Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (21 page)

There are strong political themes in Eye as well, drawn from Phil's firsthand experience of FBI surveillance. The novel begins with Jack Hamilton's being fired from his defense job because of the alleged Communist leanings of his wife, Marsha. McFeyffe, the McCarthyesque agent who has investigated Marsha, is also Hamilton's friend. At novel's end, Marsha is proved innocent while McFeyffe proves to be a closet Communist, whose slogan truths are as despicable as the Senator's witch hunts. Hamilton abandons weapons research to start up a hi-fi assembly company with a black co-worker, Bill Laws. The closing scene-in which Laws shouts out: "What are we waiting for? Let's get to work!"was an idee flxe for Phil at the time. One or more characters deciding to put their shoulders to the wheel to set society right (or better) is an ending employed in Gather Yourselves Together, Voices from the Street, Solar Lottery, The World Jones Made, and The Man Who Japed.

Underlying the need for change is this danger: Things are not as they seem, but those in power are anxious to dispense with questions. Phil was both nervous and proud of his reputation as a radical within the confines of fifties SF. In the privacy of his Exegesis (c. 1979) he defined the stance of his fifties work: "I may not have been/am CP [Communist Party], but the basic Marxist sociological view of capitalism-negative-is there. Good."

But shelves are filled with dusty tomes that pose just such issues. What Phil could do was to whip them all up into an SF alternateuniverse thriller. Blurb master Wollheim had little difficulty hyping Eye: "Worlds Within Worlds!" "Trapped in a madman's universe!" And the blurbs were true.

There is an explosion at the Belmont Bevatron. Eight people (including Jack, Marsha, and McFeyffe) plunge through the Proton Beam Deflector to the floor. One by one they begin to ascend from their unconscious haze-passing through worlds of religious fanaticism, sexless prudishness, psychotic paranoia, and Communist party-line prat- tlings. These worlds spring from their own psyches: As each one revives, he or she is able to project realities binding upon the rest. (Just how does this happen? That's the little pseudo-science leap allowed in SF.) In an unpublished "Prologue," Phil had all eight characters in Eye review the novel differently, to underscore the subjectivity of even the reading experience.

When war veteran Arthur Silvester's universe of religious fanaticism takes over, Hamilton and McFeyffe seek out a priest who sprinkles holy water onto an umbrella that gives them a flying tour of a Ptolemaic solar system. The forges of Hell come into sight, and then the vast blue expanse of Heaven:

It wasn't a lake. It was an eye. And the eye was looking at him and McFeyffe!

He didn't have to be told Whose eye it was.

McFeyffe screeched. His face turned black; his wind rattled in his throat. [...j

The eye focused on the umbrella. With an acrid pop the umbrella burst into flame. Instantly, the burning fragments, the handle and the two shrieking men dropped like stones.

What did A. A. Wyn object to in all this? Silvester's fanatical universe, in which engineers work on the problem of "maintaining a constant supply of untainted grace for all major population centers," was just the sort of thing that could piss off the American Legion and fundamentalist Christians. And so Wyn insisted that Silvester's God be called "(Tetragrammaton)" and that his "Babiist" cult be designated Moslem in origin-how many outraged Islamic SF readers could there be?

In retrospect, Phil saw Eye as a parable like unto Plato's shadows on the walls of the cave: pointing us away from maya toward a recognition, if not of truth, then of the fact of our ignorance:

My writing deals with hallucinated worlds, intoxicating & deluding drugs, & psychosis. But my writing acts as an antidote-a detoxifying-not intoxicating-antidote. (. ..j

[... ] It's like "Eye" when actual rescue is right at hand but they can't wake up. Yes, we are asleep like they are in "Eye" & we must wake up & see past (through) the dream-the spurious world with its own time-to the rescue outside-outside now, not later.

Eye established Phil, at age twenty-eight, as one of the very best young SF writers. As a practical matter, however, Ace paid only a flat rate of one thousand dollars for Phil's SF novels-with future royalties very much in doubt. There were other avenues to bolster his SF income. Phil recalled being offered, around 1957, a job writing radio scripts for the Captain Video program. The pay was five hundred dollars per week, but the job meant moving to New York, a horror that Phil would not even consider. (Kleo says, "Nonsense!"-there was no job offer; Phil was asked to do a single script.) In 1958 Phil sold at least one radio script to the Exploring Tomorrow show on the Mutual Broadcast System.

But beyond economics, Phil wanted to break through into the mainstream so badly he could taste it. And so, in 1957, just as the glowing reviews of Eye were pouring in, Phil informed Wollheim and Boucher-the two editors most responsible for encouraging his rise in the SF ranks-that he was giving the field up to devote himself fulltime to mainstream novels.

It wasn't as if Phil hadn't been trying up until that time. From 1952 through 1958 Phil wrote eight mainstream novels: Voices from the Street (1952-53), Mary and the Giant (1953-55, published in 1987), A Time for George Stavros (1955; manuscript lost), Pilgrim on the Hill (1956; manuscript lost), The Broken Bubble of Thisbe Holt (1956, published in 1987), Puttering About in a Small Land (1957, published in 1985), Nicholas and the Higs (1957; manuscript lost), and In Milton Lumky Territory (1958, published in 1985). (See the Chronological Survey for plot summaries.) The Meredith Agency marketed them with zeal, and there were awfully close calls. Crown and Julian Messner were extremely interested in Mary and the Giant (for Messner, Phil performed an extensive rewrite); Harcourt Brace was tempted by A Time for George Stavros. Always there was encouragement: Submit again, young man, you are gifted and on the verge.

Small wonder, then, that in 1957 he gave SF the brush. That same year Phil informed Boucher that he had broken with the Meredith Agency. If so, the rift was very brief. Perhaps the agency's attempts to dissuade him from strictly mainstream efforts had wounded Phil's pride. But he also received strong support for the shift. Boucher and Wollheim wrote letters cheering him on. But when Wollheim read Mary and the Giant and Nicholas and the Higs he turned them down flat and urged Phil to stick to SF: "I felt his science fiction was exceptional and his mainstream was not."

Since Phil's death, most of the mainstream novels from the Berkeley fifties have found publishers. Those that survive are, without exception, dark visions of working-class life in which ideals are thwarted, love is a rarity, and sex leads to remorseful self-confrontation. Phil used humor to brilliant effect in his SF, but there is scarcely the trace of a smile in these novels-aiming for the mainstream seemed to freeze him up just a bit. And, of course, he had to devise plots based on common reality preconceptions. No Bevatron explosions allowed in mainstream.

Each of the mainstream novels has its remarkable characters-raw, striving souls such as Stuart Hadley, the young TV shop clerk in Voices from the Street, for whom reality is painfully fragile, and Mary Anne Reynolds, the young woman trying desperately to launch herself in the world in Mary and the Giant. The finest of the group-the one that deserved to be published at the time-is Puttering About in a Small Land, which Phil was writing just as Eye hit the SF market in 1957.

Roger and Virginia Lindahl, unhappily married, move to a Los Angeles suburb after first meeting in the Washington, D.C., of Phil's childhood. They send their asthmatic son, Gregg, to a boarding school in Ojai, California. Virginia has a good deal of Dorothy in her, and Roger seems an amalgam of Edgar and of Phil himself-young Gregg all but disappears as the novel proceeds. Roger, a repairman, starts up Modern TV Sales & Service (a shop that reappears in Voices from the Street and Dr. Bloodmoney) but is frequently "on the edge" due to vague yearnings for freedom that threaten his business and family stability.

Roger commences an affair with Liz Bonner, the mother of one of Gregg's classmates. Liz is a simple soul without Virginia's intellect or maddening scruples, and so she basks in the warmth of her new love for Roger. Immersed in the pleasures of lovemaking, Liz is as purely the Eternal Feminine as Molly Bloom:

I love you, she said. I've got you. Out in the world the people grow old. She felt them age; she heard them creak; she heard their bones snap. In the different houses dust filled the bowls and covered the floors. The dog did not recognize him; he had been gone too long. Nobody knew him. He had left the world.

... ] She made him open his mouth; she put her open mouth near his, her teeth to his, holding him there as he moved inside her, and then she pressed her mouth to his mouth as she felt it happen again inside her, for the third time. Did you ever do it so many times before? With her? She kept his mouth against hers. You are inside me and I am inside you, she said, putting her tongue into his mouth, as far as it would go. I am as far into you as I can be: we are exchanged. Am which am I? Maybe I'm the one who must go back to her, all worn-out and empty. No, I'm the one who will never wear out. I am here forever, lying here on the ground, holding you down where I can reach you and get at you and inside you.

Leave it to Phil to include, even in a thought-flow of towering passion, confusion as to which lover is which.

Virginia, in exposing the affair, permanently wounds her husband. One of his ideals, vaguer yet than the yearnings for freedom, has been shattered. Call it the sense of honor inherent in marriage. Virginia has him dead to rights, and he cannot bear it. And so Roger takes to the road-funding his escape with TVs stolen from the shop he once owned.

Phil had come of age as a stylist. And in 1958 he decided, without in the least forsaking his mainstream ambitions, to put that style to work in an SF novel. He called it Biography in Time, but Lippincott ultimately published it (Phil's first U. S. hard-cover) as Time Out of Joint in 1959. It was marketed not as SF but as a "novel of menace." Phil kept watch in Time and the New York Times Book Review, hoping for the first officially serious reviews of his career. They didn't happen. Sales were poor. The next edition, six years later, was a Belmont paperback with an SF cover depicting spacemen and the moon falling out of the sky.

No matter. Phil's achievement in Time Out of Joint was to write a novel that met the future-world requirement of SF while focusing on a 1958 present reality in which he could put his mainstream talents to use. The tension of the story-and Time is a page-turner-comes from watching that perfectly realized 1958 world transformed into something other.

Ragle Gumm uses his psychic talents to solve the daily "Where-WillThe-Little-Green-Man-Be-Next?" contest in the newspaper. Ragle works at home, and people with real jobs think he's a little odd. (Ragle and SF writers have a lot in common.) It turns out his contest picks are being relied upon by the 1998 Earth military to defend against Luna's missiles. In that 1998 reality the strain of the war had driven Ragle to a nervous breakdown. So the military built a fake 1958 small town from his childhood (similar to the "Wash-35" babyland of Now Wait For Last Year) to keep him working at defense while ensconced in delusion. At the end of the novel Ragle learns the truth. Well and good, except that this neat SF ending in no way explains the happenings that give the novel its uniquely cerebral surreality. In this scene, for example, Ragle's 1958 reality decomposes in a manner unforeseen by the military:

"Got any beer?" he [Rag]e] said. His voice sounded funny. Thin and remote. The counter man in white apron and cap stared at him, stared and did not move. Nothing happened. No sound, anywhere. Kids, cars, the wind; it all shut off.

The fifty-cent piece fell away, down through the wood, sinking. It vanished.

I'm dying, Ragle thought. Or something.

Fright seized him. He tried to speak, but his lips did not move for him. Caught up in the silence.

Not again, he thought.

Not again!

It's happening to me again.

The soft-drink stand fell into bits. Molecules. He saw the molecules, colorless, without qualities, that made it up. Then he saw through, into the space beyond it, he saw the hill behind, the trees and sky. He saw the soft-drink stand go out of existence, along with the counter man, the cash register, the big dispenser of orange drink, the taps for Coke and root beer, the ice-chests of bottles, the hot dog broiler, the jars of mustard, the shelves of cones, the row of heavy round metal lids under which were the different ice creams.