Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (25 page)

But during a 1961 visit, Iskandar Guy heard Phil complain that the Oracle could speak with forked tongue. Guy recalls: "I told him, 'It goes back to at least 1165 B.C. Who are we to question an entity functioning at that level all this time?' He said, `Fuck it, I'll fix it-I'll write a novel based on it.' " The novel, The Man in the High Castle, written in 1961 with the help of plot queries posed to the Oracle, is one of Phil's best and will be discussed shortly.

When he was not wrestling with yin and yang, Phil loved being outright silly. On April Fools' Day 1962 (Phil and Anne's third anniversary) Phil and the girls, for their trick on Anne, ran into the house exclaiming about a flying saucer that had just landed. Phil enjoyed the trick enough to pull it again some months later. (What did Phil really think of flying saucer sightings? He had parodied the little local UFO group that had invited him to join its ranks in Crap Artist, but in 1980 he noted that the group's belief in superior beings leading us to destruction for the sake of our salvation "doesn't seem as crazy to me now as it did when I wrote it.")

If there were no saucers in the sky, there were hints-sometimes-of something far stranger. One night Phil thought he saw a meteor. The family spent the next day looking for fragments, finding none. And then, on Good Friday 1962, Phil saw something far different. He had just finished listening to Handel's Messiah and was outside gardening, with baby Laura in tow, when he saw what he described to Anne as "a great streak of black sweeping across the sky. For a moment there was utter nothingness dividing the sky in half." Her response: "There was no doubt in my mind but that he had seen something." This vision of "nothingness" would linger with Phil as a confirmation, however frightening, of his capacity to see into the spiritual underpinnings of reality. As will be seen, the "nothingness" would be superseded, within a year, by a vision of still more stark dimensions.

A strictly terrestrial incident from this time concerns the death of a rat. Its lasting emotional impact on Phil recalls his third-grade "satori" while tormenting a beetle. It all started when rats began to eat their organic garden compost. One rat-Phil praises its courage and will to live in the Exegesis-went on to eat holes in their walls. Phil set out poison, on which this rat thrived. He then set out traps, which the rat eluded several times before it was finally caught-neck broken but still alive. Phil tried to drown it in a laundry tub. The rat swam frantically, dragging the trap. At last it died. Phil dug it a grave, in which he placed his Saint Christopher's medal.

That same summer of 1962, there was a hue and cry in Point Reyes Station over roaming dogs that were killing sheep. Phil purchased a rifle to protect their own small flock, as did other neighbors. According to Anne, Phil began to use the rifle recklessly, shooting without carefully aiming when dogs walked by on the road; eventually she gave the rifle away, without protest on Phil's part. Phil's love for his flock was pronounced-he would develop sympathetic wrist paralysis when the time came to butcher the sheep.

Throughout their marriage, Phil and Anne paid regular visits to Dorothy and Joseph Hudner in Berkeley. After Phil sold his Mariana Street house, the Hudners gave him title to a cabin they owned in nearby Inverness. This graciousness may have contributed to the smoothest relations Phil and his mother had enjoyed in some time. Anne recalls: "Phil never had a good word to say about his mother to me, but sometimes, when they were together, I could see such a closeness between them it was as if one nervous system were working both bodies. Dorothy doted on Philip and was very proud of his writing." When, in 1962, Dorothy and Joseph considered moving to Mexico, Phil complained to Anne that his mother was "abandoning" him. The move never took place. Soon afterward Dorothy, whose chronic Bright's disease was worsening, nearly died. Phil was distraught and planned to offer Joseph a home if the worst occurred.

The greatest crisis Phil faced at this time arose from a cottage-scale jewelry business Anne had started up with a neighbor. Phil at first encouraged their efforts, even making their first sale by paying a call on a posh Berkeley store. As a game, he tried his own hand at making jewelry. Anne liked using randomly formed molten shapes, and Phil avidly took up the technique. One treasured piece, a triangular shape, he gave to neighbor Jerry Kresy, who recalls nailing it to his door as a coat hook, prompting fierce "voodoo stares" from Phil. It was no wonder. Phil loved the piece so much that he made it the touchstone of Mr. Tagomi's redemptive reality change in the The Man in the High Castle: "a small silver triangle ornamented with hollow drops. Black beneath, bright and light-filled above." The random-shape technique bestows wu (wisdom, tao), as opposed to wabi (intelligence, craft), both terms Phil picked up from a book on Japanese gardening.

But the threat Phil saw in the jewelry business-the possible economic eclipse of his writing career-brought about Phil's self-termed third "nervous breakdown," at age thirty-three, in 1962. Phil and Anne have highly contrasting versions of the key events. Anne relates that Phil's enthusiasm became so great that she had to insist that jewelry was her business while writing was his:

I think he saw it as a way for him to have a normal business. He found himself trapped in writing at the time because he couldn't really make enough money to raise a family on it-I think he was real sensitive about that. He was a great jewelry maker, he had talent. I think he was so mad I pushed him out-that's why he talked so badly about it.

Cut to Phil on the couch in 1974 with interviewer Paul Williams on the third nervous breakdown that wasn't really:

PW: What specific event did you have in mind when you called that a nervous breakdown?

PKD: [pause] Ummm ... the most profound kind of all. I was ceasing to, quote, cope adequately with my responsibilities-

PW: As defined by your wife.

PKD: As defined by my wife. And it was easier to imagine I was having a nervous breakdown than to face the truth about the situation. It wasn't until [a year later] that my psychiatrist [Dr. X] told me what the real situation was-which was her psychiatrist, too-that there was nothing wrong with me, that in point of fact the situation was hopeless . . . with her.

PW: For you.

PKD: In other words there was no way I could cope with it because it was uncopable. [... ] But you could say that I didn't face reality, in that I did not face the fact that it was my fault. [. . .] But at that time I didn't realize it, I thought I was having a nervous breakdown. As a matter of fact I was not, in a peculiar way. I was showing the result of terrible pressures on me... .

"What "terrible pressures"? Consider: Anne's fledgling business was quickly threatening to outearn Phil's ten-year writing career.

Time for the first masterwork of his career. Phil wrote The Man in the High Castle, and its hard-cover publication by Putnam in 1962 helped him endure the storms of self-doubt. In a 1976 interview, Phil recounted:

I had actually decided to give up writing, and was helping my wife in her jewelry business. And I wasn't happy. She was giving me all the shit part to do, and I decided to pretend I was writing a book. And I said, "Well, I'm writing a very important book." And to make the fabrication convincing, I actually had to start typing. And I had no notes, I had nothing in mind, except for years I had wanted to write that idea, about Germany and Japan actually having beaten the United States. And without any notes, I simply sat down and began to write, simply to get out of the jewelry business. And that's why the jewelry business plays such a large role in the novel. Without any notes I had no preconception of how the book would develop, and I used the I Ching to plot the book.

To make the getaway complete, Phil had a hideout prepared. Ironically, it was by Anne's doing that Phil first came to rent the "Hovel," a small hut up the road on the property of local sheriff Bill Christensen. Phil had developed the habit of coming out of his study to read new passages to Anne. It wore her out, and she suggested that he find a work space away from the house.

Phil moved the Royal, the Magnavox, books and desk into the Hovel and kept a supply of candy bars on hand for when the girls dropped by. Anne regretted his absence at once, but Phil would not change his mind, though he too suffered from the separation. Dorothy had taught him to accept the consequences of his actions-" I never chew my cud twice," he explained. And he pointedly dedicated The Man in the High Castle "To my wife Anne, without whose silence this book would never have been written. "

It was a drastic break. But in the isolated Hovel, Phil the writer was not merely reborn, but transformed.

Phil often spoke of his two themes: "What is Human?" and "What is Real?" Within the span of eighteen months, in the Hovel, he wrote two novels that constitute his first great explorations of these themes: The Man in the High Castle and Martian Time-Slip. High Castle remains Phil's finest treatment of his "What is Human?" concerns-a subtle tale of moral frailty and courage in a world in which Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan have prevailed.

The United States has been divided (like Germany in our world) into separate political regions: The east is governed by the Nazis, while the more humane Japanese (who have no racist mythologies and draw from the I Ching as a kind of Bible) govern the west, with the Rocky Mountain states as a buffer zone with a modicum of self-rule. High Castle holds the distinction of being the first American novel to refer to the I Ching and employ it as a plot device (and deviser). Many who, in the sixties, elevated the I Ching to cult status first learned of it in High Castle.

There is, however, another text that exceeds even the I Ching in plot prominence-The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, a novel-within-a-novel in High Castle. Grasshopper (the title is from Ecclesiastes) poses a world in which the Allies, not the Axis, have prevailed. (In this twist, Phil was influenced by Ward Moore's novel Bring the Jubilee [1953], in which the South has won the Civil War.) The alternative world of Grasshopper does not match perfectly with our "real" world-for example, Rexford Tugwell, not Roosevelt, is the President who led America through the War. Grasshopper author Hawthorne Abendsen uses the I Ching to plot his novel, and the results are impressive: despite the novel's banned status, it circulates widely, read by everyone from Nazi leaders to fugitive Jews. Grasshopper points to a startling possibility: The world as we see it may not be real. We are in bondage only so long as we close our eyes.

So threatening is its premise that Grasshopper is banned and author Abendsen must hide in a "High Castle" in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Abendsen, who appears only in the last chapter, is drawn from Phil's memories of A. E. Van Vogt. The key inspiration for the "High Castle" symbol was Vysehrad, a Czech castle used by Protestants in their revolt against the Catholic dominion of the Holy Roman Empire. Research into Nazi policies (in the fifties, anticipating their use in a novel, Phil read, in the original German, SS files kept at U Cal Berkeley) revealed further castle metaphors: Various lofty and beautiful castles from the old days of the kings and emperors were taken over by the SS and used as places to train young SS men into an elite body cut off from the "ordinary" world. These were to be bases from which the Ubermenschen would emerge to rule the Third Reich. [...] the two castles are bipolarized in the book: the legendary High Castle of Protestant freedom and resistance in the Thirty Years War versus the evil castle system of the elite youth corps of the SS.

Phil's knowledge of Nazi tactics lent High Castle a chilling dimension. Without hyperbole, he created a world in which evil is as palpable as death.

Unlike the novels to come, however, the grail-like quest for true reality does not take center stage in High Castle. Instead, the focus is on individuals whose lives are bonded by coincidence, conscience, and yearning. The third-person voice is used throughout, but in an intimate, hovering manner, with characters shifted quickly into and out of prominence. In a July 1978 letter, Phil commented on his "multiple narrative viewpoint" technique: