The Search for Philip K. Dick

by Dick, Anne R.

  THE SEARCH FOR PHILIP K. DICK

  COPYRIGHT © 1995, 2009, 2010 BY ANNE R. DICK

  COVER ART AND DESIGN BY JOSH BEATMAN

  INTERIOR DESIGN BY JOHN COULTHART

  PHOTOS BY ANNE R. DICK

  PASSAGES FROM THE WRITINGS OF PHILIP K. DICK

  USED BY PERMISSION OF THE PHILIP K. DICK

  TESTAMENTARY TRUST

  TACHYON PUBLICATIONS

  1459 18TH STREET #139

  SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94107

  415.285.5615

  WWW.TACHYONPUBLICATIONS.COM

  SERIES EDITOR: JACOB WEISMAN

  EDITOR: JILL ROBERTS

  ISBN 13: 978-1-61696-000-1

  ISBN 13: 1-61696-000-1

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES BY WORZALLA

  FIRST TACHYON EDITION

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  In Memoriam

  Philip K. Dick

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction by David Gill

  Prologue

  PART I 1958-64

  One I Meet Phil Dick

  Two Honeymoon for Four

  Three Family Life in the Country

  Four Disaster in Point Reyes Station

  A Postscript to Part I

  PART II 1964-82

  Five Bachelor in Oakland

  Six Nancy

  Seven The Scanner Darkly Years

  Eight The Vancouver Science Fiction Convention

  Nine More Dark-Haired Girls: Linda, Tessa

  Ten Doris and Joan

  Eleven Death of a Science Fiction Writer

  PART III 1928-58

  Twelve Early Years

  Thirteen Boyhood in Berkeley

  Fourteen A Young Man

  Afterword 2009

  Three 1982 Dreams

  A Legacy

  Index

  About the Author

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank the Philip K. Dick Estate for making the Philip K. Dick papers available to me and for permission to quote letters, documents, and some small bits of text.

  The material in this book was collected in 1982 and 1983, and the text was written in 1984. This paperback edition of 2009 is a revision, with new material added.

  Much of the original information was from interviews, tape-recorded shortly after Phil’s death. The original tapes are in the Philip K. Dick archives. My own personal memories did not include exact quotes. The dialogue is constructed but close to the spirit of the past.

  My sources for Part I of this book, a personal memoir, were my three older daughters, Hatte, Jayne, and Tandy; Phil’s Point Reyes novels; and old friends who still lived in the area: Sue Baty, Avis Hall, Inez Storer, and (interviewed briefly at the Palace Market) Pete Stephens. Thanks to them, Joan Stevens in Arizona, and June Kresy in southern California.

  I would like to thank my oldest daughter Hatte for remembering, criticizing, and endlessly listening. Thank you, second daughter Jayne who, living next door, had to listen even more than endlessly. Thanks to third daughter Tandy for your good memories of Phil and for encouraging this project.

  Paul Williams functioned as literary executor for the PKD estate for ten years after Phil’s death. I frequently visited the archives at Glen Ellen, one hour’s drive north of Point Reyes Station. In 1982 and 1983, Paul gave me copies of a handful of letters, childhood report cards, and newspaper clippings from the Philip K. Dick archives, which were located in Paul’s garage. I donated new information that I had discovered, mostly interviews. I also made my manuscript available to other biographers: Paul himself, Larry Sutin, and Emmanuel Carrère.

  Dr. Willis McNelly, professor emeritus, California State University at Fullerton, encouraged me and showed me how to most effectively study the Philip K. Dick papers at Fullerton.

  Dr. Patricia Warrick, from the English Department of the University of Wisconsin at Appleton, was also the 1985 president of the Science Fiction Research Associates. An early and enthusiastic scholar of Philip K. Dick’s writing, she gave me feedback on early drafts of this book over many long phone calls. At her invitation, I gave a talk about Phil, which was recorded, at the annual Science Fiction Research Association meeting at Kent State in 1985. Afterward, Jack Williamson, an old-time science fiction writer, came up to the podium and hugged me and told me I had made Phil Dick “come alive” for him.

  In 1986, at the invitation of Professor George Slusser, curator of the Eaton Collection at the University of California at Riverside, and Professor Jacques Goimard of the University of Paris-Sorbonne, I gave a talk about Phil at a five-day conference at a restored château in Etampes, France, sixty miles south of Paris. The château had a grand foyer with two curving staircases going to the second floor. In the middle of the foyer, a section of the floor had been removed to show an ancient mosaic surviving from a villa that had been located there in Roman times. I was overwhelmed when I was given the Countess’s enormous suite, which had two sets of huge French doors leading out to two balconies that overlooked a park of fifteen acres. It had a bathroom the size of a small living room. It was hard to get a good night’s sleep; the bells of the ruined monastery next door rang all night long. Its remains had been made into a church, where I went to Mass on Sunday. I gave my talk about Phil on the last day of the conference. Kim Stanley Robinson liked it and gave me a manuscript copy of one of his short stories, which I later gave to Sam Umland.

  Thanks, Professor Gregg Rickman of San Francisco State University; you were encouraging and helpful to me over the years.

  Thanks, Ray Nelson and Kirsten Nelson for information and for sending kind and helpful vibrations from Albany.

  Thanks, Betty Jo Rivers. It was a pleasure to meet you and talk with you.

  Thanks, Nancy Hackett. You were very helpful via several interviews. It was nice to get to know you and Isa and Tina.

  Thanks, Kleo Mini for your generous help. I loved talking with you at lunch in that excellent restaurant in St. Helena.

  Thanks, Joan Simpson for information, encouragement, and copyediting.

  Thanks, Michael Walsh, David Berner, and Michael and Susan Walsh in Vancouver.

  Thanks, Joel Stein in Las Vegas and to young sci-fi writer Daniel Gilbert.

  Thanks, Tim and Serena Powers. Thanks for many quotes from your journal, Tim. Thanks K. W. Jeter.

  Thank you to Professor Gerald M. Ackerman at Pomona College for sharing your unpublished manuscript; to Dr. George Koehler for coming all the way from Los Angeles to Point Reyes with your carefully thought-out information about Phil’s boyhood; to Dick Daniels for your warm and detailed memories of Phil in high school; to Leon Rimov and Pat Flannery for your memories of Phil in junior high and high school; to Maury (Iskander) Guy for your extensive memories of Phil, and Dorothy and Joe Hudner. Thanks many times over to Lynne Hudner Cecil, now Lynne Aalan, Phil’s stepsister, for family information and documents.

  Thanks to Vince and Virginia Lusby, Janet Feinstein Doyle, Alan Rich, Alan Ayle, Mrs. Anthony Boucher, Lois Mini, Pat Hollis, Grania Davis, Linda Levy, Doris Sauter, Mary Wilson, Nita Busby, and Jim Blaylock.

  Thanks to the Scanner Darkly Kids, for trusting me and for sharing your past.

  Thanks to old enemies for taking a risk, laying down old animosities, and helping me clear up the debris of my past. Thanks to Dr. Sam Anderson and William Wolfson.

  A special thanks to Karen Pierce, who came to type my tape-recorded, dictated manuscript on the computer and, when I was close to despair, taught me that my early awkwardness and incoherence were all “part of the process.” Karen helped without intruding, became my copyeditor and editorial consultant, and in the process acquired new motivation for her own writin
g.

  Thanks to Heather Wilcox, Allan Kausch, Elizabeth Story and James DeMaiolo for the copyediting, proofreading, and vetting of the current Tachyon edition.

  Thanks to Professor Samuel Umland of the University of Nebraska at Kearney for his interest in Phil and in this book. He went through it with me chapter by chapter and helped me revise it for Mellen Press for the hardcover 1993 library edition.

  I could not have finished the 1993 revision without the help of my jewelry business manager, Craig Bailey, who processed the manuscript several times, struggled with an obsolete software program, fixed small errors, added italics, etc. (He’s still here, correcting the 2009 revision.)

  Thanks, Father Tim West, for opening a door for me when I felt perhaps I “should not” write about many of these events.

  I would also like to thank all the other people mentioned in this book but not mentioned specifically in these acknowledgments.

  Thanks in memoriam to Vince Lusby, Bill Christensen, Edgar Dick, John Gildersleeve, Bill Trieste, Margaret Wolfson, Jerry Kresy, Pat Jambor, Dorothy and Joe Hudner, Alys Graveson, Ben and Anita Gross, Neil Hudner, Avram Davidson, Henrietta Russell, Avis Hall, Willis McNally, and Jack Newcomb.

  INTRODUCTION

  by David Gill

  PHILIP K. DICK still haunts us. A quarter century after his death, as our evermore wired and dystopian times look more and more like a Philip K. Dick novel, the story of Phil Dick’s life fascinates critics, fans, and followers almost as much as what he wrote. Perhaps this is because his long, strange trip is as enthralling as any of his novels. But this distinction, between Phil’s life and his fiction, has always been blurred. Avid fans see Phil Dick in each of his world-weary protagonists, grappling with the pain and uncertainty of the universe — very much the way Phil appears in this memoir.

  During Phil’s recent literary ascension, which coincided with his inclusion in the prestigious Library of America series, critics took to publications like The New Yorker and Newsweek to dispassionately list the litany of bummers in his life: poverty, multiple failed marriages, drug abuse, battles with panic attacks, and agoraphobia. As a result of our media’s obsession with the alleged connection between artistic genius and madness, Phil Dick was introduced to mainstream America as a caricature: a disheveled prophet, a hack churning out boilerplate genre fiction, a speed-freak. None of these impressions of Phil, taken without awareness of the sensationalism that generated them, advances our understanding of his life and work. Today the myth of Philip K. Dick threatens to drown out what evidence remains of his turbulent life.

  We can never fully understand Phil Dick. He, like Walt Whitman, contained multitudes. Instead, we have to content ourselves with studying Phil through a series of lenses. Like his novels that shift from character to character between the chapters, we must examine Phil’s life from the vantage point of the people who knew him. We may never be able to assemble a complete image, but the impressions that he left on the people that he loved, and that loved him, help in getting a sense of the man.

  The extensive research Anne did for this book is impressive. The interviews she conducted have become an important source for all of Phil’s biographers, but perhaps more importantly, the small details from his daily life provide a more intimate picture than any of Phil’s other biographies. The fact that Phil chose the old, battered shoe as his avatar whenever the family played Monopoly gives us a sense of him. Even though I never met Phil, after reading Anne’s memoir, he feels familiar to me. Of course, this picture is incomplete, but Anne’s memoir captures, in vivid recollections, Phil at the top of his game as a writer. But her memoir also depicts a man whose creative drive and need to make a living is burning him out.

  While Phil certainly had other prolific periods in his life, he produced some of his best work in rapid-fire brilliance during his years with Anne. Between 1959 and 1964 he wrote a dozen novels, including Confessions of a Crap Artist, The Man in the High Castle, Martian Time-Slip, Now Wait for Last Year, and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

  When Phil moved to Point Reyes Station in 1958 and met Anne, he was finishing up his novel Time Out of Joint, a book that can be read as either science fiction or psychological fiction, depending on whether you believe the protagonist is sane. In this way the book combines Phil’s disparate ambitions: to be a mainstream writer—spoken of in the same sentence as Faulkner and Hemingway—and to provide a stable income for his family by churning out science fiction.

  In 1959 Lippincott published Time Out of Joint as a hardcover, Phil’s first, and billed it as a “novel of menace,” marketing it without any of the usual science fiction trappings. This small literary success prompted Phil to try his hand again at mainstream fiction and this resulted in Confessions of a Crap Artist and The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike. While these novels were not successful in his lifetime, Dick’s reaction when his mainstream fiction remained unpublished for many years—including Confessions of a Crap Artist, which has since been recognized as one of his finer works—became a pivotal moment in his career.

  Feeling like he was back at square one as a writer, Phil momentarily gave up on writing and helped Anne with her fledgling jewelry business, selling her pieces to stores in the Bay Area. When he inevitably returned to writing, he decided to again combine his two ambitions by incorporating highbrow literary elements into his science fiction. The resulting success, the Hugo Award winning The Man in the High Castle, set the stage for an unrivaled burst of creativity that lasted until he left Anne in 1964.

  Phil’s writing became much more autobiographical during this period. Phil wrote in the introduction to his short story collection The Golden Man, that he wanted to “write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind.” And so Phil wove Anne into his fiction. Anne, a talented and forward-thinking artisan, became the model for some of Phil’s most heroic characters, the careful craftsman, the skilled artist, such as the jewelry maker in The Man in the High Castle and the ceramicist in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich, capable of producing an object that is not subject to the decay of the world; these objects serve as an antidote, in some ways, to the entropy so Ubikuitous in his writing. Artisans pop up again and again in Phil’s writing, but not until after he meets Anne in 1958.

  Anne’s memoir makes it clear that Phil’s characters did not suffer alone; their plight was a reflection of their creator’s pain. I often find myself, upon finishing one of Phil’s books, wanting to hug him and thank him for dredging up so much, for giving so much of himself. Anne is to be commended for her willingness to take an unflinching and thoughtful look at her own life and her relationship with Phil, and for sharing her search for answers.

  David Gill, a scholar who has studied the life and work of Philip K. Dick for over a decade, writes the Dick-centered Total Dick-Head blog (TOTALDICKHEAD.BLOGSPOT.COM) and teaches literature and composition at San Francisco State University.

  PROLOGUE

  OUR SMALL EPISCOPAL church was half-filled for the memorial service that I’d arranged at the suggestion of Paul Williams. Nancy, Phil’s fourth wife, came, and Joan Simpson, who could have been his sixth wife, and Tessa’s sister (Tessa was his fifth wife). Kleo, Phil’s second wife, said she wouldn’t come, then tried to get a ride at the last minute but didn’t make it after all.

  At the end of the service when Fr. Schofield said, “Into thy hands we commend thy servant, Philip K. Dick,” I felt my heart twist. “No, no,” I thought, “I can’t let Phil go.” I began asking questions I had put aside years ago. Why did Phil leave? Why didn’t he come back? If I’d been different, would he have left? What were his relationships with other women like? Had any of them had the same kind of experience I’d had? Had he loved me, or had he been a colossal fake? After eighteen years, I began again pulling off the petals of that infinite daisy: He loves me…he loves me not….

  I didn’t have any false pride to preserve anymore. I didn’t have to tiptoe around Phil�
�s touchiness, so I decided to find out. I started phoning, writing, and visiting all the people who had known Phil. I compiled so much information that I began to think of writing a book. I’d call it The Five Wives of Philip K. Dick. I gave up that idea when I couldn’t locate Phil’s first wife, Jeannette Marlin (Phil’s father, Edgar Dick, believed she was dead), and Tessa Busby Dick, his fifth wife, declined to be interviewed.

  I spent the next two years interviewing wives, an extensive list of serious girlfriends, male friends, family members, psychiatrists, and lawyers. (Phil was always terrified that his ex-wives would get together and compare notes.) Other women friends of Phil’s—Joan Simpson, Kirsten Nelson, Kleo Mini, Nancy Hackett, Linda Levy, Mary Wilson, Betty Jo Rivers, “Sheila,” and “Cindy”— shared memories with me.

  I had a lot of help from Phil. I researched when his works were written rather than when they were published and compiled a chronology. Then I read through the thirty-six science fiction novels and the 120 short stories in the sequence they were written. It was so fascinating to read Phil’s science fiction as a whole, an oeuvre (or “irve,” as my friend David Gill calls it) that I read through it twice, sometimes laughing out loud as Phil’s novels took me back to the events of our life in the early sixties. Those books were unbelievably revealing. In effect, Phil had made notes about our life together for me. His complete oeuvre was a surrealist autobiography. Reality and imagination flicker back and forth in his fiction as it did in his everyday life, Phil playing all the roles and predicting his own future.