Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (57 page)

Galen's encouragement was crucial. But it came at the end of a four-year struggle with the narrative shape of 2-3-74. How do you fictionalize when you're not sure what really happened? How do you dramatize events that sound crazy to nearly everyone else?

The questions were sufficiently difficult to force Phil to try out a number of possibilities over the years. From April to November 1974, Phil had pondered a novel called Valisystem A that would take up the story of High Castle character Hawthorne Abendsen-the author of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, the alternative-world novel (within an alternative-world novel) that claimed that the Allies, not the Axis, had won World War II. In Valisystem A, Phil planned for Abendsen to be captured by the Nazis; but Abendsen cannot tell them what they want to know-is the Grasshopper vision true?-because he isn't sure himself.

The transition to a new vision-entitled To Scare the Dead-was described in a February 1975 letter. Valisystem A had been allowed to lie fallow. It now became part of a new whole:

I combine VALISYSTEM A and TO SCARE THE DEAD.

Every novel of mine is at least two novels superimposed. This is the origin; this is why they are full of loose ends, but also, it is impossible to predict the outcome, since there is no linear plot as such. It is two novels into a sort of 3-D novel.

The title To Scare the Dead derives from the shock experienced by early Christians (such as Phil's own "Thomas") when they are reborn inside the brains of modern-day Californians such as protagonist Nicholas Brady. In a March 1975 letter, Phil sketched out the new plot. Brady (Abendsen is long gone) discovers that "there are two of him: his old self, at his secular job and goals, and this Essene from the Qumran wadi back circa 45 A.D." Phil played with the notion of turning Brady into a government agent who spies upon a character based upon Bishop Pike and then realizes that Pike's researches bear on his own "Experience."

Returning to the title Valisystem A, Phil wrote, in summer 1976, the novel ultimately published in 1985 as Radio Free Albemuth. Albemuth pits Brady, a Berkeley record store clerk turned record company A & R man, against the Black Iron Prison ruled by President Ferris Fremont (inspired by Richard Nixon). Brady's life resembles Phil's in many respects, but "Phil Dick" shows up as an entirely separate character-a sympathetic but quite rational SF writer. Ultimately Brady is killed, while "Phil" is interned in a government detention camp. The hope for the future lies with the "kids" who must find, in trashy song lyrics, vital hints as to the truth of this world. Albemuth has its moments but stands, at last, as an unsuccessful trial run. Its cloak-and-dagger plot, with Brady leading a pop-song conspiracy against the ruling tyranny, is impossible to take seriously. Phil himself showed little regard for Albemuth. It was seldom mentioned in the Exegesis-in which every other seventies novel was subjected to detailed analysis.

In his September 1977 Metz speech, Phil alluded to a new novel in progress called Valis, with three key characters: Nicholas Brady (who undergoes 2-3-74 experiences), government agent Houston Paige (who understands "Zebra" theoretically but lacks confirming experience), and Phil Dick (who needs a good SF plot quick). Paige meets Brady and goes mad from seeing his theory confirmed.

But Phil's ideas simply would not settle down into a cohesive plot. How could a novel contain the key to the structure of being? Phil girded himself for the challenge in this 1978 Exegesis entry:

This novel must be written, & I have the redeemed state of 2-74/2-75 to base it on, but God, what a task: to depict 1) that which redeems; 2) the process of redemption; 3) the redeemed (restored) state of man-in contrast to the occluded state (described in "Scanner"). It could take the rest of my life to do it. I don't know if I can. [... ] But it must be done. & it must [... ] point to the 5th Savior whose coming is imminent.

Rays of light emerged from odd sources. Phil had recently written two autobiographical pieces-the introduction to the Golden Man story collection and a short reminiscence on "Roog," his first SF story sale. Their informality felt somehow right-the writing flow had returned. Those heavy Exegesis ideas might yield some ground to a style that stayed loose and funny, as Phil could be when posing "What Ifs?" to Jeter and Powers. And then came the Galen letter-a true ally at last at the Meredith Agency.

In a two-week burst in November 1978, Phil solved the problem of how to contain the recalcitrant 2-3-74 beast within a novel's skin. Phil began Valis in the middle of an Exegesis session-page 115 of a lengthy streak of speculation. The long years of "research" were over. Once the flow was sure, Phil switched back to his typewriter and pounded it out.

What triggered the release? At root, it was Phil's realization that all he could do was write it down as it happened.

You admit outright that all your big theories don't prove a thingand how important can 2-3-74 be if you can't make up your mind as to what it was? Then, to prove you know damn well how crazy it all sounds, you split yourself in two: "Phil Dick" and "Horselover Fat" (Philip, in Greek, is "a lover of horses"; Dick is German for "fat"). The reader is told right off that Fat is insane, the victim of a nervous breakdown. Who is the narrator? Phil Dick, who confides: "I am Horselover Fat, and I am writing this in the third person to gain much-needed objectivity."

Right off we have the Epimenides paradox-"All Cretans are liars. I am a Cretan."-that Phil first used with protagonist/fool Jack Isidore in Crap Artist. The paradox is insoluble, an infinite regress. In Valis, the reader can't be sure if "Fat" is really crazy-for if he is, then how can "Phil" be objective? And from whom springs this lucid, funny narrative? Is Valis autobiography or novel? Both. As Phil explained in a March 1979 letter: "Oddly, the most bizarre of events in it are true (or ratherand this is a crucial difference-I believe they are true)."

Character Phil's first-person asides wind in and out of the Valis narrative, which tells of the quest of Fat the perfect funny Fool to find God. Unlike Parsifal of the Grail myth, Fat lives in modern-day Orange County, where people who want what Fat wants so stubbornly-God, Truth, The Works--are nuts. Phil keeps trying to explain this to Fat. But deep down Phil and the reader both know that the hope of the world lies in Fat's never being convinced. The "Tractates Cryptica Scriptura" that concludes Valis consists of distillations from Fat's Exegesis. Character Phil scoffs at them. (Real-life Phil confirmed that "Tractates" entries 7 and 9 were revealed to him by the "telepathic" Al voice.)

Throughout the novel Fat is surrounded by friends and lovers who draw strength from his faith even as they deride his speculations. As previously mentioned, Fat's wife, Beth, was inspired by Tessa, and his cancer-stricken girlfriend, Sherri Solvig, was based largely on Doris. Maurice-Fat's bighearted therapist, who tries an aggressive approach to shake Fat out of his suicidal despondency-owed much to psychotherapist Barry Spatz, who treated Phil after his February 1976 suicide attempt. Fat's friend David-naive, good-natured, and Catholic-was drawn from Powers. And friend Kevin-acerbic, derisive, but gallant in his own longing for truth-was a portrait of Jeter. In interview, Jeter stresses the stylized nature of the Valis characters:

It wasn't as if Tim was a complete religious no-doubts fundamentalist or Catholic person. I wasn't a complete scoffing church-burning skeptic, and Phil wasn't this completely befuddled person. Actually each of us incorporated segments of that, so that there was an overlapping body of things that we talked about. But for the book, Phil separated out those characters so that the relationships would be clearer. [... ] And in terms of veracity, going to see the movie is really the point at which the book differs from reality. Although there was a movie that we all went to see.

That movie was The Man Who Fell to Earth, directed by Nicholas Roeg and starring David Bowie. Phil loved it, and for a short time he and Jeter listened closely to Bowie albums, hoping to discern a sly pop sign from GodNalis/Zebra. No luck. But a failed experiment can be a useful plot device, and in Valis Fat and Kevin go to see a movie called Valis, which portrays the struggle between Albemuth characters Nicholas Brady (who is zapped by the pink light force) and evil President Ferris Fremont. Fat gets in touch with rock star Eric Lampton and his wife, Linda, who both star in the film. Fat is convinced that they know about Valis-the Vast Active Living Intelligence System-and can rescue him from his spiritual isolation.

The Lamptons live in Sonoma, a setting fresh in Phil's mind from his summer with Joan. In honor of their proposed visit, Fat, Kevin, and David form the "Rhipidon Society"-a phrase bestowed to real-life Phil by the Al voice in a 1974 dream. Rhipidos is Greek for "fan," and due to their fanlike fins "Fish cannot carry guns." Fat believes that this motto contains the essence of Christianity. In Sonoma, they learn that Valis is an information-firing device from the "Albemuth" star system and, still more startling, that Valis and Linda have made a baby daughter: Sophia. The fifth Savior, by Fat's count, and the first to incarnate in female form.

At their very first meeting, Sophia dispels character Phil's need to project a "Horselover Fat." She bestows sanity, wisdom, kindness. But "Valis" film soundtrack composer Brent Mini, whose own past exposure to the Valis information beam has left him ill and facing a slow death, accidentally kills Sophia with a laser in an effort to extract the maximum information from her.

Horselover Fat returns. Stricken with grief, Fat vows to travel the world in search of further signs from Valis. And character Phil, in his lonely apartment, scans the TV channels for hidden clues.

Bantam was more than a little freaked out by Valis. Hurst had left the scene, and Bantam didn't resolve to publish the novel until the very end of the contract period. In the Exegesis, poor Phil was posing worried queries to the I Ching: Would any other house take it if Bantam turned it down?

Valis puzzled many of Phil's longtime readers; it earned a reputation as a difficult book.

But Valis stands alongside Palmer Eldritch as Phil's greatest work-a breviary of the spiritual life in America, where the path to God lies through scattered pop-trash clues. Unsanitized by sanctity, loopy as a long night's rave, it breaks the dreary chains of dogma to leave us, if not enlightened, freely roaming.

What's it all mean? In Exegesis entries to the end of his life, Phil went at Valis again and again-startled by each new interpretation, as if it had been written by someone else.

12

Big Bucks And Condo Comfort, First Mainstream Sale To A New
York House, The Gosh Wow Hollywood Daule Of Blade Runner-None Of
These Are Enough, Not Nearly, Not With A World Crying Out For Redemption
And Stubborn Reality Still Undefined; But Time Is Running Out And Phil
Knows It (1979-1982)

I am looking for clues to an invisible being of great size, whose outline is dim but, to me, real. I call this being Christ. But I do not know what its real name is (at one time I called it Ubik, then later Valis). These are names I made up. [...] That is my quest: to know its name. And to learn that I will have to encounter it and hear it tell me; it alone knows. I saw it once; I will see it again. If I keep looking.

PHIL, November 1981 journal entry

I have willed this condition for myself, here in the final glide pattern of my life. I know it and I take responsibility for it. The only thing is, Why? Why do I want to be isolated? What do I get out of it? Lots of time to write and think. BFD-big fucking deal. [...] I think of people I have loved ("dilexi," the Latin word is: "I have loved") but where are they now? Scattered, dead, unknown to me as to where they are and how they are. [...] This is dreadful; I should live in the now, and time-bind into the future. Well, I do time-bind; I anticipate the publication of VALIS. "He's crazy," will be the response. "Took drugs, saw God. BFD. Harlan Ellison is right about him."