Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (15 page)

A love affair blossomed, and the clean-cut boyfriend was shown the door. "We had an almost exaggerated, movie-type romance." They spent hours discussing books, music, and the big issues. Phil soon felt comfortable eating in Betty Jo's company, but he would not go with her to restaurants. When he tried to attend events that mattered to her, embarrassments abounded. "Phil didn't fit into any circle I had. He was difficult to take anywhere-extremely shy." After one fiasco, Phil gave her inscribed copies of two of his favorite books, William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience and James Stephens's The Crock of Gold: "To Betty, in exchange for six social errors at once." He could handle people at work, he assured her, though he preferred to be out of sight unpacking records. Phil was seeing a therapist and blamed many of his fears on Jane's death. "He always felt it was like the German myth or legend of the person who has to look for his other half and that he was an incomplete person because he was born one of twins. He used to attribute his food problems to that."

Much of their time together was spent at Phil's Dwight Way attic apartment. His room was crammed with pulps, to which he was trying, as yet unsuccessfully, to market tales that were closer to fantasy than to SF. Some of these found their way into print (in highly revised form) in the early fifties, once Phil started to make it as an SF writer. But his primary efforts were devoted to mainstream stories. Phil wrote dozens of these during this period, all now lost. All that is certain is that their repeated rejection by editors was a heartbreak to Phil, who yearned for mainstream status-then and always.

But if Phil was as yet an unpublished writer, his fervor and commitment were evident enough to Betty Jo: "Phil's attraction was all that talent boiling around, getting ready to explode." But Phil wasn't yet comfortable identifying himself as a writer. Instead, he imagined a blissful future in which Betty Jo was the writer and he would bring in fresh orange juice as she worked. "I think he was fantasizing somebody to share the pressure he was under to get started writing, and that was the last thing I wanted." Betty Jo had won a grant for graduate study in France and was completing her master's thesis, an effort that Phil encouraged despite his own academic discontent. But when he asked her to choose between France and marriage, Betty Jo had no hesitation. Off to France she went.

That autumn, Phil gave academia one last try. From September to November 1949, he attended U Cal Berkeley. He'd been out on his own for two years, and the decision must have required considerable soulsearching in light of the horrific memories of vertigo in high school. Phil was twenty when he registered for courses in history, zoology, and philosophy (his major) along with the mandatory ROTC training. One of his philosophy teachers directed him to David Hume, whose wry, polished skepticism was right up Phil's alley; in particular, he admired Hume's argument against causality: that A precedes B cannot prove that A caused B. Phil also attended lectures on the German Romantics, which deepened his love for the lyrics of Goethe and Heine. But the ROTC courses were distasteful. Phil retained Dorothy's pacifistic outlook and voiced his objection to the policy of widening U. S. military involvement in Korea. Phil would recall his refusal to march with a rifle, instead taking a broom to parade.

But the U Cal transcript reflects that he voluntarily withdrew from the university in November and was granted an honorable dismissal in January; his later claims that he was "expelled" and "told never to come back" because of defiance shown to ROTC training and/or pompous professors seem unlikely. After withdrawing, Phil became subject to the draft, but he was rejected due to high blood pressure.

Iskandar Guy, a Berkeley friend of Phil's in the fifties, would hear of a far less rebellious, far more terrifying university experience. There was a renewed attack of vertigo, in which agoraphobia or high blood pressure could have played a part. Whatever the label, the experience was devastating:

He would mention the horrible experiences he'd had while going to Cal. The whole bloody world collapsed on him psychologically as he was walking down a classroom aisle. It was something of such pain-not hyperbole, but extreme fucking pain we're talking about-like the whole world disappeared in front of him and he was turned into this painful, vulnerable, embattled thing, and where at any moment the floor might open up and he might be canceled out as a living entity. Those were the kinds of statements he would make. Apparently he had been somewhat tenuous about his involvement with formal education before, but that did it. He felt crippled by this experience; he gave me the impression of feeling handicapped by it.

To interviewer Paul Williams-who inquired in 1974 about the self-styled "nervous breakdown" that caused him to leave college-Phil acknowledged the rebellion and the fear:

PKD: [. . .] Well, I mean that at about nineteen, um, I was unable to continue doing what I was doing, because I really unconsciously didn't want to do it. [...]

PW: And "it" was going to Berkeley and taking ROTC and all that kind of thing?

PKD: Yeah!

PW: Both, right, not just the ROTC?

PKD: Correct. Yeah, I had a whole bunch of courses that were just so much birdshit. [...] I'm standing there looking in the microscope. And there aren't even any paramecia in there at all, 'cause the slide moved. And the instruction is, "Draw what you see," And I realize that there's nothing there, nothing at all. But I can't consciously face the fact that this is a symbol of my whole projected four years there, I'm drawing pictures of things that-

PW: That aren't even there.

PKD: So I began to get terribly frightened and anxious and I didn't know why. Now I know why. I would have screwed up my life forever. [...] Fortunately I listened to my unconscious because it was too strong to be denied. [... ] It drove me out of the cloistered realms where I would have been cut off from the broader, truer world, and drove me into the real world. It drove me into a job, and marriage, and a career in writing, and a more substantial life. [...] I'm very defensive about all this still, you see? Because I didn't finish college.

Phil's defensiveness didn't show itself at the time. None of his friends recall any apologetics over dropping out and this in a markedly academic community. Phil's outward calm was due in part to the respect shown his intelligence even in erudite circles.

His two major writing efforts of the late forties, a fragment of a novel, The Earthshaker (c. 1947-48), and a completed novel, Gather Yourselves Together (c. 1949-50), evidence the jarring, passionate impact of Phil's discovery of sex. Only portions of the first two chapters of The Earthshaker survive; he did not complete it, but an outline and treatment notes give some indication of what Phil intended for the whole. These notes make reference to gnosis, cabala, and the world-tree Yggdrasill, among other esoteric themes. Major characters are derived from Jungian archetypes: wanderer, miraculous child, silly old wise man, earth woman, serpent. The prose style is unvarnished realism. As for sex, it is (as the treatment notes state) an "act of unreason, of impersonality, of unhumanity, of unbeing." When a woman lures a man into sex, and then later gives birth, her "control over the man is complete." From out of the depths of mother hatred and adolescent sexual despair, Phil was conceiving a most fearful novel. It is hardly a wonder that he could not bring himself to finish it.

Gather Yourselves Together, which remains unpublished (but may find a publisher in the near future) is set in the emergent Maoist China of 1949. Three employees of an American corporate operation that has been nationalized await the Chinese troops who will take control of the grounds. There is a faint political theme (tacked on as an ending) comparing the atheistic Chinese, in their fervor, to the early Christians, while America has become an imperial Rome. But most of the novel explores, through flashbacks, the psyches of the three employeesVerne, Carl, and Barbara-who go through a turbulent menage a trois during their isolated wait. Verne is a cynical man of the world who some years before took Barbara's virginity (as the novel stresses) and left her embittered. She tries to overcome that hurt by making love with Verne again. Mistake. Her thoughts turn to young Carl, whom she seduces (recapitulating her seduction by Verne). Poor Carl goes through spiritual shock on first espying her body as she swims in the pond of the Edenic company grounds:

He had lost all the cherished images and illusions, but he understood something now that had eluded him before. Bodies, his body, her body, all were about the same. All were part of the same world. There was nothing outside the world, no great realm of the phantom soul, the region of the sublime. There was only this-what he saw with his eyes [...] all the dreams and notions he had held so long had abruptly winked out of existence. Vanished silently, like a soap bubble.

The life of randy bachelorhood to which Lusby had introduced Phil, which he immediately sought to escape by marrying Jeanette Marlin, never did take hold. Since leaving his mother's house Phil had been seeking a home. The domestic fantasy of serving Betty Jo orange juice as she wrote was a transposition (as Betty Jo observes) of his own fear of entering the writer's life without a companion to whom to turn when his daily imaginings were done.

Phil needed a wife. He also needed the guidance of an editor sympathetic to SF plots concocted with mainstream style and smarts.

And the sometimes kindly Cosmos, seeing the plight of this young writer and, perhaps, sensing within him the works that would pick It apart, promptly provided both.

4

A Real Writer At Last, Phil Learns The Facts Of Life In The SF Ghetto
And Tries To Get The Hell Out-But Writes His Best Stuff Inside If (Hence Me
Confusion) (1950-1958)

It was like living in La Bohe ne-great, extremely romantic. Were we poor? We had a house, though never any money to speak of ... We had Linden chicken gravy with giblets at ten cents a can once a week-or more. We loved it! With baked or steamed potatoes.

KLEO MINI

In reading the stories included in this volume, you should bear in mind that most were written when SF was so looked down upon that it virtually was not there, in the eyes of all America. This was not funny, the derision felt toward SF writers. It made our lives wretched. Even in Berkeley--or especially in Berkeley-people would say, But are you writing anything serious?" We made no money; few publishers published SF (Ace Books was the only regular book publisher of SF); and really cruel abuse was inflicted upon us.

Prlu., "Introduction" to The Golden Man (1980)

You knew [as to writing SF in the early fifties] you had the shitty end of the stick, but at least you had your hand on the stick. Terry Carr (SF editor) used to have a line about how if the Holy Bible was printed as an Ace Double it would be cut down to two 20,000-word halves with the Old Testament retitled as Master of Chaos and the New Testament as The Thing with Three Souls.

KAREN ANDERSON, wife of SF writer Poul Anderson

AMERICA in the fifties was a strange and wondrous place to set up shop as an SF writer, as Phil would.

It is true enough that SF was disdained by all clean and decent persons with pretensions to culture. But it is also true that a steadily growing number of readers (mostly kids, but also World War II and Korean War vets who could well believe in the futuristic perils of the new Atomic Age) loved the stuff. Not only did it offer unbridled action and adventure, it also recognized-as mainstream fiction seldom did-that society was heading irrevocably toward major technological changes that would, in turn, redefine the scope of the shit that happens to us all. Long before computers became bureaucratic fixtures, they were consulted by mad scientists in fifties SF.

As a result, the SF pulps enjoyed, in the first half of that decade, an economic boom time. There was a proliferation of soon-to-vanish titlessuch as Dynamic SF, Rocket Stories, and even, very briefly, Les Adventures Futuristes-out there on U.S. newsstands. Selling stories to the pulps did not bring fame and fortune, but it did allow young writers serving their apprenticeships to make a living at writing SF.