Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick

by Lawrence Sutin

  In its place was a slip of paper. He reached out his hand and took hold of the slip of paper. On it was printing, block letters.

  SOFT-DRINK STAND

  Turning away, he unsteadily walked back, past children playing, past the benches and the old people. As he walked he put his hand into his coat pocket and found the metal box he kept there.

  He halted, opened the box, looked down at the slips of paper already in it. Then he added the new one.

  Six in all. Six times.

  Phil came up with the idea for Time when one day in his Francisco Street bathroom he reached for a light cord that wasn't there and never had been there-the light was operated by a wall switch. The impulse could be explained as merely freakish, or as a subliminal awareness of alternative worlds. Phil the fiction writer naturally chose the latter. As he was aware, the themes of Eye and Time resemble each other: We humans may be deceived as to the reality in which we dwell. In the Exegesis he wrote:

  "EYE," "Joint," "3 Stigmata," "Ubik" & "Maze" are the same novel written over and over again. The characters are all out cold & lying around together on the floor.* (*Mass hallucinating a world.) Why have I written this up at least five times?

  [...] What's got to be gotten over is the false idea that an hallucination is a private matter. Not hallucination but joint hallucination is my topic, inc[lud- ing] false memories.

  If the mainstream failures rankled, life with Kleo on Francisco Street provided solace. They were poor but happy, the perfect Berkeley bohemian-libertarian couple with limitless intellectual curiosity. In February 1958 Phil wrote to Alexander Topchiev of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, concerning Soviet research that had allegedly discredited Einstein's theory of relativity: "I have no particular desire to see this Theory stand. In fact, I'd very much like to see elaborated indications that major parts of the Theory do not fit reality." The letter was intercepted by the CIA, as Phil learned after putting in a Freedom of Information Act request in May 1975. Yes, sometimes they really were watching him.

  The urge to move on from Berkeley grew persistent in them both. In the mid-fifties, as an experiment, they rented an apartment across the bay in Sausalito, but stayed only one night. The second-floor apartment looked out on the Bay, and when Phil woke up and saw nothing but water his response, as a good Jungian, was to see in the vast Bay a sign of his own overwhelming unconscious forces. Back to Berkeley they went.

  Then, in late summer 1958, came the sadness of Meemaw's death. With her passing, the ties that held Phil to Berkeley were further diminished. In September of that year they uprooted for real. Their new home was a little house with a real caboose in the backyard (perfect for a writing studio) on the corner of Mariana and Lorraine in Point Reyes Station, a remote little dairy town set just south of Point Reyes, a granitic finger thrust by the San Andreas fault into the Pacific.

  It seemed to them like an idyllic escape from the Berkeley scene. "Phil liked feeling comfortable enough to walk down into the town," Kleo recalls.

  They had a short happy life together in Point Reyes Station. And then everything turned upside down-starting with their marriage.

  5

  Phil Falls In Love, Becomes A Country Squire, Starts Writing Great

  Books, & Has "Nervous Breakdown" #3 (Love Can Be A Very Deep Hole To

  Fall Into) (1958-1963)

  My Phil was like the man who wrote The Man in the High Castle. Modest, sensitive, funny, wonderful talker and listener too-he was fascinated with every word you said. He was telling me how brilliant I was, how fun I was, what a wonderful mother I was. He was a wonderful lover, wonderful around the house, verygiving, very agreeable. We talked for hours about every subject under the sun.

  ANNE DICK in interview

  Here's how you can represent me to your rustic but well-placed family & friends: "He's well known in Russia and England ... in fact, in Germany & Italy and France-also in South Africa and in Argentina (in translation, of course) .. . and he's beginning to become known here in the U.S. Lippincott is bringing out a novel of his next spring." And you can refer vaguely to "some very favorable reviews in the New York Herald Tribune." And you can mention that "Harper's took notice of him several years ago, in an editorial ... had to do with a story of his in an anthology of short stories." And you can mention that "his agent is also the agent for that fellow Traven-you know, the fellow who wrote The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which won an academy award." (Notice that in desperation I'm name-dropping. But what the hell.) Give my love to the children also.

  PHIL, December 1958 letter to Anne

  But then, at that point, my private life began to become violent and mixed up. My marriage of eight years broke up; I moved out into the country, met an artistically inclined woman who had just lost her husband.

  PHIL, 1968 "Self Portrait"

  NEWS of the Berkeley writer and his wife spread rapidly through Point Reyes Station. They were soon invited to attend a meeting of a little local group that believed that when the world ended-on April 22, 1959-they would be saved by extraterrestrials who would transform their Inverness meetinghouse into a flying saucer. Phil, amused yet frightened by the group's beautiful dark-haired female leader, declined the invitation and hid the next time she came to call.

  Anne Williams Rubenstein, who lived on nearby Mesa Road, also became curious to meet them. Her husband, Richard, a well-educated poet from a wealthy background who had helped to edit a little magazine called Neurotica, had died that summer while in the Yale Psychiatric Institute, a victim of a severe allergic reaction to tranquilizers prescribed for him. Anne now suddenly found herself raising three young girls alone. Getting to know a neighboring writer seemed a welcome diversion.

  Anne was thirty-one, of medium build and height, with shoulderlength blond hair and blue eyes, a WASP intellectual with energy and assertiveness to burn. Her New England father traced ancestors to the Mayflower and was a successful Wall Street broker. He adored Anne but had died when she was four. Her mother's family raised her through the Depression years in St. Louis. Anne majored in psychology at Washington University and there met Richard. Their marriage was happy enough, but somehow Anne hadn't lost her heart.

  When she came by to introduce herself, the Dicks responded warmly. Phil was twenty-nine, slender, with thick brown hair, a high forehead, and those piercing blue eyes. His standard attire: flannel shirt, work pants, and army boots. Phil was impressed by Anne's connection with the officially literary Neurotica and, when listing his own accomplishments, stressed the mainstream novels. "I am only a very minor science fiction writer," he insisted.

  Phil and Kleo paid visits to Anne together, and then Phil started paying visits on his own. Kleo was commuting three times a week to a part-time secretarial job in Berkeley and Phil wrote mostly at night, leaving his days open. Anne's "swanky modern San Francisco type of house" (as Phil described it in his mainstream novel Confessions of a Crap Artist) included a glass-walled kitchen and living room that faced out onto rolling hills and meadows; a circular open fireplace; hi-fi speakers built into the wall-Phil could not but be dazzled by this first hands-on exposure to the American Dream. The underbelly of the Dream did set him to thinking: The house, built on a concrete slab, had to be expensive as hell to heat. But everything about Anne seemed expensive to Phil after eight years of the Lucky Dog Pet Shop.

  Anne called him a "Berkeley beatnik," and Phil loved it. Raptly they told each other the stories of their lives. In her unpublished memoir, Search for Philip K. Dick, Anne recalls:

  I found him to be the most enchanting conversationalist I had ever met! He was the first person I ever stopped talking long enough to listen to.

  We found that we had endless ideas, attitudes, and interests in common. [... ] Both of us were shy, though each of us covered our shyness up. Both of us were trusting to the point of gullibility, and terribly romantic. [...] Phil told me about his twin sister who had died three weeks after birth-how he still felt guilty about this. He felt that some
how he carried his twin sister inside of him.

  "And she's a Lesbian," he told me very seriously.

  As to Jane-as-lesbian, Kleo recalls: "Philip would say things straight-faced often, and after a while people started to take him seriously, which was too bad. Once in a while he'd say, `Well, I've decided my whole problem is that I'm a lesbian and it's all because of the identification with the sister,' and he'd talk about it for a bit and go on to something else." Was Phil serious? Anne thought so. Of course, one of Phil's favorite effects was to blur the funny/serious distinction that most people take too seriously (leaving reality free to conceal itself in funny forms). In Phil's 1974 novel Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, character Alys Buckman is a somewhat campy leather-queen lesbian whose death rends the soul of her surviving twin-brother, a policeman.

  Two weeks after he and Anne met, Phil declared his love and their course was set:

  We sat at either end of the couch talking. Suddenly Phil grabbed my hand and said in a low and intense voice, "You represent everything I've ever dreamed of."

  I was so surprised I almost fell off the couch! I stared at the floor like some Victorian maiden. I didn't know what to say.

  Phil drew me towards him and kissed me. After a moment I returned his embrace and kissed him back. We kissed and talked and talked and kissed. [...) I felt like one of those mythical heroines who has been awakened out of her enchanted slumber by the hero leaping over a ring of flames.

  The affair became a minor scandal in little Point Reyes Station. Anne turned to a psychiatrist to help her cope with her feelings of guilt; the psychiatrist (hereafter known as Dr. X-he was to treat Phil, sporadically, through 1971) was quite taken with Phil when they met, a reaction that Anne attributes to Phil's incredible "charisma." But by December 1958, despite her rapture and Dr. X's advice to her not to worry, Anne decided to break things off. Phil begged her to reconsider. To assuage Anne's guilt, he argued that Kleo refused to bear children-grounds for annulment under Roman Catholic doctrine. (Kleo denies any such refusal; within a few years, she had children with Norman Mini.)

  Anne's stance forced Phil to break the news of the affair to Kleo. He set forth reasons for ending their marriage as solicitously as he could, even hinting that he was bound by necessity due to Anne's having become pregnant. But Kleo was unconvinced by this shamming and infuriated that Phil seemed so completely under Anne's dominion: "In this situation Phil had turned into a namby-pamby shit." At one point, Phil demanded that Kleo return all photographs of him in her possession, claining that Anne insisted upon it (which Anne denies). But Kleo was more than kind in the formal divorce proceeding, conceding ownership of their Mariana Street house and waiving all royalty claims on works written during their marriage. It did annoy her that the legal "fault" Phil alleged was a supposedly faithless trip by Kleo to Salt Lake City-the one she'd taken to give Phil time to think through his 1957 affair. In Crap Artist, Phil drew from his own experience to describe protagonist Nathan Anteil's day in court: "Was there any truth to what I said? Nathan wondered. Some truth. Part truth, part made up. Strange to lose sight, blend it together. [. . . J Aloud, he said, 'Like the Moscow Trials. Confessing to whatever they want.'

  At last Kleo resolved to leave Point Reyes Station, and asked only for their '55 Chevy. Phil was supposed to bring by the registration slip one day but forgot. It was "one thing too much," Kleo says. She yelled, Phil started to whine, and she slapped him. "We were both pretty surprised."

  Phil paid further visits to Dr. X, who informed him that if Anne wanted a husband, she would go out and select the best one-like choosing a bar of soap. Phil found that observation hilarious. Anne was less amused, but it seemed a minor matter. They made plans for Anne and her daughters to return to St. Louis to try to reach a child-support arrangement with the family of her deceased husband, Richard. While she was gone Phil wrote her impassioned letters. In the first (December 21, 1958), Phil recounted how he got "the shakes"-induced by Anne's absence-while driving home after taking them to the airport. In the second (December 27), written just after Anne had called long-distance, Phil's love was expressed in a manner he retained for the rest of his life: The Woman, the Loved One, is the ground-source of the Real-without Her, it fades away:

  You have no idea how much your phone call affected me. For an hour (more like two) afterward I was in a state of what I would in all honesty call bliss-unlike anything I've ever felt before. Actually, the walls of the house seemed to melt away, and I felt as if I were seeing out into time and space for an unlimited distance. It was a physical sense, not a mere intellectual thought. A genuine state of existence new to me. Evidently my not having heard from you for a couple ofd,-.vs had had the effect of starting into motion a sense of separation from you [...] Then when you called, this distance was abolished, and the return of you as a physical reality caused a genuine transformation in me, as if I had stepped from one world to another. [... ] This is no doubt similar to the religious experience of conversion, and in a sense, I did undergo conversion upon hearing from you. There is a direct relationship between my hearing you, and the religious person who, after the traditional isolation and fasting and meditation, "hears" the voice of "god." The difference is that you exist, and I have sonic deep doubts about that fellow god.

  Phil went on to "introspect" as to his own character. He conceded to a strong streak of "intolerance":

  I'm violently partisan and sectarian, and I have the word of god with me-or haven't you noticed? [... It's not that I'm holier than thou, but that I'm filled with the moral wrath of the godly-admittedly a dreadful thing, and a cause of much human suffering. My image of myself is this gentle saint-like sage, full of bookish wisdom-and in actuality I'ni more like some minor Communist official getting up and attacking the "slug-like blood-swilling depraved homosexual lice of the whiskey-infested West." In theory I'm a relativist, but in many situations I'm an absolutist, and unfortunately your circles and your views bring out the latter as often as not. [...] There is some virtue in this moral wrath, too, in that it permits me to act out, carry out, certain strong convictions that run contrary to practical gain-it gives me the psychic energy necessary to actually being an idealist, rather than merely thinking idealistic thoughts. Beethoven was the same way.

  Three days later, in a letter to a high school friend, Phil saw fit to paint a guarded picture of life as usual with Kleo. He added that, as to the highly publicized San Francisco Renaissance, ". I'm favorably inclined toward On the Road, but not the poetry & jazz...." Phil felt little attraction for the Beat social scene, though he later recalled meeting Gary Snyder and Robert Duncan (his McKinley Street housemate in 1947) during this period.

  Anne returned from St. Louis with a financial settlement, and all continued to fare well. Phil got on splendidly with Anne's three daugh- ters-Hatte, age eight; Jayne, six; and Tandy, three. They called him "Daddy" (Rubenstein was their "first father"). Phil cooked breakfast for them, played "monster" and baseball with them in the pasture-sized backyard, gave scary nighttime readings of Lovecraft stories, and quoted by heart from Winnie the Pooh and When We Were Young. (Phil refrained from adopting them so as not to create a barrier to payments from the Rubenstein estate.) The newly formed family played typical American games: In "Life," Phil never took the path through college; in "Monopoly," his marker was always the old shoe.

  When Phil at last moved into Anne's "swank" house, his possessions (aside from cherished pet cat Tumpy) were relatively few: a Royal Electric typewriter, the faithful Magnavox, an enormous quantity of records and books, and complete collections of Astounding, Amazing, F & SF, Mad, and Mandrake the Magician comic books. While Phil shared with the girls his love of pulps, he was also concerned that they read good books. "He'd say, `Don't read crap,' " Jayne recalls. "He'd make jokes about his books-he'd say, This one I wrote in a week-it's crap, too.' " The girls received daily lessons in music appreciation by way of the Magnavox: Wagner, Bach, Beethoven, Handel, and Gilbert and Sullivan filled th
e house. One of his obsessions was the Fischer-Dieskau recordings of Schubert's songs (quotations from these songs occur often in the SF novels of the sixties).

  Phil did have one additional collection when he moved in: a wide variety of pills and medicines, which he kept in a large closet and prescribed from when the girls had colds. Phil was taking two Semoxy- drines a day (they'd been prescribed years ago, he told Anne), as well as quinidine for his recurrent tachycardia (he warned her that he could "drop dead" from taking quinidine). Phil was fearful of germs and fretted intensely when any of the girls fell ill. Jayne recalls: "He'd tell me adults don't feel well very often. He'd tell me about life in a roundabout way-being an adult wasn't too great, kids have a better time of it."

  In late March of 1959 Phil and Anne drove down to Ensenada, Mexico, and found a judge; they were married on April Fools' Day. On the drive back, Phil confessed to Anne-fearful that she would cease to love him when she knew-that he had a hernia. Anne suggested medical treatment, but Phil couldn't face the idea of a hospital. At the border, Phil decided not to declare the gallon of tequila they'd purchased for the equivalent of thirty cents and hidden under their luggage. Twenty miles on into the U. S. they heard a siren and Phil went pale, recovering only when the cops passed on.

  The marriage prospered. Phil was grateful when Anne made no objections to his growing a beard. He helped with the cooking and cleaning and knew how to make excellent martinis-two each night for Anne, while Phil sipped wine (he loved Buena Vista's Zinfandel). They raised ducks, guinea fowls, and banty chickens. Phil was a bit afraid of Anne's quarter horse and yearned for an owl as a pet (the title of Phil's last projected novel, which he did not live to write, was The Owl in Daylight). They had their first real fight over Phil's continuing to tend his old Mariana Street house. Anne wanted their home to be his primary concern. Phil sold the house. Afterward, he felt guilty about not giving Kleo half the proceeds.