Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (24 page)

Crap Artist is, beneath the shifting narrative realities, a hell of a novel about the male psyche at war with its demons. Isidore is named after Isidore of Seville, Spain (560?-636), whose Etymologiae was regarded as a universal compendium of knowledge during the Middle Ages. But the modern-day Isidore is drawn to pulps like Thrilling Wonder Stories-reading tastes shared by young Phil. Fay Hume, Isidore's sister, is a wiry, aggressive, seductive woman unhappily married to Charley Hume, a fall-guy American businessman who pays the bills, suffers a heart attack, and is driven to killing the household animals-and himself-by his wife's demands and betrayals. Nat Anteil is a passive, collegeeducated intellectual whose low-rent life with loving wife Gwen is swept aside by his passion for Fay, which he starts to regret as soon as it happens. But it's too late for regrets when you've found what you always thought you wanted.

In a copy of Crap Artist inscribed for friend Chris Arena in September 1980, Phil made a series of notes on the novel's narrative techniques and autobiographical sources. Like Charley, Phil feared falling victim to a heart attack. More fundamentally, Phil acknowledged the link between himself and both Jack Isidore and Nat Anteil: "Jack is a parody on myself as a teen-ager; his instincts and thoughts are based on my own when I was about 16 years old." He added: "Nat is based on me but as an adult, whereas Jack is my stunted adolescent side. Nat is mature, but he is psychologically weak, and falls under Fay's control."

And Fay was based on Anne. Phil told her so when he gave her the manuscript to read during their "honeymoon" period.

In Chapter 3, Charley hauls off and sucker punches Fay because he is humiliated by her having sent him to buy-publicly ask for-Tampax at the local store. In "real" life, Phil bought Tampax for Anne without comment. When Anne read the novel, she asked Phil why he hadn't said if he minded buying them for her? In the seventies, Phil would tell male friends about the time he hauled off and slugged Anne after having to buy her Tampax. By 1963, four years after Crap Artist was written, there was occasional, minor physical violence on both Phil and Anne's part. Crap Artist had known it was coming. Precognition-Phil claimed, in the seventies, to have displayed it in some of his novels. Listen to Nat:

I wonder if I'll wind up hitting her, he thought. He had never in his life hit a woman; and yet, he already sensed that Fay was the kind of woman who forced a man into hitting her. Who left him no alternative. No doubt she failed to see this; it would not be to her advantage to see this.

Chapter 11 begins with Nat wondering if Fay had "gotten herself involved with him because her husband was dying and she wanted to be sure that, when he did die, she would have another man to take his place." Nat recognizes intellectually that Fay picks out husbands as she would soap-Dr. X's joke-but is incapable of acting on his insight. By 1963 Phil was telling friends that Anne had killed her first husband and was trying to kill him.

Fay is not only Nat's lover-wife but also Isidore's sister. And Nat/ Isidore "laminated together" (to borrow a phrase Phil used in the Exegesis when conjoining characters or ideas) are the man-child confronting a wife who arouses their worst childhood fears:

I went to so much trouble, he [Nat] thought, to break away from my family-in particular my mother-and get off on my own, to be economically independent, to establish my own family. And now I'm mixed up with a powerful, demanding, calculating woman who wouldn't bat an eye at putting me back in that old situation again. In fact it would seem perfectly natural to her.

How would the "old situation" be reinstated? Maybe by Fay/Anne telling Isidore/Nat/Phil to chuck Thrilling Wonder Stories and get a real job. Charley Hume says of Fay: "The sharp contempt in her voice made him shiver. It was her most effective tone, full of the weight of authority; it recalled to him his teachers in school, his mother, the whole pack of them." In 1980, Phil noted that "Fay's speech patterns are authenticbased on those of an actual person."

In her Search for Philip K. Dick, Anne says of Fay:

I was blunt and direct; but not that crude, and not devious like Fay. If Fay was a portrait of me it wasn't one of warts and all, but all warts. Phil portrayed Fay as needing a husband for herself and a father for her children, so she acquired Nat. It seemed never to occur to Nat that Fay loved him.

One can imagine Phil smiling now: the proof of his subjective truths borne out by placing side by side his novel and Anne's memoirs. The nature of their love-and their differences-is exemplified in their feeling for Isidore. In a January 1975 letter Phil wrote: ". . . Jack Isidore of Seville, California: more selfless than I am, more kind, and in a deep deep way a better man." Writes Anne, in response to that letter: "Jack Isidore that weird, provincial, sexless fellow with a head filled with garbagy science-fantasy! Phil was about as much like Jack Isidore as a bird of paradise is like a bat. Phil was Nat!"

Phil tried to blend strict writing discipline with the new demands of family life. He worked during the day and spent evenings with Anne and the kids. As a good provider, he would keep to a pace of two novels per year-each novel taking six weeks for the first draft and another six weeks for the second (retyping and minor copy editing). Between each novel would be six months devoted to thinking out the next plot. He warned Anne never to interrupt him when it seemed that he was only sitting quietly. "Beware," he would say, "of the person from Porlock"-the stranger who, knocking to ask the way to Porlock, shattered the composition of Coleridge's dream vision "Kubla Khan."

Once a novel was under way it moved swiftly. Phil still had his awesome typing speed. He told Anne: "The words come out of my hands not my brain, I write with my hands." Phil might make preliminary notebook entries, but the novel took true shape only in actual composition:

The intuitive-I might say, gestalting-method by which I operate has a tendency to cause me to "see" the whole thing at once. Evidently there is a certain historical validation to this method; Mozart, to name one particular craftsman, operated this way. The problem for him was simply to get it down. If he lived long enough he did so; if not, then not. [...] The idea is there in the first jotting-down; it never changes-it only emerges by stages and degrees. If I believed that the first jotting-down actually carried the whole idea, I would be a poet, not a novelist; I believe that it takes 60,000 words for me to put down my original idea in its absolute entirety.

The intense writing bouts had their physical cost. Some weeks after Laura was born, Phil was hospitalized by chest pains (shades of Charley Hume). He remained cheerful: "I'm either going to die or else I'm going to have a baby," he told Anne. The diagnosis was pyloric spasms; the doctor told Phil to reduce his coffee intake and to meditate. Did the subject of Semoxydrine ever come up? By now it was a steady fuel for the writing.

For Phil, one of the great joys of his new "good life" was sports cars. They bought a used Peugeot, then traded it for a '53 white Jaguar Mark VII saloon with a mahogany dashboard, gray leather upholstery, and a sun roof. Phil cranked it out to 96 mph on the freeway. But it broke down, and in the autumn rains the sun roof leaked and the blue carpet sprouted mushrooms. When Phil refused to help build a garage, Anne traded the Jaguar for a new Volvo. Phil was furious.

Petty quarrels like this arose frequently. Sometimes it was mere sparring-spirited competitions to establish who had authority. But more often the fights were heated. Growing up under Dorothy, Phil had never known loud arguments, and life with Kleo had been peaceful. Shouting and profanities were new territory for Phil, and he enjoyed it at first: "We're just like a Mediterranean family, everyone waving their hands and yelling." Then Anne upped the ante one day, flinging half the dishes they owned. Repentant, she suggested a peacemaking family trip to Disneyland.

Phil Dick in Disneyland . . . He was fascinated by the Abraham Lincoln "simulacrum," as he termed it in We Can Build You, a novel written in 1961-62 that combined SF and mainstream elements. And the trip did the family good. A new era of peace began. They purchased a spinet, on which Phil played classical pieces. He also had occasional out-of-body experiences (as in the Berkeley days): seeing himself in the living room, or at his own bedside. He also saw the ghost of an elderly Italian man who he suspected had lived on the site of their wonder house.

In autumn 1960, Anne became pregnant again. Convinced that they could not take on a fifth child, Anne told Phil that she wanted an abortion. In interview she recalled:

I felt it was the only way to go. The doctor thought it might be bad for Phil-maybe Phil had told the doctor he didn't want me to have the abortion-but I persisted because I wanted it. It must have been extremely disturbing to him, looking back now and realizing that We Can Build You was about that experience and look at the woman [Pris Frauenzimmer, a "schizoid personality"] in that novel. Demonic, right?

We couldn't cope as it was with four children. Financially, I think he knew he couldn't stand the responsibility of being father to this complicated middleclass family. That was my instinct.

Phil would certainly state his viewpoint strongly if it came to some theoretical intellectual topic-he could be adamant even when he was wrong, so he wasn't any milquetoast. He finally did think it was for the best-he said, "I agree"-and then we went up to Seattle, went to this nice restaurant-it's all in We Can Build You-in the novel Pris kills a little robot with her high heel. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

I think the abortion may have brought back his awful birth experience with his sister [Jane] dying. One of my daughters says, "He takes this stand against abortion when he didn't raise his own children."

As Anne points out, We Can Build You, written in the year following the abortion, includes a naked psychological account of Phil's enduring love-and poisonous hatred-for his wife. In Build, protagonist Louis Rosen undergoes psychiatric treatments that employ hallucinogens to induce fugue states. During these, Louis lives out multiple fantasy lives with Pris. At last, in one fugue, they have a child together, and Louis is ecstatic: "Across from them I sat, in a state of almost total bliss, as if all my tensions, all my anxieties and woes, had at last deserted me." But in his normal consciousness, Louis realizes that Pris is "both life itself-and anti-life, the dead, the cruel, the cutting and rending, and yet also the spirit of existence itself."

In a February 1960 letter to Harcourt, Brace editor Eleanor Dimoff, Phil had acknowledged-even prior to Build-his difficulties with female characters in his mainstream novels: "I tend to take it for granted in a novel that a man's wife is not going to help him; she's going to be giving him a bad time, working against him. And the smarter she is, the more likely she's up to something." The "evil woman problem" (as Phil termed it) preceded his marriage to Anne. The source of his rage was mother Dorothy. But despite Phil's apparent awareness of the problem, evil women continued to proliferate in the SF novels of the sixties. Many resembled Anne in life details and speech patterns. The high-water mark of the "problem" came in Phil's 1974 short story "The Pre-Persons," which reflects Phil's deeply felt antiabortion stand. The vehemence of its woman-hate is extraordinary. Father explains to son about aborting women: "They used to call them 'castrating females.' Maybe that was once the right term, except that these women, these hard cold women, didn't just want to-well, they want to do in the whole boy or man, make all of them dead, not just the part that makes him a man." It is as if female fetuses did not exist.

Phil later regretted the vehemence. In a 1980 "Afterword" he wrote: "In `The Pre-Persons' it is love for the children that I feel, not anger toward those who would destroy them. My anger is generated out of love; it is love baffled." Precisely this anger that springs from "love baffled" was aroused by Anne's abortion.

Somehow, things settled back to something like normal. Which is to say that a strange new force entered Phil's life, a book to contend with: the I Ching, Book of Changes, with roots three thousand years old if they're a day. Truths consonant with the reader's ability to apprehend them. Maybe not truths at all-maybe the Oracle is a malevolent crock. Spiraling yin-yang forces, impossible to nail down. Perfect vehicle for Phil. By summer 1961 he was consulting it at least once a day and had even dreamed of Chinese sages superimposed upon each other, whom he believed to be the many authors who had contributed to the I Ching over the centuries.