Despite two years of writing inactivity, Phil's career wasn't doing badly. Good news came in the form of a visit from his Paris-based editor, Patrice Duvic, whose Editions Opta had published most of Phil's work. (Steady foreign sales, particularly in France, England, and Germany, had supported Phil despite his failure to sell a new novel since 1970.) Duvic spoke of the possibility of a screenplay based on Ubik, which several French critics saw as a masterwork of pataphysique. Soon after, Phil was interviewed (along with Spinrad) on Los Angeles's KPFK FM. And there would be glowing mention of his work in Thomas Disch's anthology The Ruins of Earth and in Brian Aldiss's study of the SF genre, Billion Year Spree-both published in 1973.
Tessa and Phil discussed moving to Vancouver or to the Bay Area, but Fullerton continued its hold on them. As Phil deadpanned in a December letter to Roger Zelazny: "There is nothing more reassuring to someone who's gone through an acute identity crisis than clean plastic apartments, streets, restaurants and furniture. Nothing gets old or worn or dirty here because if it does the police come in and kill it. I'm not sure if I have an identity again, or if I do if it's the same one (I suppose not to both questions). "
Then, in November, Phil learned that Stanislaw Lem had succeeded, after much struggle, in arranging for the publication in Poland of a translation of Ubik. The news thrilled Phil, who speculated that he might travel to Warsaw to make use of any captive royalties. The trip never materialized, but there was a brief correspondence between Phil and Lem. One topic was Lem's 1972 essay "Science Fiction: A Hopeless Case-With Exceptions," the exceptions being solely the works of Philip K. Dick. Phil explained the "trash" elements Lem had noted in his work:
But you see, Mr. Lem, there is no culture here in California, only trash. And we who grew up here and live here and write here have nothing else to include as elements in our work; you can see this in ON THE ROAD [Phil had, earlier in the letter, stressed his literary affinity to the Beats]. I mean it. The West Coast has no tradition, no dignity, no ethics-this is where that monster Richard Nixon grew up. How can one create novels based on this reality which do not contain trash, because the alternative is to go into dreadful fantasies of what it ought to be like; one must work with the trash, pit it against itself, as you so aptly put it in your article. [...] Hence the elements in such books of mine as UBIK. If God manifested Himself to us here He would do so in the form of a spraycan advertised on TV.
(When Ubik was published in Poland in 1975, Phil was angered at what he saw as broken promises concerning royalties, and (unjustly) blamed Lem. Tit for tat, Phil lobbied for Lem's expulsion from the Americanbased Science Fiction Writers Association, on the grounds that Lem's honorary, nonpaying membership violated SFWA rules prohibiting honorary membership when a writer was eligible for a regular paying membership. Lem, by virtue of having published in the U.S., was so eligible. Phil was not alone in raising this objection-Lem had raised the ire of several SFWA members by his critical comments on American SF writers-and Lem's honorary membership was ultimately revoked.)
Now that he was settled in with Tessa, Phil's writing energies had returned, in late 1972, in full force for the first time in over two years. In November 1972, he wrote to Disch: "If [Tessa] didn't exist I would have had eventually to invent her, in order to survive; [... ] My motive for once more writing is so that I can have something to dedicate to her."
His first project was the completion of Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, which had lain unfinished since August 1970. After Flow, Phil wrote his first short story since 1969, "A Little Something for Us Tempunanuts." Then it was on to Scanner-with just a brief time out for a brush with extinction. In late 1972 Phil contracted double pneumonia. Things looked so bad that "Death" thought to pay Phil a bedside visit:
He wore a single-breasted plastic suit, a tie, and carried a sort of samplecase, which he opened to show me. In it he had several psychological tests, and he indicated to me that these tests showed that I was completely nuts and therefore ought to give up and go with him. I felt relief that he would take me somewhere else, because if I was completely nuts there was no point in my trying any more and wearing myself out, and I was really so damn tired. Death pointed to a rising road, up a long twisting hillside, and indicated to me that there was a mental hospital at the top of the hill there where I could go and be and take it easy and not have to try any more. He led me up the winding road toward it, higher and higher. And then all at once Tessa came back into the bedroom to see how I was, and instantly I was back in bed sitting up against my pillow, same as always. But I had really gone a long way before she came in and it ended. Later I realized that Death had lied to me. He told me what would cause me to go voluntarily with him. Another person, he would tell something else, whatever would do it. I didn't see him again, but now I know that Death lies to make his job easier. It's a lot easier for him if you go of your own free will. I still remember, though, what relief I felt to know I could give up. Nothing but relief. How willing I was. But, then, I believed him.
Death did indeed lie. Phil proceeded to write A Scanner Darkly, the definitive portrait of the sixties drug endgame. The addictive, brain-toxic drug Phil invented for Scanner is called "Substance D" or "Death." The overcoming of Death, the triumph of the spirit over lies that drain life of meaning, is the tale told.
In music, you can form a perfect sixties syzygy with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the Beatles embodying the joyous dream that seemed not only possible but more real than reality, the Rolling Stones flashing the edge that the dream risk entailed.
in literature, you can fashion an equally telling sixties syzygy with Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America and A Scanner Darkly. Trout Fishing catches the feel of the magic that people could pull, for a time, from the hat of daily life. The sixties provided the wildly colored backdrop, the spacy patter, and the spiritual suspense to make the magic work.
And Scanner lets you see and hear how cravings for drug-based special effects maimed and killed many who, as Phil wrote in his "Author's Note," were "like children playing in the street." He added: "I myself, I am not a character in the novel; I am the novel. So, though, was our entire nation at this time." Included in Phil's "Note" is a list of friends who died or suffered permanent injury through drug abuse; included is Phil himself, with "permanent pancreatic damage." Not all of his diagnoses of "permanent psychosis" are accurate, but there is death enough to make the point that "We were forced to stop by things dreadful."
Phil produced a first draft of Scanner from February to April of 1973, then revised intensively (with the valued assistance of editor Judy-Lynn Rey) in summer 1975. Phil then wrote to editor Lawrence Ashmead (whom he naively addressed as "Editor-in-Chief" when Ashmead worked only on Doubleday SF) pleading for the house to treat Scanner as mainstream. Indeed, Scanner has few SF trappings, and its 1994 Los Angeles is recognizably our own, down to 7-11s and freeway hassles. Not since High Castle had Phil's mainstream ambitions shown so fiercely. Ashmead recalls:
Science fiction is very gutterized as pulp. I can remember trying to get people at Doubleday to read Philip K. Dick, and they'd say, "I don't read science fiction."
I have always thought Phil's books will still be selling in forty years, which is probably not true for most of his contemporaries. I tried to get him out of science fiction, but there was just no way. They just didn't take the genre seriously, and they thought of it strictly as a library sale. It just wasn't a commercial reality.
The basic plot of Scanner is the decline into something near total brain death of Fred, an undercover narc who poses as Bob Arctor, a small-time dealer, to track down the ultimate suppliers of Death. There is one standout bit of SF tech: the "scramble suit" Fred wears for anonymity when reporting on Arctor and friends. As the dealers have their own antinarc undercover operatives in the police department, Fred must keep both his real Fred and alias Bob identities secret from both sides. The "scramble suit" (inspired by Phil's phosphene vision experiences of 2-374-see Chapt
er 10) is "a multifaceted quartz lens hooked to a miniaturized computer whose memory banks held up to a million and a half physiognomic fraction-representations of various people"; these rapid-fire images are projected onto a "shroudlike membrane" in human form, in which Fred is enclosed.
What drives a man to go into a line of work in which identity splitting is inevitable? In Fred's case, disgust with suburban life. Fred, a loyal cop, prefers the company of Death addicts to that of the Orange County Lions Club members whom he addresses on the evils of drugs. In this, Phil and Fred are one. Phil wrote in a September 1973 letter:
During each marriage I was the bourgeois wage-earner, and when the marriage failed I dropped (gratefully) into the gutter of near-illegal life: narcotics and guns and knives and oh so many crimes ... not so much that I did them but that I surrounded myself with those who did; I embrace truly vicious people, I suppose as an antidote to the middle class safe rational spineless world my wives had forced on me. Cut loose from my children and wives I had no responsibilities to anyone but myself, and I wallowed in the gutter; and yet, to be fair to me, drew from that very gutter, lives of young people that might otherwise have been lost. [... ] I am only out of there because once again I am married and must lock my door each night, lest some one rip off my valuables. I was happier living with those who ripped off (i.e. stole) valuables.
Phil exaggerates for effect here; he was never a "bourgois wageearner," and he had no real desire to abandon the safe harbor of Tessa and their Fullerton home. But he had felt Fred/Bob's craving, and this spurred him to finish what he had begun with Felix Buckman in Flow: the creation of a fully sympathetic policeman protagonist. Fred's drive to escape the suburban void leads him to Death. He loves his fellow addicts even as they betray him by slipping him ever more Death. The result is toxic brain psychosis that severs the right and left hemispheres of the brain, terminating gestalt functions in the percept and cognitive systems.
It all adds up to this: Fred stops knowing who Bob is.
He narcs on himself. Listens disdainfully to the Holo-Scanner surveillance tapes of Bob and his friends babbling aimlessly. As the toxicity advances, the world grows ever more murky. His police superiors notice that all is not well and bring in Fred, clad in scramble suit, for testingjust a little too late. The brain hemispheres have begun to compete. And then all but the dimmest awareness fades away. Just before that final stage, Fred/Bob lives out the truth of Paul's words in 1 Corinthians by way of his Scanner self-surveillance:
It is [the police psychologist explains] as if one hemisphere of your brain is perceiving the world as reflected in a mirror. [...]
"Through a mirror," Fred said. A darkened mirror, he thought; a darkened scanner.
Scanner was wrung from late-sixties darkness, from Phil's times of hellish despair. Donna Hawthorne, an undercover cop who loves and betrays Fred/Bob, is based on the dark-haired Donna who saw Phil through hard times and let him go to Vancouver alone. Death addict Jerry Fabin, who cannot fight off the aphids, is drawn from Phil's Santa Venetia housemate Daniel. The maniacal Jim Barris, who may have slipped Fred/Bob the final Death overdose, is based on Peter, the ominous hanger-on whom Phil suspected of burglarizing his house. NewPath, the drug treatment center to which the husk of Fred/Bob is consigned, owes much to X-Kalay. In Scanner, New-Path is the clandestine supplier of Death.
The police, by contrast, are rendered nobly. Indeed, in February 1973 Phil wrote to the Department of justice to offer his assistance in "the war against illegal drugs" because "drug-abuse is the greatest problem I know of, and I hope with all my heart to accomplish something in this novel in the fight against it." Phil even proposed to dedicate Scanner to Attorney General Richard Kleindienst-a remarkable exception to Phil's otherwise implacable opposition to the Nixon administration. But in daily life Phil adopted a less adamant approach to drugs, even smoking an occasional joint or bowl of hash.
In the service of its antidrug theme, Scanner nails down the hazy, twisting weirdness of sixties doper dialogue perfectly. In novels such as The Soft Machine and The Wild Boys, William Burroughs employs a junkie patois that is part forties Times Square, part private eye, part laconic Beat Burroughs. Vivid and sharp, but not the way it sounded at the time. What it did sound like, when the dream devoured itself, is Ernie Luckman explaining to Fred/Bob Arctor a new idea for smuggling dope:
"Well, see, you take a huge block of hash and carve it in the shape of a man. Then you hollow out a section and put a wind-up motor like a clockworks in it, and a little cassette tape (...j and it walks up to the customs man, who says to it, 'Do you have anything to declare?' and the block of hash says, 'No, I don't,' and keeps on walking. Until it runs down on the other side of the border. "
"You could put a solar-type battery in it instead of a spring and it could keep walking for years. Forever."
"What's the use of that? It'd finally reach either the Pacific or the Atlantic. In fact, it'd walk off the edge of the Earth, like-"
"Imagine an Eskimo village, and a six-foot-high block of hash worth about-how much would that be worth?"
"About a billion dollars."
"More. Two billion."
"These Eskimos are chewing hides and carving bone spears, and this block of hash worth two billion dollars comes walking through the snow saying over and over, No, I don't.' "
"They'd wonder what it meant by that."
"They'd be puzzled forever. There'd be legends."
After this strange colloquy, a silence. Then:
"Bob, you know something ..." Luckman said at last. "1 used to be the same age as everyone else."
"I think so was I," Arctor said.
"I don't know what did it."
"Sure, Luckman," Arctor said, "you know what did it to all of us."
"Well, let's not talk about it."
Phil cried often during the long nighttime stints writing Scanner. In the spare bedroom at Quartz Lane, he would type until he collapsed from exhaustion, then sleep an hour or two and go at it again. In a 1977 Exegesis entry, Phil provided a fitting coda:
[. . .] I can see what I have done to transmute those terrible days into something worthwhile [... ] This is what God does; this is his strange mystery: how he accomplishes this. When we view the evil (which he is going to transmute) we can't see for the life of us how he can do it-but later on, & only later on, after it's done, can we see how he has used evil as the clay out of which he as potter has fashioned the pot (universe viewed as artifact).
Even as he worked on Scanner, public interest in Dick's work continued to mount. An admiring parody by John Sladek of Phil's pell-mell cosmic style-"Solar Shoe Salesman"-appeared in F & SF. In March 1973 the BBC came to Fullerton to shoot Phil acting out a scene from Counter-Clock World. That summer, the SF slick Vertex conducted an interview, followed in September by a French documentary crew who set Phil and Norman Spinrad to discoursing on Nixon and SF amid the whirling teacups at Disneyland. Then Entwhistle Books, a small independent publisher, announced plans to publish Confessions of a Crap Artist-the first of his fifties mainstream novels to make it. On French TV Phil's work was proposed for the Nobel Prize. The year closed with an interview by the London Daily Telegraph.
Alas, the subject of all this attention was near broke most of the time. To Ashmead and the Meredith Agency, Phil wrote citing the critical praise, hoping it would make a difference in the New York marketplace. It did not.
Worse yet, the new bout of writing productivity was jeopardizing Phil's health. In April 1973 he wrote to Nancy and Isa:
[T]he doctor says I have serious if not dangerous hypertension (physical high blood pressure, not psychological) and it must be controlled. So I'm on a goddam pill again, after having had no prescriptions for over a full year for anything. [...] After sending the novel [Flow] to my agent [...] I started another one [Scanner] [... ] (a) a 62-page outline; (b) 82 final pages to mail to accompany the outline for submission; (c) 240 pages more in rough. Add that up, for a period from Februa
ry 20 to April 2, and how many pages of writing do you get? A fatal stroke, that's what. See? See??? I'm writing more and faster off chemicals than I was on. And-my blood pressure is higher. Does not compute.
One source of the intense pressure Phil was feeling was also a source of great joy: Tessa was pregnant. In April they were married. Tessa recalls:
I don't know why I married Phil. He asked, and I said I would think about it. We were already living together. I wanted to have a baby, although I didn't really care whether it was out of wedlock. The next thing I knew, Phil thought I had said yes. [... ] When he got a check in April, from his agent, he called a minister and had him come to our apartment and marry us. I was five months pregnant, my feet too swollen to wear anything but sandals, and I thought it would be a good idea to marry the baby's father.
On July 25, 1973, Phil's son, Christopher, was born. It was a relief to Phil, who had feared that twins were on the way. Life with a son changed things between Phil and Tessa, but differently from the changes that followed the birth of Isa. Tessa writes:
Phil was a model father. [...] He loved his son a great deal, probably more than he loved me. [...] Where Phil and I had been "partners in crime." pulling off little pranks and practical jokes, I found myself gradually cut out in favor of Christopher. It was wonderful, for me, to watch the two of them together. It was okay to be cut out, because I enjoyed seeing their relationship blossom.
There were two practical limits to Phil's parenting: He never did diapers, and he insisted on quiet while he wrote. Quiet proved elusive, as Christopher cried loudly through most nights.
Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick Page 30