Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (30 page)

In the novel my father appears as both Palmer Eldritch (the evil father, the diabolic mask-father) and as Leo Bulero, the tender, gruff, warm, human, loving man. [... ] the horror and fear expressed in the novel are not fictional sentiments ground out to interest the reader; they come from the deepest part of me: yearning for the good father and fear of the evil father, the father who left me.

Palmer Eldritch was Phil's first SF novel sale to Doubleday, which published this book (and seven more) in hard-cover in the sixties and seventies. For the first time, Phil had found a steady market for his books alongside Ace, which continued to publish the majority of his titles through the end of the sixties. While Doubleday didn't pay much more than Ace-an advance of $2,000, on average-they did provide the dignity of dust jackets. And so, in a market sense, Palmer Eldritch was a breakthrough novel for Phil.

More important, it was the confirmation of what he could do with SF. Palmer Eldritch terrified him-Phil claimed that when the galleys arrived he couldn't bring himself to read them. Anne calls it a "black mass" and laughs, in retrospect, at Phil's having written it in the midst of confirmation classes. !n a 1974 interview, Phil termed the Chew-Z realm "not a dream or even a hallucination. It is a state entered into by the characters . . . and their attempts to find their way back to 'sanity.' "

Certainly the novel lends itself to intriguing interpretations. Consider Palmer Eldritch. A palm branch, in Christian symbolism, suggests the martyr's triumph over death. A palmer is a pilgrim who, as a sign of having been to the Holy Land (or the Prox solar system?), carries a palm branch (or the Chew-Z lichen?). Eldritch, of course, is a favorite adjective of Lovecraft and other writers of the Weird Tales pulp era of the twenties and thirties. As for Leo Bulero, the lion appears in the prophecies of Ezekiel and, as a symbol of Christ the Lord of Life, is associated with the Resurrection. And the Chew-Z realm may be seen as the hellish Gnostic parallel to the Christian Eucharist, which, as described by Jung, "contains, as its essential core, the mystery and miracle of God's transformation taking place in the human sphere, his becoming Man, and his return to his absolute existence in and for himself."

In the Exegesis, Phil frequently turns to Gnostic doctrines in an attempt to explain Palmer Eldritch to himself. For example, Eldritch is "the arrogant one, the Blind God (i.e. the artifact) which supposes itself to be the one true God." The true God-the true Father-has abandoned this world. Most fundamental, however, is this 1978 entry: "Leo Bulero defeating Palmer Eldritch is the savior/messenger (Son of Man) defeating the demiurge creator of this prison (& illusory) world. Breaking his power over man."

All that and a great invasion-of-Earth tale too. God bless SF.

By early 1964 the marriage was nearing its end. Phil's stays with Dorothy in Berkeley grew more frequent. On March 9, Phil filed for divorce (the decree became final in October of the following year). Phil did circle back to Point Reyes Station for several brief efforts at reconciliation, staying as little as an hour and as long as a day or two, always leaving with a renewed sense of the marriage's failure.

The worst of it was leaving Laura and his three stepdaughters behind. Phil had been, through all the turmoil, a devoted father, accepting Hatte, Jayne, and Tandy as his own. But fundamentally, Phil was ready for a change. He was markedly ill-suited for the confines of middle-class family life. And his love for the children could not compensate for his bitter restiveness with Anne. Like most men of this era, Phil scarcely considered sharing custody after the marriage ended. Child raising was a woman's task. Phil would come to resent Anne's reluctance, in later years, to have Laura visit him. But he never objected to Anne's taking on the primary duties of care, including economic support-Phil resolutely dodged child support payments to Anne over the next decade. Even as he separated from Anne in March 1964, his primary energies were focused on starting up life anew.

In particular, Phil was happy to return to city life and decidedly on the prowl. Moreover, he became, for the first and only time, a mainstay of the Bay Area SF social scene. At first Phil moved in with the Hudners in Berkeley. Then a serendipitous correspondence arose-and Phil had a new romantic interest.

Crania Davidson (now Crania Davis, with three published SF novels to her credit) was twenty and living in Mexico. Her marriage to SF writer Avram Davidson, a friend of Phil's, was coming to an amicable end. She wrote to Phil in praise of High Castle and the I Ching, which Crania was consulting regularly. This led to an epistolatory courtship. When Crania and her son came to the Bay Area in June 1964, she and Phil hit it off and decided to share quarters at 3919 Lyon Avenue in East "Gakville," a/k/a Oakland. It was a small old house in a less than fashionable neighborhood. Officially, to avert embarrassment during the divorce, Phil rented the house while Crania occupied the backyard cottage.

Their relationship, which lasted until Halloween, provided Phil with a striking change from life with Anne. Crania was a free-spirited lover who admired his writing and made no difficult demands. Crania recalls that Phil was affectionate and considerate both to her and to her son, for whom he built a sandbox in the backyard. His gifts to her were on the practical side: an old Chevy and a salad bowl. But his declarations of love were breathtaking. Says Crania: "Phil had this marvelous ability to love-blast people, to turn on this incredibly intense affection-I think that was his main attraction to women and also to his friends. When he loved you, he really loved you."

She describes Phil as beset by "inner demons" during that summer. He would awaken in anguish in the middle of the night. One fear was that Anne was spying on him for information to use in court. He confided to friends that Anne had somehow planted a bug in his Magnavox. Anne did saw off the lock of the Hovel to obtain Phil's financial records for her lawyer. Outraged, Phil obtained a court restraining order; he also purchased a .22 Colt derringer to protect himself against potential violence on Anne's part. Crania recalls that he "became rather overly fond of it, waving it around at people," including once at Anne when she came to the Lyon Avenue house with Laura. Crania doesn't know if it was loaded on those occasions. She observes: "Phil was interested in violence, attracted to it. It was part of the whole pattern of his life at that timewith fears of the CIA and Nazis being around."

Phil did make numerous allusions to his friends of Nazis, CIA and FBI bugging of his house, and of Anne's alleged spying efforts (which she denies). Phil being Phil, when he told these stories he was often hilarious-deadpan accusations that the CIA had bugged his cat box. And while Phil talked a gruff act toward Anne and toward those who he felt threatened people he loved (and, as Crania emphasizes, Phil loved many people-including platonic adoration of several women-at this time), he avoided violent confrontations and would often flip-flop into a jolly mood just when it seemed a crisis was at hand. For example, shortly after obtaining his restraining order against Anne, Phil gave her his unlisted phone number. When Anne then came by to visit, Phil asked Crania to hide in the closet. He then proceeded to have a friendly tea with Anne while Crania was kept secluded, as she recalls, "longer than the capacity of any human bladder."

Crania speaks of Phil's having "angels and devils. That he kept as together as he did, as grounded, is interesting." Laughing, she adds: "Of course he was crazy-as a hoot owl. But Phil was also so far beyond that-a rich and complex person. Crazy is merely one facet of this incredibly complex man-brilliant, a genuine mystic, very human." She recalls that Phil was fond of "implying that everyone around him was crazy-and they were [laughing again] or they wouldn't be closely involved with Philip K. Dick." He would often administer the James Benjamin Proverb Test (a psychological diagnostic tool featured in We Can Build You) to new acquaintances to measure their human qualities, but Grania recalls that Phil interpreted answers largely in accordance with whether or not he liked the person to begin with.

Phil's changeable moods were exacerbated by injuries he sustained in a July 1964 accident. While driving with Crania, he flipped their VW bug on a curve; Crania emerged without serious injury, but Phil wore a body cast and arm sling for two months. While his writing pace had already slowed since leaving Anne, the accident put an end to all sustained effort. Phil's wretched life in a body cast, intensified by his fears of ending a marriage and starting a new life, led him to entertain thoughts of suicide. His desperate mood was described by Crania in an anxious July 1964 letter. Immediately, Crania regretted its tone and threw it away; Phil fished it out of the trash and saved it. Here is an excerpt:

[H]e is separated from his children.... He is in constant pain from his shoulder ... and helpless in many ways, cant drive, cant write, cant wash, tye his shoes, [...].... It is not all in his mind, you see ... he has reasons ... good, mundane reasons for feeling as he does . . . except that there are the other things TOO ... the things which ARE IN HIS MIND ... which are added to his daily problems ... [... ] until the dear, delightful, intelligent and interesting Philip turns [...] unrecognizeable. . . .

She also wrote of "rages" alternating with gloomy moods in which Phil would choke on his food-a recurrence of the childhood swallowing difficulties.

But their relationship had its many happy times as well, and Phil was adept at writing what Crania calls "beautiful, ardent, apologetic letters" to atone for his bad moods. In a subsequent October letter, Crania regretted that her fears over Phil's moods, confided to friends, had "been fed into the Bay Area loud speaker and blown up into [. . ] unbelievable proportions." But Grania wasn't the only source of rumors-Phil himself had the knack of acting out and blowing up the events of his life. Many who knew him found it difficult to sort out how much was Phil being deadpan funny and how much was Phil frightened for his life. He had earned the reputation (as he complained in one letter) "of an advanced schizophrenic paranoid who believed everyone was plotting against him and so for whom anyone might become the enemy at any moment. (The very fact that all this bewildered me, that I could not imagine who would circulate such an image and for what reasons demonstrates its falsity. [.I"

Their East Oakland house was, in fact, a peaceable SF social hub. Phil's long isolation in Marin County made him relish contact with writers. On Sunday afternoons, a group that variously included Ray Nelson, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Jack Newkom, Poul and Karen Anderson, Avram Davidson, and others met at Phil and Crania's place to brainstorm plot ideas. The collaborative novel by Phil and Ray Nelson, The Ganymede Takeover (p. 1967), was inspired by one such session. There was a proposed novel, The Whalemouth Colony, ideas from which Phil worked into The Unteleported Man (p. 1966).

But the most important fantasized project was Ring of Fire, which Phil conceived as a sequel to High Castle. Nelson writes that the title "refers to the ring of volcanoes and earthquake faults around the edge of the North Pacific Ocean which corresponds to the Japanese Empire." In the story, "a remarkably creative society called Amerasia came into being, produced a few immortal works of art combining Eastern and Western influences, then was destroyed along with all but one of its artists, writers and musicians on the first day of World War III, which ends Ring." There was also discussion of a third volume: Fuji in Winter. Nelson recalls that it "described the brief and apocalyptic war that almost exterminated humanity, but ended in a note of hope as a new religion, uniting the best elements of all the previous religions, arises in the ruins." The whole was to be called the "Amerasian Trilogy."

Ideas abounded, but for the first time Phil was suffering from writer's block. He feared it would be permanent. Combining forces with other writers seemed the most likely way out. The only two collaborations of Phil's career-The Ganymede Takeover and Deus Irae (first with Ted White, ultimately with Roger Zelazny; p. 1975)-were commenced during this period.

Another SF writer whom Phil befriended was Ron Goulart. And to Goulart, during summer 1964, Phil sent a long letter that comes as close to a definite blueprint on novel construction as Phil ever wrote. Which is not to say that any of the novels fits precisely the blueprint proposed in the letter-Phil could outswerve any plan in the course of his white-hot typing stints. But the letter is revelatory as to the strategies that went into creating the multiple-viewpoint Phildickian worlds. It's also a striking letter to have written during a writer's block-maybe it helped Phil reassure himself that he could do it again.