Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick

by Lawrence Sutin

  I know I was frustrating to Phil, because as much as I respected him as a writer, I wasn't interested in a romantic attachment. I had such an intense feeling that he didn't know who I was-that he was in love with some internal image of his that he had pinned on to me. I went over to see him because he would beg me to, basically. He didn't come down too hard in telling me that he loved me-what he did say was that he needed me and that I could save him.

  The J'Ann he thought he loved had remarkably little to do with me. He would make grandiose and quite abstract statements about how I was so bright and how I could cope with things. It's true I'm a strong woman, but that time in my life was an extremely bad one-I wasn't coping with anything. So for him to say how strong I was really struck me as bizarre.

  By November 1970, J'Ann felt compelled to break off her visits. Phil's journal entries on their failed romance parallel J'Ann's account. Early on, Phil wrote that J'Ann "stepped in and saved me." How? By filling in for bitch-mother Dorothy:

  In contrast, consider my mother who has not visited me since Nancy left, although she visited I stepsister] Lynne and in fact came right to the door of this house-but wouldn't come in. Well it was she 42 years ago I at the time of Phil and Jane's birth] who set into action the security drive that finally at long last someone satisfied. ]...] So in a sense J'Ann has been the mother I never had

  And now J'Ann was gone. "I don't merely love her; I require her to live." But within a month, Phil (demonstrating the recuperative powers that fortunately accompanied his head-over-heels approach) was able to see J'Ann more clearly: "Maybe the reason I turned so bitterly on her did not have to do with her flat point out blank refusing to go in my room but rather her detailing how realistically she had failed to cope-in contrast to my idealistic, romantic picture of her coping to beat hell."

  By December Phil had fallen in love again-with both members of a lesbian couple in their early twenties. Again the relationship was rather intense, especially since Phil identified one of the couple with Jane and fantasized about bringing both of them to confront his mother. From his journal:

  I would be saying, "Look, Dorothy; I know two girls who are stronger than you. You are old and will soon die, but these girls are strong and young and capable. They will survive long after either of us." [...] A lifetime ambition fulfilled. One-upmanship on my sainted, aged mother who, when I was nineteen, told me I was so weak that I would become homosexual once I left her.

  Whether the visit-Phil presenting a living Jane to Dorothy-ever took place is not known. But Phil's journals indicate that by January 1971, the relationship had come apart. The young girl who had reminded Phil of his sister had looked to him to "ease the pain," but instead he brought only more pain. "She was like Jane-and she was killedneglected-allowed to die-all over again. Can I bear it? Has she the courage to face the life ahead of her without me?" Further on, Phil realized that she would survive. Still further on, his concern for her (and others) turned to fear:

  I hate them because they let me hurt them because their love for me depends on me trusting me. I'm terribly afraid of them and of what I might further do to hurt them-I just want to get away. [... ] Maybe they were all weak, fragile, delicately balanced people and my intensity was too much for them. What I wanted from them and to see happen-I was imposing myself on them and their reality the way I do in a book. Maybe I tried to write their lives. I wouldn't let the people around me live; I had to mastermind everything.

  In his next entry Phil could absolve himself: "I'm very angry and I can't sleep-I also know I'm tired-nuts to their protective drives; in the final upshot no one can protect anybody. It doesn't matter whether you're well or sick, you still have to do it."

  With this girl, Phil reenacted the trauma of Jane's death, including both his desperate desire to bring Jane back to life (through the fantasized visit to Dorothy) and his guilty identification with Dorothy (through failing the girl). Jane's survival as a defiant lesbian (like Alys Buckman in Flow) would be a slap in Dorothy's face; her taunts over Phil's "weak" "homosexual" tendencies would be refuted in an ultimate manner: by the sight of a strong child who had survived her neglect (which Phil, the guilt-filled surviving twin, had in fact done but could not believe he had done). It was, to Phil, an agony that at forty-two he still yearned for Dorothy to visit, to love him, to affirm his manhood.

  In fact, Phil was in close contact with Dorothy-through lengthy, frequent phone calls-all through the misery of 1970-71. Vituperative contact it was, but it persisted. Son and mother remained bound, even as Phil's search for a woman to eclipse her intensified.

  Joseph Hudner, Phil's stepfather, kept a diary for the first half of 1971, some entries of which reveal the painful relations between Phil and Dorothy, as well as Phil's utter unreliability, during this period. The entries summarized here provide a valuable record of Phil's doings and of Dorothy's (and Joseph's) view of him. Early 1971, as seen through a diary darkly:

  January 13: Phil calls Dorothy twice. He has taken on the care of a seventeen-year-old girl whom Phil describes as "psychotic." Phil's psychiatrist says he functions best in crises-and so must have them one after another. Dorothy believes "Philip cannot function in the dull daylight." He handles emotional crises on four-to five-year-old level-his age when she and Edgar divorced.

  January 18: Phil phones, excited over new use of I Ching.

  January 31: Phil's house full of "oddball characters," whom Phil terms a "family."

  February 4: Joseph unhappy that Hacienda Way house is in their name. "We love him. Let it go."

  February 26: The loan company begins foreclosure. Phil late with payments but never told the Hudners. Joseph fears his credit is shot.

  February 27: Phil phones to say he'll repay fifty dollars he just borrowed. Dorothy tells him they know about the foreclosure. Phil shocked to learn of possible effect on their credit, assures Dorothy that Doubleday has agreed to give him enough per year to live on [not true] and that he'll pay up the back loans.

  March 31: Phil phones, depressed about house and relationship with seventeen-year-old girl living with him. Says he attempted suicide.

  April 4: Phil phones, is living with a new woman-"Jennifer." [Here and throughout the rest of this book, false names are used in every case where someone is introduced by first name in quotes.] Joseph tells him he wants no more responsibility for the house; Phil agrees to figure out a way to accomplish this. Problem: If Phil files the deed of gift Dorothy and Joseph gave him two years ago, the IRS will foreclose on the house for back taxes.

  April 9: Phil phones. He and Jennifer will try a life together. He's into something so bad he can't tell Dorothy what it is. Jennifer opposed, so he's already half out of it. Joseph appalled.

  April 13: Phil phones. He's staying at Jennifer's place, can't cope with his house and wants to sell it.

  April 19: Phil phones. Wants to sell house in June, use half the profits to go down to Mexico with Jennifer.

  April 22: Phil phones. Has no money. Joseph sent in late payment to loan company.

  April 23: Phil phones. Has some money but not enough for house payment, wants a loan. Dorothy doesn't tell him they've already sent in payment. Phil claims his money tied up in bank accounts in Jennifer's name-she won't let him at it. Joseph concludes: "Can't believe anything he says."

  April 26 and 27: Phil phones. Convinced he can help Jennifer. Joseph sees it as part of Phil's pattern of believing he can "save" women. "He can't help himself; so he can help her."

  April 30: Phil phones, tells Dorothy he's a drug addict, takes a thousand amphetamine tablets a week. Jennifer helping him quit. "We knew Philip was taking drugs but didn't know he was hooked that bad. [...] Philip says it's either quit or die. [... ] Shock of Philip being a dope addict is great to both Dorothy and me."

  May 2: Phil phones. Always talks to Dorothy and not Joseph. Says good-bye to Dorothy, he's going to kill himself. Dorothy tries to keep the conversation going, but Phil hangs up. Calls back a few minutes later
to say Dorothy is right-he has a responsibility to his daughters and his pets. Keeps saying that no one has ever really cared for him, that he has wanted to die ever since he was five-when Edgar left. He's been on Benzedrine and other drugs since 1951, when Kleo's physician father gave him a prescription. Can't write if he's off drugs. While with Nancy was off them two months, didn't write, went back on them when she said he could. "Dorothy badly shaken up." Joseph (concerned over suicide threat) phones Jennifer, who finds Phil at her place, listening to music.

  May 3: "Dorothy feels there is no hope for Philip because of his bent and distorted personality." "He told Dorothy last night that he could make more off his drug deals than his writing." [Note: Those who knew Phil well during this time recall that he gave pills away freely. His statement, if made, was likely intended to shock and impress.] Jennifer phones, says she and her doctor have taken Phil to the psych ward of Stanford University Hospital (Hoover Pavilion).

  The idea of a stay in the psych ward did not appeal to Phil initially. But he felt he had no choice-as he was staying at Jennifer's place in Palo Alto, without money or car, it was hitchhike back to San Rafael or deal with her insistence that he was a drug addict.

  He was admitted on May 3 and checked out on May 6 with the approval of the examining psychiatrist, Dr. Harry Bryan. Dr. Bryan's records state that Phil said he was taking one thousand Methedrine tabs per week, costing him three hundred dollars per month. He was also taking 10 mg of Stelazine four times a day, as well as other tranquilizers. There was a past threat of suicide. Phil's mental-status exam showed an "astute" intellect with no evidence of delusions. Physical exams showed sustained recovery from the pancreatitis-and no physical drug addiction or internal organic damage. Phil was in remarkable shape for someone downing a thousand beans a week. Even his blood pressure was normal. In their discussions, Dr. Bryan found Phil optimistic with respect to the hippie movement. Dr. Bryan recalls: "In all of his behavior he was so people-oriented, so friendly and compassionate, that any paranoia would have been temporary and a spin-off from stopping the speed or taking the speed." While Phil was in Hoover Pavilion, Joseph's diary shows that he spoke often by phone with Dorothy. After he was discharged on May 6, Phil continued to pay visits to Dr. X (whose diagnosis of Phil then was schizophrenic reaction), as well as to two other psychiatrists (who posited paranoia and malingering, respectively).

  Lynne Cecil confirms that during 1971 Phil was often "very dramatic"-everything became exaggerated in his presence. This year stood out as one of Phil's worst times:

  He was paranoid-I know it was from the effect of the drugs. At one point he knocked on my door in the middle of the night. I was also living in San Rafael, and he had gotten a friend to drive him over at 4:00 A. M. I was really upset and angry about it-I didn't want him in my living room and there he was. He was talking about some kind of plot with the CIA. It was very involved-he had written something in one of his books that corresponded with something true and the CIA was interested. It was full-blown-he was looking over his shoulder all the time.

  Phil's crises, financial calamities, and paranoia worsened to the point where, in June, he accused Dorothy and Joseph of conspiring to take his house away from him. On June 15 Joseph remarked that "Dorothy feels that Philip will have a psychotic break if he doesn't have this continuous string of crises he gets into. (And often invents.)" Later that month Joseph wrote of the house accusations: "So ends things for me with Philip. If and since he can construct and believe a lie like that, there is no reason to believe anything he tells us about his doings, life, and other people. I have a feeling of sadness about this."

  Joseph's diary ends in July 1971. He died shortly thereafter. In the course of a most difficult relationship with Phil, Joseph extended contin ual financial and emotional support. And love. The diary, for all its horrors, confirms that as well.

  The chasm between Phil and the Hudners lent urgency to Phil's desire to create a new family in Santa Venetia. Phil's obsession-which put fiction writing on hold-was to reassemble what had been shattered by Nancy's departure. Lots of young folk passed through these last months of 1971. Bikers and boppers, diagnosed schizos and violent crazies, even a few sweet souls. They came to listen to the good stereo, to score, or just to get to a place where they were welcome. A few moved in rent-free when Phil asked them to. To visitor Paul Williams, Phil seemed to be "playing a kind of guru role. It was a weird scene." Indeed, there were those toward whom Phil played the role of wise rescuer. And in this role, Phil had his successes. He provided food and shelter, listened intently, cared deeply.

  But Phil did not aspire-and was quite unfit-to play the role of a full-fledged commune leader. However much he yearned to rescue his friends, he needed their love back quite as much. To need is to become equal: poor strategy for a guru. The boppers were never in awe of Philip K. Dick the writer. They liked this strange older guy Phil, who always had beans to share and swung from mad raps to kindness to fear to three-daysstraight crashing in his bedroom, door closed. Sometimes they teased him, sometimes they ripped him off outright. They sensed the loneliness, the need.

  Two men who came to live with Phil in June 1971 were "Rick" and "Daniel," two speed freaks who were both dead by the time A Scanner Darkly was published in 1977. Rick, in his mid-thirties, had spent time in a mental hospital. He was thin, with scary eyes, and kept several loaded rifles under his bed. Both Phil and Rick feared that the FBI or CIA was watching the house, but Phil hid Rick's ammunition and removed the firing pins from the rifles. Daniel, a talented musician in his early twenties, was dark-skinned with blue-black hair. In Scanner, burnout Jerry Fabin believes that aphids are crawling all over him. Daniel suffered from the same mental agony. Like Fabin, he sprayed Raid on himself. At times (as in Scanner) Daniel's obsession struck his housemates as funny. Head-tripping was common sixties drug fun: How far can you get someone to go with your/their fantasy? Rick flicked imaginary bugs at Daniel from across the room. Phil kept a shoebox supposedly full of captured aphids.

  Other Santa Venetia regulars included two brothers, "Mike" and "Lonnie," both of junior high age. When the jack holding up the car he was working on started to give, Mike was saved by the courage and quick action of a drug burnout-an incident Phil included in Scanner, as it expressed for him the human kindness preserved even within the husk of addiction.

  "Gene" and "Sandy" were a teenage couple whom Phil befriended. Both Gene and Phil owned guns and played around with them; Phil once shot a hole in a window. Phil was off and on in love with Sandy, an attractive young Japanese woman who was studying nursing and could lend an air of calm to Phil's confusions. In his worst fits of jealousy over her love for Gene, Phil would ask Sandy to leave, then shortly afterward plead for her to return.

  Then there was "Don," a fifteen-year-old veteran of juvenile court, who would hide when Phil's SF friends-Terry and Carol Carr, Ray and Kirsten Nelson, Crania and Steve Davis-came by to visit. Don recalls that Phil would act totally straight with these older friends and would keep his writing office an oasis of neatness in the house. But as the year went on, Phil grew subject to fits of rage, during which he would fling books off the shelves and even knock over his own speakers. Once Don insisted that Phil sell-not give him a hundred bennies. Phil asked for two dollars, well below street price. Don gave him four. The next day Phil burned the bills.

  Phil had a sunnier friendship with Loren Cavit, a fifteen-year-old who heard about Phil's house through a friend. Loren succeeded in coaxing Phil out of the house for a question-and-answer session with her high school class, which had read "Roog," his first story sale back in 1951. (The delightful exchange between Phil and the kids was published in Reflections of the Future, a 1975 SF anthology.) Loren recalls that Phil was nervous on the way to the talk-and ecstatic afterward:

  Phil didn't consider himself old. He's the only person I know of who can transcend levels. He can rap with a two-year-old and then turn around, at a dinner, and talk with intellectuals. Maybe he p
layed with people; I do believe he did. But he would never put you down. He was in conflict with himself, but he wouldn't share that except in little bits once in a while-the confusion he felt.

  During their talks, the perpetually lovelorn Phil sought advice from Loren. "He always fantasized about every woman he knew-maybe it was more fun to fantasize than to act on it. He'd want feedback on chicks'Do you think she'd go out with me?' He'd get crushes like a sixteen-yearold."

  But the young woman who meant the most to Phil first rode up to the house, in late 1970, on the back of her boyfriend's Harley Davidson. She helped inspire Donna Hawthorne in Scanner, Gloria in Valis (p. 1981), and Angel Archer in The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (p. 1982). It is as "Donna" that she'll be referred to here.

  They were friends, never lovers. Phil would have wanted things differently, but it didn't matter-he cherished Donna's street-smart courage, the beauty and warmth of her dark hair and dark eyes. Household members suspected that Donna was setting Phil up for a rip-off. Phil himself came to share these suspicions-and still he loved her, didn't care if they were true or not. He even wrote up a document giving her the right to use all his possessions and to be on the premises at any time-to preclude her being busted, should she become implicated in any of the burglaries that Phil feared would occur. And ultimately did.

  In a letter, Phil described Donna this way:

  She was just a bibbity-boppity gutter-type, [...] virtually illiterate, just out of high school, a brooding dark girl of French peasant background whose ambition it was [... ] to be a checker at Safeway. Nobody paid any attention to what she said except me. I believed everything she said. [... ] Without her wise and dispassionate guidance during the year after Nancy left me, I would have gone even nutsier than I did.