The Search for Philip K. Dick

by Dick, Anne R.

  Phil wrote and phoned my oldest daughter, Hatte, who was living in Austin, Texas, with her Israeli husband. Both of them were taking advanced degrees at the University of Texas. They spoke at great length. It was the first time they had communicated since Phil had left Point Reyes. Phil told Hatte he wanted to bring Tessa and come to Texas to visit her, but Hatte didn’t feel comfortable about this and said that she didn’t have any extra room in her house. Phil sent Hatte a German-language edition of one of his novels and inscribed it to her in German.

  Phil described the beginning of some problems in his new marriage in a hilarious letter to Tessa:

  Well, here I am in sunny Cleveland, having won first prize in the Fullerton Stink Bug look-alike contest (first prize, which I won, is a week in Cleveland; second prize is two weeks in Cleveland)…. Wow, but it’s nice here. Tall buildings, big potholes, fat cops. Tawdry old bags in place of women…. It hurts when the one you love goes away. But you wouldn’t understand, cruel-hearted Tess with the lovely black hair and firm, high breasts—you, Tess, who has (have?) hurt, even wounded, men such as I again and again. Specifically, YOU HAVE WOUNDED MY HEART BY YOUR CRUELTY AND INDIFFERENCE (sp?) AND YOUR HAUGHTY MANNER, FOR INSTANCE YOUR READING ALL DAY AND NOT DOING THE DISHES. More about this later.

  That last moment when we were together, before parting, at the 30-minute zone of the parking lot at Fullerton International, you asked me candidly why I had accepted the prize in the Fullerton Stink Bug look-alike contest (a week in Cleveland), leaving you behind and going away forever (a week in Cleveland is forever). I didn’t have the fortitude to lay it on you then, with you standing there close enough to hit me, why I was taking advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get away from you for what has proved to be forever … squirming out of the grip that your love has fastened hammerlock-wise around my neck…. I was limping as I ran for the Fullerton plane as it took off (you may have noticed, too, that I caught it). This pronounced limping is because, Tess, in point of fact I am as I was when you first encountered me still: a sick and wounded animal injured by the hate and violence of modern American life in this culture which we have all around us (except in Cleveland). I recall, back at that party Ginger had, that you noticed the sorrow and grief in my eye (actually, both eyes). And, to assuage that grief and sorrow, you cleverly crept up on my lap and I cleverly put my arms around you and so on…. Anyhow, I am still that limping beast of the field that Christ wrote about in his memoirs that neither spins nor reaps or however it goes. Meaning, your warm firm breasts and arms enfolding me may have banished my suffering AT THE TIME (say, for six months), but only really actually on the surface…. My heart, while living with you day by day, Tessa, was like that pot of warm glue bubbling and boiling and suffering with pain on the stove of your furnace-hot intensity…. You have again and again so wounded my suffering bubbling heart that, Tess … you have lost me…. Right now I know how really mad you are, Tess. But you can’t get me because all Cleveland loves me and you’ll never find me here … even with all the influence and power and money you’ve achieved writing those funky one-liners for the septic tank people. Cleveland will surround me like a protecting shroud, veiling my comings and goings…. I intend to take out citizenship, here, Tess, permanent Cleveland citizenship. I feel safe. I shake the fist of wrath and defiance at you in the face here from sunny Cleveland, where neither you nor your rat Seymour (may he have a coronary running around his wheel) can get me.

  Now, about your not doing the dishes. Or emptying the garbage. Or vacuuming. Or shopping. Or fixing dinner. Or anything. Your just sitting drinking coffee in that incredible, prolonged, insipid way you have, day after day, month after month, just glancing up now and then when I dusted you off. While I earned the money, cleaned up after you, dusted things, made your coffee, and so on….

  I’m starting a new life, Tess, free of the fear of being suspended for an eternal terror-stricken instant over the void that is the garbage disposal in the middle of the night when I haven’t done anything to no man. Especially not to you…. Actually, in my own way I did a lot for you, Tess. I bought you a $6.50 electric can opener and a $4.00 cute little matching skirt and blouse. And a patty melt several times at Fiddler’s Three (total cost to me: $1.68) where you said as usual that the service was lousy and the food worse, especially compared to Alfie’s. And after a few kicks and blows from you I ceased conversing with the pretty waitresses, a big sacrifice on my part for your sake. That was honor and loyalty and a great deal more you wouldn’t understand. My heart was bound to yours out of cords of silent love and tenderness and devotion and fright. But that’s over now. Starting with the fright and working backwards to silent love. What I have, instead, is loud hate. Can you hear it? My hate shouting at you across the miles, dinning the inner ear of your being? It’s my hate talking to your laziness, Tess. But you’re probably too indolent to listen to my hate, just as you were too indolent to listen, when it existed, to my love. That’s the trouble with silent love anyhow; nobody hears it….

  You are a good little lady, Tessa, and filled with love, but love does not in itself keep a creature alive…. Anyhow, I am not really in Cleveland, as you may have guessed; I am seated in the kitchen, our own kitchen, at our own mutual typing machine, simulating being in Cleveland, writing to you what I can’t verbally say (I know “verbally” is technically wrong, but “orally” always suggests a thermometer or worse, so the hell with it)….

  When Phil went over to Tessa’s father and stepmother’s house, he wouldn’t sit down. He wouldn’t come to family holiday gatherings, but had a plate of food brought to him at his apartment. When Nita Busby, Tessa’s stepmother, whom he also knew from Willis McNelly’s class, said something to him that he didn’t like, he told her, “If you say anything like that again, I’ll put you in my next novel as a plain mud road.” Phil seemed to her to be morose and unhappy, impatient and irritable.

  Tim Powers said, “In the fall of 1975, Phil gave a big house party. It seemed that he and Tess were no longer a going thing. Phil was earnestly pursuing another lady throughout the evening, trying to monopolize her attention.” During 1974 and 1975, Phil told friends that Tessa had left him three times, taking the checkbook, giving a retainer to a divorce lawyer, and renting an apartment. Each time, she came back. There were great debates at Cal State about the relationship between Phil and Tess and who, if anyone, was the villain.

  Despite domestic problems, Phil’s career and reputation continued to climb. In late 1975, Phil sent me a copy of Science Fiction Studies, an academic journal that had devoted one whole issue to his work. I was impressed and told him so over the phone the next time he called. He said to me, “You’ll notice that they say all my best novels were written in the early sixties when I was married to you.”

  Early in 1976, Phil and Tessa split up for the final time. In February 1976, Phil and Tim Powers were sitting at a table in Phil’s house in Fullerton, drinking wine that Tim had brought. While they were sitting together, Tessa and her brother came to move out Tessa’s share of the furniture. Phil said, “Well, Tim,” as he took a drink of wine, “never oversee what the ex-wives take. It’s much better to let them have what they want and then later inventory what you’ve got left.”

  At that point, Tessa’s brother came over to them and said, “Say, would you mind picking your glasses up off that table?” and took the table.

  Tim told me,

  Phil was in good spirits right then, but the next evening he tried to commit suicide. Tim visited Phil in the hospital the next afternoon. He told me, “It was raining like a barrage…. He was in the intensive care unit, sitting up in a bed with monitoring screens over him…. They had shaved his arm where he had cut his wrist … and he was plugged in eight million ways to this machine. There was an old lady in the bed next to him, an incredibly old lady, and she had one of those “beep, beep, beeps” going. As we were sitting there talking, it went “beeeep, beeeep.” And a bunch of doctors ran over and pulle
d the curtain and after a while turned the machine off. Phil said, “Oh, this is a terrible place, Powers.”

  Phil was amiable, though, and told me what had happened. He had become intensely depressed over the loss of [his son] Christopher and took forty-nine Lenoxin tablets [digitalis]. Then he took eight Libriums to calm his nerves and laid down in bed to wait for the cardiac arrest. After an hour, it hadn’t happened, so he went to the bathroom and cut his left wrist. He got an arterial spurt that sent blood to the ceiling, but after a while the blood coagulated and the cut stopped bleeding…. He went into the garage and started the Fiat in an attempt to kill himself by carbon monoxide poisoning … the car kept stalling. So he went inside and went to bed.

  In the morning he felt terrible—the digitalis had destroyed all the potassium in his blood, and he was weak. When the mail arrived in the middle of the morning, though, he managed to walk outside and bring it in. He also put down a pan of water for the cats. He called his analyst then, having … changed his mind about wanting to die. The analyst told him, “That was a silly thing to do. Call the paramedics.” He did and they arrived in time; another hour would have given the digitalis enough time to poison him off…. He had even tied a bandage on his wrist…. As absurd as this attempt was, Phil meant to die. Phil describes all this pretty accurately in VALIS.

  I called the hospital for him Friday. I was relayed to the psychiatric ward; they gave me a run-around, asking me if I was a member of the family … and, finally, they had him call me. He sounded worried and even scared. He said they were keeping him indefinitely and they were right to do it, because he was crazy. The last time I’d seen him he told me that Tess had, when called by a medic about it, claimed to be too busy to come. “I hope she rots in hell for twelve eons,” he told me.

  Tessa did come to the psychiatric ward where Phil had been transferred, finally, and brought a few clothes. Tim brought a Bible and several tins of Dean Swift snuff. Phil was discharged in mid-February and went home to find that Tess had returned. Tim said, “He’s apparently letting her stay. I can’t understand it, but I guess I don’t have to. I thought Phil was crazy to let Tessa stay. But she didn’t stay for long.”

  At that time, Phil began calling me more often, maybe every other week. He didn’t say anything about having tried to commit suicide. He told me that he had been in the hospital with a severe, life-threatening potassium deficiency. He said he was taking the Bach flower remedies. Later I found out there really was such a thing. I could hear in the tone of his voice that he was depressed. I must have found the right words to say to him, because each time he phoned, by the time we’d hang up he was sounding better. Phil turned to Tim for comfort, too, at this time, and he was also able to cheer Phil up.

  Good memories of the past returned to me when, late in 1975, my oldest daughter, Hatte, called me to tell me that Confessions of a Crap Artist had been published. She had just read it. “Mother, you mustn’t read it, you’ll be too upset,” she said. I laughed and told her, “Hatte, I already read it when he wrote it—when Phil and I were first married.” I was glad that one of Phil’s literary novels was finally being published, although I didn’t reread it until after Phil’s death. It’s not my favorite novel of Phil’s. I don’t like the whole tone of it. It’s taken me a long time, blinded by my romantic feelings for Phil, to see how outrageous it was, what an ambivalent and negative depiction of me. But I called Phil up to congratulate him, and feeling sentimental, I told him, “Confessions of a Crap Artist reminds me of the old days, when we were so happy. I want to tell you, Phil, I don’t regret anything.” He deftly moved the conversation to another topic.

  When I reread Confessions after Phil’s death I was struck by a letter of Phil’s quoted in the introduction to the Entwhistle Press edition. Phil went on and on about what a fine fellow Jack Isidore (that rat fink) was, and never even mentioned Fay Hume. And in the dedication, he wrote, “To Tessa, the dark-haired girl who cared about me when it mattered the most, that is, all the time….”

  Ten

  DORIS AND JOAN

  It had been Fat’s delusion for years that he could help people. His psychiatrist once told him that to get well he would have to do two things: get off dope (which he hadn’t done) and to stop trying to help people (he still tried to help people).

  —Philip K. Dick, VALIS

  PHIL DIDN’T REMAIN without female companionship for long. Soon he was calling me and telling me that he was taking care of an Episcopal nun who had cancer. I didn’t believe him, although I didn’t say so, but, indeed, Doris Sauter had been a lay sister in an Episcopal order and had been diagnosed with cancer in 1975. At the time Phil called me, her cancer was in remission from chemotherapy.

  In Los Angeles, I had obtained a lead to Doris Sauter in Yuba City, where she was the assistant to an Episcopal priest. We talked at great length on the phone, and later she came to Point Reyes to spend a weekend with me. We had a picnic on top of Mt. Vision and she recorded three tapes about her life with Phil. Doris, a stocky young woman with short dark hair, had lost her mother as a teenager. She went through some hard times growing up—times, she said, that toughened and matured her rather than leaving psychological scars. She wrote poetry and science fiction and was interested in psychology, philosophy, and astronomy. At the time she met Phil, she was planning to study for the Episcopal priesthood and eventually did become an ordained minister in a different Protestant denomination.

  Phil had asked Doris to marry him while he and Tessa were still living together but Doris turned him down. She told me, “When Tessa and Phil split the last time, it was pretty much because of indifference on both their parts, and, anyway, they had lost the lease on their house. Phil moved into an apartment in Santa Ana, where there really wasn’t any room for Tessa and Christopher. I moved in with him for three weeks. For Phil, it was a romance, but for me, it was a convenient situation. I loved Phil, but I wasn’t in love with him. Phil and I lived together for health reasons. Phil was worried about his heart and I had a history of seizures.”

  Doris was from a conventional background and felt uncomfortable when her aunt called once from New York at 8 a.m. and Phil sleepily answered the phone. Her aunt asked her, “What’s that man doing there in your apartment?”

  Doris said, “I came from a family situation where you didn’t live with people unless you were married to them. I felt a lack of privacy, too. Phil never let me alone; he wanted to talk to me about theological topics or his latest novel, or the latest news event … all the time. I needed time to be alone and I wasn’t getting any.” Doris told Phil that she was going to move next door. Phil was upset, but she showed him her front door, which was only five feet from his front door. “Look, Phil, I’m almost as close as I was. We’ll have dinner together every night and visit back and forth during the day.” Doris and Phil lived in side-by-side apartments for several years until the apartment went condo and Doris had to move because she couldn’t come up with a down payment.

  Doris felt her relationship was with the person, not the writer, and was careful to keep it on a personal level. However, she did read VALIS. “I was Sherry in VALIS, and the theological conversation about that fish was exactly the way it happened. We had endless theological arguments. The conversation about whether Jesus communicated in a secret code was not complete. Phil found a section in the New Testament which seemed to support his position, but I brought in some irrefutable arguments to support my position. Phil left those out when he incorporated our discussion in VALIS.”

  Right after this argument with Doris, Phil joined a group that maintained the New Testament was written in code. He became involved with one religious cult after another, like a kid who’s onto something, is keen on it, then finds a flaw and goes off on something else. Finally, Phil’s religious goings-on began to sound like a bunch of hooey to Doris, but she listened and didn’t argue with him.

  She told me, “Phil would sometimes put on a scatterbrain act. But it was just an act. I
f he was talking business, he would just cut out all that crap and get right down to work. Sometimes he would go to bed at 4 a.m. and Russ Galen, his agent, would call him at 9 a.m. New York time, which would be 6 a.m. Santa Ana time, but Phil would be right there. He was pretty astute when he wanted to be.”

  During this period, Phil led a quiet life except for his Thursday nights out when he had a few drinks with the boys at Tim Powers’s apartment. Doris believed he was off all drugs and didn’t take any amphetamines at all. “He did a little grass, a little coke; that was all.” Tessa would visit once a week, bringing Christopher.

  Phil was a night owl. He went to bed at 4 a.m. and got up at 12 or 1. He would eat a little breakfast and then go to the post office and the bank. He was just waking up when Doris would arrive at his apartment at 5 p.m. with takeout dinner from the Chinese restaurant around the corner. Phil’s apartment had no table to eat on, so he and Doris ate in the living room with their plates on their laps. After dinner, Phil and Doris would watch a movie, or Phil would work: “He worked steadily on his Exegesis or on research every evening. When he worked on a novel, he would write eighteen hours a day for a three-week period and then be exhausted.”