Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (11 page)

Last contribution, I think. Have gotten to the point where she doesn't understand my pieces. No point in sending in any more.

Don't think she ever did!

While Phil showed considerable passion as to writing, he continued to be desultory in his schoolwork. His grades at Garfield Junior High were good, but he was coasting and bored with his teachers. To spur him, Dorothy decided upon a boarding school-the California Preparatory School in Ojai, to the south. The Ojai catalogue was plainspoken: "[Pjersistent, down-right hard work and close attention to the main purpose of the School is rigidly insisted upon for every boy." Kitchen duties and weekly church attendance were mandatory.

Phil responded by earning a "cum laude" class rank for the 1942-43 prep school year; other than C's in phys ed, he did well in all subjects. Minor disciplinary infractions included swearing and using a curtain rod as a peashooter. But the strain of the new daily regimen quickly showed. His letters to Dorothy from Ojai show Phil's remarkable capacity-which he would utilize to great advantage in the SF novels-to turn a single set of facts (in this case, life at Ojai) into the basis for constantly shifting and equally credible or incredible conclusions.

Early on Phil complained that kitchen duties interfered with his studies and so he was failing math; his belongings were being stolen; he was bullied by eighteen-year-olds; he was losing weight because he declined the potatoes served twice a day. But he was affronted when Dorothy suggested that he come home-he was a man, not a homesick boy. She must have found it difficult to keep track of which shell the pea was under. From a letter by Phil of October 1942:

As soon as I mailed the [previous] letter I sent you I was sorry that I had done it. I realize now what a cruel thing it was to do, and I thought that you would realize that I was so homesick the first week that you would expect a letter like that. Surely the fact that you would want me to come home because you missed me wouldn't overpower your logic in realizing that I would not mean what I said. [... ] Here is what I think we should do: Don't send Dr. Brush [the headmaster] any kind of a letter; don't send for me; don't decide that I don't like it here. I do not like it here too much, but I like it alot better than when I wrote that letter. Then, somewhere around Oct. 23, if I still don't like it, I will come home.

A week or so later:

I do not like working, but I do not think that it makes any difference to whether I stay or not. I like it here now, as much as I would if I did not have to work.

[...1

I will not stay here if I do not have to work, because everyone would say, "What a sissy he is." If you think that being behind in my classes is reason enough for coming home, then I had better do so. Other than that I like it swell here.

By October 22, he was back to tangled reassessments:

For goodness sake, don't tell me that I can come home, because it is just like when you would say "All right, you don't have to go to school today." [.... ] I hope that the fact that you miss me does not influence your judgment. If you want me to be a spoiled brat, then just let me come home. That would be admitting defeat, and I am going to prove that I am just as much a man as any boy here.

In this same letter, Phil triumphantly informed his mother of his A-grade English paper on a cat, which his teacher read aloud to the class "because they begged him to read it after he had read the first paragraph out loud to make a correction on it." Phil added, "I think that my writing is O. K."

Phil's final letter to Dorothy, in May 1943, declared: "As long as I live I will never make the mistake again of going to a boarding school." He returned to Garfield for ninth grade in the autumn of 1943; in February 1944 he advanced to Berkeley High School. But his difficulties did not end with escape from Ojai. There was something visceral in his hatred of academic structure. In a 1974 letter to his fourteen-year-old daughter Laura:

Around the time I was your age I went exactly one half the time and stayed home the other half. School systems have been shown [...] to isolate kids from the real world, to teach them skills no longer needed, to ill-equip them to handle life when or if they ever emerge from the school. In a sense, the better you adapt to school the less your chances are of later adapting to the actual world. So I figure, the worse you adapt to school, the better you will be able to handle reality when you finally manage to get loose at last from school, if that ever happens. But I guess I have what in the military they call a "poor attitude," which means "shape up or ship out." I always elected to ship out.

Phil's attempt to draw an absolute inverse correlation between academic and real-life skills is strained. His efforts at justification-even glorification-of his school problems gloss over the extreme anxieties he experienced at the time.

The phobias he couldn't fight (as he d; scribed them to George Kohler) grew in strength during his ninth-grade stint at Garfield, when he experienced recurrent attacks of vertigo that left him bedridden for days at a time. As a sophomore at Berkeley High, a new friend, Dick Daniels, urged Phil to usher at a performance of the San Francisco Symphony. Phil adored classical music, but the strain of the formal public setting was too great. Anne Dick writes: "Years later, Phil said that he had had [at the symphony concert] a terrible vertigo attack, that something irreversible happened to his psyche when he was ushering. [... ] His being sank down into itself, it was as if he could only see out into the world with a periscope, as if he were in a submarine. He felt that he had never recovered the ability to perceive the world directly."

What underlay these attacks? In a December 1981 letter to daughter Isa (then fifteen, Phil's age when the attacks began), he outlined the stakes-survival or oblivion:

At about the seventh grade in school the person's own individual identity starts to come into being; [.... ] And (and this is what I think, although I may be wrong) the person senses the possibility that this new self, this unique identity, may be snuffed out, may be engulfed by the world that confronts him or her, especially by all the other identities coming into existence on all sides. The real fear, then, is that you yourself-which at one time did not exist-may again not exist; fear inside you, flooding over you in wave after wave of panic, is what is experienced as an engulfing of that self.

Vertigo as the fear of engulfment, of extinction. In his 1965 essay "Schizophrenia & The Book of Changes," Phil linked those fears with the urge that led him to write within the fantasy and SF genres. In Martian Time-Slip (1964), protagonist Jack Bohlen, an "ex-schizophrenic" who hated school and serves as repairman for the Earth colony on Mars, must fix the Public School teaching simulacra. When one unit, "Kindly Dad" (the obverse of the "Father-thing"), begins to rattle off rote assurances, Bohlen lashes out in rage:

"Now here's what I think," Jack said. "I think this Public School and you teaching machines are going to rear another generation of schizophrenics, the descendants of people like me who are making a fine adaptation to this new planet. You're going to split the psyches of these children because you're teaching them to expect an environment which doesn't exist for them. It doesn't even exist back on Earth, now; it's obsolete. I...]"

"Yes, Little Jackie, it has to be."

"What you ought to be teaching," Jack said, "is, how do we-"

"Yes, Little Jackie," Kindly Dad interrupted him, "it has to be." L...J

"You're stuck," Jack said. "Kindly Dad, you've got a worn gear-tooth."

"Yes, Little Jackie," Kindly Dad said, "it has to be."

The battle lines were already drawn by the time Phil entered Berkeley High: Either engulfment or refuge in the realm of imaginative art. Phil had come to see-could not help but see-that his "unique identity" was not about to be tamed or reasoned away.

s

Forward Into The "Real" World, Or, Phil And The Cosmos Start To
Compare Notes Seriously (1944-1950)

This original struggle to break free of my mother (when I left high school) was the moment/situation/act in which and by which I asserted my independence and identity at last, as an adult and as a man; [.... ] The greater the pain the greater the victory; [.... J Those years right after I left my mother were the happiest years of my life.

PHIL., November 1981 journal entry

I had never kissed a girl, I did not shave. I read Astounding Stories for entertainment. At 21, 1 have been married and divorced, shave every day, and read James Joyce, & Herodotus' "Persian Wars," & the "Anabasis" of Xenophon for entertainment. [...) At 15, 1 thought I knew what I wanted out of life, now I do not. At 15 1 was a big psychological mess. I still am, but differently.

PulL, letter to Herb Hollis (Phil's first and only boss) on Phil's twenty-first birthday, December 16, 1949

Without knowing it during the years I wrote, my thinking & writing was a long journey toward enlightenment. I first saw the illusory nature of space when I was in high school. In the late forties I saw that causality was an illusion.

Exegesis entry, 1979

IN 1944 Dorothy and Phil moved to a new Berkeley address-1711 Allston Way. It was a narrow, two-story house close to the street, with a pointed roof. Dorothy had the upstairs bedroom, Phil the downstairs. Neither did much housekeeping, and shared meals were not a major affair. Their relationship was so adult in tone that Phil's friends were sometimes taken aback-he spoke his mind more vehemently than they would have dared with their parents. Dorothy, whose brown hair was now flecked by grey, seemed to hold herself aloof. But the tension between them showed. Phil never complained about her to friends-it wasn't something he discussed.

Gerald Ackerman, a high school friend, recalls that the house "had something quaint and temporary about it." His attempts to talk books with Dorothy were rebuffed-"she was either impatient or just inclined to discourage any show-offy precosity, pretentious and awful anyway. Her bedroom was rather stagey: it was shallow, and her bed was against the wall facing the door in which she was centered as I stood talking to her. A rather formidable set up."

Phil entered Berkeley High in February 1944. Dick Daniels, who met Phil in sophomore-year German class, recalls him as "meticulous" in his classroom preparation. "He was permanently in search of a disembarrassed state. He didn't like to be put in a situation where he was found wanting, and tried to avoid exposure." Phil acquired a working knowledge of German which would serve him well-his independent research in the Nazi war archives kept at U Cal Berkeley forms a vital backdrop to The Man in the High Castle.

Another class Phil enjoyed was advanced English, taught by Margaret Wolfson, for whom Phil developed a sizable schoolboy crush. Even as an adult, he retained a considerable respect for Wolfson. In a 1970 journal entry, Phil spoke of his then-current love as being "plenty smart enough to challenge me, as no woman has ever done before with the exception of Margaret Wolfson."

Wolfson confirms that Phil was a highly intelligent student who kept within a "quiet shell" and rarely spoke in class. Phil possessed an "intuitive imagination" and was, in his classwork, "never satisfied with an off-handed kind of treatment." Once, instead of the assigned literary analysis, she received an SF story, the contents of which she cannot recall. "I would have preferred that he follow the assignment, but once I read what he had written I knew perfectly well that what I had gotten was exceptional and that I had better not carp about it." She suggested that Phil send it off to one of the SF magazines; if he took up that suggestion, he never spoke of it, and no Phil Dick story was to appear until 1952. One unpublished SF story-"Stability"-does survive from his high school years, however. "Stability" depicts a post-twenty-fifth-century dystopia governed by the stifling principle of "Stabilization," which permits no political or technological change. Similar static dystopias would appear in two of Phil's SF novels of the fifties: The World According to Jones and The Man Who Japed.