Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (58 page)

PulL, December 1980 letter

His philanthropy, his warmth, his loyalty, his devotion to his art, and his moodiness.

MARY WILSON, in response to interview query: Name five aspects of Phil that remained constant

PHIL enjoyed the afterglow of his tour de force completion of Valis. The novel that had plagued him for four years had taken sudden shape in two weeks. Naturally, he was already conceiving a sequel, to be entitled Valis Regained, after Milton. But Phil needed fallow time-he no longer had the bodily stamina to plunge from one novel to the next, as in the sixties. The nightly Exegesis "research" sessions continued apace, however.

Meanwhile, Phil's worth in the New York market had climbed impressively. Back-title royalties and resales enabled Phil to gross $101,000 in 1978 and $75,000 in 1979. In January 1979, a lucrative package deal for three of his least distinguished Ace titles-$14,000 for The Cosmic Puppets, Dr. Futurity, and The Unteleported Manprompted Phil to send this telegram to the Meredith Agency: "Russ Galen's sale to Berkley Books the best of my career. Please congratulate him. He has enormously enhanced my career." Phil's shrewd intent was to enhance young Galen's career as well. At last, after nearly thirty years, Phil had found a truly enthusiastic ear in the agency. He meant to keep it.

Along with financial success came the reassurance that the counterculture young continued to relish his effects. Two different punk bands took their names from his novels in 1979: Eye in the Sky and JJ-180 (the drug in Now Wait for Last Year). Then, in May, Phil learned that A Scanner Darkly had won the Grand Prix du Festival de Metz. In June, he completed a new story, "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon," which Galen sold to Playboy. Phil didn't care for the Playboy philosophy and gave his four-figure fee to Cambodian famine relief. At the same time, he was proud of this major market sale, and prouder still when the story (published in December 1980 as "Frozen journey") earned him a "Best New Contributor" award. Another coup came when "Rautavaara's Case" appeared in the October 1980 Omni. A third new story, "The Exit Door Leads In," was featured in the fall 1979 Rolling Stone College Papers. (For discussion of these stories, see I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon in the Chronological Survey.)

To his great joy, Phil was able now to reestablish close ties with Laura and Isa. Both paid him visits during this time. Isa, who came to stay three times in the late seventies, recalls:

We didn't see enough of each other, but I sort of understood he just couldn't do it. What would happen when I'd go down there is that we would be so close. We'd snuggle and talk, and when I had to go home it was awful. I'd cry, and I know he would too. So pretty soon it was better not to see each other, because it was too hard to deal with parting.

He told me once that while he and Tessa were married, he saw an angel over Christopher's head while he was playing in the sandbox. He started crying, saying, "It's true, I really saw this." It was important to him that I believed he saw this angel.

He had so much anxiety that he couldn't really take me anywhere. The only place we could walk every day was to a little market that sold sandwiches. He didn't exercise at all. We'd play kickball, but after five or ten minutes his heart would start to pound from the running and he'd have to rest. Day after day he'd sit in the dark apartment. He'd stay up late and get up late and take an afternoon nap. He didn't care about his clothes or appearance. I didn't see him as an author. He never told me about his writing. He was just my dad.

Phil and Laura had not spent any extended time together for fifteen years prior to her February 1979 visit. Rumors of Phil's excesses had made Anne mistrustful. But Phil and Laura had managed to correspond and talk by phone throughout the seventies, and now that she was of college age there could be no objection to her flying down to Santa Ana. Laura recalls:

He was so funny, an incredible sense of humor. And also so polite-his manners were impeccable. When he walked with women he walked on the outside, nearest the street. He opened doors for me, helped me pick out clothes. And he was so witty and quick. Half the time when he gave interviews he was laughing inside at the things he said. People didn't seem to know that, though.

His apartment was full of Bibles and religious books, encyclopedias, and books of science fiction. Lots of records, especially Wagnerian opera. It was disordered, cluttered, and dirty-I didn't want to use the bathtub. There was mold and mushrooms in the corners in the shower. It didn't bother him.

He was one of the most frightened people that I have ever known. He wanted to make people happy. He was brilliant and empathetic. But he was trapped by his fears. Crowds, cars, freeways, travel, speaking in front of people. All the times he'd say he would do things and then didn't. Tickets to go places that were never used-l found them while cleaning up his apartment after he died.

He said that I could move in with him and attend U.C. Irvine instead. I didn't take him seriously about that. I couldn't see him being thrilled by my being there day after day. The distance contributed to our having a good relationship.

He did his best-he did very well. I never felt he wasn't a good father. He was who he was.

Certain aspects of fatherhood did cause Phil difficulty. Both Isa and Laura concur that coming to their father for financial help was touch and go. Phil contributed over $5,000 in 1979 to charities such as Children, Inc., and Covenant House (a New York shelter for runaways). But, for whatever reasons, Phil was on his guard when either Isa or Laura brought up money. Recalls Isa: "Lots of times when we'd ask him for money he'd get very paranoid and say, `No, I'm broke.' He was very generous when he wanted to be. But if you'd ask, he'd get suspicious and weird."

Spontaneity appears to have been the key. Phil promptly sent Laura a check for $4,000 when he learned of her acceptance by Stanford. Later he promised her $200 per month, which he soon discontinued; the sense of obligation killed the joy. Phil's reluctance here is striking, given that he continued to carry a grudge against his own father for failing to provide help with tuition expenses when Phil attended U Cal Berkeley in 1949. Says Laura: "Like many things he said, his intentions were good but the follow-through was lacking. fie would send me a Christmas card that said he'd given to the children of Biafra in my name. And I became furious-I told him that I would give to that charity, or to something else, if I wanted to. He was kind to a lot of people, but he turned me down when I asked for a $1,000-to-$2,000 loan, and I was working three jobs at Stanford."

By contrast, Tessa stresses Phil's generosity in assisting her and Christopher. Phil not only kept up his legally required $200-per-month child-support payments, but also voluntarily upped the sum to $400 per month. He further helped Tessa purchase a house, and made substantial contributions for private school and toys for his son. Then too, Tessa (unlike his prior wives and daughters) was there in Santa Ana to persistently plead her case.

If Phil was sometimes wary of financial contributions to his out-oftown daughters, he nonetheless anguished over his own selfacknowledged failings as a father.

In a May 1979 letter to Laura, he describes the ceaseless, obsessive Exegesis labors, which he felt kept him from his children:

I am neglecting entire parts of my life such as my relationships with my children because of my worry and exhaustion. I have become a machine which thinks and does nothing else. It scares me. How did this come about? I posed myself a problem and I cannot forget the problem but I cannot answer the problem, so I am stuck in fly paper. I can't get loose; it's like a self-imposed karma at work. Every day my world gets smaller. I work more, I live less. [... ]

Phil did not always find his Exegesis stints so disheartening. Tim Powers confirms that while Phil saw himself first and foremost as a fiction writer, he considered the Exegesis perhaps his most significant writing. James Blaylock recalls that Phil the writer was happiest composing letters and Exegesis entries. On the other hand, K. W. Jeter relates that he once intercepted Phil on the way to the incinerator with a stack of Exegesis pages. Phil's confidence in the worth of his speculations may have wavered, but his will to set them down night after night did not. Its publication did not matter to him. It was a means to an end: fashioning theories for novels that poked indelible holes in official reality. And with his friends Phil could share the fun of his speculations and sudden visions. Powers recalls a March 1979 episode when Phil, despairing of the truth, decided to demand some answers:

... I Monday night lie called me and said that the night before-Sundayhe'd been smoking some marijuana that a visitor had left, and felt himself entering that by-now-familiar state in which lie had visions (generally not dope-related-unless you count Vitamin C as dope), and he said, "1 want to see God. Let me see You."

And then instantly, he told me, he was flattened by the most extreme terror he'd ever felt, and he saw the Ark of the Covenant, and a voice (Voice?) said, "You wouldn't conic to me through logical evidence or faith or anything else, so I must convince you this way." The curtain of the Ark was drawn back, and lie saw, apparently, a void and a triangle with an eye in it, staring straight at him. (How prosaically I put this all down, especially when I pretty much believe it's true!) Phil said lie was on his hands and knees, in absolute terror, enduring the Beatific Vision from nine o'clock Sunday evening until 5 A.M. Monday. He said he was certain he was dying, and if he could have reached the telephone he'd have called the paramedics. The Voice told him, in effect, "You've managed to talk yourself into disbelieving everything else (more gentle and suited for human consumption) I let you see, but this you'll never be able to forget or adapt or misrepresent."

Phil said that during the ordeal he said, "I'll never do dope again!" and the Voice said, "That's not the issue."

Spurred by encounters of this kind, Phil's Exegesis labors were yielding remarkable fruit. The quality of the entries varied considerably, of course. But Phil's gift for startling speculation-grant him his initial premises and he would weave of them remarkable worlds-lend select portions of the Exegesis a power akin to that of his best novels. His most persistent starting point was the "two-source cosmogony" discussed in Valis: our apparent but false universe (natura naturata, maya, dokos, Satan) is partially redeemed by its ongoing blending with the genuine source of being (natura naturans, brahman, eidos, God). Together the two sources-set and ground-create a sort of holographic universe that deceives us. Disentangling reality from illusion is the goal of enlightenment, and the essence of enlightenment is Plato's anamnesis (as in 2-3-74): recalling the eternal truths known to our souls prior to our birth in this realm. But enlightenment is a matter of grace. God bestows it at the height of our extremity, in response to our need and readiness to receive the truth. These are Phil's basic themes in the Exegesis. Of course, the variations he fashioned are near infinite.

Occasionally Phil would type out formulations that particularly pleased him. One of the finest of these is a 1979 parable on the apparent lack of divine wisdom in our world:

Here is an example of hierarchical ranking. A new ambulance is filled with gasoline and parked. Then next day it is examined. The finding is that its fuel is virtually gone and its moving parts are slightly worn. This appears to be an instance of entropy, of loss of energy and form. However, if one understands that the ambulance was used to take a dying person to a hospital where his life was saved (thus consuming fuel and somewhat wearing the moving parts of the ambulance) then one can see that through hierarchical outranking there was not only no loss but in fact a net gain. The net gain, however, can only be measured outside the closed system of the new ambulance. Each victory by God as intelligence and will is obtained by this escalation of levels of subsuma- tion, and in no other way.