The Search for Philip K. Dick (34 page)

In the teens of the twentieth century, Edgar thought his father made a terrible mistake when he moved his family from the Pennsylvania farm to a desolate, water-deprived area near Cedarwood, Colorado. The family starved physically and mentally for more than three years on a homestead that was “ruled by dry, hot wind, tumbleweeds, jack rabbits, coyotes, rattlesnakes, and prairie dogs.” Later they moved to Fort Morgan in northeastern Colorado and went into sugar beet farming. Brothers of Edgar’s still own land and farm in this area.

In 1917, when the United States declared war on Germany, Edgar “wanted to go to defeat the Kaiser.” Although he was only seventeen, he was six feet tall and a big, husky young man. He persuaded his father and mother to go with him, and one night they went by lantern light to the tiny post office in Fort Morgan and signed his enlistment papers for the Marines. “When I left Colorado on the train, I told my mother I’d wave to her as I went by the house. I remember her standing there on the front steps waving good-bye to me. I’ll never forget. I can still see her standing there.”

After training for six months in Pennsylvania, Edgar went to France. He was, he said, “a corporal, like Napoleon and Hitler,” and became a runner taking messages from one company to another at the front, because he could spot German machine-gunners in the trees when no one else could. The Fifth Marines were shock troops that were brought to the front lines of battle in difficult military situations. Edgar fought in the battles of Belleau Wood, the Argonne, and Chateau Thierry. He loved the adventure of being a soldier and told me he was sad when the war was over and he had to go back home.

He met Dorothy Kindred from the Rocky Mountain town of Greeley, and they married September 29, 1920. In 1923, the young couple moved to Washington, D.C., to take advantage of a federal scholarship at Georgetown University that was granted to ex-servicemen. Pursuing agricultural studies, Edgar graduated in 1927 and became a scientific aide at an experimental livestock farm near the capital.

Dorothy Grant Kindred, Phil’s mother, was the middle child of three. Her father, Earl Grant Kindred, “a big handsome, brilliant man,” as Edgar described him, was a self-taught lawyer, something that was still possible when he was a young man. Earl Kindred had married Edna Matilda Archer in 1892 in Iowa. When Dorothy was born, the family lived on a ranch they owned near Greeley. According to Edgar, Earl made and lost fortunes. He had bad luck. After he went bankrupt and sold the family ranch, potash was found there and made the next owner a millionaire. Earl couldn’t support his family most of the time. Dorothy told me that on two occasions her father, seeing bad times coming, shot all the children’s pets because he felt there wouldn’t be enough money to buy feed for them. This was traumatic for Dorothy, an animal lover. She had dearly loved her horse Brownie, which she owned as a young girl, and her love of cats was enormous. Phil used the story of Earl’s killing the family’s pets in
Confessions of a Crap Artist
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Earl Kindred left the family home in Colorado on many occasions “seeking his fortune” and then, later, came back. While he was gone, the job of supporting the family fell on Dorothy’s shoulders. Although only a teenager, she went to work to support Meemaw and her younger sister, Marion. Older brother Harold left home permanently when he was twelve. The family legend was that he was very angry, but Edgar didn’t know what he was angry about.

Dorothy was furious when her father would come back from his wandering and Meemaw would take him in again. Perhaps the stress of this period contributed to her contracting typhoid fever at seventeen and then Bright’s disease. The doctors gave her only a few years to live. She never recovered her health completely and was ill with kidney problems all her life.

Much of the information about Dorothy’s early years with her natal family came from Lynne Hudner, Dorothy’s stepdaughter. Lynne came down from Santa Rosa for an interview and spent the night at my house. We talked all afternoon and evening. It was the first time we’d had an opportunity to visit since those pleasant times in 1973 when Lynne and Dorothy lived in Inverness
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Lynne said that Dorothy, although sickly and frail all her life, as sickly people sometimes are, “went on to become a gifted and brilliant woman, intellectual, articulate, powerful—a person with definite ideas—but there was another side of Dorothy that came out of that difficult childhood and adolescence, a fearful and reclusive side, and guilt-ridden.” She was ill with an unending series of kidney infections and other physical problems “and like some chronically ill persons she was hypochondriacal. She was overly concerned with Phil’s health, and years later in her second family, with the health of [Lynne] and [her] twin brother, Neil. Illness was a way of life for Dorothy, and she used her illnesses to manipulate and control her family.”

Lynne thought that Dorothy “had insight into her tendency to be reclusive. Paradoxically, she also liked people and fought her inclination to guard her psychological territory. But she had a view of life as intrinsically not good, a view of herself as not a good person, and a real worry that the world would be destroyed. She believed the parent was responsible for making the child into a good person. As a mother she was loving and intelligent but guilt provoking.” Phil, earlier, and Lynne, in Dorothy’s later family, both felt they’d be cut off from Dorothy’s love if …???

Dorothy and Phil, when he was growing up, weren’t part of any large family group and didn’t belong to any community groups or church. Lynne thought Phil never learned to adjust to certain aspects of life.

Lynne, a psychiatric social worker looking back on her childhood, wondered if the ambivalent feelings of love and hate that both she and Phil had for Dorothy were due, in part, to a misunderstanding on the children’s part of an undercurrent of suffering and limitation that created an atmosphere of heaviness and somberness in Dorothy’s household. “Dorothy was a restrained person, relating outwardly mainly on an intellectual level, not given to expressions of affection—not open with her feelings.” Lynne thought that Dorothy must have been “overpowering to Phil as a small child.” Lynne herself had a father and a brother to insulate her.

“Dorothy, a pacifist, dedicated to nonviolence, would not allow any expression of anger—but she herself could show disapproval by a withering glance. Her household wasn’t one of emotional self-expression; there was no give and take, and no yelling, ever. If Phil did something wrong, he wouldn’t quite know what it was. Yet there was a tremendous, deep closeness between Phil and Dorothy. It mattered a great deal to Phil what Dorothy thought. But also he wanted to fight, to get away.” Lynne felt that a part of herself, a part of Phil, and a part of her twin brother, Neil, always remained a child around Dorothy. Phil’s hurt and his deep love for his mother were by far the most intense. Lynne said that Phil adopted a lot of Dorothy’s patterns. He was frugal and orderly like his mother and became a writer because of his mother’s admiration for this profession.

To compound the paradox and the complexity around Dorothy, Neil remembered Dorothy with a deep love that had no reservations. He told me, “My mother, Dorothy, was a wonderful person. There were never any problems between me and her. All my friends liked her, too. But Dorothy had a love-hate relationship with Phil. Dorothy always loved Phil but he sometimes hated her.” Dorothy maintained an excellent relationship with her second husband, Joe Hudner, for many years until his death.

Phil, as an adult, referring to Dorothy, called her “a rotten mother who didn’t like kids at all.” He thought that Dorothy was responsible for all his problems. Mothers of that generation were blamed for everything. But Dorothy was loyal to a fault to Phil. All during the Depression she worked hard, holding the same government job for years to support herself and Phil. Perhaps divorcing Edgar was a mistake, perhaps not. Despite our considerable social skills, Laura and I weren’t able to sustain a relationship with him.

In 1929, Dorothy, Edgar, and baby Phil took a trip back to Colorado to visit their families. Dorothy decided to stay for a while. Edgar had to go back to Chicago to work. Little Phil was already talking at eight months old. Dorothy also had him wearing finger restraints to prevent thumb sucking, a common practice at this time.

Dorothy, an observant mother, wrote a detailed notebook about her baby:

It’s hard to believe that the loving mother who wrote this detailed account was also the person who created such emotional damage in Phil.

In August 1930, Edgar was promoted to director of the western division of the NRA (Roosevelt’s National Recovery Act), with headquarters in Reno. Dorothy and Phil moved to Berkeley and Edgar planned to commute from Berkeley to Reno.

In Berkeley, Phil grew to be a tiny, handsome child. His father remembered, “He loved life and sparkled with energy. He was not argumentative, but he was competitive. He had a temper, but it flashed and then cooled off.

“He loved to play hide-and-go-seek and had a navy in the nearby creek. He had the old men in the neighborhood competing with each other to make toys for him. Phil had a lot of pride. In the woods, one day, he fell over a root and hurt himself. He went behind a tree to cry so people couldn’t see him.”

Dorothy joined a Berkeley group that started one of the first preschools in the country, an experimental program sponsored by the University of California. Phil was a leader there. Edgar said, “He would even call the nursery school parents and talk to them on the phone like another adult. He amused the other children at nursery school by putting a slice of bread on his head at lunchtime.”

The Institute of Child Welfare, the university preschool, sent a report on August 12, 1931, to the Dicks at 931 Shattuck Avenue:

When Phil and I were first married, I made an attempt to get together with Edgar. Phil had told me that he and his father had a falling out over politics in the mid-fifties and they hadn’t communicated since. Hoping to mend the rift between them, I urged Phil to invite Edgar and his wife, Gertrude, to visit us. Edgar accepted—but at the last minute he phoned and said he was having trouble with his teeth and couldn’t come. Phil said disgustedly, “That figures.”

When I drove down to Menlo Park to interview Edgar, I found him outside, gardening. He told me about a wild squirrel he had tamed and what all the local birds had been doing. We went inside but it was hard to talk because of his fourteen-year-old cocker spaniel bitch’s relentless barking. Gertrude said that Edgar wanted her to train the dog, but when she tried, Edgar would say under his breath to the dog, “Bark. Bark.” Then he would tell Gertrude, “Give the dog some beefsteak,” and she would get out a dog biscuit
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Edgar was built like Phil and stood like Phil. Gertrude showed me a photo of him in his prime when he was still playing football. He had been a big, athletic-looking man and very handsome. Now a cheerful octogenarian, he told me, “I live for my dog.” He spoke in a kind of rural patois that must have been useful to him in his line of work as executive secretary of the California Cattlemen’s Association. He had lobbied almost four hundred bills through the California legislature. He was especially proud of one that protected wild horses and burros. Gertrude said that Edgar had been a workaholic who came home only every ten days. That day, Laura came over to Edgar’s house from Stanford and we all went out to lunch. However, Edgar would never go out with us on subsequent visits; he had seen a program on television about people choking in restaurants and felt it wasn’t safe to eat and talk at the same time. Several months later, Laura and I took Isa to meet her grandfather. Edgar was quite taken with her and made it immediately clear that Isa, not Laura, was now his favorite. Later, when Isa didn’t come to visit him again, he called me up to say he wondered who was “keeping her away,” and implied that it was me
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