The Search for Philip K. Dick

by Dick, Anne R.

  Many religious themes interested Phil. At that time many new translations of the Bible were coming out. He liked a book entitled The Desert Fathers. He quoted a Russian proverb, “Break a stick and there is Christ.”

  We read the Tao Te Ching and at the same time, coincidentally and synchronistically, a book on cybernetics by Norbert Weiner, which described machines of eight different orders. A machine of the eighth order would be one that would create its own matter. Weiner believed that Taoism described a universe like the one in cybernetics theory.

  I had found a beautiful book on Japanese landscape gardening that Phil liked. He used the concepts of wu wei and wabi sabi from this book. He didn’t like Zen and the Art of Archery, a popular book of that time, at all. After he had finished it, he dropped the book over his shoulder and kicked it up in the air with his heel, saying, “So much for Zen Buddhism.”

  Everything wasn’t always so super-intellectual. We watched the Rose Bowl Parade on TV, Sherlock Holmes, Cyrano de Bergerac, and The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. We played Go, canasta, chess, Scrabble, and verbally threw “Tom Swifties” at each other like the following:

  The book business is hidebound.

  Plants are taking over the world sporadically.

  The operator let me off the hook.

  The discovery of atomic energy electrified the world.

  The Senate inquiry into the modern use of sidearms was muzzled.

  —Philip K. Dick, Galactic Pot-Healer

  That spring, Mamie Eisenhower—that was the name we had given our oldest Suffolk ewe, she had bangs like Mamie’s—had triplets. On Good Friday afternoon, Phil played the Dublin version of Handel’s Messiah on the record player while working just outside on the flowerbeds around the patio. He came running back in the house: “I saw a great streak of black sweeping across the sky. For a moment there was utter nothingness dividing the sky in half.” There was no doubt in my mind that he had seen something. Perhaps it was the great spiritual black hole symbolically re-created on Good Friday when the churches in the world were commemorating the crucifixion.

  I thought it would be good if the house were legally in both of our names instead of only mine. A man and wife should both own the domicile where they were bringing up their children. Phil agreed and so we went to the title company and made the change. The property had been listed in “joint tenancy” instead of “community property” because Richard’s family’s lawyer had advised Richard to have it listed this way in case we got divorced. Then I wouldn’t automatically get the house as was usual in California at that time. Although I didn’t realize it then, not only were Phil and I not legally married but Phil now owned half of the house. We were both happy that we had taken this step. It put Phil in the high mood that produced The Man in the High Castle.

  Phil had suggested that I read Ward Moore’s novel, Bring the Jubilee. I borrowed it from the library and read it with delight. Bring the Jubilee is an alternate-reality novel set in a world in which the South has won the Civil War. A footnote in it refers to a novel written by a Northerner about a world in which the North has won the Civil War. It wouldn’t be our North, but a North that a Southern writer living in a victorious South would imagine. I told Phil, “I wish Ward Moore had developed that fascinating idea further. I wonder what that world was like?”

  It wasn’t long after this that Phil started working on his new novel, which was set in a universe where Japan and Nazi Germany had won World War II. Phil’s typewriter was being rebuilt. Tandy had dropped it, so he wrote the beginning of The Man in the High Castle on a $10 1936 Underwood typewriter that we had bought for the children to play with. One key didn’t work. It didn’t seem to faze him.

  While Phil was writing, I was making jewelry with my partner, Lorraine Hynes, but we weren’t getting along well. Phil went back and forth between our neighboring houses, supposedly mediating, but somehow everything between us kept getting worse and worse. Soon Lorraine quit and I was working alone in my small laundry-room workshop.

  To keep me company, Phil starting making some molten globby metal forms. He loved doing this. He made an irregular silver triangle and polished it for an hour on the buffing wheel. He described this object in The Man in the High Castle: “a single small silver triangle ornamented with hollow drops. Black beneath, bright and light-filled above.”

  He took off a couple of days from his writing to go to Frazier’s, a fine store in Berkeley, to make my first sale to Mrs. Hom, the buyer there. (She continued to buy from me for the next fifteen years until Frazier’s was forced out of business by the street people who lined the curbs with their merchandise and scared away the upper-middle-class shoppers from the Berkeley hills with their odd costumes and weird demeanor.) Phil created a jewelry display in small baskets. He cut a design in an art-gum eraser and printed handsome cards on the children’s toy rotary printing press using handmade paper an artist friend, Inez Storer, had given us. He wrote about all this in The Man in the High Castle, exactly as it happened.

  Before I knew it, Phil was taking over the whole jewelry business. Finally I had developed something for myself besides housework and raising kids, and he wanted it. He already had his writing. It was my business. I didn’t want him working in it if he was going to completely dominate it. Huffily, I asked him not to work in my small shop anymore. He withdrew without a word, and I thought he understood.

  That evening we went downtown to visit Jerry Kresy. When we were ready to leave, Phil took the silver triangle out of his pocket and asked Jerry if he’d like to have it. “Sure,” said Jerry, “I’ve got a fine place for it right on the front door,” and he picked up a hammer and a nail and nailed right through Phil’s silver triangle. Phil winced as the nail pierced his cherished ornament. Suddenly I felt bad. What was happening? Phil was being hurt—but it was too late to do anything about it, wasn’t it? I brushed my thoughts away. It was, after all, only a little piece of metal.

  That summer Phil became involved with local water politics. The one-inch-diameter pipes bringing water to our house were so old and rusty that in summer when the pressure dropped, the only way I could wash dishes was to go out on the ground-level concrete front porch at midnight and use the hose. There wasn’t enough pressure in the lines for the water to rise to the level of the kitchen sink.

  Phil decided to do something about this problem. He went around the town asking people about their service and was quite amazed when homeowners would tell him, “They’re pumping nothing but mud to us.” He couldn’t believe that people “were so mute” and hadn’t complained about this problem. He wrote letters and attended meetings. It wasn’t long before two-inch-diameter pipes were being laid up the two-mile hill to our house at the very end of the waterline. Phil was mild mannered, even humble, not at all pushy—but he had a way. I told him, kiddingly, “It’s lucky you’re a reclusive person or you’d be another Goebbels.”

  It was a wonderful summer. The children pushed Laura around in their doll buggy on the patio. Jayne had a pancake-eating contest with Phil. She won, eating twenty-three pancakes in one sitting. Phil and the girls collected “shaky grass” in the field and put it in a vase on the dining room table. We went downtown evenings to watch the local townsmen play donkey baseball. Phil bought a huge two-handled lumberman’s saw and a giant axe to cut firewood for the winter—which he never used.

  Iskandar Guy (then, still Maury Guy) came to visit bringing his beautiful new girlfriend. We took a picnic of cold guinea fowl to Stinson Beach and ate with our hands, not using any utensils, a style that was part of Maury’s new Subud religion. The sun, the sky, the ocean, the beautiful young woman, and the delicious food combined together in a way that made me feel that something cosmic was breaking through that day.

  In late summer, we decided to have the lambs slaughtered for the freezer. We had far too many sheep for the size of our pasture. All the ewes had had lambs, some of them twins. Our next-door neighbor, an old-time rancher, offered to slaughter them. Phil
said he was going to hold the lambs for Mr. Hendron. I thought I should watch and give moral support.

  They were beautiful big animals. Phil held them while Mr. Hendron cut their throats. It was horrible. I didn’t eat mutton again for years. Phil didn’t seem to be disturbed. It was surprising since he loved animals and was so sensitive. He said, “Remember, I come from a farming tradition. All my father’s people were ranchers.”

  Phil brought me the manuscript of The Man in the High Castle to read. He said, “I don’t think I’ll even send this off. I’m afraid it isn’t any good.”

  I loved it. I was pleased that, for a change, Phil had based a female character on me who was really a heroine. I totally identified with Juliana. Suddenly, naked, she went into a schizophrenic fugue and cut a man’s throat. It was horrible, even if he was a Nazi SS killer.

  As I read, I became totally absorbed. I thought, “Frank, how could you give way to despair at the moment that your artistry was being recognized? Of course Juliana believed in Abendsen and his world, a world of hope, a world without oppression. There was Abendsen with his arms crossed, rocking back on his heels just like Phil did. For a moment, contemplating the blobby silver triangle, lovely, sensitive Mr. Tagomi came into our universe—but he was disoriented here and returned to his own world. Betty Kasoura was cooking one of my menus for Robert Childan. Those complicated feelings of pride and inferiority that Childan had. For a short time he rose above his own nature and experienced the grace of God. Ah, Phil, are we all doomed to commit acts of cruelty, violence, and evil?”

  “Phil, it’s the best thing you’ve ever done. Send it right off.” He was pleased but still dubious. But he retyped it with only a few changes and did send it off.

  Every time I read The Man in the High Castle, I find another level of meaning that I didn’t see in previous readings. I had to laugh when I found out, while working on this book, that one of the thugs Tagomi killed has a calling card in his wallet that reads “Jack Sanders,” which was the name of an old friend of Phil’s from Berkeley in the fifties. The intensity, the daring, the delicacy of feeling, and the playfulness of The Man in the High Castle bring back the spirit of Phil more than any of his other novels—but still it is only a pale shadow of the man I knew.

  When it came time for publication, Phil sent his publisher the most awful picture of himself from the early fifties that had ever been taken. An old friend of Phil’s, John Gildersleeve, said, “That picture showed every bad character trait that Phil had ever had, and none of the good ones.”

  Phil dedicated the novel to me: “To my wife, Anne, without whose silence this book would never have been written.” I wasn’t sure I liked this phrasing. I never did quite understand it.

  After writing The Man in the High Castle, Phil rested for a while and did his thinking thing. We went out more. We took a trip to San Francisco to buy some books. We had dinner in town. Driving up the Olema grade at night, we saw in our headlights an owl with his claws caught in a dead skunk’s body. It was too heavy for the owl to fly away with. The skunk had also sprayed. I said that perhaps we shouldn’t interfere with nature’s ways, but Phil stopped the car, got out, and freed the owl. I had to agree that it was the right thing to do. Phil smelled for weeks and we had to throw out all the clothes he had been wearing.

  In January and February of 1962, the rains were especially heavy. Phil was beginning to work on a new novel, The Game-Players of Titan. I found some shaggy-looking mushrooms growing under our cypress trees and wondered if they were good to eat. I took them to a mushroom expert, Dr. Robert Orr, at the Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, who told me they were shaggy manes. The Orrs came out to visit us on several occasions, and with their expert guidance and several reference books we became fanatical mushroom hunters, tramping daily during the rainy season through the mist-covered slopes of the mixed bay and oak forests on Inverness Ridge. We were usually the only people there. “We’re comrades, marching shoulder to shoulder,” I told Phil.

  Sometimes Lois Mini and Tandy went with us. It was a treasure hunt, looking for those exotic little bits of color, texture, and form that were also delicious to eat: chanterelles, bluets, oyster mushrooms, boletes, Agaricus augustus and more. Of course Phil was fascinated with the red and white Amanita muscaria which, he read, was used by the Eskimos for religious reasons because of its hallucinogenic properties. We were almost the only people gathering wild mushrooms in the area at that time except for a few Italian Americans. A few years later all the counterculture folk were gathering and eating wild mushrooms, and some of them eating Amanita muscaria with no bad or even, disappointingly, hallucinogenic results. Mushroom hunting is a great activity during the wet winters of Point Reyes. The daytime temperature is in the fifties. It’s perfect mushroom country (everything, in fact, molds). The torrential rains of winter instead of being depressing become an asset.

  We joined the Mycological Society and went to meetings in San Francisco. Along Bear Valley Trail we found a geoglossum, a little black, leathery “Earth-tongue.” I was fascinated with the slime molds on the rotten logs, tiny plants that move. Phil put all these fungi in his novels. I became tired of my own mushroom recipes and asked Phil if he could think of any new way to cook the wild mushrooms. He invented several excellent seasoning combinations although he said he really didn’t know how to cook.

  Phil was excited when we went to the Mycological Society banquet and ate a dish made out of edible Amanita caesareas, the tasty edible mushroom that looks similar to and is closely related to the deadly Amanita phalloides. It was scary, but I ate a little anyway. We sat with a young black man who was later to take a vow of silence and walk around the world playing his guitar and writing poetry. That night he was still talking. At one point, out of the blue, he told me he loved me. I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. About twenty years later I ran into him and acknowledged the kind remark that he had made at that Mycological Society dinner. He wasn’t talking still but he laughed and laughed in a wonderful way.

  The Game-Players of Titan was a bit of a letdown after The Man in the High Castle, although imaginative and well crafted. The game was patterned on our bouts of Monopoly. The society Phil described in this novel was obsessed with getting its females pregnant. I think Phil used some material from his Berkeley days.

  Next, Phil told me about his new idea for a novel: “I’m going to write about the plumber’s union and the Berkeley Co-op. I’m going to put them on Mars.” This became Martian Time-Slip.

  As I look back on those days, sometimes I wonder if I am only imagining how happy our life was, but Lynne Hudner, Phil’s cousin and stepsister, remembers, “Phil loved the girls and loved being a part of a large family. His marriage of that period was like a marriage between two adults.” When I interviewed my friend, Inez Storer, for this book, she said, “I saw a couple with a balanced relationship. Phil was domestic, hovering around the kitchen. There were dogs and children around. Phil took a lot of interest in the children. The family was the most interesting and erudite family that I knew.”

  I found June (Kresy) von Schucker in Arizona, still living with the chiropractor she had run away with years ago. We talked for a long time. June recalled, “Back then you two were so happy, getting along real well. I remember everyone laughing all the time. Everything seemed to be just fine.”

  I contacted Jerry Kresy by phone in Oakland in 1983. He had become a recluse and was suffering from a serious heart condition. I felt warm toward him for old times’ sake and wanted to meet him for lunch but he didn’t reciprocate my feelings. He gave his emphatic judgment about the relationship between Phil and me over the phone: “When he was married to you, Phil came out of himself for the first time in his life. He loved you, Anne he loved you…. He came out of himself for a while and gave and gave…. [Phil was] a totally selfish person, [and you] were one of the few persons he cared for…. [He] was a little man, violent, had a little life…. [He] was a selfish computer…. [H]e love
d [you], Anne…. He loved you. [angrily] You and Phil had what everyone wants, and you ruined it.”

  I was blissfully happy. Everything in our lives was running smoothly, nothing dramatic, it was an everyday life. We drove the kids around, had big family meals, and worked in the garden. Phil was interested in everything that was going on, listening intently, asking questions. It seemed to me that our love was expanding, deepening, evolving. We shared everything. We were equal partners in a total relationship. There was no hint of any shadow. We told each other that each of us was to the other like father, mother, brother, sister, and uncle.

  Our love life, which had been perfect, became even better. Phil was an adoring lover, totally at home with physical and emotional intimacy, affectionate, other-directed. Our everyday life was so rich, so full, that sex, even though wonderful, was only a small part of the gestalt (as Phil would say). I remember one night when he seemed for a moment to be a transcendent being.

  Phil continued to be very funny. One day a flock of bluebirds landed in the cherry-plum tree just outside the living-room window. Phil quickly put on the record “The Bluebird of Happiness,” the corniest song ever recorded. He loved to hang around the kitchen while I was cooking dinner and talk. Sometimes he would make desserts with the children, creamy fudge, or lemon or chocolate soufflé, or a chocolate cake. Other times Phil and the three older girls would drive to the Inverness Park store after dinner to buy the makings for root beer floats. He started getting a little pudgy. He told me he’d been fat in high school and had a kind of transient diabetes. I put both of us on a diet. He lost ten pounds in a week. I didn’t lose any weight at all.

  Although we got along beautifully most of the time, currents of conflict did exist. One source of conflict in our marriage was my desire for equal status. I saw Phil going off to write, having a prestigious career, while I was stuck with the housework. Although he always did the breakfast dishes, sometimes mopped the floors, and helped much more than most husbands, he wouldn’t agree that, in principle, housekeeping was partly his job. We had a number of bitter arguments about this. Betty Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique, had just come out and, of course, I’d read it, but I’d already thought of a lot more than she wrote about.