Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (61 page)

3/20/74

12-2-80

THE DIALECTIC: God against Satan, & God's Final Victory foretold & shown

Philip K. Dick

AN EXEGESIS

Apologia Pro Mia Vita

But by December 12 he'd filled an envelope with new notes. And then Phil was back at the Exegesis again. Hadn't he told God that he'd play the game again as soon as he'd rested?

For a guy who had just been granted a theophany, Phil had a downright dismal Christmas. He was blue because it seemed there was no one to talk with about the ideas that mattered to him. In the Exegesis, Phil acknowledged that his talk sometimes sounded like "religious nonsense & occult nonsense"-but somewhere in it all was the truth. And he would never find it. God Himself had assured him of that. So come Christmas Eve 1980 he was alone-by choice-watching the Pope's Midnight Mass on TV and seeing no sign of Christ in the ritual display.

By the New Year, Phil had recovered some of his zest for speculation. And he grappled with his sense of declining energy by dieting severely. Within a relatively short time, Phil was thin for the first time since the early sixties. He found the dietary discipline easy-what he called his "self-denial trip" allowed him to relish giving up favorite foods like canned steak-and-kidney pies from Ireland. The change in physical image suited Phil. Chris Arena, a Thursday Night Group regular, recalls Phil's prior vulnerability about his weight:

One night Phil and I were having this chop session with each other and I told him, "You're just a fat old man." Phil gets up like okay, now I'm going to kick your ass. And then he sits down and says, "I am a fat old man." The doctor told him to lose weight and not drink, and that prompted Phil to go on the diet. But even before that, he knew that I was telling him the truth.

The new slim Phil took on a surprising role in his condominium association. Juan and Su Perez, who became Phil's new neighbors and close friends after Doris Sauter moved out, recall that the new condo occupants enjoyed having a "creative kook" in the building but suspected that Phil smoked a lot of weed. Those few who ventured to read his books were horrified. So how the hell did Phil become chairperson of the Rules and Grievances Committee? "He was always home," Juan explains. "And Phil was concerned that anyone else would be too strict about cats and loud music."

Phil and Juan, who was working on his master's in psychology (he'd been assigned two of Phil's novels for a class on delusional thought), would fantasize out a book project that would blend Juan's background in chemistry and psychology with Phil's philosophical and religious knowledge. Su recalls that Phil, a frequent guest at dinnertime, would often bemoan his bad luck with women and request her advice. "I would say to him, 'Don't tell them so much about yourself so fast.' "

But in early 1981 there arose an event that eclipsed even the longing for a woman: A Major Hollywood Motion Picture!

At long last, negotiations to adapt Androids for the screen had resulted in a solid deal. Producer Michael Deeley took up the project, with the Ladd Company to handle distribution. Ridley Scott (Alien) would direct the film-to be titled Blade Runner-and Harrison Ford (of Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark) would play Rick Deckard, whose job it is to kill "replicants" (as Phil's "androids" are called in the film) who escape their colony planets. Shooting would commence in Hollywoodjust a short jaunt up the freeway from Phil's place-in the first half of 1981.

To understand the impact all this had upon Phil, it's important to realize that in the early production stages Blade Runner was the odds-on candidate to be the next Star Wars. No two names were then hotter than Ridley Scott and Harrison Ford. The budget ultimately reached $25-$30 million, a heavy wager by the firm's backers. Blade Runner only gradually earned the profits to justify the gamble-at the outset, re views were mixed, the box office so-so, the merchandising spin-offs were a total flop. In the long run, the film has made substantial earnings through international distribution and the video sales and rental markets. In Japan, Blade Runner is regarded as a cult classic and it is a key factor behind Phil's towering literary status in that country. But in America, the film never quite took hold in first-run distribution-though it's not hard to see why Phil was so excited at the time.

Phil was also duly skeptical that the film would do justice to his novel. But no one is immune to Hollywood dreams, and Phil had his fantasies of fame and glory. Reality obtruded quickly enough, though. Phil loathed Hampton Fancher's screenplay, which he read in December 1980. His response was to declare war on the project. In a piece for the February-March 1981 issue of SelecTV Guide-the magazine of Phil's cable service-he took a potshot at Ridley Scott's biggest hit: "For all its dazzling graphic impact, ALIEN (to take one example) had nothing new to bring us in the way of concepts that awaken the mind, rather than the senses."

It's extremely doubtful that any of the Blade Runner principals ever took notice of Phil's little piece. David Peoples, who in early 1981 was called in to do a rewrite of the Fancher script, doesn't recall Phil's name ever coming up in meetings. Peoples thought Fancher's initial script excellent and never read Androids, before or after his rewrite-which Phil (making a 180-degree shift from his previous disdain for the entire project) praised to the skies when he read it in August 1981. The final screenplay, jointly credited to Fancher and Peoples, recasts or eliminates key elements of the Androids plot (see Chronological Survey); the Mercer empathy religion is entirely absent, for example. But Phil was well aware of the differences between the print and film media and never thought an exact transposition possible or even desirable.

While the screenplay struggles ended happily, a more painful and personal misunderstanding arose, by way of the mails, between Phil and Ursula Le Guin. In February 1981 Le Guin gave talks at Emory University, at which SF writer Michael Bishop was in attendance. Bishop had written admiring essays on both Ubik and the just-released Valis and was corresponding with Phil. (Since then, Bishop has published a 1987 novel, The Secret Ascension-subtitled Philip K. Dick Is Dead, Alas-in which the late mainstream author Philip K. Dick could not, in his lifetime, find acceptance for his subversive SF works.) Bishop informed Phil of certain of Le Guin's comments, the substance of which Phil considered offensive enough to warrant a public response in Science Fiction Review, a fanzine in which quarrelsome correspondence is an entertainment staple:

I'm looking at a recent letter to me from Michael Bishop. Michael likes my new novel VALIS, but learned that Ursula Le Guin had been tremendously upset by it, "not only for its examination of perhaps unresolvable metaphysical matters (into which she seems to fear you are plunging at the risk of never emerging again) but for its treatment of female characters-every one of which, she argued, was at bottom (I cannot remember her exact phrase) a hateful and not to be trusted death figure [... ] she had the utmost admiration for the work of Philip K. Dick, who had been shamefully ignored in this country and who appeared to be spiraling into himself and going slowly crazy in Santa Ana, California." Her dismay, Michael says, "Results solely from a genuine human concern about your intellectual and emotional well-being."

Phil's letter also cites Le Guin's complaint that he had failed to portray the redemptive power of art in his Valis self-portrait.

For her part, Le Guin deeply regretted Phil's hurt feelings. She had long been a staunch public advocate of Phil's talent, and her 1971 novel The Lathe of Heaven was, by her own acknowledgment, markedly influenced by his sixties works. A letter from her offering apologies and clarification is included in that same summer 1981 issue of SFR. In interview, Le Guin explains that she never seriously feared for Phil's sanity and does not recall terming his themes "unresolvable." "I would say `crazy' about both Phil and Virginia Woolf. But I don't like those books of his later period through Valis. I think there is a madness in those books that he didn't come out of-Virginia Woolf comes out, Phil doesn't always. It is not always transmuted into art." Le Guin reaffirms her dislike of the female characters in the decade preceding Valis. "The women were symbols-whether goddess, bitch, hag, witch-but there weren't any women left, and there used to be women in his books."

Phil and Le Guin did come to an ultimate reconciliation through subsequent private letters. But it remains useful to trace just where Phil stood firm or gave way in response to her criticisms. As to her alleged dislike for unresolvable metaphysical speculations, Phil pointedly replied, in his SFR letter, "I have never drawn the line between ideas that could and could not-should and should not-be looked into. That, to me, is a dangerous idea: that some ideas are better left alone, for the good and the sanity of all concerned." The issue of his sanity was a more painful matter, of course. In the SFR letter, Phil insisted that Valis be taken as picaresque fiction and not as a self-portrait: "The fact that my protagonist, Horselover Fat, is a madman does not prove that I, the author, am a madman even if I say, `I am Horselover Fat', because this is the way you write certain kinds of books. There are scenes of violent arguments between Phil Dick and Horselover Fat in the novel."

As for the redemptive role of the artist, this had always been one of Phil's least favorite themes. In the SFR letter, Phil proudly restated his proletarian writer's credo, unchanged since the Berkeley days. "My answer: My novel is my justification, not anything I arrogate to myself as a person, as a novelist. [... ] This [writing] talent [... ] does not make me superior to people who repair shoes or drive buses." Phil's defiance here is surely related to his longtime sense of the differences between his status and that of Le Guin. He was the trashy writer, she the elegant stylist who had far outdistanced him in garnering SF awards and even mainstream acceptance-stories in the New Yorker, novels published by Knopf. Back in a 1978 Exegesis entry, Phil had offered an explanation of their respective fates:

Taking a pop form [SF] as "serious" is what you do if it won't go away. It's a clever tactic. They welcome you in [...] This is how the BIP [Black Iron Prison] handles it if they can't flat out crush it. Next thing, they get you to submit your S-F writing to them to criticize. "Structured criticism" to edit out the "trashy elements"-& you wind up with what Ursula writes.

As to the woman problem in his work, Phil's SFR response-that women and men alike in Valis are portrayed as picaresque rogues-isn't to the point, and Phil himself wasn't convinced by it. In a subsequent letter to Galen, Phil acknowledged that in his work prior to The Divine Invasion "my depiction of females has been inadequate and even somewhat vicious." In May 1981, upon completing The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, with its loving portrait of Angel Archer, Phil would write to Le Guin in joy and triumph: "This is the happiest moment of my life, Ursula, to meet face-to-face this bright, scrappy, witty, educated, tender woman, [. . . ] and had it not been for your analysis of my writing I probably never would have discovered her."

But new troubles were brewing on the Blade Runner front. The film's backers badly wanted a novelization of the screenplay to market in conjunction with the film's release. Galen took the position that Androids itself, and not a hastily written rehash, ought to be reissued as a tie-in with the Blade Runner title. The backers' May bargaining response was classic carrot and stick. Carrot: If Phil agreed to a novelization, he could write it himself for a $50,000 advance plus a 50 percent cut of net profits from all print media tie-ins-souvenir magazines, posters, comic books, etc. If the film was a smash, Phil could stand to earn $250,000 to $400,000 in total royalties. But Androids, his own novel, would be shunted aside. Stick: If Phil refused, the backers still had the right to issue print tie-ins of 7, 500 words or less without Phil's consent-and Phil wouldn't see a dime. And if some publisher chose to reissue Androids, it would be under its original title-no mention permitted of its relation to Blade Runner.

As it turned out, Phil would, by Galen's estimates, have earned roughly $70,000 on the proposed novelization deal, with only $20,000 or so coming from print media tie-ins. But at the time that Phil and Galen were talking over their strategy, a gross of $400,000 seemed at stake. And the offer had come at a most pivotal moment. For David Hartwell, the editor who had purchased The Divine Invasion for Simon and Schuster, had just contracted with Phil for a mainstream novel. In fact, in the course of a single day's visit with Phil in April 1981, Hartwell had agreed to terms for three Phil Dick novels: a $7, 500 advance for the mainstream novel, Bishop Timothy Archer (Phil's working title), $17,500 for an SF novel to be called The Owl in Daylight (never written), and $3, 500 for a Timescape paperback reissue of Crap Artist. Hartwell's trust in Phil's talent was unconditional. In interview he recalls:

Phil talked for nearly six hours in enormous detail on what became Timothy Archer. The whole structure was there-all he had to do was sit down and write it.

As for Owl, I never got a formal written proposal. Phil once told me that he could pitch anything to editors and agents before two in the afternoon and make it sound like a convincing plot-two was when his mail came, and he had a fetish about his mail, couldn't get any writing done until he had seen it. The plot description of Owl I got the day I visited was something like Dante, like Thomas Mann, like Valis, like The Divine Invasion, and at that point I didn't push. Later I did get a letter with a few paragraphs of description, but it was the vaguest kind of Philip K. Dick description.