Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (27 page)

Reviewers treated High Castle as a political thriller on the order of Fail-Safe ("Scarifying," pronounced the New York Times), but sales were poor. And with Time-Slip Phil was back in the SF ghetto. But something strange happened. In late 1962 Putnam sold the rights to High Castle to the Science Fiction Book Club. And the SF fans saved Phil's ass, talking up High Castle so much that in September 1963 it received the highest SF honor: the Hugo Award.

If Phil was in the ghetto, at least he was its king. A local reporter took his picture standing beside the rocket-shaped trophy.

Meanwhile, the Meredith Agency, weary at last, had returned all of Phil's unsold mainstream novels in one big package that was dumped on his doorstep in January 1963. Those rejections, coupled with the ray of hope of the Hugo, made it official. After seven years, Phil's mainstream breakthrough effort was formally at an end.

So be it. Phil would move right on to work on an SF novel (the mainstream be damned!) that for sheer hairpin plotting and metaphysical weirdness soared far beyond anything in High Castle or Time-Slip.

For he would now see a vision of absolute evil in the sky.

And his marriage would come to seem, at times, even worse.

Phil's Marriage Mimics "Reality" By Coming Apart At The Seams, A
Vision In The Sky Inspires The Most Brilliant Invasion Of Earth Story Ever
Written, And, Country Squire No More, Phil Moves To East (Gak!) Oakland,
Gets Weird, And Finds A New Wife (1963-1965)

And I wrote at a fantastic speed; I produced twelve novels in two years ... which must be a record of some sort. I could never do this again-the physical stress was enormous-but the Hugo was there to tell me that what I wanted to write was what a good number of readers wanted to read. Amazing as it seems!

PHIL, 1968 "Self Portrait"

I was supporting, at one time, four children and a wife with very expensive tastes. Like she bought a jaguar and so forth. I just had to write and that is the only way I could do it. And, you know, I'd like to be able to say I could have done it without the amphetamines, but I'm not sure I could have done it without the amphetamines, to turn out that volume of writing.

PHIL, 1977 interview with Uwe Anton

Well, I have an East Oakland care quotation, which is the brochure from the pills I've been taking for seven years (or is it nine? My mind seems oddly fuzzy, somehow), semoxydrine hydrochloride, which I now learn is methamphetamine hydrochloride (i.e. another name for methedrine), because, see, this last refill time-I am up to six 7.5 mg of them a day, and 7.5 is their strongest dose-the druggist forgot to snatch loose the accompanying brochure, so after all these years I got to read about the side-effects, etc. of the pill. One sentence under the subtitle HUMAN TOXICITY particularly made my decade. It reads like this, gang: Overdoses, may, in addition, cause hallucinations, delirium, peripheral vascular collapse and death. (Eeg, gak, wach, fug, gugh, whuh!)

PHIL, October 1964 letter to Terry and Carol Carr

IN 1963 and 1964, Phil wrote a mere eleven (not twelve) SF novels, which include three of his best (Dr. Blood money, The Simulacra, Clans of the Aiphane Moon), one of his worst (The Crack in Space), and, for good measure, an outright masterpiece (The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch). He also produced eleven stories, two essays, and two extended plot treatments that served as the bases for subsequent collaborations with Ray Nelson (The Canymede Takeover, 1967) and Roger Zelazny (Deus Irae, 1976). Not to mention hundreds of letters and God knows what all else that may have been lost or destroyed along the way.

All this is worth stating at the outset because, in light of the tumultuous tales of these two years-told variously by Phil, Anne, friends, and rivals-it would be easy to overlook one central fact: Phil was not only a gifted writer, but a highly disciplined one. Swirling chaos never kept him from the trusty Royal for long. Indeed, it can be said that Phil thrived on the chaos, drawing from it the sustenance for his novels and stories.

There were times of peace and happiness between Phil and Anne. Of course. It's just that they became lost amidst the anger and accusations. Anne concedes that they possessed "hair-trigger tempers." She can't recall what it was they fought over so frequently, or rather, it was any and all things, most seemingly minor. Simple talks accelerated into verbal sparring and then into outright rage. In interview Anne says:

He was powerfully brilliant, much smarter than me-putting out eighty different things simultaneously. It was very difficult to relate to him. You couldn't help loving him. He was scary. You never knew what bizarre thing he would do next. He made me angry too. Also, he was this charming lover, but the other Phil was just dreadful. You couldn't make out what was happening. I was very competitive with Phil, I had the college degree, and I was very, you know, "Now I've got you, you son of a bitch." I'm sure I gave Phil a lot of problems with that in the old days. I'm sure I did.

Never mind who started what when or why. They both were in love up to their ears, and it brought out the demons in them. Both Phil and Anne spoke freely to friends about the anger and violence that went on between them. Anne recalls: "I had a bitchy tongue back then. Who hit who on what occasion isn't so important. I know I participated spiritually in the violence." She acknowledges that each struck the other on more than one occasion. And Phil, though he more than held his own, grew ever more terrified by the escalating tensions. Several times he claimed to their friends that she was trying to kill him.

Anne denies any such thing, and no one who knew them at the time considers it plausible. But there's no question that Phil had reached the point where Anne scared the hell out of him. The jewelry experience had left him humiliated both as writer and as practical breadwinner. Phil would bemoan the double bind of facing complaints both about how little money he made and about the long writing stints that kept him away from his family.

And yes, by 1963 he did fear that Anne was out to kill him. Daughter Hatte recalls that during their arguments Phil would scream: "You killed [first husband] Richard and now you're trying to kill me." Anne recalls that one day, as Phil was opening a gate for her to drive through, she revved the motor and started forward slowly. In a panic, Phil bolted. "I thought disgustedly, `What is he doing, now?' After I had driven out on the road he came back and got into the car. I didn't even ask him what he thought he'd been doing." What he thought-and accused Anne of for years to come-was that she had intended to run him down.

Phil had long been threatened by Richard Rubenstein due both to his mainstream literary status and to his wealth. When he was not falsely accusing Anne of plotting Rubenstein's murder, he worried that he himself was no more than an emergency replacement. Anne writes:

But I do remember Phil saying on a number of occasions, "You don't love me, you just wanted a husband and a father for your children."

No answer I gave would carry any weight with him. I tried an indignant, "I do too love you!" but when I couldn't get him to acknowledge this avowal I finally replied, "Well, of course I just wanted a husband and a father for my children. Why else would I marry you?"

Phil found two important allies who helped him to do what he knew he must: separate from the wife he could not help loving. Dr. X, to whom he and Anne paid alternate weekly visits, was the first. The second was his Hovel landlord, local sheriff Bill Christensen ("Sheriff Christen" in The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike). Anne recalls one argument in which they both threw furniture, culminating in Phil's striking her. Their daughters looked on, frightened. Anne called Sheriff Christensen. When he arrived in his squad car, Phil went out to him while Anne glowered on the porch. Whatever he said satisfied the sheriff, who was sympathetic to Phil due to prior accounts Phil had given him of Anne's allegedly severe mood swings.

Anne's jewelry business was going well, but that wasn't totally good news to Phil, who was still selling his SF novels for a lousy $1,500 a shot to Ace. (He would enjoy a post-Hugo economic boomlet of sorts that saw him earn $12,000 in 1964, but it didn't last long and came too late to matter to this marriage.) During 1963, either Phil or Anne (each claimed it was the other) decided to sell the Inverness cabin, which Dorothy and Joseph Hudner had deeded to Phil. The understanding had been that the cabin would someday be reconveyed to them; Dorothy was furious at them both.

During this time, Anne recalls, Phil told her he was tired of being a writer; he suggested that they finance a record store by mortgaging their home. Anne states that Phil told both Dorothy and Dr. X that the mortgaging plan was Anne's idea. Dorothy promptly expressed her disapproval, while Dr. X informed Anne that she suffered from delusions of grandeur. Both accused her of trying to end Phil's writing career.

During summer 1963, Phil backed out on a planned family vacation to Yosemite National Park at the last moment. It seemed to Anne that he was suffering, for the first time in their marriage, from agoraphobia. By contrast, Harlan Ellison recalls that during this period Phil visited him in Los Angeles several times. They'd first met at the 1954 Worldcon- Ellison as a punk SF fan, Phil as the young pro. Now their friendship as fellow writers grew. They even went hunting together:

I told him once about hunting for javelina pig, which is something I used to do. [... ] We talked about it and I said, "Let's go."

I suppose that was when I first got an insight into the way he looked at the world. Which was a very peculiar way indeed. His stories already had a strange slant: the feeling that a shadow world existed beside our own. I didn't realize it was paranoia until a great many years later; I wasn't that smart. Anyway, Phil found it an interesting experience. We didn't find anything. We had rifles along, rode out in the jeep to Nevada; he was fascinated by the guns.

Ellison's perception of "paranoia" in Phil during this period is not an isolated one. Old Berkeley friend Iskandar Guy recalls:

Phil was talking stuff so outrageous it made no bloody sense. What he was experiencing, what was going down-I couldn't make sense of it. He was going through extreme vacillations between depression and almost manic things. He would say, "Anne hooked up the stereo to the Jaguar and dragged it down the street." It could have happened, I don't know-but that's pretty far out. He said Anne tried to kill him. I would see her and, my God, Anne's pretty mellow. Nice lady. Talking about her Phil had gone from she's the greatest thing that ever happened to me to she's a pseudo-demonic creature, the destructive feminine principle of the world.

There was a general paranoid cosmology-faces in the clouds, government, FBI. You name it. It was like he was holding the fort against the forces of evil.

Phil came to rely upon Dorothy as a refuge from his wife. Whatever Dorothy's faults, she had never failed to rally behind Phil's writing career, and now she came to sympathize with his view of Anne as a threat to it. Phil was often in despair during his visits: shutting down, sitting and staring. If he did talk, it was in flat tones. Dorothy knew to allow for a degree of elaboration in his tales. Recalls Lynne Cecil, who was still living with her aunt/stepmother Dorothy at this time: "Phil exaggerated and dramatized. Mom used to say about him, if he didn't have a book going, he made one. I don't think he ever knew he was doing it, and his imagination was so rich that it was difficult to sort out."

Dorothy was alarmed by the increasing amounts of amphetamines her son took to bolster his moods and his writing production. She'd known of his prescription Semoxydrine use in the fifties. But now she found herself in the position of a passive supplier. Lynne Cecil recalls: "Mom would say she wished she could put a lock on her medicine chest because he'd come to the house, open it up-Mom had everything because she had so many physical problems. He preferred speed, but I think he'd try anything to see what it felt like. He was like a little kid in some ways."

Dorothy's medicine cabinet was not Phil's only source of drugs-he continued to obtain prescriptions for antidepressants. While he could seem childlike in his trust in the efficacy of uppers and downers, he was by no means as naive as he sometimes liked to pretend. Phil knew drugs, and by the early sixties the deleterious side effects of amphetamines were widely discussed. But he found it difficult to acknowledge his own responsibility here. To the end of his life he blamed Anne for his increased amphetamine usage during this time. Likewise Dorothy. After one visit to his mother, Phil told Anne: "I'm afraid that I'm going to kill myself with the drugs in Dorothy's medicine cabinet. She's going to kill me the way she leaves those drugs around."