs, saw God. BFD [big fucking deal]."
Phil was surely not crazy by any standard that I would dare apply. For what it's worth, I have interviewed a psychiatrist and a psychologist who saw Phil during two of the most difficult periods of his life, and both declare him to have been as fully sane as the rest of us. In addition, it sticks in the craw to indulge in psychological name-calling in the case of a productive and disciplined artist who demonstrated an intelligence and imagination well beyond those of any of his detractors.
Phil's emotional and behavioral difficulties were, at times, extremely severe-causing considerable pain and suffering to himself and to others-and led him to write, at times, of his "three nervous breakdowns" and to level against himself diagnoses of "schizophrenia" and "psychosis." (On other occasions, he would vehemently deny that such terms had any bearing upon his life.) Phil's inner life was unremittingly intense. Perhaps he utilized extreme psychological terms to lend maximum drama to the forces that fueled him as a writer. Perhaps he said simply and directly what he believed, at certain times, to be the truth.
Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick Page 2