by Gwen Lee
Copyright
First published in the United States in 2000 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
Copyright © 2000 by Gwen Lee and Doris Elaine Sauter
Introduction copyright © 2000 by Tim Powers
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-46830-228-8
Contents
Copyright
Foreword by Tim Powers
Introduction
Blade Runner, Part 1
January 10, 1982
The Owl in Daylight, Part 1
January 10, 1982
The Owl in Daylight, Part 2
January 15, 1982
2-3-74
January 15, 1982
Blade Runner, Part 2
January 15, 1982
Exegesis
January 15, 1982
Selected Bibliography
Index
This book is dedicated to our mothers, Mattie Hurst Gype and Mae Helen Sauter.
FROM GWEN:
My first thanks is to PKD for his friendship, he was everything a friend could be. His intellectual generosity was boundless. He was as excited about the interview as I was. He made it an extraordinary experience.
Thanks to my husband, Wibert Lee, for his support of this project from its inception.
Thanks to David McDonnell at Starlog for his advice and support over the years.
Finally I would like to thank D. Elaine Sauter for her friendship, for bringing Phil into my life, for bringing life into this manuscript and getting it published. I am fortunate to have such a multi-talented friend!
FROM DORIS:
Thanks to my friend Gwen, who had the foresight to interview Phil, an interview which turned out to be the last record of one of the most gifted writers of this century. Thanks also for her support during and after Phil’s final illness; shared grief is so much easier to bear.
A heartfelt thank you to all the members of the Dallas Writers group, especially Jan Blankenship, Amy Bourret, Robert Burns, Victoria Calder, Will Clarke, Fanchon Knott, David Norman, Christine Phillips and Sandra Sadler, for their support and suggestions during the publications phase of this book.
Grateful thanks also to Lawrence Sutin for his kind words of encouragement after Phil’s death and during the preparation of this manuscript.
Gratitude also to James A. Padova, M.D., and everyone else at the Hematology-Oncology Group in Orange County who kept me going long enough to get here. And hopefully beyond.
And many blessings to Tim Powers, who told me in his Santa Ana living room years ago: you can.
FOREWORD
TIM POWERS
Less then two months after these interview sessions were taped, Philip K. Dick would be dead. He never lived to see the finished movie Blade Runner, and his proposed next novel, The Owl in Daylight, didn’t go much further than the musings in these talks.
But what talks! These conversations vividly bring back the recollection of spending an evening with Philip K. Dick. I’m glad the text hasn’t been edited to take out all the off-track remarks and the repetitions of “you know”—this is simply transcription, and it gives the reader the real sense of how the man spoke. His conversation was always fascinating, even when the beginning of a sentence, if not the whole topic, had been left behind in the mercurial free-association of his thoughts. I remember the pleased satisfaction I’d feel when I’d occasionally throw in what seemed to be a related speculation, and see his eyes widen and hear him say something like, “Yes, of course, and—” More often, I suppose, he would nod politely, say, “Yes, yes, but—” and then resume where he had left off.
Many of the conversations he’d have with Doris Sauter and K. W. Jeter and me were gonzo-theology, and while the rest of us were hampered with fairly fixed convictions, Phil would shift creeds almost day to day, like a fencer shifting among guard-lines.
And though he would shift his creeds—one day deciding that the real truth was to be found in Orthodox Judaism, the next day that the Gnostic Essenes had found all the secrets—he was never cynical. Well, how could he be? Something very big had happened to him in February and March of 1974, as he describes in this book, and he was on the one hand too honest with himself to minimize it and on the other hand too curious and erudite not to pursue it with his whole mind. Always the “minimal hypothesis”—the possibility that he had simply suffered some kind of psychotic episode—was objectively considered and eventually found inadequate to explain all the facts.
For some, though, the minimal hypothesis is satisfactory. I have read that Dick didn’t dare move from a shabby apartment, because he believed that was where God knew how to reach him; and that he was a misogynist recluse; and that he once killed a cat with the power of his mind. None of these, actually, is true—but the image of the crazed, mystical hermit-genius is an attractive and easily swallowed one, and people have a fondness for easy summaries, even if the summaries are wrong and the truth is something a good deal more complex.
I think it’s impossible to read these interviews, or Valis, or The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, and conclude that Dick was irrational. His sense of the absurd is everywhere as palpable as his bewilderment at his experiences, and he is at least as aware of the implausibility of some of his theories as his listeners or readers are. I remember frequently being convinced by some outre notion of his, only to be cut off in mid-credulity by his abrupt decision that the notion was based on faulty logic. His objectivity, his clear-eyed humor—his self-derision, even—were too briskly realistic to permit the cocooned egotism of insanity.
If these interviews are in fact not the record of a madman, though, they are at least the testimony—humorous and whimsical, but nevertheless clear—of an artist who is killing himself for his art.
As Doris Sauter notes in her insightful introduction, Dick did write each of his later novels in eight to twelve days. I remember him calling me up to come over to his apartment and read some early pages of Valis—he only emerged from his office long enough to give me some typed pages, and then he was back in there, typing away. I remember that he called to me to ask how to spell certain words, and it’s fun now to find them in the published text and see what part of the book he was writing as I sat in his living room— and eventually I called some comments to him and then let myself out. I believe he wrote Valis in twelve days; he must have eaten and slept during that time, but I’m certain it was not nearly enough.
It’s enthralling to hear Dick explaining how he wrote his books. Some of it is funny, as when he explains how to drop evidence of a technical development like biochips into a science-fiction story:
That’s another technical device, you casually have one character say to the other, ‘Where did you put the biochips?’ ‘I put them back in the cupboard where they belong.’ That’s all you need to say … See, it’s amazing how easy it is to write if you know how …
But only a few pages later we see him seriously address the constructing of a story. “Let’s do it right now,” he says, “let’s work the book out.” And for the next dozen pages we are privileged, because of Gwen Lee’s tape recorder, to hear Philip K. Dick actually composing the plot of his new book, snatching
up ideas and trying out characters and conflicts in the crucible of his freewheeling imagination.
In a natural progression, and all too soon, he reflects on what his writing is costing him:
And this is something I’m beginning to realize about myself, that, uh, although I think my writing is getting better all the time, my physical stamina is nothing like it used to be … when I got finished [with The Transmigration of Timothy Archer] I was living on aspirin, scotch, and potassium tablets.
Less than two months later a series of strokes had killed him. As he foresaw, “finally the cost is going to be higher than the yield line.” The Transmigration of Timothy Archer was the last book he was to write, and in fact he died shortly before it was published— the “About the Author” page of the galley proofs describes him as still living.
I imagine that when he was young he thought of his writing as working for him—providing him a living, giving him the chance to express ideas; but before the end he had come to realize, and accept, that in fact he was working for his writing, and that if one had to be sacrificed to the other, it was his work that had to prevail. The cost line, ultimately, had to be ignored.
His cheerful humor here, and his unflagging curiosity and research, and his ever-patient, unfeigned interest in everyone he met, are bravely quixotic. They didn’t help when the vessel in his brain inevitably gave way before the ever-higher blood-pressure— but this vivid portrait of him survives. His novels and short stories are his splendid and costly work, but we’re lucky to have too this record of the man who killed himself to make them.
INTRODUCTION
The interview you have in your hands comes at the end of a long relationship. It is derived from interviews recorded several months before Philip Kindred Dick passed away on March 2, 1982, at Western Medical Center.
I had known Phil for ten years, first as a friend who helped me through a cancer diagnosis and then in a deeper relationship during the time we lived together. Phil’s ex-wife, Tessa, first called with the news of Phil’s stroke. (By that time, I had moved to Northern California.) I went down to Southern California soon after, spending the better part of a week at the hospital visiting Phil, calling his friends and his agent, Russell Galen, to inform them of Phil’s condition, mediating between family members, dealing with the cats, Phil’s property, and other practicalities.
During the time I kept vigil in the waiting room of the ICU, the interviews my friend Gwen Lee had taped were the furthest thing from my mind. I certainly didn’t know that they would become the last record of a man who was one of the leading literary figures of the twentieth century.
I was just worried about Phil.
I first met Philip K. Dick in the spring or early summer of 1972, when I was dating Norman Spinrad. Norman lived in Laurel Canyon, near Hollywood, and he would drive down to Tustin and pick me up. Then we would drive to Phil’s house in Fullerton, about twenty minutes away, and have dinner at a Chinese restaurant near Phil’s house with Phil and his then-girlfriend, Tessa Busby. We did this frequently in the roughly five months Norman and I were together.
When my relationship with Norman ended, Phil said that just because I was not seeing Norman anymore, it didn’t mean that we couldn’t be friends. So Phil and I stayed in touch. He continued to see Tessa, and I began a new relationship as well. But I would often go out to Fullerton from Orange or Tustin or Santa Ana and spend the evening with Phil and Tessa. Usually Tim Powers or some of Phil’s other friends would come over as well. We would discuss books, writing, religion, politics—you name it—for the evening.
I also introduced Phil to several of my friends, among them Gwen Lee, whom I had met in 1971 when we were both students at Santa Ana College.
Sometimes Phil would visit me, coming to my sister’s house in Orange or to my place, a small one-room apartment near downtown Santa Ana. It had a metal shower in the living room (the only room), and a bathroom. No kitchen, just a hotplate. Phil was appalled that I had no place to wash dishes except either the bathroom sink or the shower.
I was raised Lutheran, but it was in this apartment that I went through a quiet Christian conversion, the genesis of which was reading Daniel Berrigan’s poetry. I read the Bible and prayed, and began to attend Catholic Mass at Holy Family Catholic Church in Orange. Several weeks later when I mentioned this religious experience to Phil, he was ecstatic. He told me of his own conversion experience of 2-3-74 (February and March of 1974). Those familiar with Phil’s life and work know that during that period Phil felt he was propelled back into the early Christian era and was given lifesaving information about his son, Christopher. Phil and I realized we had even more in common as we discussed our spiritual lives.
By January of 1976, Phil had helped me through quite a few painful experiences—the loss of my boyfriend, David Parker, in 1974, followed soon after by the death of several other close friends; the development of histiocytic lymphoma in 1975, and the subsequent chemotherapy sessions. Phil was always there to lend a hand, growing angry at friends who could not bear to visit me. “Love without guts is worthless,” he said.
Phil was now living in a rental house in Fullerton, and his relationship with Tessa was disintegrating rapidly—it was clear that his marriage was at an end. Phil soon proposed to me, but I turned him down—judging by the results of his last marriage (the fifth), I was reluctant. Phil was adamant, however, that the two of us should move in together. Our relationship had become quite serious, and Phil was worried about my living alone. I had suffered three seizures as a result of chemotherapy and, although the doctors assured me the seizures would not return (and they didn’t), Phil was not to be dissuaded. He also said he shouldn’t live alone because of his heart condition. Finally, in the summer of 1976, we moved in together.
Our apartment in Santa Ana was a moderately sized two bedroom—a big step up from my one-room efficiency. Phil’s cats, a beautiful tortoiseshell named Mrs. Mabel M. Tubbs (given to us by Gwen) and Harvey Wallbanger, a black part-Siamese, kept us both company. The apartment was on the top floor, the balcony looking out toward Civic Center Drive. On a clear night you could see the Disneyland fireworks.
However pleasant the place sounds, though, living with Phil was difficult. He needed constant company when he wasn’t writing, and complete solitude when he was. I was not used to the lack of privacy. I was also alarmed when Phil grew jealous of my male friends and even complained about the time spent with female friends. Although I loved Phil, I soon realized I needed my own space.
After several months the apartment next door became vacant, a studio that I could afford, and I felt the only way to salvage the relationship was to move. Over Phil’s protests, I left. Eventually, the apartment complex turned into condos, and having no money to buy, I was forced to find another apartment. However, even after moving out of Civic Center Drive, I continued to go over to Phil’s almost every night to cook dinner and watch a movie with him.
Although it was religion that in many ways brought Phil and me together, it was also what eventually split us apart. Soon after the death of my boyfriend David Parker in 1974, I had begun to attend the Church of the Messiah, an Episcopal church down the street from where Phil and I lived at the time. I had felt a calling to the Episcopal priesthood for some time, and after graduating from Chapman College in 1981—and with Phil and me remaining friends but the romantic era of our relationship over—I started the process for ordination. When the priest who had agreed to sign my papers for ordination moved to Northern California, I believed his impression of the diocese there as being more progressive and open to women’s ordination.
I knew that I would always be friends with Phil, no matter where I had to live. Phil, however, saw the move as abandonment, and refused to come up and visit. I was worried about him, worried that he wouldn’t take care of himself, and asked Gwen, who lived nearby, to keep an eye on him for me. I moved to Northern California, believing it to be the right thing, but cried almost all the way during the d
rive up to Yuba City.
Gwen Lee had been a journalism major in college. She wanted to reenter the field, so she needed a project—she wanted to interview Phil. Phil, always ready to talk, wanted to give Gwen the chance to interview him. She drove up from Carlsbad three times and spent the day with Phil, taping him as he spoke on a variety of topics.
The interviews began with Phil newly returned from his visit to Hollywood, where he was shown special effects and scenes from Blade Runner. He was ecstatic about the film; although he had had several books optioned, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was the first book ever to go into production. Phil was overwhelmed by the moody dilapidated exterior, the extras, the special effects, the sets, and director Ridley Scott. Although he never lived to see the final cut in its entirety, he was convinced it was going to be a groundbreaking film, a view that has been confirmed by many film critics and fans since.
From the Blade Runner discussion they move on to how Phil creates his characters—including a loving rendition of Angel Archer—and insights into his creative process. His process was very unusual—and very taxing. Phil would not write for several weeks or months (usually months), and then he would get an idea for a novel and it would roll around in his head for a while. When he did start to write he would do nothing but write, nonstop. Phil could type very fast and would complete a novel in about eight to ten days. So he would rest up and gird his loins for the task. He would get up at 8:00 or 9:00 A.M., and he would write until the wee hours of the next morning, usually around 4:00 A.M., and then sleep about four or five hours, starting again the next morning. It was hard to get him to eat anything during this time—he hated, hated, to be interrupted while he was writing. He would just burn himself out and write for over a week straight, and then when the novel was done he would just fall into bed, exhausted. As a result, he became intensely attached to his creations, as he told Gwen about his experience after finishing The Transmigration of Timothy Archer:
