Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (62 page)

By late that day I had decided to buy all three books, and I told him so. Phil picked up his cat and said to him, "Boy, do we have a hot one here." We went to dinner and had a great time.

So here Phil was with a first ever New York mainstream deal worth all of $7,500, while Hollywood dangled a fat $400,000 cigar between its lips for a gimcrack novelization. Phil often described these two options as a vital either-or test of his integrity. Galen recalls the course of the negotiations this way:

Phil told a lot of people that I said there were two offers-Timothy Archer for $7,500 or the novelization for $400,000-which do you want to do? His version makes a better story, but it's not true. He didn't have to choose. He could have done both.

Really, his initial reaction was, it sounds great, let's explore it. I told him no, it's terrible, if you do a novelization no one will read Androids. He wanted to know how much they were offering-and this is what people try not to remember, that Phil came out of the hack world and the money definitely mattered. He couldn't understand why I'd say no to a lucrative deal. We talked, and he finally said, "I guess you're right."

The final deal saw Androids reissued under the title Blade Runner, with the film backers getting a one percent royalty. In an interview before final terms were agreed to, Phil decried the idea of novelization, but also pointed out that, had he been willing to write one, "financially, as my agent explained it, I would literally be set up for life. I don't think my agent figures I'm going to live much longer."

But it was Phil, not Galen, who was having premonitions of death. This was nothing new: Phil had sensed himself signaled to die several times over the past decade, as during the Xerox missive episode of March 1974. The difference now was that Phil felt himself not so much endangered from without as, simply, bone weary. Galen's point that Phil could have done both projects is true enough from a contractual standpoint; but as a matter of will and energy Phil knew better.

He turned to writing The Transmigration of Timothy Archer in April and May of 1981, and experienced a powerful sense of having endured temptation: "my spiritual aspirations endured white-hot iron testing[... ] Finally, I am right now triumphing, as I write the `Archer' book," Phil wrote in the Exegesis. He emphasized: "Literature is not the issue. Forging a vision of anokhi [Hebrew: I am the Lord] as I write is the issue. For me there is no other issue. Pure consciousness." While Phil's literary aims were exalted, his manner of fueling this new writing stint was not. To Paul Williams, he confided that he drank significant quantities of Laphroaig Scotch each night he worked on the novel-and felt that he was thereby jeopardizing his health.

Timothy Archer is an exploration of the soul of a man for whom, like Phil, "vision" and "consciousness" are the essence of life. No other of Phil's novels delineates so clearly the radical difference between Phil the thinker and Phil the artist. For in telling the story of Bishop Archer's failed existence-his unhappy family life, bitter extramarital affair, and soulless intellectual justifications-Phil is in essence rejecting the abstractions of his own Exegesis in favor of the simple, day-to-day virtues of human warmth and kindness.

Timothy Archer is also, more markedly than is typical for Phil, a straightforward roman a clef. Bishop Archer, who dies in the Judean desert in search of anokhi in the form of the Vita verna mushroom, is a psychological portrait of Bishop Pike. A letter on the bishop's life, sent by Angel Archer to "Jane Marion" in Chapter 2, closely resembles a February 1981 letter by Phil to Joan Didion (who wrote an essay on Pike in The White Album). Jeff Archer commits suicide, as did Bishop Pike's son, Jim junior, but the key models for Jeff were two of Phil's friends, Tom Schmidt and Ray Harris. Archer's mistress Kirsten Lundborg is limned from Maren Hackett. Teacher Edgar Barefoot is based on Alan Watts.

And Bill Lundborg, Kirsten's schizophrenic son, who believes Bishop Archer's soul has come to inhabit him, is based in part on Phil himself. The notion that Bishop Pike was somehow within him had continued to haunt Phil, as in this 1981 Exegesis entry: "2-3-74: 1 was bewitched. The purpose: to re-create Jim so he could continue [... ] speaking (through my writing, & not just the `Archer' book)." But the Jim Pike re-created in Archer is a most ambiguous portrait. His desert quest for anokhi is the act of an unwise, driven man. Angel Archer, the narrator, writes of him:

That this trying out of every possible idea to see if it would finally fit destroyed Tim Archer can't be disputed. He tried out too many ideas, picked them up, examined them, used them for a while and then discarded them ... some of the ideas, however, as if possessing a life of their own, came back around the far side of the barn and got him. [... ] But he died hard, which is to say, he died hitting back. Fate had to murder him.

Though the plot focus of the novel is ostensibly on Bishop Archer, it is his daughter-in-law Angel Archer, practical and tender, a widow in her thirties who manages a Berkeley record store, who quietly dominates the narrative. A key inspiration for Angel was daughter Laura (whose middle name is Archer). Donna, Phil's great love from the Santa Venetia days, was another model for the character, according to the Exegesis. But these real-life models emerged into something more. Angel's simple transcendence over the bishop's abstract speculations gave Phil a sense of having at last reconciled with the feminine, the anima, within himself. In the Exegesis: "When God looks at me he sees Angel Archer because this is what Christ has made me: new life: reborn. The [feminine] Al voice is the voice of my own soul."

His delight in creating Angel Archer led Phil to yearn anew for mainstream status. If Timothy Archer was well received, there was a chance that the doors would open at last. To Galen, in a June 1981 letter, Phil allowed that exclusion from the mainstream "has been the tragedyand a very long-term tragedy-of my creative life." He proposed to devote himself to further mainstream efforts and asked for his agent's advice. Galen's letter in response was guarded: He loyally urged Phil to abandon SF if he so desired. But Galen's heart wasn't really in it. In interview Galen recalls:

What I was trying to say in that letter was, don't stop writing science fiction. I just couldn't say it. I felt it would break his heart. If he had lived to see Archer not be a success-and Archer did poorly-it would have been very difficult, 1958 all over again. I would have had to submit his next mainstream novel to twenty-five houses and get twenty-five rejections.

To my mind, his mainstream stuff wasn't one-tenth as good as his science fiction. It's not something you could say to his face. Now he's dead and a martyr, and it's convenient to look at Phil as this man who could have been a mainstream writer but the dirty rotten publishing industry never gave him a chance. I don't think that's the case.

Timothy Archer didn't sell out its modest print run, even though it was published in spring 1982, just after Phil's death. A 1983 paperback reissue made a small profit. His subsequently published mainstream works have garnered the same low profits and quiet esteem.

Did Phil suspect the worst? In an August 1981 letter to Galen, Phil seemed to shake himself free of the mainstream dream. "Yes, I think I will continue to write SF novels. It's in my blood, and I feel no shame about being an SF author." He was wrestling with The Owl in Daylight, posing different plots in letters to Galen and Hartwell and pondering a "lamination" of them all. In one version, a Dantesque Inferno- Purgatorio-Paradiso structure forms the backdrop to the tale of a scientist imprisoned in an amusement park by an angry computer. Only by solving ethical dilemmas can the scientist-trapped in a boy's bodyreach Paradiso and recollect his true self. The park includes a Berkeley milieu with a Tony Boucher figure who helps the boy become an SF writer.

Another element in the Owl plot stew was "Ditheon," a word that came to Phil in a June 1981 dream: A beneficent medication appeared on a dream cylinder labeled-shades of Ubik!-"DITHEON." In the morning Phil hit the reference books and parsed out the Greek words di (two) and theon (God). In the Exegesis Phil exulted: "The term-the concept- Ditheon is the complete, absolute, total, accurate, definitive, final, ultimate explanation of 2-3-74." A person possessed by Ditheon has fused the two prior forms of divine wisdom, the justice of the Torah and the grace of Christ, into a third and higher spiritual wisdom-a return to pure being as expressed in Plato's concept of ideas. In a July letter Phil explained: "As human is to android, Ditheon is to human."

What role would Ditheon play in Owl? Phil never quite nailed that down. Had he lived, the time would have come for the feverish two-week stint that would have put such questions to rest. In an interview conducted by friend Gwen Lee in February 1982-just days before the first of the strokes that killed him-Phil offered what must stand as a final version of the Owl plot. The protagonist is a composer loosely inspired by Beethoven, who composed what Phil believed to be his finest music after becoming deaf. This is possible, Phil reasons, because music is a conceptual act processed by the right brain.

Phil's composer, Ed Firmley, lives out in the boonies, maybe Oregon. He's a strange loser type-musically ungifted, he earns a good living writing scores for cheap SF flicks. Then comes his big break: "They have this really rotten science fiction film about this detective who is tracking down these androids." (A parody of Blade Runner.) Firmley "is writing a schmaltzy score to go with this movie. [...] Now it's easy to track him down, because he is well known." Who's tracking Firmley down? Aliens from a planet on which music-or any sound-is unknown. Color is the basis of their language. One such alien discovers music by way of a religious experience and travels to Earth to learn how it is composed. "I have to write from the standpoint of the creature who is using color for language and for whom this is a sacred planet-like finding God." Firmley is the unwitting object of this sacred quest. "The alien decides to biochip himself and insert himself as a symbio into the human host brain." Phil doesn't provide an ending for Owl but does pose its ultimate theme:

The problem here is does a human want an alien in his brain as a symbio? I intend to make that a major question. You're catching me when I'm actually organizing a novel. This is the most essential part of writing a book, what I'm doing now. We switch viewpoints. A human being who is a composer would be the ideal host for this alien. [. . . ] It's there to enjoy music. It's a transcendental religious experience.

Why the title? "Owls cannot see in daylight, they become confused. It simply means a person whose judgment is clouded over."

Ideas for Owl came and went, but Phil couldn't bring himself to start it. In a letter Phil confided: "I'm afraid I bit off more than I can chew; I exhausted myself writing THE TRANSMIGRATION OF TIMOTHY ARCHER[ ... I and just can't keep up the pace." Phil feared he would follow the fate of Herb Hollis and a Point Reyes friend, western writer Bill Cook, both of whom died in early middle age from heart attacks. Then, in early September, Phil read in a Berkley Books newsletter that two of its writers had suffered heart attacks, one fatal. His response was desperate:

After I read the news [...] I stopped taking notes on my novel-in-progress, lay down for a nap, got up, drove to the grocery store, drove home and rammed a support column in our underground parking area. My unconscious was saying, Enough. I knew I was going to hit the support column and even after I hit it I kept on moving; I wanted to hit it. I wanted to protest the two heart attacks [... ]; I wanted to protest my own enslavement to decades of writing in order to pay spousal support, child support, send my older daughter to Stanford, my youngest boy to a private school, buy my ex-wife Tessa a $150,000 house-meet deadlines, rent a tux for the gala premier showing of BLADE RUNNER, all the long-distance phone calls, all the answering letters from readers who plan to commit suicide and want me to talk them out of it, because I wrote about my own suicide attempt in VALIS and they know I'd understand. I do understand. I understand that the payoff for writers-and editors as well!-who work day after day, sixteen hours a day, seven days a week [...] is not happiness but sudden death or total disability; they are, as Jesus said, like "your ancestors who ate manna in the wilderness; they are all dead."

The crash left him with an injured leg that made even walking about his condominium difficult. Intense physical expressions of empathy and rage were part and parcel of Phil's makeup. When he learned of the 1981 assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, Phil crushed an aluminum pop can so that it cut into his wrist. These were protests that verged upon suicide but stopped short. Phil wanted to live. He was looking forward to the Blade Runner premier, scheduled for mid-1982, and despite his complaints, money wasn't really an issue. But Phil was tired-and more than tired. He craved redemption for himself and for the world.

The endless explanations of 2-3-74 had left him high and dry, and he knew it. A week after the accident he wrote to Galen enclosing a one-page "final statement" on the Exegesis. His cover letter explained that 2-3-74 was real "but what it is I simply do not know, nor do I expect ever to know." The "final statement" admits his ignorance but argues that knowledge-not mere faith-as to the true "hyper-structure" of the universe is possible. A new species with a higher level of awareness than humans may be evolving, and the "hyper-structure" is "actively involved" in this evolution. "[Ijt is a meta-entity in the truest sense, and poses a vast, urgent mystery deserving of our profoundest attention."