Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (26 page)

In the forties I got into novels written around that time by students at the French Department of Tokyo University; these students had studied the French realistic novels (which I, too, had read) and the Japanese students redesigned the slice-of-life structure to produce a compact, more integrated form [...] When I went to write MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE I asked myself, How would this novel have been written-with what structure-if Japan had won the war? Obviously, using the multiple viewpoint structure of these students; [.. ]

These multiple viewpoints provide High Castle with a richness of texture that encompasses even the most subtle emotional shifts of its characters. The novel demonstrates convincingly that our smallest circumstantial acts can affect our fellow humans-for good or ill-more than we can ever likely know. By way of example, there is Robert Childan, a San Francisco dealer in antiques, who clings to Nazi dreams of white supremacy while kowtowing to the Japanese victors who govern his life. But Childan experiences a redemption of sorts because he can recognize the intrinsic meaning and value (wu) of a piece of jewelry crafted (unbeknown to Childan) by a despised Jew, Frank Frink. Then there is Nobusuke Tagomi, a customer of Childan's, who slays three Nazi killers with a purportedly antique Colt .44 (illegally counterfeited by Frink) in order to halt Nazi plans to incite a new war between Germany and Japan. Through Tagomi's courage, Frink's dishonesty is transformed into a contribution toward a better world.

Karma, as Phil depicts it in High Castle, is nothing like simple cause and effect. Goodness cannot assure peace of mind. Tagomi is anguished by his acts of murder, though it would seem that the Nazi killers left him no choice. In an effort to calm himself through aesthetic contemplation, Tagomi purchases from Childan a piece of Frink's jewelry (the same piece nailed to the door, in real life, by Phil's Point Reyes Station neighbor). But while Frink's craftsmanship opened the way to inner harmony for Childan, it transports Tagomi into a world of personal horror-the Grasshopper world in which the Allies have prevailed. His confrontation with that world recalls to Tagomi his ethical responsibilities in his own realm. He refuses to sign the extradition papers that would allow the Nazis to kill Frink.

Tagomi is one of the finest character portrayals of Phil's career. A middle-level trade official, he bears within his proper bureaucratic self a reverence for life and the tao. That very reverence causes Tagomi exquisite pain-the price of empathy. During a briefing on the German leadership (Bormann, who succeeded Hitler, has died, and Goebbels will succeed), Tagomi undergoes an anguish resembling those endured by Phil in school classrooms:

Mr. Tagomi thought, I think I am going mad.

I have to get out of here; I am having an attack. My body is throwing up things or spurting them out-I am dying. He scrambled to his feet, pushed down the aisle past other chairs and people. He could hardly see. Get to lavatory. He ran up the aisle.

Several heads turned. Saw him. Humiliation. Sick at important meeting. Lost place. He ran on, through the open door held by embassy employee.

At once the panic ceased. His gaze ceased to swim; he saw objects once more. Stable floor, walls.

Attack of vertigo. Middle-ear malfunction, no doubt.

He thought, Diencephalon, ancient brainstem, acting up.

Some organic momentary breakdown.

Think along reassuring lines. Recall order of world. [. ]

There is evil! It's actual, like cement. [...]

It's an ingredient in us. In the world. Poured over us, filtering into our bodies, minds, hearts, into the pavement itself.

Why?

We're blind moles. Creeping through the soil, feeling with our snouts. We know nothing. I perceived this ... now I don't know where to go. Screech with fear, only. Run away.

Pitiful.

Tagomi is not alone in recoiling from evil. The Swiss Mr. Baynes (name borrowed from Cary Baynes, the English translator of the I Ching), is really Rudolf Wegener, a German double agent seeking to avert war with Japan. While talking to a Nazi fellow passenger during a rocket flight, he undergoes his own horror:

They [Nazis] want to be the agents, not the victims, of history. They identify with God's power and believe they are godlike. That is their basic madness. They are overcome by some archetype; their egos have expanded psychotically so that they cannot tell where they begin and the godhead leaves off. It is not hubris, not pride; it is inflation of the ego to its ultimate-confusion between him who worships and that which is worshipped. Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.

There is a second double agent in High Castle. Frank Frink's exwife, Juliana, commences an affair with Joe Cinnadella, who proves to be a German assassin seeking to utilize Juliana's charms (Abendsen, like Phil, is partial to "a certain type of dark, libidinous girl") to get into the "High Castle" and do away with the loathsome author, whom Joe cannot resist reading. When she learns of the plot, Juliana first attempts suicide and then cuts Joe's throat. On the advice of the I Ching, she proceeds to Cheyenne on her own. To her alone is granted the privilege of reaching the "High Castle"-which she finds is an ordinary suburban house. Abendsen abandoned his fortress years before; he recognizes that there is no refuge from the world's horrors.

But Juliana seeks no refuge, only the truth. Face to face with Abendsen, they consult the Oracle to determine what truth there is in Grasshopper. As in all cases where characters in High Castle use the I Ching, Phil first tossed the coins offstage and let his characters deal with the outcome. In the final chapter, Juliana and Abendsen confront the Chung Fu (Inner Truth) hexagram:

Raising his head, Hawthorne scrutinized her. He had now an almost savage expression. "It means, does it, that my book is true?"

"Yes," she said.

With anger he said, "Germany and Japan lost the war?"

"Yes. "

Hawthorne, then, closed the two volumes and rose to his feet; he said nothing.

"Even you don't face it," Juliana said.

For a time he considered. [.. ]

"I'm not sure of anything," he said.

"Believe," Juliana said.

He shook his head no.

In a 1976 interview, Phil accused the I Ching of being a "malicious spirit" largely because it "copped out completely" as to the "unresolved" ending chapter of High Castle: "It is a liar. It speaks with forked tongue." (Notwithstanding such pronouncements, Phil consulted the I Ching regularly up to the time of his death, with peak use in the sixties and early seventies.) What frustrated Phil (as well as numerous critics who otherwise admired the novel unreservedly) was that the revelation of the truth-that the Allies prevailed in World War II-does nothing to dispel the characters' foreboding. Juliana remains isolated; Abendsen continues to live in fear. The sense of Nazi oppression remains. Truth alone, it seems, is not enough to liberate the soul. In an August 1978 letter, Phil tried to make the High Castle ending cohere:

Juliana tells Hawthorne Abendsen that his book is true and it makes him angry. [...] Simply because he knows that if this woman, this stranger, this ordinary person knows, then the Fascist authorities must know, and his life is in danger. Abendsen feels two opposite ways about his novel; on one level he would like the truth of it to be palpable, but it scares him that he knows the truth and has publicly stated that truth: he is a Geheimnistrager: a carrier (knower I mean) of a secret, and it is a secret which frightens him.

Phil's sense of being a frightened "knower" of a "secret" appears throughout the Exegesis, begun in 1974. That same year he returned briefly to the idea of writing a sequel to High Castle. Back in 1964 he made a start at it (two chapters, twenty-two pages total, survive; see High Castle in the Chronological Survey) but could not face further research on hideous Nazi tactics. Dictated cassette notes of 1974 describe one scene in which Abendsen would be brutally interrogated by Nazis who seek (like Juliana) the truth as to the alternate Allied universe ("Neben- welt"), which Abendsen cannot provide-he does not know. The secret is forever elusive.

Of Martian Time-Slip, written in 1962 and published by Ballantine in 1964, mention has been made in Chapter 2 with regard to the parallels between Phil and Time-Slip protagonist Jack Bohlen: their shared hatred of schools and their horrific visions of reality coming apart at the seams. But Time-Slip does more than cast light on Phil's development. It is a brilliant novel of ideas and a humane and hilarious look at life on Earth's struggling colonies on Mars (which bears little resemblance to the Red Planet of pulp dreams). The central themes: the nature of schizophrenia, and of what by tenuous common consent we term the "real."

The appearance of Time-Slip as an SF paperback was a letdown for Phil. In 1974 he recalled:

With High Castle and Martian Time-Slip, I thought I had bridged the gap between the experimental mainstream novel and science fiction. Suddenly I'd found a way to do everything I wanted to do as a writer. I had in mind a whole series of books, a vision of a new kind of science fiction progressing from those two novels. Then Time-Slip was rejected by Putnam, and every other hardcover publisher we sent it to.

As Paul Williams has noted in Only Apparently Real, a biographical sketch and collection of interviews with Phil, Phil's memories of Time- Slip's fate are not entirely accurate. The novel that was submitted to, and rejected by, mainstream publishers was We Can Build You, ultimately published in 1972 by Don Wollheim's DAW Books. Phil's original title for Time-Slip was Goodmember Arnie Kott of Mars, and the Meredith Agency treated it as SF all the way, first serializing it (as All We Marsmen, a title even worse than Phil's, in Worlds of Tomorrow) and then selling it to Ballantine.

But if Phil misremembered the details, his sense of defeat by the reception of Time-Slip as SF was very real. Even its reception as SF was troubled: Wollheim at Ace-who in 1960 had purchased Phil's two worst-ever SF novels, Vulcan's Hammer and Dr. Futurity-turned down one of his best in Time-Slip. Why? The novel was set in 1994. "It offended my science fiction sense," says Wollheim. "There couldn't have been a Mars colony when he put it-if he'd thrown it ahead a hundred years, I would have liked it." Live by the SF sword, die by the SF sword.