Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick

by Lawrence Sutin

  That summer, Phil wrote a story as a gift for Joan: "The Day Mr. Computer Fell Out of Its Tree." Composed in a childlike tone, "Mr. Computer" is a dress rehearsal of certain key themes in Valis. It is also a declaration of love that both delighted and frightened Joan, who feared she might not be up to the task of keeping the world intact, as the female protagonist in "Mr. Computer" must:

  Not only does that take a lot of time and energy-it takes away from anything you might want to do for yourself as a singular entity. It calls for total twenty-four-hour devotion-make sure the computer and everything else is okay.

  Phil, it seems, always was with women who were strong, and yet there was that about him that wanted to make women little girls, buy things for them. That was his form of caring and devotion. If something was bothering me and I wanted to climb in his lap and be comforted, that was okay. But if it was something more profound, he wasn't good at that, because that always carries a responsibility to it. It can be a burden.

  I really couldn't let him pamper me in a little-girl way. I had my own car, money, life-I was in many ways the antithesis of what he wanted me to be.

  That pampering also had a backlash effect. If things weren't working out, or there was a divorce, that same woman he'd wanted to buy things for turned into the flip side-"She wants my house, my novels."

  That summer in Sonoma, Phil resumed his acquaintance with fellow SF writer Robert Silverberg. They had first met in 1964, but since then Silverberg had gone on to garner numerous Hugos and Nebulas and to earn advances that dwarfed Phil's. In interview he recalls: "Phil did feel competitive with me in some fashion-a nice fashion. But there was always an edge on Phil, whether because I was the hot new kid on the block or maybe because he resonated with something in my character. He would always duel with me in a playful way-defying me to keep up in banter." The humor could serve as a facade. Silverberg writes: "Once we held a long public conversation in fractured Latin in the cocktail lounge of a convention hotel; it was wildly funny, but I would rather have been speaking English with him. I figured he was lost to me."

  In early 1977, Silverberg had favorably reviewed Scanner in Cosmos. A correspondence ensued, in which Silverberg confided to Phil the anguish of his then-ongoing divorce. To Silverberg, Phil was a man who had lived on the edge long enough to serve as a worthy guide through hard times. Indeed, Phil did offer solace and advice, and the competitive edge vanished. In their private talks, Phil seemed to Silverberg "much quieter and much more authentic-less the performer. Mainly he sounded very troubled and frightened. His publishers, health, women, the break-in. Always something."

  In June-July 1977, D. Scott Apel and Kevin Briggs conducted interviews with Phil, which are included in Apel's excellent Philip K. Dick: The Dream Connection (1987). Apel writes: "Photos do not do him justice. He was large, physically imposing and hairy. He was wearing slacks and an open shirt, as if his hairy barrel chest and barrel belly couldn't stand being confined." Apel notes that when Phil took phone calls, he would often break off to consult his Rolodex. "When he came back on the line, it was always with some personal comment, like, `How'd the surgery go on your cat?' or `How come you haven't called in six months?' After ringing off, he'd make a note of the conversation on the caller's card, and then continue with the interview."

  Phil battled depressions throughout the summer-his failure to find a novel to fit 2-3-74 left him feeling woefully unproductive, and his unfulfilled contract with Bantam weighed heavily upon him. But the relationship with Joan had infused him with new confidence. Proof of this was his willingness to travel with her, in September 1977, to Metz, France, for an SF festival of which he had been named guest of honor. Phil was nervous enough about the trip to score a supply of speed-the only time he resorted to amphetamines in his final decade.

  Nonetheless, for Phil, the Metz Festival was a triumph over longstanding fears. He enjoyed the fine architecture of the city, relished sampling French food and wine, and was understandably thrilled to find that in France he was regarded by fans and the press as the greatest SF writer in the world. Meanwhile, Joan came down with stomach flu and was largely confined to their hotel room. During their breakup two months later, Phil would claim that she'd had a "nervous breakdown" in France-a claim he denied when Joan confronted him about it. The reality was that it galled Phil not to have her by his side throughout the festivities, though it did leave him free to flirt madly.

  Roger Zelazny, who also attended the Metz Festival, recalls that Phil's sixties reputation had preceded him. At one dinner, a young Frenchman popped the pill that Phil had placed alongside his plate, then asked what to expect. Phil explained that he'd soon feel better if he happened to have a sore throat.

  There was a perfect Phildickian mix-up with regard to Phil's guest of honor speech, "If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others." The speech raised a number of speculations derived from 2-3-74, such as our world seen as a Gnostic computer chess game: "God, the Programmer-Reprogrammer, is not making his moves of improvement against inert matter; he is dealing with a cunning opponent. Let us say that on the gameboard-our universe in space-time-the dark counterplayer makes a move; he sets up a reality situation." All of this would have been startling enough if Phil had read the speech as he'd written it (with simultaneous translation into French). But at the last moment the festival organizers asked Phil to shorten it by twenty minutes. Phil made some hasty deletions, which were not, alas, the same deletions made by his translator. The resulting bilingual hybrid, coupled with Phil's delight in sowing tongue-in-cheek chaos, left the audience in a daze. Zelazny recalls:

  [... ] Several hours after the time the talk was scheduled, people began drifting in from the hall where Phil had been speaking. A man came up to me with a book and said, "Monsieur Zelazny, you have written a book with Monsieur Dick [Deus Irae]. You know his mind. I have just come from his talk. Is it true he wishes to found a new religion, with himself as Pope?"

  I said, "Well, he has never mentioned that ambition to me. I don't know how these things come through in translation. He has a very peculiar sense of humor. It might not have carried through properly. But I don't think he meant it to be taken literally."

  The fellow who was behind me said, "Non, I think you are wrong. I rode back to the hotel in a taxi, and Monsieur Dick gave me the power to remit sins and to kill fleas."

  I said, "I'm sure that was meant to be taken with a grain of salt. I wouldn't be too concerned about it."

  A little later, another fellow came in [...J "Well, in the lecture he said that there are many parallel time tracks and we are on the wrong one, because of the fact that God and the Devil are playing a game of chess and every time one makes a move, it reprograms us to a different time track, and that whenever Phil Dick writes a book, it switches us back to the proper track. Would you care to comment on this?"

  I begged off.

  Harlan Ellison was also in attendance at Metz. He and Phil hadn't been in contact since their 1975 break, and Ellison avoided attending Phil's speech. He recalls that the audience, as it wandered back to the hotel bar where Ellison sat nursing a Perrier, "looked like they had been stunned by a ball peen hammer. They couldn't describe it to me except that they thought he was either drunk or doped. After the speech Phil was, if not ostracized, then treated differently. I felt very bad for him, but I couldn't get near him or want to get near him to help."

  The two did encounter each other a few days later in that same hotel bar. Neither had been drinking, but the verbal pyrotechnics lasted better than an hour. Ellison recalls:

  Phil looked like hell physically. Pale, dark bags under his eyes, haunted look. I didn't know what he had been going through. By the time Metz came along, I was convinced he was a loony-unreliable and not fit to deal with as a friend.

  It started off with him making an introductory jibe at me and just took off from there. Phil would say something that was intended to hurt you, but he delivered it with such cleverness that it came off
as light and frivolous. I was not about to be made an ass of by any damn body.

  Joan, who witnessed the fray, remembers it this way:

  Phil was very antithetical to Harlan. Harlan is very cocky, glib, cool, and here is Phil going clunk clunk clunk. Phil was not a very debonair or self-assured man. Snuff falling out of his nose, ninety-two spots on his tie-you know. And Harlan thought Phil treated people very badly because he wandered away, got lost, had people support him rather than be master of his own ship.

  Anyway, they got into this huge debate. Phil does very well in those kinds of situations. Here is Harlan banging his chest, and Phil was more a philosopher. Phil was just great-more dynamic and sexy than I'd ever seen him be.

  The bar crowd relished the bloodletting, but the rift between the two friends was now final-to the lasting regret of both.

  On their return to the States, the plan was that Phil would wrap up affairs in Santa Ana and then rejoin Joan in Sonoma. In October, Phil did attend the SF Octocon in Santa Rosa, where he mingled with kindred spirits Theodore Sturgeon and Robert Anton Wilson. But Phil now balked at a permanent move back to Northern California, and Joan would not consider Orange County residence. The relationship ended. For years to come Phil would miss Joan-the last woman with whom he lived in a serious relationship.

  But friendships and Exegesis labors sustained him. He and Jeter drew ever closer through their night-shift collaborations. In late 1977, Jeter introduced Phil to Discreet Music, an album of tape loop minimalist music by Brian Eno-the inspiration for the "Synchronicity Music" of composer "Brent Mini" in Valis. Phil adored the album, playing it constantly. Recalls Jeter: "And I thought, 'Jesus, Phil. You may be off drugs, but you still have the drug user's personality. Give you anything good, and the first thing you do is go out and abuse it.' "

  Jeter's barbed wit had the salutary power to shake Phil free from his periodic depressions. During one funk in March 1978, Jeter told him that if he was too fucked up to go out and buy something that would cheer him up-a good stereo system-then he was a loser and might as well end it all. Together they went to an audio store, where Phil happily plunked down for an excellent system. In May, Phil paid full cash purchase price for a new red Mercury Capri. He could afford to make such moves because the foreign and reprint sales of his cumulative work were conferring upon Phil upper-middle-class status for the very first time in his life. In 1977 he grossed roughly $55,000; in 1978 he exceeded $90,000. Phil gave to several charities, including Care, Save the Children, and the Crusade for Life, an antiabortion group. And he took pride and comfort in the success he'd achieved at long last. But the money didn't change the basic pattern of his life: shared dinners with neighbor Doris, snuff, Thursday nights at Powers's place, and the Exegesis.

  Deter sometimes drove Phil to group therapy sessions at Orange County Medical Center. Phil disliked these sessions, but was required to attend in order to receive his prescribed medications. He tried to make the best of a bad situation. Recalls Jeter:

  He would come out with phone numbers! Of these very weird people.

  I said, "Phil, you want to go to a bar and meet people? Whatever you want to do. Church even. That's fine. But don't go to the mental ward of the Orange County Hospital and come out with phone numbers. These people are not the kind you need to get involved with."

  He'd go, "Yeah, I suppose you're right."

  He's the one person I ever knew who seriously cruised those kinds of places for dates.

  Phil was now long overdue on his promised novel for Bantam. He was bursting with metaphysics, but the shape of the plot would not come. Meanwhile, from his handwritten Exegesis notes, he attempted a synthesis of his key ideas. In January 1978, he typed out in one long night an essay titled "Cosmogony and Cosmology," which posited an "Urgrund" (fundamental Being) that, for the sake of self-awareness, "constructed a reality-projecting artifact (or demiurge; cf Plato and the Gnostics)," which had in turn created our own spurious empirical world. We are, at one and the same time, instructed and enslaved by the artifact. To progress spiritually, we must learn to break free from false reality-to disobey our teacher. Our spur to do so is suffering:

  What can one say in favor of the suffering of little creatures in this world? Nothing. Nothing, except that it will by its nature trigger off revolt or disobedience-which in turn will lead to an abolition of this world and a return to the Godhead.

  In an essay written later that year-"How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later"-Phil explored similar themes with greater skepticism and a lighter hand. Its title playfully sums up the Exegesis, which now numbered several thousand pages.

  In August 1978, Dorothy died in a Bay Area hospital. During her final illness, Phil had phoned Lynne Cecil, who knew what agony travel was for Phil and so dissuaded him from flying up to pay a last visit. At first, Phil's reaction to his mother's death was shock and grief. Second wife Kleo recalls that (much to her surprise) Phil called her long-distance to tell her the news, his voice distraught and anguished. But then a chill set in again. In his address book, by Dorothy's name, he inscribed simply "todt" (German: dead). And in the Exegesis, in late 1978, Dorothy's passing is seen as a favorable turn-enhancing Phil's personal growth:

  Only now, as I become for the first time in my life financially secure, am I becoming sane, free of psychotic activity (... ] Also, my accomplishments last year-traveling, being with Joan-did wonders for my psychological health. I learned to say no, & I conquered most of my phobias. I think they lessened as I learned to enjoy living alone for the first time in my life. [...] The death of my mother has helped, because I can see what a malign person she was in my life & how I feared and disliked her-which she deserved.

  What is most startling about this passage is the offhand manner in which Phil introduces the subject of Dorothy's death-it is no more nor less than one of a list of recent developments cited to demonstrate Phil's psychological progress. His hatred for her, as expressed here, was complete and unrepentant. Of all the aspects of Phil's personality, this is perhaps the most startling and saddening. For Dorothy did love her son, and at many points in Phil's life-the early writing years, the breakup with Anne, the dark days in Santa Venetia-he had drawn heavily on that love. But it had never been enough-not for Phil, and surely not for sister Jane. Now, at last, they both were avenged.

  In a September 1978 entry, Phil was far less sanguine about his prospects. The form for a novel to encompass 2-3-74 still eluded him. He was lost in his own questionings. And soon, he sensed, he was to die:

  My books (& stories) are intellectual (conceptual) mazes. & I am in an intellectual maze in trying to figure out our situation (who we are & how we look into the world, & world as illusion, etc) because the situation is a maze, leading back to itself, & false clues show up, such as our "rebellion." [.j

  The fact that after 4'h years of strenuous exegete, whereupon I have reached these conclusions (not to mention 27 years of published writing) I now find myself signalled to die-which effectively makes it impossible for me to put this gnosis in a form that I can publish-is a condition which can be deduced from my exegesis itself, & shows I'm on the right intellectual path, but to no avail.

  In late September, "Therese"-a young woman whom Phil had met at Metz the year before-came to stay for a month at his Santa Ana apartment. Phil was a gracious host, providing financial help and emotional encouragement. According to Phil, on the last night of her visit Therese offered to make love with him by way of repayment for his kindness. Her whorish ways appalled Phil even as they caught at his lust. He turned her down. In an anguished Exegesis entry, the enticements of sex were stripped away to show the skull of death beneath the skin. Lust-like art and the Exegesis itself-is a stratagem of the maze:

  I now know sin & evil, I know myself and what went wrong-what Genesis is about. I know that without Christ's help I am damned. [...] Obviously I cannot punish myself for this original sin by killing myself, or being killed; my punishment is that which
I don't want: life. & a lonely and pointless life, a life I loathe. What I really want is what I wanted from [Therese]. But the price is too great: humiliation, to be degraded & know I was degraded. It's like being addicted to some hideous drug.

  In his vehemence here, Phil returns to the tone of suspicion and loathing that marked his descriptions of sex in his earliest mainstream novels of the late forties, such as Gather Yourselves Together and the notes for the unfinished The Earthshaker. Phil was no prude, but he did bear within himself a visceral sense of disgust over sex, which his pleasurable adult sexual experiences never did quite strip away. Then too, his temporary bout of impotence during his time with Joan Simpson in 1977 may have contributed to his anxieties with Therese.

  Another problem that would not go away was the long-overdue novel for Bantam. A young newcomer to the Meredith Agency played a role in helping him solve it. Russell Galen was an ardent admirer of Phil's work and had Phil assigned to him as a client. He recalls: "Things could have been done on Phil's behalf that weren't being done, and I simply started doing them. Nobody objected, because it brought in considerable income to the agency." Under Galen's aegis, Phil's back titles were kept steadily in print, and it was Galen who would negotiate the Blade Runner film deal. But none of Galen's efforts proved more fateful than his unsuccessful attempt, in September 1978, to market a book of Phil's nonfiction. Phil, delighted at being so championed, sent a glowing letter of thanks-Galen had convinced him that he had a novel in him after all.

  On November 29, Phil mailed off the Valis manuscript-dedicated "To Russell Galen, who showed me the right way"-to the Meredith Agency. The cover letter read: "Here is VALIS for Bantam. My work is done."