Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (19 page)

But Phil had succeeded, with Kleo, in constructing his own world. He took walks down San Pablo Avenue, peeking into the cafes and shops and kicking the tires in the used-car lots. That small-time commercial strip (along with the Shattuck Avenue locale of Hollis's University Radio) forms the backdrop to several of the fifties mainstream novels. Phil also enjoyed sitting on the front steps watching the children at play across the street-until he became afraid of what his neighbors might think. (A similar fear arose during the early seventies, when Phil helped a neighborhood girl carry newspapers; whether or not he was abused in his own youth, Phil carried considerable guilt and anxiety on the subject.)

As a published SF writer, he had no problems with celebrity. In 1953 Phil noted wryly: "Have finally arrived as a writer. Droves of small boys, all aficionados of science fiction, greet me on the street. Ah, Fame!" The Elves, Gnomes, Little Men's Science Fiction, Chowder and Marching Society was the most active Berkeley SF fan group. Phil would have none of it. He refused to dwell in the genre ghetto, though his saleable work was written for it. "The early fans were just trolls and wackos. They were terribly ignorant and weird people." But Phil did occasionally write for fanzines. His essay "Pessimism in Science Fiction" appeared in the December 1955 Oblique; in it Phil declared, with respect to the "dour tone" of post-nuclear holocaust SF: "In science fiction, a writer is not merely inclined to act out the Cassandra role; he is absolutely obliged to-unless, of course, he honestly thinks he will wake up and find that the high-minded Martians have sneaked off with all our bombs and armaments, for our own good."

Despite his objection to "trolls and wackos," he did attend the 1954 Science Fiction Worldcon, where he met a young fan named Harlan Ellison; he and Phil would later become close friends. He also met A. E. Van Vogt, an introduction that struck him deeply at the time; The World of Null-A (1948) was one of Phil's favorite SF novels, laden with ideas on superior mutant intelligences, general semantics, and (one of Phil's favorite themes) implanted false memories. In his 1964 story "Waterspid- er," Phil incorporated Van Vogt's response-back at the 1954 Worl- dcon-to Phil's question about plotting novels: "Well, I'll tell you a secret. I start out with a plot and then the plot sort of folds up. So then I have to have another plot to finish the rest of the story." Phil made this method his own. What Kleo recalls is that Van Vogt was wearing the first polyester suit they had ever seen. "The suit glowed. We were both impressed."

One fellow Berkeley SF writer with whom Phil formed a close bond was Pout Anderson (for a time they considered collaborating on an SF novel). Together, they could talk over the facts of SF life: editors chopping stories, lousy royalties, no recognition outside of fandom. Recalls Anderson:

I bitched, and so did everyone else. You have to remember that in those days a science fiction writer-unless he was Robert Heinlein-was really at the bottom of the totempole. If you wanted to work in the field you had to make the best of what there was. But we didn't feel put upon. I don't recall that we ever went into self-pity, the most contemptible emotion there is. We were young then, and there was always tomorrow. Okay, you get shafted this time, but there was always more where that had come from.

When the talk was on books, Phil championed Nathanael West and admired Tolkien's The Hobbit. His sense of humor showed itself by deadpan assertions that left listeners wondering whether he was joking or revealing a strange new truth-Phil's favorite effect.

Of all the old Art Music crowd, Phil remained closest to Vince Lusby, who, by a recent marriage, had an autistic son. Phil and Kleo baby-sat for the boy, and he strongly influenced the character of Manfred (an autistic boy trapped in a schizophrenic "tomb world") in Martian Time-Slip. Phil tended to avoid parties but felt comfortable at the loose bohemian gatherings held at the Lusbys' house. Virginia Lusby, who married Vince in 1954, remembers: "Phil analyzed everything, and he was good at it. He didn't resent interruptions, but once he got started he was rarely interrupted-you just sat and listened. I think he was brilliant, really brilliant." But one Lusby party proved disastrous. Allan Temko, an architecture critic, confronted Phil with a drunken song-and-dance parody of the kinds of people who wrote SF. Says Vince Lusby: "It was a horrible experience even if you weren't Philip Dick." At another party, Phil met mainstream writer Herb Gold; Phil later recalled that Gold "autographed a file card to me this way: 'To a colleague, Philip K. Dick.' I kept the card until the ink faded and was gone, and I still feel grateful to him for this charity. (Yes, that's what it was, then, to treat an SF writer with courtesy.)"

One of Phil's neighbors was Jacquin Sanders, a mainstream novelist who came over to watch the McCarthy hearings with Phil and Kleo. When Sanders returned to New York, he bequeathed them his 1952 Studebaker, with a unique wraparound window design that made it hard to tell front from back. Phil loved it and decided to learn to drive, taking lessons from several volunteers-including an FBI agent investigating his and Kleo's possible Communist ties.

FBI surveillance and questioning were not unusual in McCarthy-era Berkeley. Sather Gate was the usual site for political speech of all persuasions-more often than not, to the left. FBI agents up on the rooftops would photograph the crowds, just as they did during the Free Speech Movement a decade later and just as they do to the present day. Kleo, who enjoyed taking in all sorts of viewpoints, was a Sather Gate regular. Phil never joined her and seldom attended political meetings of any kind.

Nonetheless, one day in 1953 or 1954 FBI agents George Smith and George Scruggs knocked on the door. "They were dressed," Kleo recalls, "in gray suits and Stetson hats-like nothing in our world." Politely they asked the couple to identify faces in Sather Gate surveillance photographs; Kleo pointed out some obvious Berkeley political luminaries and then herself. Then Phil and Kleo asked questions of their own, fascinated by the agents' knowledge of splinter parties. There were more visits; Kleo describes Phil and herself as "nervous, not threatened-they were obviously just fishing." Scruggs became friendly and took Phil for driving lessons. Says Kleo: "We would have socialized with Scruggs but he was quite a bit older. Really, they could see [Kleo bursts out laughing] that we were a couple of dips and didn't want much to do with us." But there was something the agents wanted. They offered Phil and Kleo the opportunity to study at the University of Mexico, all expenses paid, if they would spy upon student activists there. Phil and Kleo found the offer attractive except for the spying, and refused. The visits petered out after that.

For Phil, the lasting importance of these visits is unquestionable. From 1964 on, he frequently believed himself to be under FBI or other agency surveillance; the Berkeley "Red Squad" (as he came to call Scruggs and Smith) provided a vivid foundation for that belief, which caused him great anxiety and was central to the events of 2-3-74. Phil later claimed that the agents had asked him to spy on Kleo. Kleo regards this claim as highly unlikely.

At least Phil had finally learned to drive. They swapped the Studebaker for a Plymouth and, in typical fifties fashion, set out to see the U.S.A. In 1956-57, they took two separate driving tours-Phil's only time off from writing during their marriage-which included a return visit to Ojai (Phil hated the school but loved the mountains) and wanderings through the Rocky Mountains (Cheyenne, Wyoming, is a vital capital in many of the SF novels because Phil loved driving through it) and as far east as Searcy, Arkansas, where the women still wore poke bonnets. They disdained "sights" like the Grand Canyon. "We weren't interested in anomalies," Kleo explains. "We wanted to see the country." For the first time, they considered moving from Berkeley.

Phil's old love from his pre-Kleo days, Betty Jo Rivers, returned to the Bay Area in 1956 and found him a far more assured person than she had known in 1949. He could walk down the street comfortably, and his sense of humor was more developed. Kleo was protective of Phil and tried to keep the house as a studio for him. Phil had become fascinated with sports cars and swapped the Plymouth for a Renault.

But Phil still found public settings difficult. When Kleo purchased tickets to Beckett's new play, Waiting for Godot, Phil could not bring himself to go. Even dinner guests in their home had to be carefully chosen. These frustrations fueled the blasts of anger he leveled so often at Dorothy. Iskandar Guy recalls Phil's telling him that "to the extent that he was in any way crippled or enfeebled psychologically, it was because of his mother and father. It was as if he'd been treated like a feral child."

It was standard medical practice in the fifties to provide amphetamine analogues such as Semoxydrine for patients who complained of anxiety or depression. The extent to which Phil used amphetamines while in Berkeley just isn't clear. On at least one occasion, Phil obtained Semoxydrine samples from Kleo's physician father. Iskandar Guy recalls that Phil took it regularly in low, commonly prescribed 5 mg doses and possessed a sophisticated pharmaceutical knowledge. But Kleo insists that, other than the Semoxydrine sample from her father, Phil took no drugs but Serpasil (a muscle relaxant) for tachycardia and an aspirin and a teaspoon of soda every night before bed.

There came, at last, a buffeting of the tranquil marriage. In 1957, after seven years of marriage, Phil had his first affair. The woman was a friend of Lusby's who was unhappily married and had children. She was dark-haired and sensual, and possessed a sunny disposition and an unashamed directness. When Kleo learned of the affair, she took a bus trip to Salt Lake City to let Phil think things out. "We both had to know if he wanted to do something else, and if he did . . . I didn't think ahead." When Kleo returned a few days later, Phil was confused-his relations with the woman had declined, and Kleo's calm frustrated him. "He'd hoped I'd make the big traditional scene." Instead, Kleo had dinner with the woman, who confided to her: "I never feel like I know a man unless I go to bed with him."

The affair was never a serious threat to the marriage, but it was intensely gratifying for Phil. In the early sixties, during his marriage to Anne, this woman paid several visits to their Point Reyes home. Phil would be proud, Anne recalls, that "his ex-mistress was on the way." Most importantly, she served as inspiration for the seductive Liz Bonner in his finest mainstream novel of the Berkeley fifties, Puttering About in a Small Land (written in 1957, published in 1985).

Oh yes. While all this was going on, Phil wrote, from 1951 through 1958, eighty-odd stories and thirteen novels-six SF, seven mainstream. The six SF novels were all promptly published, but the seven mainstream novels languished.

It was an anguish to him. And out of that anguish, his best work would come.

Phil never gave up writing stories; in truth, his finest achievements in that form were to come in the sixties and after. Nor did he ever abstain from writing novels; even in 1952 and 1953, while producing SF stories at white heat, Phil finished two novels, a massive mainstream work, Voices from the Street, and a fantasy, The Cosmic Puppets, and started a third, the mainstream Mary and the Giant. (See Chronological Survey.)

But from 1954 on, there was a distinct shift: From this point, Phil would devote his main energies to writing novels. In his 1968 "Self Portrait" lie confessed:

With only a few exceptions, my magazine-length stories were second-rate. Standards were low in the early '50s. I did not know many technical skills in writing which are essential ... the viewpoint problem, for example. Yet, I was selling; I was making a good living, and at the 1954 Science Fiction World Convention I was very readily recognized and singled out ... I recall someone taking a photograph of A. E. Van Vogt and me and someone saying, "The old and the new." But what a miserable excuse for "the new"! [...] Van Vogt in such works as THE WORLD OF NULL A, wrote novels; I did not. Maybe that was it; maybe I should try an sf novel.

For months I prepared carefully. I assembled characters and plots, several plots all woven together, and then wrote everything into the book that I could think up. It was bought by Don Wollheim at Ace Books and titled SOLAR LOTTERY [1955]. Tony Boucher reviewed it well in the N.Y. Herald Tribune; the review in Analog was favorable, and in Infinity, Damon Knight devoted his entire column to it-and all in praise.