More Alive and Less Lonely

by Jonathan Lethem

  On a personal note, I’m proud to make this introduction. Dick’s is a voice that matters to me, a voice I love. He’s one of my life’s companions. As Bob Dylan sang of Lenny Bruce, he’s gone, but his spirit lingers on and on. In that spirit, let Phil have the final word here. Again, from the Golden Man essay:

  What helps for me—if help comes at all—is to find the mustard seed of the funny at the core of the horrible and futile. I’ve been researching ponderous and solemn theological matters for five years now, for my novel-in-progress, and much of the Wisdom of the World has passed from the printed page and into my brain, there to be processed and secreted out in the form of more words: words in, words out, and a brain in the middle wearily trying to determine the meaning of it all. Anyhow, the other night I started on the article on Indian Philosophy in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy…the time was 4 A.M.; I was exhausted…and there, at the heart of this solemn article, was this: “The Buddhist idealists used various arguments to show that perception does not yield knowledge of external objects distinct from the percipient…The external world supposedly consists of a number of different objects, but they can be known as different only because there are different sorts of experiences ‘of’ them. Yet if the experiences are thus distinguishable, there is no need to hold the superfluous hypothesis of external objects…”

  That night I went to bed laughing. I laughed for an hour. I am still laughing. Push philosophy and theology to their ultimate and what do you wind up with? Nothing. Nothing exists. As I said earlier, there is only one way out: seeing it all as ultimately funny. Kabir, who I quoted, saw dancing and joy and love as ways out, too; and he wrote about the sound of “the anklets on the feet of an insect as it walks.” I would like to hear that sound; perhaps if I could my anger and fear, and my high blood pressure, would go away.

  Thanks to Pamela Jackson, whose 1999 dissertation “The World Philip K. Dick Made,” helped clarify my thinking in writing this introduction.

  —Introduction to The Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick, 2013

  The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike

  If literary history has an undertow in the form of neglected works, then the undertow of the undertow is unpublished writing: How many hundreds of interesting novels live only in attics? Yet how could we ever lay hands on such material, let alone sort it for value?

  During his lifetime, Philip K. Dick’s wrenching and hilarious science fiction novels earned him cult status. After his death in 1982, his work leapt into the pantheon of American literature, bringing with it biographies, letters, dissertations. Now comes The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike, one of a staggering eleven naturalistic novels Dick wrote and shelved from 1955 to 1960, before turning completely to genre writing. Set in Marin County, California, the book is a gently savage minor-key comedy of small-town manners, against a backdrop of middle-class malaise and real estate values. At a time when our culture seems transfixed by yearning projections of ’50’s life—Mad Men and the slick adaptation of Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road—here’s an uneasy tonic brew of the real thing.

  The relations between Dick’s husbands and wives are unbearably vivid and sad; the sense of an old set of manners giving way to the new, a harbinger of the decade to come. Dick captured middle-class conformity just as its neurotic undercurrent sizzled to the surface. The counterculture that rose in reply was one Dick—like Pynchon and Donald Barthelme and others—would require surrealistic means to depict. Yet this book shows that before Dick was the “poor-man’s Pynchon” he was the poor-man’s Richard Yates, though no one could possibly have known it at the time.

  —O, 2009

  To Ubik

  Ubik, short for ubiquity, a kind of medicinal eternity

  Available in pharmacies, an aerosol product,

  Ubik, you yourself play at being little more than a discontinued item.

  Though disguised as a clown or a jape, as ephemera, an eruption

  From the pop-junk stratum,

  you’re an American Book of the Dead.

  You embarrass your readers and get under their skins forever—

  You embarrassed your author!

  It was he who disguised you as a clown,

  Your characters in costumes unbearably larkish,

  Your women all described tits-first, yet—

  Your author found himself condemned to wonder

  Whether this book, above all his others, might hold the key

  To his lifework, to his life, to the universe.

  Your hero’s an everyman—Joe Chip,

  A good egg, stolid and homely as they come.

  Your basic motif’s as sturdy, as hoary! even,

  As Bierce’s “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” or

  O’Brien’s The Third Policeman. Yet unfolded, as it is,

  Within your satiric consumer paranoia,

  Of rival corporate psychic-spies dependent

  On over-the-counter entropy-reversal balm

  You’re positively Pataphysical!

  (In fact, were ratified as such, by the French,

  A nation better at theorizing the surreal

  Than at creating it themselves,

  That best left to Austrians, Swiss, Russians,

  Or American pulp writers—nearly anyone else.)

  Ubik, in our hour of need, you restore our sense

  That the living and the awakened dead

  have more in common than not:

  Both lost in time, and permeable

  To selves not ourselves.

  —Black Clock, 2015

  Life After Wartime

  When I first moved to Berkeley in 1984 I was driven to walk in the footsteps of my recently-departed hero, Philip K. Dick. Of course, as a lifelong New Yorker, I had my Californias a little mixed up. Dick had for the last decade of his life been living five hours south in the other California—in an anonymous apartment complex in the Republican suburban and tract house haven of Orange County, not far from the birthplace site (and now the museum) of his bête noire, Richard M. Nixon. In southern California, in 1984, I could have easily searched out members of the circle of writers and other friends who’d surrounded him in those last years, in lieu of meeting the man I’d originally meant to visit in person when I planned to go to California in the first place, a chance I’d been cheated of by his death.

  In eccentric, paranoid, radical Berkeley, Dick’s natural spiritual home, and the place to which I was drawn for a variety of personal reasons, Dick’s traces were fainter. They were the traces of his childhood and early adulthood, his apprentice years as a writer. These I sought avidly, though they were hardly legible shrines, more the random markers of an only slightly out-of-the-ordinary existence. I lived for five years just a few blocks from the first home Dick owned, in the early 1950s: a tiny, ramshackle house in an unglamorous neighborhood near the waterfront, known as the Berkeley Flats. It was there that Dick wrote his first stories and novels while still employed at the only respectable occupation of his life, unless you count writing: working at a store called University Radio, a busy hive of a place, which sold and repaired radios and record players and early televisions, as well as records. Dick’s employer there was a sort of surrogate father, a beleagured figure of kindly but irascible authority, who became a model for many of the sometimes gruff but always well-meaning small business owners Dick’s readers find scattered throughout his novels.

  Dick’s lifelong love of not just music but of the ephemera of record collecting began in that shop, as did his admiration for repairmen and tinkerers, the sort of guys who worked in the basement of University Radio. Dick himself was just a shopkeeper’s assistant—a shelver of records, he also swept the Shattuck Avenue sidewalk in front of the store, just like Stuart McConchie, the character he introduces in the first lines of Dr. Bloodmoney. The building was still in evidence there on Shattuck, though the business was closed. Two doors away a rival music shop was still in operation, one with long old-fashioned display
windows much like the ones described in Dr. Bloodmoney. It was easy, visiting there, to picture those scenes of Dick’s early life.

  Still in business as well on nearby San Pablo Avenue was the Lucky Dog Petshop. There, Dick confessed in an essay, he sometimes bought horsemeat intended for animal use, to feed himself and his wife, during his starving writer days in the tiny one-bedroom house. Berkeley is of course home to a famous university—where Dick took a few classes and then dropped or was kicked out—and the Bay Area more generally encompasses several institutes of scientific research and weapons development, places like Livermore, where a Doctor Bruno Bluthgeld might be expected to work. Dick distrusted academics and expatriate scientists and weapons developers, along with pretty much all authority figures, and in his writing he consistently plays these types against the sort of common-man protagonist he adores—the Stuart McConchie type of worker, striving to get ahead, or the ingenious artisans, like Andrew Gill with his hand-rolled cigarettes.

  Finally, across the Bay and north of San Francisco, is Marin County, a geologically lush peninsula dotted with small towns, which provides the pastoral post-apocalyptic setting for the latter two-thirds of Dr. Bloodmoney. Dick himself lived in Marin in a kind a rural fantasy for a few years, during which he suffered a violently unhappy marriage to an intellectually remarkable woman, and wrote the greatest sequence of masterpieces of his career in an exceptionally brief time. Dr. Bloodmoney is one of those masterpieces, and his churning ambivalence about Marin County informs the book at every level. No surprise there, for Dick was an artist who transmuted his ambivalent feelings into metaphor and paradox with the obsessive ingenuity of a prisoner devising repeated escapes from a prison whose walls he’ll never see the outside of.

  Many of these fragments of Dick’s Bay Area life contribute to the setting for Dr. Bloodmoney, which is at once one of the most realistic and the most absurd of Dick’s non-realist novels. Like Time Out of Joint and The Man in the High Castle, two novels that precede it, Bloodmoney contains elements of the unpublished realist novels Dick was writing around the same time, a relationship exemplified by Dick’s use of the prosaic details of the Bay Area settings, including the names of streets and buildings. It is typical of Dick that he located his capacity to write about Berkeley, San Francisco and Marin most affectionately in a novel in which he first destroys these places (along with the rest of the world) in nuclear war.

  Dr. Bloodmoney stands apart from all Dick’s other novels in addressing this fear of atomic or nuclear destruction directly, rather than leaving it implicitly or explicitly hanging over the heads of the characters, as it was hanging over the heads of all Americans, all human beings, during the Cold War era in which Dick’s sensibility was formed. (Never mind that we ought to be equally worried now; collective global anxieties have drifted to other metaphors). Nuclear fear both haunts and activates Dick’s imagination, as it did Bob Dylan’s, and Rod Serling’s, and Stanley Kubrick’s, and so many others. It must have taken a leap of courage for Dick to depict the bomb, as he has, unmaking the streets of the city of his youth. These early chapters are delicate, scrupulous, and painful. Yet it must also have been a relief to go ahead and at last have it done, to not have the terror hanging over his head. Despite the threat still represented by Hoppy Harrington’s power-drunk murders and manipulations, and by Dr. Bruno Bluthgeld’s continuing uncanny ability to bring disasters into being by confusing his inner torment with outer reality, the book depicts a post-apocalyptic Marin County world that is relatively sunny. The radiation-spawned freaks are regarded with a gentle curiosity which again conceals an eternally unresolved ambivalence—are the highly-intelligent mutant rats better hunted down as a Darwinian threat to man, or should they be employed as bookkeepers in offices?

  In Marin, Dick portrays a community which is as tattered and fragile as his Martian colonies, yet never as desolate or nihilistic. Perhaps this is because he was in those years in that very same place exploring the possibility of a connection to a natural environment—to dogs and sheep and trees and mushrooms—which, while indifferent to man, might contain some measure of the grace of the music and writing he previously regarded as his only solace and redemption. As for music and writing, those are embodied in the novel in Walt Dangerfield, the lonely disc jockey circling the earth in his satellite, his broken transmissions offering samples of the solace of culture, of wit and irony and savoir faire to the dismembered world below. Dangerfield, whose wife died earlier, leaving him isolated in his satellite, is a flattering and self-pitying portrait of the artist, and he’s also for Dick a characteristic image of a man riven forever from his natural female companion. Dick was born a twin, but his sister died at birth, and he would be forever haunted by the thwarted possibility of completion by a feminine other. In later books this yearning would take on galactic or theological overtones, but as embodied in Dangerfield it remains humbly mortal.

  Of course, if you suspect his ambivalence about this possibility of male-female symbiosis, look no further than the mutant twins Edie and Bill Keller, one, the male, embedded in the other, the female, and bitterly wishing for escape. These twins, while hardly the villains that Hoppy and Bluthgeld represent, are certainly a repository for Dick’s uneasiness about birth, childhood, symbiosis, and much else that is common in nature, including earthworms and owls. I’ll say it again: Dick’s self-contradicting tendency is his genius for paradox, and it is everywhere in Bloodmoney. Take Stuart McConchie, a black man in racist America, who is himself first distinguished by his fear and prejudice of Hoppy Harrington. Yet Dick will turn this irony on its head by justifying Stuart’s suspicion of Hoppy: he’s certainly aware of Hoppy’s potential for corruption. Another instance is Bluthgeld/Bloodmoney himself, who makes the mistake, early in the book, of believing that he in his sickness is responsible for the catastrophe: we share Dick’s horror that Bluthgeld solipsistically takes the explosions personally when everyone else is suffering too. Yet on a symbolic level, Bluthgeld types are the architects of the war economy that terrorizes the world. And anyway, Dick contradicts himself in the later chapters, when he shows us that Bluthgeld somehow does have the ability to create explosions with his mind. Which is true? Either way, on rereading, Bluthgeld’s delusion that he is helping to heal the city when, after the fallout settles, he stands at Berkeley’s waterfront and directs the movements of the straggling swimmers, becomes unbearably poignant instead of merely ridiculous. What’s more, Dick slightly undermines his commitment to his post-apocalyptic premise by hinting that the bombs might not have even fallen, that we might instead be dwelling in some twilight world of collective subjective catastrophe, all manipulated by a warped dreaming brain. In this hint, Dick forecasts Ubik and A Maze of Death, his late masterpieces of collective solipsism—and glances back to his earlier novel of Berkeley’s destruction, Eye in the Sky.

  Dr. Bloodmoney is very much a novel about fear, and like the game of Rocks/Scissors/Paper that the settlement’s children are shown playing, fear has infectious fluency in the lives of the characters: Gill fears McConchie, McConchie fears—and loathes—Bluthgeld, Bluthgeld fears Hoppy, Hoppy fears Bill Keller, who speaks to him in frightening voices. Barnes, the newcomer who has become Bonnie Keller’s latest lover, fears Bill Keller too, and so in a way, does Doctor Stockstill. Anyone who learns of him fears Bill Keller, and yet who does Bill Keller, who can speak with the dead, fear? He fears Bonnie Keller—his momma.

  By the time he wrote his own afterword to Bloodmoney, Philip K. Dick had forgotten his empathy for Bruno Bluthgeld. He declares Bluthgeld inhuman. This is another contradiction, but in this case you should trust the song, not the singer. Dick also claims that Stuart is the novel’s main character, and the character he feels closest to, because of their alliance as sweepers of Shattuck Avenue’s sidewalk. This is touching, but Dick’s wrong again (I suspect he only read the opening chapter before writing his afterword, trusting his faulty memory to reconstruct the plot). The novel’s main character, if i
t has one, isn’t Stuart or Hoppy or Bloodmoney—nor is it the admirable and charismatic Walt Dangerfield or Andrew Gill. It’s Bonnie Keller, whose irritable sexual vitality both frightens and thrills Dick, and whose fitfulness about the agrarian paradise that Marin promises to become probably closely matches that of her creator. Dick was, ultimately, a city boy, an apartment dweller, and despite the dreamy pastoral possibilities glimpsed in Bloodmoney, the prospect of a full recovery from Bloodmoney’s bombs is only gained with the return to San Francisco and Berkeley, to the stridency and chaos and risk of a life among those who wanted to build and invent and create a new culture, one capable of constructing universities to drop out of and deplore, one capable of binding words into books and pressing music onto vinyl discs and perhaps even one capable of designing weapons and advertising. If the majority of Dick’s novels prove he’s not on the side of capitalism, Bloodmoney, charming as it may be, proves he’s not wholly on the side of the mushrooms and earthworms either.

  Leonard Cohen sang: “There is a war between the rich and poor/a war between the odd and the even/there is a war between the ones who say there is a war/and the ones who say there isn’t.” In Dr. Bloodmoney, Dick decided, with typical lack of resolve, to take a side: For once, he’d declare for certain that there was a war. And yet, maybe there wasn’t. And anyway, maybe if there was it would lead to something beautiful. By unleashing his written violence on the streets of his own city and killing the boss he loved at University Music and then puzzling sincerely over the results, by allowing Bonnie Keller to fuck every guy who walked into town and not punishing her as he might have wished to, by letting Walt Dangerfield and Edie and Bill Keller and Stuart McConchie and Andrew Gill all survive their brush with Bluthgeld and Hoppy, Dick was as generous as he was likely ever to be in the 1960s: generous with his world, and with himself. By the time he was as hopeful again, it was a mystical hopefulness, enlivened by the strange and terrifying glimpses of a higher power he’d begun to experience in the early ‘70s. In 1964, he was still able to see the galaxy in a grain of fallout, or in the prospect of a mutated rat playing a noseflute.