by Gwen Lee
DICK: There’s words that she used that I don’t use that I would have to look up the meanings to before I could write ’em down, ’cause I didn’t know what they meant. Like, there’s one part where she’s having an argument with a psychiatrist, he says something to her—it’s a beautiful scene at the end, because this is the scene where she blows it. Also, she’s got more guts than I have. She’s, uh, she’s very brave, and, uh, she is—also she’s got this incredible sense of humor, which I don’t have. I mean, she’s marvelous. She has this incredible dry wit which just goes over everybody’s head—
LEE: I don’t—
DICK: She’s got a better one.
LEE: She’s better.
DICK: Uh, this psychiatrist is bawling her out. He’s real furious with her. He thinks she’s responsible for mental illness in this guy that she knew, this young man that she knew. Uh, and he starts dumping on her, and she says in response, he tells her all her faults, and stuff, and she responds, and this is in the first person: “I said, ‘And you are full of recondite bullshit.’” I had to look up “recondite” to see what it meant. And it is the correct word. But I don’t use that word. ’Cause I don’t know exactly what it means.
But she, OK now, she’s a graduate of the University of California, the English department. Now, evidently what happened was that when I lived in Berkeley, I knew some women who were graduates from the English department. In fact, I had a girlfriend who had gotten a master’s degree from the English department. So, I knew her. I knew such a woman, who graduated from U.C. Berkeley, from the English department, she’d gone to Europe on a Fulbright Scholarship. But she’s completely different from Angel Archer. She had no sense of humor. She was very affected. Angel Archer is not affected at all. Angel Archer has tremendous insight. So, now, where did Angel Archer come from? There is nobody in my life or my thoughts, I’ve never known anybody like her. And, yet, to me she is as real—
In fact, you know, when the galleys came to me to read the galleys over I was breaking up with my girlfriend. And I was tremendously involved in this emotional relationship. And meanwhile I had to read the galleys. I mean, there was a time limit. In other words, here I was breaking up with a woman I love and meanwhile the goddamn galleys, you know. (chuckles) So this is horrible, you know, it’s like some kind of sentence to hell, you know—like, you know, on the one hand I’m getting these phone calls, you know, “How can you throw me away?” phone calls, you know, “How can you treat me like this?” And I’m trying to find typographical errors in the galleys. And I’m sitting here one night, and I suddenly realized that the character in the book, Angel Archer, was literally as real to me as my own girlfriend. And I thought, you know, I said, “This is absolutely impossible,” because there is no such person as Angel Archer. Then I wondered if that’s true with other writers, ’cause they have—I don’t know. I mean, I’m going to start asking around. Because I suddenly thought—now here we have a direct comparison. I mean, half my time is spent reading what Angel is thinking, this is all her thoughts, you know, her thoughts throughout—and she is literally real to me. And now, OK, where did she come from? She didn’t come from my mind. She did not come from my mind, because it’s impossible, unless I somehow contain another human being. But, in that case, I then contain a whole lot of other human beings, because I’ve written about many characters. I mean, she’s not the only person I’ve written about. So is my brain full of hundreds of subpersonalities? Well, uh, the Bishop, for example, is based on an actual bishop that I knew, and I’m not supposed to say who ’cause then they’ll all come in and sue. And there’s a big disclaimer in the front of the book. It says, “Warning! This book is utterly fictitious, you know, and none of the people ever existed, and if you think otherwise, uh, you’re wrong.” But it’s based on an actual bishop, that I actually knew. And this man was one of the most educated people in the universe. As they say, Latin, Hebrew, Greek, and the Bible backwards and forwards. So he’s forever quoting things which I have no access to. Well, now in that case I simply looked them up. I mean, I just simply get out my Bible and get out books on the Bible and stuff like that and I remembered my actual friend. But with her there’s no model. There’s no [unintelligible] this person. And she’s smarter than he is. And that’s the incredible thing. As smart as the Bishop was, she had to be smarter to understand him. Because, you can never really have a protagonist that does not understand what’s happening, because then it’s like a camera with a defective lens. The lenses, you know, that have powers of resolution. To a very high degree. And the protagonist character has to have that same lens resolution quality. Especially the first person, like that. And she’s continually thinking about the Bishop. And she notices where he fouls up. Because she’s a very astute woman. And—
LEE: Do you think you ever ran into this person, or do you think it might be a precognition from a former life? How do you go about—
DICK: Well, you know, it’s bizarre—
LEE: Reincarnation?
DICK: It’s totally bizarre. In fact, I mentioned to my agent, I said I’d like to meet Angel Archer sometime. I said, she’s become so real to me. Now, here and now there’s something that is really not funny at all, this is really the tragedy of the serious writer, at least as far as my own experience. And I know it sounds like some kind of affected literary pain that, you know, is engineered by the artist merely to be able to say, I am a great artist. But it isn’t, it’s not the case. When I finished writing that book, the pain of losing that woman, and losing the sound of her voice and the sound of her thoughts was agony. Because all that time her thoughts had been running through my mind, her speech patterns, her cadences, her wit, her personality, and the day came when I typed the words “the end” at the end of that book and that voice stopped and that personality disappeared. And all I can do now is exactly what you or anyone else could do, is simply pick up a copy of the book. And get it back out of the book, and retrieve it from the book. But for a while I had her in my mind, and the pain at the end of writing it was just—the pain was so great at losing that woman as my friend that after I sent the manuscript off I discovered that I was hemorrhaging, gastrointestinal bleeding. From the pain, from sheer pain. I mean, I was literally physically sick from the shock of saying good-bye to Angel Archer.
LEE: What about the android—in the movie now, I’m sorry.
DICK: OK, the character?
LEE: Yes.
DICK: Rachael Rosen?
LEE: Rachael Rosen?
DICK: Yes.
LEE: And did you feel any pain for her, if not—
DICK: Well, now, see, for that character, I have a love-hate relationship. I’m afraid of her, but I’m attracted to her, ’cause she is, you know, a femme fatale to me. You know, whenever I see a woman of this kind, I seek her out, I’m a trophy to her. But part of me knows she’s gonna trash me. So all the time I am seeking her out half of me is running the other way, you know, so that I’m moving toward her and away from her. So my dialogue with women like this consists of “Hi, darling” and then I feel like popping her one. You probably noticed that earlier today. I mean, in other words, I’m in love with this woman, and I hate her guts, is what all my dialogue amounts to— you know, “Don’t leave me, you awful person,” is what it all amounts to. “You horrible person, you’re leaving my life.” But with Angel, it’s completely love, I mean, she was just, you know, everything that I admire. The wit, the intelligence, you know, the variation, the tremendous self-analysis that she shows. But I get mixed up with women that—
LEE: Is she a part of yourself?
DICK: I don’t see how she can be. I don’t understand it.
LEE: You don’t find any correlation of your own characteristics, or with your own experiences in the past?
DICK: Only, only—
LEE: Is she a feminine version of yourself?
DICK: No, she’s not even an opposite from me. You can’t even say that. She is kind of an idealized self. She�
�s kind of what I would have liked to have been. She is what I would have liked to have been. And there’s no problems with the sex thing there. Because for an author, an author has to write from the standpoint of both male and female—any author has to do that—I mean, in other words, if you can’t do that, you’re doomed. Because then, all books by women would have nothing but female characters and all books by men would have male characters—
LEE: That’s true.
DICK: You see, and nobody could write about children or animals, you see, so that would be that. But, uh, she’s to me an ideal human being. And, and, uh—the thing about Angel is that she is able to—when the Bishop dies, because he does die in the book, and the whole book is really a eulogy to his death, to this man who died, that she loved so, he was her father-in-law. And the book is nothing more than, when we first encounter her, the Bishop is already dead, and she is shattered. She is demoralized, shattered, and reduced to a kind of very rigid, very—almost a kind of bitter quality. And then we discover why. I mean, we go through the flashbacks and discover, you know, that at one time she had this father-in-law, you know, that she had this close relationship with, and he died. And from then on she was never the same. And then the last part of the book is a Sufi guru who brings her back to her full humanity again, reawakens her soul, which has died. I mean, she says when the Bishop died that her soul died with the Bishop. And she goes—it starts out going to this seminar and she goes, you know, perfunctorily—I mean, she doesn’t really think she’s getting anything out of it. And she does, she comes back to being what she was originally. So it’s a study in the death of a—a pointless death. The Bishop dies a pointless death. I mean, it is just a pure accident, I mean there’s no, you know—it is one of those things which could have been averted and yet at the same time was absolutely destined. I mean, it was one of those incredible things. But the Greek word for “chance” is the same word as for “fate.” Chance and determinism were the same word: anonche in Greek. In fact, it’s not known which they meant or if they even distinguished the two.
But the whole book is not really about the Bishop’s death but the effect of his death upon Angel and what it does to her. And at that point, when she heard over the TV that he’s died, uh, her thoughts begin to change. You notice an actual change in her thoughts. They begin to get rigid, brittle, and cold, and mechanical. And she turns into that android figure which is my metaphor for the dehumanized person, as you know, who is someone who is less than human—that essential quality that distinguishes a human being is essentially compassion or kindness, that—it’s not intelligence. An android—or in the film Blade Runner it’s called “replicant”—can be very intelligent, but it’s not really human. Because it’s not intelligence that makes a human being; in my opinion it’s the quality of kindness or compassion or what - ever—you know, the Christians call “agape.” And this is what Angel loses when the Bishop dies. And she loses that quality of kindness. She no longer can love. She loses the capacity to love. She does not love again. But she is not even aware of that. That’s what’s happened to her. She knows something terrible has happened to her, she knows she’s somehow become like a machine, but she doesn’t exactly understand what it is.
LEE: It sounds as though your books kind of write themselves for you.
DICK: Yes. Once I get started. There’s those two years before they start writing themselves where I’ve got to figure out what—
LEE: Did you ever experience writer’s block?
DICK: Yes, but for me it’s a blessing. Because I’m an obsessive writer, and if I didn’t get writer’s block I’d overload, short-circuit, and burn out right away. I once did sixteen novels in five years, sold every one of them. And, uh, yeah—
LEE: That’s a lot of work.
DICK: Plus a lot of stories, too, plus a lot of stories. And, uh, they were all publishable. They all sold. Sixteen novels in five years. And if I didn’t get writer’s block, I’d die. I mean, it’s the greatest relief to me. Now, most writers they get writer’s block they become frantic, they just literally—
LEE: Does it last a long time when you get it?
DICK: I’ve had it for several years, yeah.
LEE: Oh, really? That long?
DICK: Yeah, but to me, it’s always a blessing. Because I know that on a unconscious level my mind is sorting through all different possibilities and a day will come when I will know how to begin. And the second the first sentence is down on paper the book has begun.
LEE: I think when I first met you you weren’t writing at that time. In ’74? ’75? Around there?
DICK: Well, you would have met me in ’76. ’Cause that was after I left Tessa. ’Cause I met you through Doris.
LEE: Is it that—
DICK: Did you know? Was I with—
LEE: No, I knew you before you broke up with Tess.
DICK: You did?
LEE: I met you once or twice.
DICK: Oh, OK, that would be before ’76.
LEE: So I think it probably was maybe ’75.
DICK: Oh, yeah.
LEE: But [… ] to know you, coming over here and so forth, yes, it probably was ’76.
DICK: Well, I was experiencing a writer’s block but not really. I had some experiences that I didn’t know how to write up and I, uh—this is almost a redefinition of writer’s block. I’ve had some experiences I don’t know how to write up. I mean, that’s almost a—if you looked up, “What is a writer’s block?” it means that the writer has something, you know, that he knows about but he can’t figure out how to write about it. Although, I suppose it’s possible that writer’s block could consist of not having anything to say, and could occur at any point, but for me it’s just a question of how to say it, how to go about it. OK, now, the book— I’m under contract to write a book, at this point. I’ve been paid for it. If I don’t get it, they’re gonna come kill me. So, uh, and I’ve been warned I have a deadline, but I have blocked out when the deadline is, because I don’t want to think about it.
LEE: That would be a stress factor on your writing ability.
DICK: Well, since I almost died writing that Angel Archer book, I mean, I value my hide more than I value my career. And I will write this book, but they may get it late. But, I’ve cut out—it’s almost as if that joke about if God can do anything, can he make a ditch so wide he can’t jump over it? Or can he create an object so heavy he can’t lift it? You know, is—after I finished the Angel Archer novel, I was convinced I could write anything. You know, I was convinced that I could— well, if I could write from the standpoint of a character smarter than me, more rational than me, more educated than me, funnier than me, I said OK, I can do anything. So I said, now, what comes next? What’s the next hardest thing? And she’s younger than me, she’s a woman, she’s younger, everything—God, I can do that! I can do anything. Well, let’s see, if I can do anything, what would be the hardest job of all? And I thought about that, and I said, I know what I’ll do.
Now, every writer who’s any good is tempted at some time in his career to do a version of the Faust story. Because, I mean, it is almost the paradigm of the writer. Faust and the writer are almost the same person. A good writer is Faustian. And this is what led James Joyce to write Finnegan’s Wake, which no one can understand; he just couldn’t leave it alone. He said, “I can write anything—I wonder if I can write the most difficult book ever written, or will ever be written?”
LEE: I don’t know—he had some tough competition.
DICK: So, he, you know, he stayed in that category, so I says OK, now I will do the Faust story, but it’s been done before. A number of writers have done it before. So what I’ll do is I’ll create a character based on Beethoven and Faust together. ’Cause Beethoven, I was looking at my Britannica one time and it said Beethoven is the greatest genius the world has ever seen. And then it goes on to explain why.
Now, that would make an interesting character. The greatest genius, creative genius—not intel
lectual, creative—genius the world has ever seen. That would make an awfully interesting character. So I started to study the life of Beethoven. And trying to figure out in what way he was a genius. And I thought I would create the synthetic character based on Beethoven and Faust both, where the character strives for the absolute ultimate. So then I had to define what the absolute ultimate was. If you took the greatest genius, creative genius, the world has ever seen, what for him would be the absolute ultimate? This is—this is—it’s not as easy as it sounds. The first one, you’ve got to get into the mind of the greatest creative genius in the world. And then you’ve got to think what for him would be the ultimate task. Well, somewhere along the line in doing this, I overreached myself. I—my notes became too complex for me to understand. I started taking notes that, when I looked them over, the concepts were too complicated for me. It wasn’t the words, it was the ideas.
LEE: This is what you got from the background thing, dealing with—
DICK: Building up the character, right. Yes.
LEE: Oh, I see.
DICK: I was building up this character, right, yes. I was building up as an intellectual thing, that is, he would be an intellectual genius—it wouldn’t be creative genius but intellectual genius in terms of conceptual intelligence, but not—
LEE: Did this frighten you after a while, trying to deal with it?
DICK: No, it didn’t frighten me. I got to the point where, uh, I discovered that I was now dealing in concepts which were so difficult that—I was finally dealing in concepts that were too difficult for me to, to understand. Although I had conceived of the concept in the first place. I then, I went back and looked over the notes—
OK, I’ll give you an example. Now one of the greatest insights in ancient philosophy was by Pythagoras. One time [he] was walking by a blacksmith’s shop. And he noticed that the anvils, when hit with a hammer, the smaller the anvil, the higher pitched the sound. So the bigger anvils make a low-pitched sound and the little ones make a higher-pitched sound. Now that’s interesting. Why should a small one make a higher-pitched sound than a bigger object? Wait a minute, he says. These are musical intervals. The sound the anvil emits when struck is a musical sound. There is no difference between an anvil being hit with a hammer and a musical instrument. This is not— everybody knows that if you divide a string in half, on a stringed instrument, you jump one octave up. I mean, that’s a definition of an octave, is that it is an absolutely even division of a string. See, it doesn’t matter what scale you use, it’s always one octave— that is the definition of an octave. So Pythagoras was standing there in the blacksmith’s shop, you know, I can just see him there, a rolled up copy of the Free Press under his arm, you know, and he’s saying, “There’s something significant here.” And all of a sudden he understood the relationship between music and mathematics. That all the intervals in a musical scale are mathematical, in other words, and can be expressed by number. Very well.
