Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (17 page)

SF story sales made Phil's firing seem fated in the long run. He gave the record store business two more brief tries. Shortly after being fired, Phil caught on with Art Music's leading competitor, Tupper & Reed. But he quit almost immediately. Phil later described this time as his second "nervous breakdown" (the first having been his flight from U Cal):

I bought a house, I was married, and I felt like I should be leaving in the morning and going to work like everybody else. My unconscious just saturated me with anxiety when I got there, to the record store, and I couldn't comprehend why. And I started to faint.

Now these are obvious [...I hysterical conversion symptoms, to get you out of a situation that you don't want to be in. Later I realized, my God, I would have been back in the retail record business [... ] But I was forced to go back to writing.

Kleo observes that the formality of Tupper & Reed, after Phil's years of familiarity with Hollis, played a critical part:

A sense of stuffiness was one of his major sensations during times of agoraphobic fear. Those breathing and swallowing problems-Phil would confuse the physical and social realms, or rather the social realm underlay those physical symptoms. During family dinners with his mother, he would have those sorts of physical manifestations and be forced to leave early. He could have casual dinners with three or four people he felt comfortable with. And stand-up parties were OK as long as you were free to come and go. But Tupper & Reed was too tight-it was up on a second floor, carpeted, and catered to a wealthier clientele. Phil couldn't handle it and he wanted to be home writing anyway, so he quit.

There was one more try. In late 1953, Herb Hollis died, and his wife, Pat, asked Phil to help with the business. Phil gave it a try for a few days, but he had already tasted freedom. Again he quit. Phil would later mention an A & R (Artists and Repertoire) job offer made to him at this time by Capitol Records. It may be; Kleo doesn't recall it, and at any rate he turned it down.

Phil could fantasize about cutting a swath in the big wide world. At heart, however, he was happy to let that world go by. Or rather, he imagined he could write in peace and have it to come to him. After all, he could sell SF stories.

Which allowed him, with Kleo's help, to just scrape by.

In 1946, in the aftermath of the wartime paper shortage, there were eight SF magazines appearing regularly. By 1950 there were nearly twenty; by 1953, the number had climbed to twenty-seven. They were readily distinguishable-by their bug-eyed-monster covers and pulpy titles like Thrilling Wonder Stories and Fantastic Story Magazine-from respectable "slicks" like Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post.

What led to the SF boom? In part, the pulps rode with the economic good times of postwar America. But there was also a growing public fascination with the possibilities, wondrous and dreadful, posed by the threat of atomic destruction. Even before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this had been a frequent theme of SF writers. The convergence of the SF future and the American present lent a vitality to SF-it could be both glorious escapism and serious prophecy.

Phil moved fast after "Roog." By May 1952 he had sold four more stories on his own. It was time to find an agent. Scott Meredith, who had just founded an agency, drew much of his clientele from regular pulp contributors. Phil first proposed that the agency represent only his mainstream work. Meredith insisted on the SF as well. Phil gave in, and the relationship endured (give or take a few severe bumps) for his entire career.

The Meredith Agency's cozy contacts with New York-based pulp editors, plus Phil's amazing capacity for generating startling possibilities, produced an explosion in a market that was ready for one. SF historian Michael Ashley observes that by mid-1953 "Sf writers had never had it so good: with titles appearing daily, their writings would sell somewhere. New writers had ample opportunity to ply their wares and also to experiment."

In 1952 four Phil Dick stories-fantasy and SF-appeared. In 1953 there were thirty, including seven in June 1953 alone. In 1954 he published twenty-eight more. In 1955 Rich & Cowan, a British publishing house, chose fifteen for hard-cover publication (an honor seldom accorded SF in the U. S. at that time) as A Handful of Darkness. A second collection, The Variable Man, was issued by Ace in 1957. Phil was prone to deride their quality in comparison to his later work, and it is hard to disagree. They were, at their best, trial runs for far more intricate Phildickian worlds. But a good many are very good indeed-suspenseful or funny as hell or both. Phil pounded them out at the rate of a story per week. From his "Afterthoughts" to the 1977 The Best of Philip K. Dick collection:

The majority of these stories were written when my life was simpler and made sense. I could tell the difference between the real world and the world I wrote about. I used to dig in the garden, and there is nothing fantastic or ultradimensional about crab grass . . . unless you are an sf writer, in which case pretty soon you are viewing crabgrass with suspicion. [...] One day the crab grass suits will fall off and their true identity will be revealed. By then the Pentagon will be full of crab grass and it'll be too late. [...] My earlier stories had such premises. Later, when my personal life became complicated and full of unfortunate convolutions, worries about crab grass got lost somewhere. I became educated to the fact that the greatest pain does not come zooming down from a distant planet, but up from the depths of the heart. Of course, both could happen; your wife and child could leave you, and you could be sitting alone in your empty house with nothing to live for, and in addition the Martians could bore through the roof and get you.

The closest Phil ever came to this crab grass story is a brilliant little horror tale in SF clothing called "Colony," which appeared in the June 1953 Galaxy, edited by Horace Gold; it was also adapted for the X Minus One radio program aired in October 1956. An overpopulated Earth needs worlds to colonize. Commander Morrison (a woman-highly unusual for fifties SF) pushes for approval of a new planet that passes all scientific tests. Then Major Hall's microscope tries to strangle him. Hall is suspected of "psychotic projection." But the attacks continue, carried on by faked objects-the mimickry of the planet's malevolent life force:

The towel wrapped around his wrist, yanking him against the wall. Rough cloth pressed over his mouth and nose. He fought wildly, pulling away. All at once the towel let go. He fell, sliding to the floor, his head striking the wall. Stars shot around him; then violent pain.

Sitting in a pool of warm water, Hall looked up at the towel rack. The towel was motionless now, like the others with it. Three towels in a row, all exactly alike, all unmoving. Had he dreamed it?

[...] His belt got him around the waist and tried to crush him. It was strong-it had reinforced metal links to hold his leggings and his gun.

In the end, the entire exploration crew is gobbled up by a fake rescue ship into which they have all climbed naked (no longer being able to trust their clothes). Phil wrote of "Colony": "The ultimate in paranoia is not when everyone is against you but when everything is against you. Instead of 'My boss is plotting against me,' it would be 'My boss's phone is plotting against me.'!'

For a time, Phil enjoyed a happy relationship with Galaxy editor Gold. During 1954 they corresponded as to their mutual agoraphobic difficulties, and Phil confided that he felt stuck at the "emotional age" of nine years and six months (when he and Dorothy moved from Washington to Berkeley). But Gold, in typical pulp fashion, felt free to substantially revise stories without consulting the writer. The practice drove many writers (financially dependent, to the tune of three to four cents per word, on Gold's good graces) to despair, Phil among them: "[D]espite the fact that Galaxy was my main source of income I told Gold that I would not sell to him unless he stopped altering my stories-after which [1954] he bought nothing from me at all."

Such was life in the SF subbasement, even with the best editors. But Phil was gracious enough to give Gold credit for improving the ending of Phil's best fantasy story, "The King of the Elves," which appeared in the September 1953 Beyond Fantasy Fiction (a sister publication to Galaxy). Shadrach Jones, an old man in a desolate small town, offers shelter from the rain to a tattered troup of Elves, whose ailing King dies in Shadrach's bed. The Elves are battered from their fierce war with the Trolls; they badly need a new King and convince Shadrach to lead them. His neighbor, Phineas Judd, tries to persuade Shadrach that he is losing his mind-but Phineas is himself revealed, in a master stroke of paranoia become real, as the evil and ghastly Great Troll. At the end, with Phineas and his Trolls defeated in fierce battle, Shadrach abandons the throne. It was Gold's idea to have Shadrach change his mind and come back to lead the Elves. The ending, as Phil revised it:

The little circle of Elf torches closed in joyously. In their light, he [Shadrach] saw a platform like the one that had carried the old King of the Elves. But this one was much larger, big enough to hold a man, and dozens of the soldiers waited with proud shoulders under the shafts.

A soldier gave him a happy bow. "For you, Sire."

Shadrach climbed aboard. It was less comfortable than walking, but he knew that this was how they wanted to take him to the Kingdom of the Elves.

Efforts have been made to precisely distinguish the SF and fantasy genres; in 1981 Phil declared it "impossible to do": "Fantasy involves that which general opinion regards as impossible, science fiction involves that which general opinion regards as possible under the right circumstances. This is in essence a judgment-call [... ]" Back in 1954, the difference was clear enough to the young writer. He saw his fantasy characters as projected Jungian archetypes. "I had a term I used. Inner-projection stories. Stories where internal psychological contents were projected onto the outer world and became three-dimensional and real and concrete." In a September 1954 letter, Phil confided that fantasy was his own "private love" but that it was "disappearing from the marketplace." "[A] writer doesn't work in a vacuum; if people don't want or don't like what he's doing, the fire seems to go out of it."

"Impostor" was the only story of Phil's ever purchased for Astounding (June 1953) by the then-doyen of SF editors, John W. Campbell, Jr. Earth is at war with the Outspacers, and Spence Olham, a defense researcher, is under suspicion of being an Outspacer "humanoid robot" (Phil would later adopt the term "android") that has killed the real, human Spence. There is a "U-Bomb" implanted in the robot triggered to explode when a certain phrase is spoken. The robot "would become Olham in mind as well as the body. He was given an artificial memory system, false recall. He would look like him, have his memories, his thoughts and interests, perform his job." And so Security is out to kill Spence, who can't convince them that he's really human. And he really isn't-and that realization sets off the U-Bomb. The implanted-memory theme remained one of Phil's favorite means of exploring the possibilities of "fake" reality.

In "Impostor," robot Spence wins the reader's sympathy far more than do his calculating human pursuers. In "Human Is" (Winter 1955 Startling Stories), an alien also takes over a human form. Lester Herrick was a jerk to his wife, who prefers the gracious and loving alien soul now occupying his body-she saves the alien's life when the authorities track it down. Phil wrote of "Human Is":

I have not really changed my view since I wrote this story, back in the fifties. It's not what you look like, or what planet you were born on. It's how kind you are. The quality of kindness, to me, distinguishes us from rocks and sticks and metal, and will forever, whatever shape we take, wherever we go, whatever we become. For me, "Human Is" is my credo. May it be yours.