The Disappointment Artist

by Jonathan Lethem

  Karl isn’t urgent about contemplating our old comics, but he’s willing. This day, while we were browsing the Kirbys of the Return era, he corrected my memory in a few specifics. Most crucially, he raised the possibility that the argument about Kirby, which had seemed to me loaded with the direst intimations of the choices we were about to make, the failures of good faith with our childhood selves we were about to suffer, had mostly been conducted in my own head. It was when I put a stack of Kirby’s 2001’s in his hands.

  “I really got into some of these issues,” he said. I could see his features animate with recollection as he browsed Kirby’s panels, something impossible to fake even if you had a reason to do so. “I remember this comic book really blew my mind.”

  “I thought you never liked Kirby,” I said feebly, still stuck on my thesis.

  “No, I remember when he first came back I was a little slow to get it,” Karl told me, after I’d explained what I thought I remembered. “But you had me convinced pretty quickly. I remember thinking these were really trippy. I’d like to read them again, actually.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I just never liked the way he drew knees.”

  You Don’t Know Dick

  Not like I do, anyway. Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) is the only prolific author whose whole life’s work I can fairly claim to have read through twice, picayune exceptions notwithstanding—the fact that my eyes may have glazed over on a second pass at some of the lesser posthumous novels, or at the massive volumes of letters, is surely compensated by the fact that I’ve reread Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Martian Time-Slip, A Scanner Darkly, and a couple of other favorites three, four, even five times since my discovery of Dick, long ago, at age fifteen. He was my “favorite writer” ten years before the start of the publishing boom (Vintage Books is in the process of reissuing thirty-six of his books, good, bad, and lousy), and as formative an influence as marijuana or punk rock—as equally responsible for beautifully fucking up my life, for bending it irreversibly along a course I still travel. I find I need to spill this now, not (I hope) merely to establish provenance but to get on paper, before it is too late to recall, some glimpse of what the special condition known as “Dickheadedness” consisted of in the years after his death and before his current and ongoing canonization. As well, I need to warn you: Philip K. Dick’s shelf is growing ever-more strange and misleading as it makes contact with the outer reaches of his vast and woolly oeuvre. So I offer myself as a native guide.

  The world doesn’t need another introduction to or apologia for Philip K. Dick. There’ve been plenty. I’ve committed a few myself already. Between his hipster canonization, the frequency of academic and newspaper pundit citation, and the endless flow of Hollywood adaptations of his novels and stories, nobody much needs persuasion that Dick is some kind of important figure. Anyone who’s taken the hint and cracked one of the books also knows he’s many kinds of problematic—foremost in the disastrous unevenness of his prose, even within the space of a given page. He’s that species of great writer, the uneven-prose species: Dickens, Dreiser, and Highsmith are others. Russians will tell you Dostoyevsky is too, and that we don’t know this because translators have been covering his ass. Dick’s ass, though, is uncoverable. His sentences routinely fall down and cry “ouch.” In the words of Bob Dylan, another prolific and variable artist whose oeuvre offers pitfalls for newcomers, “I’m in love with the ugliest girl in the world!”

  I’d read maybe a dozen of Dick’s novels before I encountered the word oeuvre—maybe forty before I dared use it in a sentence. Dick visited France (“I had the interesting experience of being famous”) in 1974 and there possibly heard the word applied to his work. By that time his caustic and generous irony had mostly salved his raw sense of rejection by the literary establishment (“The only non-SF writer who ever treated me with courtesy was Herbert Gold, who I met at a literary party in San Francisco”) and he might have enjoyed the use of the word, but likely wouldn’t have identified much. I’d like to propose an alternative usage, irv. We’ll speak of Dick’s irv.

  Uncertain of the value of their holdings, Vintage has chosen to publish in bouquets. For instance, in May 2002, Dr. Bloodmoney, Clans of the Alphane Moon, Time Out of Joint, and The Simulacra, which is not a bad batch, not bad at all. In particular, Dr. Bloodmoney is one of Dick’s most sympathetic and humane books of the early sixties (with The Man in the High Castle and Martian Time-Slip), as well as one of the most capably (maybe I should say least-badly) written. Time Out of Joint is a dark-horse favorite, set in a Cheeveresque fifties suburb, and incorporating the flavor of Dick’s realist novels (unpublished during his lifetime) into a pataphysical– Twilight Zone framework, only marred by a piss-poor ending. Clans is a cruel and antic psychiatric farce, written as if cribbed from the DSMR-IV; Simulacra a murkily overpopulated Balzacian social panorama. Bloodmoney and Time are crucial books. Clans and Simulacra , if not exactly ideal entry points into the irv, don’t shame it.

  Certainly none of this quartet risks turning off curious readers as do the previously republished Game-Players of Titan, We Can Build You, or the god-awful World Jones Made. Among the howlingly bad ones I’ll single out Vulcan’s Hammer for special shaming. When Dick potboiled the results were usually characteristically strange, but not so Vulcan’s Hammer. Throw any fifteen out-of-print SF novels from 1954 into a blender—maybe you’d get Vulcan’s Hammer, maybe something better.

  When I was fifteen and sixteen I scoured Brooklyn’s used bookstores and thrift shops for the hardest-to-find Dick titles, trying to complete a shelf of the thirty-seven-odd published works. This was 1979 and 1980, before Dick published his last three novels and died, and before the posthumous publication of a dozen or so manuscripts. Locating Vulcan’s Hammer was a notable triumph. I’ll always remember dowsing it out of a crate of moldering paperbacks that had been pushed beneath a shelf, dusting its glorious, hideous cover (Dick’s biographer Lawrence Sutin describes it as occupying “deserved purgatory as half of a 1960 Ace Double”) and more or less pinching myself in disbelief: Vulcan’s fucking Hammer! I’d found it! Of course, then I had to go and read the damn thing. The irony is that out-of-printness served the purposes of exploring the irv nicely: the easiest books to find, and therefore the first I’d happened to read, were mostly Dick’s masterpieces (Castle, Ubik, Stigmata , Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). This was because the better books had received comparatively many reprintings, whereas the dreck was always the rarest essence. The problem nowadays is that Vintage’s uniformly prestigious shelf of clean, authoritative editions disguises these natural hierarchies absolutely.

  Would Dick have liked seeing Vulcan’s Hammer rescued, and seated like a homunculus among the angels? Impossible to know. Late in life Dick saw odd virtues in his rottenest early works, partly because he tended to see all his previous novels and stories as precognitive glimpses of a religious revelation which overtook him in 1974—everything in his own history seemed to prefigure his conversion experience. Dick was a strange and difficult man, if famously enchanting to meet, and as his posthumous career expanded through the eighties—as the work became enshrined in academic and literary culture—it was hard not to speculate how completely the man’s continued earthly existence might have screwed it up.

  Of course, it’s easy to oversimplify, and imagine that Dick’s career splits cleanly into the disreputable past and the reputable present. In fact, the possibility that Dick was of dire and awesome literary significance haunts his reputation, such as it was, in the old SF ghetto. The back cover of the $1.50 1976 Ace Books reprint of Simulacra boasts: “The 21 st Century. It was a shifting, shadowy and extraordinary world . . . and very dangerous . . .” But it also bears a blurb which reads: “If there is such a thing as ‘black science fiction’, Philip K. Dick is its Pirandello, its Becket and its Pinter . . .” That’s Becket [sic].

  The opposite applies: understanding of Dick’s stature is still muddled by th
e appeal to mysticism his late work provides. Curious readers attracted by the advocacy of scholars and fellow writers may still be put off by an air of conspiracy theory, persecution ecstasy, and religious charlatanism in Dick’s writing, or the woolly-eyed gullibility of some of his admirers. There surrounds Dick some stink of cultishness no number of Frederic Jameson citations can rub off.

  If there ever was a cult, in 1984 I managed to sign up as its lieutenant. All through my high-school years I’d planned to visit California and plant myself at the feet of my hero, but before I managed it, he died. So I clipped obituaries and went to college instead. When one of the clippings announced the formation of a Philip K. Dick Society, dedicated to propagating his works and furthering his posthumous career, my flame of pilgrimage was relit. I dropped out and hitchhiked west, and in Berkeley I looked up Paul Williams—not the short blond songwriter, but the Crawdaddy-founding rock critic who’d written about Dick for Rolling Stone and become the estate’s literary executor—he was wearing a Meat Puppets T-shirt the day I found him. Paul made immediate good use of me, mostly for licking stamps. I hosted the PKD Society’s envelopestuffing parties in my Berkeley apartment, two blocks from the tiny, wood-frame house where Dick had lived during the writing of his first ten or so novels. And, a great thrill, I later sold the Dick estate a few dozen of the hundreds of spare copies of paperbacks I’d assembled—my book hunting had become obsessive, and I by then owned three, four, and even five copies of most of the dozens of out-of-print titles. The estate didn’t. In order to “further his posthumous career,” Paul needed copies of the rarest books to send to prospective publishers like Vintage. Vulcan’s Hammer, in other words, is sort of my fault.

  In my role as Paul’s sidekick, I got a chance to sort through acres of letters, outlines for novels never written, and personal ephemera, like Dick’s lease for an apartment in Fullerton (“two neutered cats okay”), which for some reason I photocopied and have kept to this day. I once handled Dick’s personal copy of the I Ching (any reader of The Man in the High Castle knows the talismanic importance of that text), its hard covers softened and swollen from use, like Ahab’s Bible retrieved from the Pequod. The book was full of paper slips in Dick’s handwriting, desperate inquiries into everyday subjects on which Dick had turned to the oracle for consultation: Will (editor X) accept the new draft of Policeman? Should I lend Y money for Seconal? Will Z sleep with me? I also once owned a single gold earring made by Dick’s jeweler wife, another Man in the High Castle–related fetish. The earring was stolen by an ex-girlfriend who didn’t understand its importance—who found my obsession with Dick embarrassing.

  When Vintage completes the cycle, it will have made available all of the fifties and sixties SF novels—the ten or fifteen excellent books which originally made Dick’s underground reputation and the twenty-some weaker titles which always kept that reputation hobbled. In the mid-eighties, before the Vintage reissues, the only one of those books which was at all easy to find was the Del Rey Books Blade Runner tied-in reprint of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? But for the collectors and cognoscenti (all six hundred of us) who were tuned into Paul’s PKD Society newsletters, the market was flooded with outré material just reaching first light in expensive small-press hardcovers—Ubik: The Screenplay , The Dark-Haired Girl (essays), Nick and the Glimmung (a children’s book), five volumes of Selected Letters, and enough unpublished realist novels from his thwarted “mainstream” efforts of the fifties to make up another writer’s whole career: Mary and the Giant, The Broken Bubble, Gather Yourselves Together, In Milton Lumky Territory, The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike , Humpty Dumpty in Oakland, and Puttering About in a Small Land. These were works never published during Dick’s lifetime, all made easily available—for a brief moment, anyway. Now the situation is exactly reversed: those titles have all slipped back into the mists, and that list I’ve just typed out might serve to fuel another fifteen-year-old’s obsessive quest. In a sense, the “lost” and the “found” Dick have swapped places, twice.

  It’s hard to make a case for the realist novels. The implicit assertion of the Dick credibility-boom goes something like this: There’s this writer who works with the pop-culture iconography of science fiction but with such mad originality and verve—and emotional intensity—that he created his own personal genre, surrealistic and freewheeling, with enormous capacities for humor, despair, and for making a sophisticated critique of capitalist culture (despite, ahem, infelicities in the prose). He deserves your serious attention as much as any realist writer. This was a bunch to swallow in the first place. It’s asking a huge latitude of the guardians of our literary culture to then say: Oh yeah, that same guy, the visionary pop-culture surrealist? Well, he also wrote these eight puzzling and unforgettable novels in a dour, lower-middle-class realist mode—something like Richard Yates meets Charles Willeford. These too, deserve a look (despite, ahem, infelicities in the prose). That double reverse may simply be too much.

  Nevertheless, even the very worst of those realist novels would better reward your time than Vulcan’s Hammer. Not to be a bully.

  I can’t keep from comparisons to other artists whose sprawling fecundity makes any such essay as this the equivalent of providing the reader an umbrella before ushering him out the door into a hurricane. So—just to focus again for a moment, on that bouquet of titles I mentioned before—if Dick is Hitchcock, then Dr. Bloodmoney is his The Trouble with Harry (perverse pastoral). If he’s Altman, Simulacra is A Wedding (underrated but overcomplicated), and The Clans of the Alphane Moon is Beyond Therapy (disturbed). If he’s Graham Greene, Time Out of Joint is Brighton Rock, but if he’s Dylan it’s Another Side. If he’s Picasso—oh, never mind.

  In a review of Joseph McBride’s eight-hundred-page master biography of John Ford, Jonathan Rosenbaum notes that in the galley copy McBride had sliced through the thicket to provide a “Ford’s Top Ten Films”—but then cut it out of the final book. I wonder, was McBride afraid of being too final? Or was he embarrassed that, for all his scholarship, he had a fondness for “top-ten lists”? Let me not deny this service— after all, I’ve only been adjusting and polishing this list in my head for the majority of my life. So, the irv de la irv, in no particular order: Castle , Stigmata, Ubik, Valis, Androids, Bloodmoney , The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, A Scanner Darkly , Martian Time-Slip, Confessions of a Crap Artist—wait, shit, okay, fifteen—Now Wait for Last Year, Time Out of Joint, A Maze of Death, Galactic Pot-Healer . . .

  Perhaps I fear that if I ever finish this list—the making of which is an extension of my obsessive searching in bookstores for Dick’s books, even after I’d found them all—I will die. Or grow up. Similarly, this is probably the right place to admit that I’ve never actually read Gather Yourselves Together. I suppose the truth is that I’m saving it.

  Lives of the Bohemians

  I learned to think by watching my father paint. I wrote that sentence five years ago, in a brief essay for the catalogue of a ten-year retrospective exhibition of my father’s paintings by a small museum in New England. More recently I’ve helped him archive a cache of his canvases from the 1970s, many of which I’d not seen since he painted them—that is to say, since childhood. Confronting an array of pictures spanning my own life on this planet, I was struck again with their implicit challenge to my understanding. Could I think about the paintings themselves? Tell Richard Lethem something about them he didn’t know? I’d begun to see my father’s work (and his life) as being defined by a resistance to—and reluctance to assume—conventional authority. To write about him while he still lived, I’d need to borrow some of his disobedience. I wanted to try.

  Yet I find myself in relation to father and paintings as the apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey stood before their monolith. Dumb, though making noise. Weren’t those apes supposed to grab an implement and get to work? After all, it was me that put think and my father paint in the same sentence.

  As a teenager I revered Stanley Kubrick, a
nd Arthur C. Clarke—at some point I’d have called them my favorite director and favorite writer (though Clarke was shed years sooner than Kubrick). And probably, as choices of favorites, Kubrick and Clarke formed an armor against threatening aspects of my father’s art, and of my parents’ world, and of our family’s life. They offered images the surfaces of which were clean of the paint-drippy, hippie-drippy, Bob Dylan–raspy-voiced, imperfection-embracing chaos surrounding me everywhere. And as images of the artist, Kubrick and Clarke felt somehow absolute in their stances of confidence, of magisterial indifference. (I know better now, but it doesn’t seem mistaken that each of these artists particularly wished to make that impression—enough to fool a kid.) So they made an antidote for the drug of proximity to my dad—an artist whose authority was for me both bigger and smaller, more problematic in every way.

  Like that ape, gazing at his monolith, my attempt here is in the nature of a scientific inquiry under impossible conditions. I set out to write about a painter. He happens to be my father. Who was married to my mother. Who—parents, together with my brother and sister—make up my family. All I know comes from the ground I gaze across, and am rooted to, helplessly. What’s to keep the paintings from slipping out of view below the horizon, as my planet of memory grumbles on its axis?

  As late as 1966, at the age of thirty-four, my father’s trajectory was a fine and ordinary one, for a serious painter of his generation. I mean, rather than for a person of his small-town Midwestern upbringing, which might not have indicated that a serious young man would look to become a serious painter of his generation. The last of six siblings raised in Missouri and Iowa, Richard Lethem’s childhood straddled the Depression and the Second World War, the war in which two of his older brothers, and his sisters’ husbands, fought—men vacating the scene while a boy stayed behind with sisters and sisters-in-law, who might have seemed more like a batch of adoring young aunts.