Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (37 page)

• Phil, Nancy, and isa Dick, San Rafael, California, September 1968. Photo by William Sarill

• Phil in 1979. Photo by Doris Sauter

• Phil and Tessa Dick, 1973. Photo by Linda Hartinian

• Phil and Isa, circa 1977.

♦ Phil with cat in February 1982, just three days before the first of the fatal strokes. Photo by Gwen Lee

• The gravesite, in Fort Morgan, Colorado, of Phil and Jane.

The Ramparts petition was not Phil's only source of anxiety. He would speculate that somehow, by accident, he had depicted a vital, classified secret in his SF-and had aroused the government's suspicion. The two works Phil most often suspected, in this regard, were The Penultimate Truth (1964) (see Chronological Survey) and "Faith of Our Fathers," a story written for Harlan Ellison's SF anthology Dangerous Visions (1967), which portrays a Chairman Mao-like totalitarian leader who conceals his true form by dosing the water supply with hallucinogens. Phil would later charge that Ellison's "Introduction" to "Faith of contained misstatements that had threatened his reputation and security. Ellison's piece included the following:

Philip K. Dick has been lighting up his own landscape for years, casting illumination by the klieg lights of his imagination on a terra incognita of staggering dimensions. I asked for Phil Dick and I got him. A story to be written about, and under the influence of (if possible), LSD. What follows, like his excellent offbeat novel, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, is the result of such a hallucinogenic journey.

Ellison recalls that Phil assured him that both "Faith of" and Palmer Eldritch were LSD-inspired; further, letters from that time by Doubleday editor Lawrence Ashmead-who supervised the Dangerous Visions project-confirm that Phil made no changes to the "Introduction" galleys. Phil's 1967 "Afterword" to the story itself stresses the LSD theme (though he did not say he had written under its influence). But in all editions of Dangerous Visions from 1975 on, there is an expanded "Afterword" in which Phil rebuts the acid-inspiration claim. It seems likely that Phil's 1975 denial is truthful and that the 1967 version sounded fun at the time.

Despite the later furor, Phil's friendship with Ellison, fueled by phone calls and occasional parties at Cons, continued. Ellison, who was at this time one of the most dominant figures in SF, saw Phil as one of the few writers in the field whose fervor and talent exceeded his own:

Phil, it seemed to me, was an outsider who was on one of those holy missions. Held by the madness and the demon. That's what drew me to him. I knew how painful it was for me, but I'm a tough little fucker and I knew how to handle it-I know how to fight back. Phil, I thought, was a flounderer in that area. He didn't know how to handle the business or life side of it. When he sat at the typewriter he was pure and clean and could do it, motivated by his madness that inspired his work. Beyond that, he kept getting shit upon. Mostly because of his own social ineptitudes. It was a strange feeling on my part in that he was more than my equal, probably a superior writer . . . the sort of writer I wanted to know. In that way I was parallel to Salieri looking to Mozart.

With fellow writers such as Ellison, Phil more than held his own as a dedicated professional. But in his strictly private life, the drugs were taking hold to the point where he looked to them for both solace and inspiration. Phil would go so far as to plan little festive occasions around pills. For example, Phil had managed to obtain a prescription for Ritalin, an upper intended for the relief of mild depression. (Its major side effects: high and low blood pressure, mood changes, heart irregularities.) Ritalin is contraindicated for persons with marked anxiety. Phil would save up a month's worth and down it all while close friends were over; the energy burst would fuel blue streak ideas and wild humor. The paradoxical truth is that drugs both estranged Phil from the world and intensified his sociability among fellow drug users.

One day in 1968, when Miriam Lloyd decided to throw away her pill stash, Phil rushed over to help (and salvage what he wanted):

So he helped me flush them. The last bottle, I said, "I don't even know what these are." Phil said, "Oh, these pills-you don't ever want to take these pills. I took these once and I ended up in Union City, which is a place you never want to be, especially on these pills." He hung out awhile, took some pills, drank some beer. He was a funny man.

Miriam points out that the sixties drug culture had an accepting, sharing ethic that contributed to Phil's fascination with it:

One of the things about the drug scene is that it creates instant intimacy. You have a gang, you have all this communal thing because, you know, joints are passed, trays of lines are passed, someone wants wine and we don't have any-quick, go get wine. Everyone's needs are taken care of.

Phil was really into being gracious-he loved it. He was incredibly egalitarian. Everything he liked, he just loved. He wasn't naive-he was very sophisticated and egalitarian. His politics were good, very humanistic. He really cared about people.

Phil seemed to be in his glory while attending the September 1968 SF Baycon, referred to as the "Drug Con" by many who attended. Several conventioneers, including Phil, ingested what they thought was THC (the active ingredient in marijuana) but proved to be PCP, a horse tranquilizer later known as angel dust. Nonetheless, Phil kept up active social rounds, socializing with Ray Bradbury, Robert Silverberg, Fritz Leiber, Philip Jose Farmer, Norman Spinrad, and-for the first time Roger Zelazny, with whom Phil had agreed, the previous October, to collaborate on Deus Irae.

At the Con there was considerable debate swirling around the SF "New Wave" that had been masterfully hyped by Ellison in conjunction with Dangerous Visions. Phil had his doubts about the substance of much "New Wave" writing. Still, he'd feared-as a fifties SF veteran-being regarded as passe (even though he had recently sold his first film option, on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). It was with relief that he wrote to his editor at Doubleday, Larry Ashmead, that his status had climbed since the '64 Con, due to the popularity of Palmer Eldritch.

Phil seems, at this time, to have been wracked by greater insecurities as to the worth of his writing than at any point since his Berkeley neophyte days. He would systematically underrate the novels he had produced since Palmer Eldritch. To stepdaughter Tandy he wrote in May 1969: "I haven't been able to do an important book since 1964, and I feel very unhappy about it." Phil later came to regard Ubik as a highly significant work, as has been discussed. As to "important" writing, mention should also be made of "The Electric Ant," a late-1968 story that is the finest of Phil's career. Protagonist Carson Poole thinks that he is a human being. But inadvertently he learns that he is really an "electric ant" (organic robot). Within him, a plastic punched tape roll serves as a "reality-supply construct." What happens, Poole asks, "if no tape passes under the scanner? No tape-nothing at all. The photocell shining upward without impedance?" Technicians inform him that he will merely "short out." But Poole is undeterred. "What I want, he realized, is ultimate and absolute reality, for one microsecond. After that it doesn't matter, because all will be known; nothing will be left to'under- stand or see." Poole opens himself up with a microtool and gets his wish. Read the story to learn the ending, which Phil said always frightened him.

But 1969 was a year of wheel-spinning by Phil's standards; the only novel he completed that year was a potboiler, Our Friends from Frolix 8, for Don Wollheim at Ace. In a March 1969 letter he explained his slump this way: "I have a theory: I can't sit and write one novel following another; between each I have to emerge from my shell and be with people; otherwise my novels resemble each other too much." But Phil was reading everything he could find concerning the Dead Sea Scrolls; the theological concerns fueled by his encounters with Pike were burning brightly.

In another March 1969 letter, Phil emphasized the slow gestation of a novel idea within him. His early holographic notes would include minor details on the technology and culture of the SF future world. He would then type up and revise these notes in the order in which they had occurred to him. Character creation was the most difficult step. The male protagonist would be a "composite" of actual persons. Female characters were to be "expertly developed, with many complications, contradictions-in other words, real women." Plot comes last:

I would go so far as to say that I plot in advance only the first chapter or so of the novel, and the further I go into it the more I tend to depend on the inspiration of the moment (which sometimes never arrives, or arrives too late, say after the novel is in print). [...] For me, knowing the characters comes only when I am actually writing the novel; I need to hear them actually speak, actually do things, react, etc. [...] Thus I frequently find myself arriving at a point in the novel where, for example, the notes (and if there is an outline, then the outline) calls for the protagonist to say "Yes," where in fact he, being what he is, would say "No," so "No" he says, and I must go on from there, stuck with the fact that that is the way he is . . . which fouls up the plot-line terribly. But I think a better novel comes out of this. Other writers would not only disagree with me; they would be horrified.