Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick

by Lawrence Sutin

  If acceptance was what "Jim" sought, he achieved it. Grades at Hillside were on a Satisfactory (S)/Unsatisfactory (U) basis; Jim earned all S's plus accolades on his report cards. His fourth-grade teacher noted that "Jim has made quite a place for himself in our group. He is quite popular with his playmates. He has a fine sense of `right' and they seem to realize it." In the fifth grade it was noted, "He has a great deal of poise and self-possession for a boy of his age." In the sixth grade, at the Oxford School, and going by Phil again, he served as a junior traffic patrolman.

  But the pattern of frequent absences continued at the Hillside School-for example, Phil missed nearly a quarter of the 1939 spring term schooldays. Dorothy recalled that "he was so bored in public school-from the beginning-that he didn't work at all and seized every opportunity to stay at home with whatever illness was handy." Some of these absences may have been due to illnesses that were far from merely "handy." Phil's asthma attacks continued to be severe. He had never been an avid athlete, but now even relatively mild boyhood activitiesrunning, biking, hide-and-go-seek-became more of a strain than a pleasure. Young Phil was self-conscious and proud, and the humiliation of coming to a wheezing halt kept him away from the playgrounds where friendships might have been made. In addition, he began to experience brief but frightening attacks of paroxysmal tachycardia (sudden, rapid beating of the heart-a condition from which Edgar also suffered), along with bouts of eczema. The tachycardia would remain a lifelong condition. These physical ailments surely took their psychological toll. But it is also true that Phil never felt at home at Hillside or Oxford, not even in the sedentary classrooms. Later Phil would recall having been diagnosed in the sixth grade as having a "learning disability." Whether or not this diagnosis was made, it reflects the boy's sense of himself in academic confines.

  Phil's "self-possession" manifested itself not only in his schoolwork but in his relations with Dorothy, who treated Phil like the little man of the house-subject to responsibilities but also worthy of considerable respect. And Phil, though inwardly he longed for affection, was drawn to this flattering view and conducted himself with as much dignity as a boy could muster. Once Dorothy considered buying property in nearby Concord. Anne Dick writes: "Philip had a fit. He said he wouldn't ever live out there! Dorothy lost a million dollar opportunity."

  As Jim, at age nine, he tried his hand at selling magazine subscriptions; his solicitation letter scrupulously specified his own profit margin. Discontented with mere marketing, he established a periodical of his own. The Daily Dick cost one cent and was printed on a "dupli-craft" that reproduced Jim's handwriting and tiny masthead drawings. Two issues survive from December 1938. There is a brief, poignant account of a neighborhood dog:

  Friday 23. Mickey, a fox terrier was taken to the city pound yesterday. He was caught without a license. He has no owner. The dog catcher caught him with a rope. It was a long battle. Finally the dog catcher caught him. Mickey cried and cried.

  A crudely drawn comic strip-"Copper"-prefigures the mature Phil's fascination with fake-real puzzles and the ambiguous role of Authority in distinguishing between the two. A policeman is hot on the trail of "Looie the Counterfeiter" and questions a filling station attendant who may have been passed a fake five-dollar bill. "Give it here!" the policeman demands. "Why? Do you think it's counterfeit?" asks the attendant. "Of course!" the policeman responds. "Why else would I want it?" The final frame belongs to the attendant, who is not quite suppressing a thin smile as he answers: "To spend it sir!"

  In 1940 Edgar moved to the Los Angeles office of the Department of Commerce and became a regular on a local radio program: This Is Your Government. Twelve-year-old Phil paid a visit to Edgar and his wife in May; his pride in his father-and fear of losing him-show in this letter to Dorothy:

  Dad thought it would be a good idea if I was to stay here until Monday morning and then leave on the train. It would mean the miss of I day of school-but that is not importen [sic] since I have so little time down here.... How about it? I think it would be good: Dad may go to Washington-Friscoor someplace else. I may not see him for a long time. That is why I would like to stay here. Hows [sic] it?

  Dad says I am growing to his size. I am almost as tall as him!

  Of course, Phil, just about five-three at the time, with blue eyes and sandy brown hair, didn't approach Edgar's six-foot height. But his excitement here contrasts markedly with other letters to Dorothy from this time-dutiful summaries, pained explanations of academic woes. And Phil's fears concerning a job transfer proved accurate. When America joined World War II, Edgar became a regional business consultant for the Federal Reserve in Cleveland, then moved to a similar post in Richmond, Virginia. They did not see each other again until the late forties, after Phil had graduated from high school. Phil's second wife, Kleo Mini, stresses that loss of contact with Edgar-not troubles with Dorothy or the death of Jane-marked Phil most profoundly:

  Philip figured that his dad had abandoned them. It was a hurt that influenced everything he ever did. A primary aspect of Philip's orientation to the world was sadness-along with a tremendous sense of humor-of the unbalance of things, which was the most endearing thing about him. But he was perpetually sad and I think the father is why. At the same time, he felt his father was his mother's intellectual inferior. Dorothy was a strident feminist and Philip always got a real put-down description of his father from her at the same time as he missed having him around.

  During the spring 1940 visit to his father, it was art-not writingthat was his primary enthusiasm. Phil had drawn the cover for the Oxford School yearbook that June, a turbaned crystal gazer foretelling his classmates' futures. There also survive pages of sketches and doodles-of Nazis, slouched men, dolled-up women, and even a stern SF-like alien labeled "4162 F"-that demonstrate how seriously he took his drawing for a time. When, a decade later, Phil began his writing career in earnest, Edgar was surprised that he had not become an artist instead.

  This was for Phil, a time of exploration of all the arts. That summer, while attending camp in Cazadero, California, he appeared in three plays. (Also at this camp he learned to swim, but shortly thereafter nearly drowned-a scare that left him with a lasting aversion to the water.) As for music, Phil had commenced piano lessons in earnest and provided Dorothy with a Christmas want list of 78s, including the "Turkish March" from Beethoven's Ruins of Athens, the "Largo El Factotum" from Rossini's Barber of Seville, and Wagner's Tannhauser Overture. (Quotations from operatic libretti, particularly Wagner and Gilbert and Sullivan, abound in the SF novels.) He also continued to write poetry. A poem from November 1940, "He's Dead," is a rhymed elegy to the late family dog. The final two lines: "No longer shall he scorn his bed./Alas for us! Our dog is dead." The poem was published, in October 1942, in the "Young Authors' Club" column of the Berkeley Gazette, edited by one "Aunt Flo."

  Of Aunt Flo and her role as Phil's first editor, more shortly. For now, bear in mind that Phil dated the start of his writing career at age twelve-which he reached on December 16, 1940 (a birth date Phil was pleased to share with his idol, Beethoven). At twelve he taught himself to type, in recognition of his vocation. He also read his first SF magazine: Stirring Science Stories. SF linked perfectly with his prior discovery of the Oz fantasies of Frank Baum: "It seemed like a small matter, my utter avidity to read each and every Oz book. Librarians haughtily told me that they 'did not stock fantastic material,' their reasoning being that books of fantasy led a child into a dreamworld and made it difficult for him to adjust properly to the 'real' world. But my interest in the Oz books was, in point of fact, the beginning of my love for fantasy, and, by extension, science fiction."

  Phil became a voracious collector of SF pulps, haunting the secondhand bookstores of Berkeley. By the time he entered Garfield Junior High in 1941, Phil owned stacks of Astounding, Amazing, Unknown, and Unknown Worlds. He also regularly took in the Buck Rogers serials. Friend George Kohler recalls that Phil was a "selective" reader whose recall of sto
ries he liked was flawless. Phil the artist would copy the pictures of sleek-finned rocket ships. Throughout his life Phil continued to cherish his pulp collections. In a 1968 essay he wrote:

  What is it about sf that draws us? What is sf anyhow? It grips fans; it grips editors; it grips writers. And none make any money. When I ponder this I see always in my mind Henry Kuttner's [a prominent thirties and forties writer of SF and "weird" stories] FAIRY CHESSMEN with its opening paragraph, the doorknob that winks at the protagonist. When I ponder this I also see-outside my mind, right beside my desk-a complete file of UNKNOWN and UNKNOWN WORLDS, plus Astounding back to October 1933 ... these being guarded by a nine-hundred-pound fireproof file cabinet, separated from the world, separated from life. Hence separated from decay and wear. Hence separated from time. I paid $390 for this fireproof file which protects these magazines. After my wife and daughter these mean more to me than anything else I own-or hope to own.

  Young Phil was also a regular reader of Life and National Geographic, and followed closely the radio news concerning the Nazi menace and the outbreak of World War II. In a 1979 letter, he linked his memory of Pearl Harbor to the persistent anger he bore his parents. The idealization of youth is typical:

  I phoned my mother to tell her. "We're at war with Germany, Italy and Japan!" I yelled, to which she replied calmly, "No, I don't think so, Philip," and went back to her gardening. I was 12 years old and I was more in touch than a grown person. [... ] This maybe is one reason I get along so well with people a lot younger than me; I have little respect for the opinions of people my own age. I think the older you get the dumber you get. [... ] You start losing touch with reality by subtle, gradual degrees until you wind up puttering around with your flowers in the backyard while World War Three breaks out. This is how I imagine my father, assuming he's still alive: out in his backyard unaware of the world and, worse, wanting to be unaware of the world.

  As the war proceeded in earnest, Phil and Dorothy settled into an economically constrained life in their cottage (in the backyard of a larger house) at 1212 Walnut Street. Early on, unaware of the atrocities, Phil wholeheartedly sided with the Allies but was duly fascinated by the Nazis-their outsized "Bismarck" battleship and goose-stepping disci pline (viewed in newsreel footage narrated by Edward R. Murrow). He enjoyed imagining superweapons: fighters faster than German Messer- schmitts, cannons larger than the Japanese twenty-inchers (from the hills Phil could see the U.S. gun emplacements guarding the Bay). But Phil was very aware that much of the war news-from both sides-was not necessarily what it seemed. He admired the propaganda skills of Goebbels and speculated with friends as to similar Allied ploys. FDR in particular earned his suspicion. (Phil would later put these boyish fantasies and suspicions to hilarious use in The Zap Gun (1967), an expose of cold war neuroses set in the twenty-first century.)

  It was relatively easy to figure out propaganda. How to get girls to notice him was the real mystery. Leon Rimov, a junior high friend, recalls that Phil had "fantasies of relating to all the girls in the room, wherever he was," but that the girls were "indifferent." At dances "Phil would line up on one side, the girls would line up on the other, he'd maybe ask for a dance or two and then go home and fantasize what was going to happen and then he'd want to talk to me about it." What attracted Phil to a girl? "Pure looks."

  But George Kohler recalls a less inept young Phil whose awareness of realities testified to a liberal sex education policy on Dorothy's part. In eighth grade, Kohler and Phil saw a used condom while walking through a park. Kohler wanted to touch it, but Phil stopped him and proceeded to deliver a "discourse" on what the condom was and the health hazards it might pose. On another occasion, Phil explained to his friend what a homosexual was. On still another occasion, Phil enlightened his friend even more dramatically at a neighborhood party: "Phil was more advanced then the rest of us and was feeling the breasts of one of the girls."

  Kohler also confirms that Phil tended to "moon after the neighborhood girls" from an adoring distance. But Phil did ask at least one junior high crush for a date, the memory of which endured. From a 1974 letter to his daughter Laura:

  Laura, honey, did you know that (I never told anybody this before. Get ready. Be cool, baby). Laura, when you were born, neither your mother [Anne] nor I had a name for you. [... ] The nurse said to me, "What are you going to call her?" I admitted I didn't know. The nurse frowned at me; she was very pretty and I almost said, "What's your name?"-but wisely I didn't. I then remembered-it flashed into my mind-the name of the first girl I ever dated, back in junior high school, a really foxy chick named Lora Heims. So I called you Laura, after her, and never told anybody until now.

  If you tell that, you die.

  Phil's sexual fantasies-and occasional small triumphs-were part and parcel of the coming of age of most boys. But there was a darker side to his growing psychic self-awareness. During this period, Dorothy de cided that her son's academic apathy and anxieties might be dispelled by psychiatric therapy. Phil likely saw more than one psychiatrist during his late elementary and junior high years; little can be said as to the specifics of their treatments. But one thing is certain-the therapy left in Phil a deep sense of tragic difference between himself and his peers. Kohler recalls Phil discoursing on Rorschach tests as a seventh-grader: "Phil, in fact, made up his own and he and I played Rorschach test. Phil knew all about the Thematic Apperception Test too. He knew the names of various phobias. He told me, I have some I can't fight.'

  But Phil did have one comforting means of breaking out of his introverted woes-writing. Kohler had a tiny printing press, which Phil commandeered for a second brief attempt-this time, in collaboration with Pat Flannery-at a self-published newspaper. The Truth made its debut in August 1943 and went for two cents. ("However, if we start to show a huge profit, we'll bring it down to one cent.") Its motto: "A Democratic Paper With A Democratic Principle." The writing was nearly all Phil's, including this fervid pronouncement: "This paper is sworn to print only that which is beyond doubt the TRUTH." It featured a serial story, "Stratosphere Betsy" (about a daring test pilot), and a comic strip hero, "Future-Human," who was Phil's first full-fledged SF creation:

  Future-Human, champion of right, defender of the oppressed. Few gangsters dare to oppose him; and when they do they are soon vanquished.

  Future-Human lives in the year 3869. Using his super-science for the welfare of humanity, he pits his strength against the underworld of the future. Appearing each issue in:

  THE TRUTH!

  At thirteen, Truth editor Phil was pale, slightly overweight, and often coughing or snuffling due to his asthma. Necessarily, he was contemptuous of team sports. When, rarely, he played games with his friends, he was ungainly and even dangerous, once hitting Flannery with a dart and drawing blood, another time shoving him into a bramble bush. With Kohler, Phil did take rambling walks up the Berkeley hills to Tilden Park (passing the newly constructed cyclotron). But he was delighted when Garfield Junior High reduced phys ed class hours.

  Dorothy came home late from work and was soon upstairs in bed reading from piles of books-mostly best sellers, but also works on nutrition and healing. Her nightstand was covered with prescription medications for kidney and other ailments. This home atmosphere of illness was difficult for Phil, who was coping with his own physical and phobic woes. He could be moody, but his outbursts of sharp anger were vanquished by Dorothy's calm. Most often, mother and son spoke formally, using "Philip" and "Dorothy." One can imagine them passing the nights reading fervently in separate bedrooms. But the bond between them was growing-and Edgar was far away. During this period Phil considered dropping "Dick" in favor of his mother's maiden name, Kindred.

  Dorothy was polite but taciturn to Phil's chums, seldom engaging them in conversation or inviting them for supper. Those suppers seldom varied from night to night: ground round, peas, mashed potatoes. Phil welcomed dinner invitations from Kohler's grandmother, who provided decadent delights denied to Phil at hom
e, such as chocolate milk and soda pop. He always left a tiny bit of food on his plate, in respect for the Depression custom of showing you'd been fed enough not to require seconds.

  Dorothy's upstairs seclusion did allow Phil and visiting friends uninterrupted confidential talks, toy-soldier battles, classical music listening sessions, and chess matches (in which Phil invariably trounced his pals). Phil could fashion Rube Goldberg-like circuitry: a light switch to turn on the Victrola, tiny electrical boxes for show-and-tell that scared his teachers. His musical abilities surprised even close friends. Once he sat Kohler down and played first a Chopin funeral march and then what Kohler recalls as a "macabre kind of thing." When Phil asked which he preferred, Kohler chose the second. Phil played it over and over to make sure his friend really liked it-and only then confided that it was his own composition.

  Phil's bedroom was a clutter: records, model airplanes, stamp albums, a microscope, a portrait of the German kaiser. There was also a secret compartment in his desk in which Phil kept a little Kodak camera, nudist magazines, and a teaser known as "Captain Billy's Whiz Bang." He invited Kohler to join him in masturbation sessions in the bedroom, with the blinds drawn. Kohler also slept over on occasion, and naturally they discussed sex. There were no overtures: Kohler recalls that Phil regarded "homosexual" as a derogatory term.

  Dorothy offered freedom and privacy, which fostered the adoles- cent's intense existence. Some idea of it is afforded by his early (circa 1949) unpublished mainstream novel Gather Yourselves Together. One character, a young man named Carl, bears a striking resemblance to Phil-including a passionate interest in philosophy (Carl's lengthy journal writings on truth and reality prefigure the Exegesis) and in dark-haired girls. In the following passage Carl, secluded in his room, copies a picture he has torn from a magazine: