Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick

by Lawrence Sutin

  University Radio in Berkeley greets you. Yesterday when we came to work we found that our salesman had moved his potted palm to the other side of the store, so that he could see the television screen better. Customers are requested not to bother him with inquiries about buying things. If you wish to purchase a Magnavox, kindly lay the money on the counter with a note describing the set you want. If you are lucky, he may notice your request between television programs.

  The years with Hollis provided Phil with a mother lode of writer's capital. Characters based on Hollis can be found in several of Phil's mainstream and SF novels, particularly in the fifties and sixties (see Chronological Survey). The lonely, cranky figure of the "repairman" also recurs as a symbol of integrity and courage in the face of impossible odds. In the Exegesis, Phil observed that much of his work was "palpably autobiographical-the little business firm, & the fatherly owner or world leader." The boss-employee relationships between Jim Fergesson and Stuart Hadley (Voices from the Street, c. 1952-53), Leo Bulero and Barney Mayerson (The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, 1965), and Glen Runciter and Joe Chip (Ubik, 1969) are the most notable portraits of the trust and tension that existed between Hollis and Phil.

  In Voices from the Street, an apprenticeship mainstream novel, the Hollis figure is Jim Fergesson, owner of "Modern TV Sales and Ser- vice"-"a small, muscular man in a blue serge suit, middle-aged, face red with wrinkles and wisdom." As Voices was written during and just after Phil's employment with Hollis, vivid memories lingered. How strong a figure was Hollis in Phil's psyche? Fergesson's opening of Modern TV for the day's business is patterned after the creation in Genesis:

  Here no life existed. [...] He bent down and clicked on the main power; the big neon sign sputtered on, and after a moment the window lights warmed to a faint glow. He fixed the door wide open, caught up some of the sweet outdoor air, and, holding it in his lungs, moved about the dark, damp store [... ] The dead things came reluctantly back to life. [... ] He threw the Philco display into whirring excitement and carried it to the back of the store. He illuminated the luxurious Zenith poster. He brought light, being, awareness to the void. Darkness fled; and after the first moment of impatient frenzy he subsided and rested, and took his seventh day-a cup of black coffee.

  The ultimate tribute to Hollis is Leo Bulero in Palmer Eldritch, the greedy, needling, cigar-chomping, heart-on-sleeve owner of Perky Pat Layouts, Inc., who becomes Earth's only hope of resisting the psychic invasion (conducted through masterful marketing of the drug "Chew-Z": "GOD PROMISES ETERNAL LIFE. WE CAN DELIVER IT.") by Palmer Eldritch, the magisterial embodiment of pure evil. Bulero, whose "Can-D" drug product is being pushed off the market by Eldritch, writes the little memo (Hollis frequently wrote memos to employees) that serves as a frontispiece to the novel-a pure, stuttering affirmation of the human spirit:

  I mean, after all; you have to consider we're only made out of dust. That's admittedly not much to go on and we shouldn't forget that. But even considering, I mean it's a sort of bad beginning, we're not doing too bad. So I personally have faith that even in this lousy situation we're faced with we can make it. You get me?

  In a 1977 interview, Phil refuted the notion of an "anti-hero" slant in works such as Palmer Eldritch:

  I think very often I'm accused of writing my protagonist as an anti-hero. [...] And what I'm doing is just taking the people that I've worked with, that I've had as friends, had as fellow workers and I get a tremendous sense of satisfaction. [... ]

  And I always think, well, the ultimate surrealism [...] is to take somebody that you knew, whose life time ambition was to sell the largest television set that the store carried, and put him in a future utopia or dystopia, and pit him against this dystopia, or place him in a position of power. Like I like to take employers that I've had who've owned small stores and make them supreme rulers of entire-

  Uwe Anton [interviewer]: Galaxies?

  Phil: Galaxies, yes. That to me is very enjoyable, because I still see this person as sitting at his desk, looking at a lot of invoices for purchases that have never been made, saving who authorized this?

  Phil loved to tell stories of the philosophic realizations he achieved while working in the Hollis shops. Once, while sweeping the floor at age fifteen, Phil got into a debate with a repairman as to whether radio speakers allowed one to hear music (the repairman's view) or a "simulation" of music (Phil's position). Another time, a repairman pointed out to Phil, while they were at a traffic light, that there was no way to prove that they were both seeing the same color, even though they both called it red. Underlying the lessons was the sense of dignity provided by doing one's work well. There was the time they tried to repair a Capard, a complex marvel that automatically stacked records. After much labor it was fixed, but the bumpy ride to the customer's house undid the effort:

  And we said there is no bill, we're not charging you. [...] And I was very proud [.] that we had all admitted to our own defeat, in the face of the situation. I ... ] I was only about fifteen years old-this made a vast impression on me-that this Capard epitomized an inscrutable ultra sophisticated universe which was in the habit of doing unexpected things. [... ] But the great merit of the human being is that the human being is isomorphic with his malfunctioning universe. I mean, he too is somewhat malfunctioning. [. ] He goes on trying and this, of course, is what Faulkner said in his marvelous Nobel Prize speech, that Man will not merely endure, he will prevail.

  The support and warmth of the Hollis operations, and the steady salary they provided, assisted Phil in an undertaking that he came to regard as one of the most difficult-and ultimately triumphantchallenges of his life: moving out of his mother's house in the fall of 1947:

  Parents have a vested interest in keeping their kids little and dumb and in chains, like all oppressed groups. I remember when I told my mother I was moving out. "I'll call the police," she said. "I'll see you in jail first." Naturally I asked why she felt that way. "Because if you move out and leave me," she said, "you'll wind up a homosexual." I had to go and ask why, again. "Because you're weak," she said. "Weak, weak, WEAK."

  Dorothy heard out these accusations again and again, but never acknowledged them to be true:

  Philip was 19 when he moved out of the house. Here again, his account will differ from mine. It was friendly, in fact it was at my suggestion, and he came back almost every evening for a long talk-test. I remember the yellow cat we had at the time; he couldn't understand why Philip would come in the front door, stay a couple of hours, and then leave.

  But Phil was always adamant: The struggle to break free from his mother's rule was a paradigmatic act of courage that allowed him to enter the dreaded koinos kosmos on his own terms. He recognized the erotic overtones of the struggle. To third wife Anne he confided: "When I was a teenager, I had 'the impossible dream.' I dreamt I slept with my mother." His interpretation of the dream: "I won my Oedipal situation." But true victory would not come until he left Dorothy's home. In a 1981 journal entry, Phil theorized that his pattern of impermanent relationships with women was rooted in that event: "I am drawn to women who resemble my mother (proud, intelligent, cruel, judgmental, suspicious, scathing, etc.) in order to re-enact the primordial situation in which I fight my way loose at the end and divide off into autonomy." Later in the same journal entry Phil flip-flopped: "An even more important point could be made: I am searching-not for my mother, the cruel i.e. bad mother-but the good mother, the tender, kind, sympathetic and loving mother I never had but always wanted."

  Whether or not Dorothy ever threatened to call the police when Phil moved out, it is fair to assume that she was concerned over Phil's choice of accommodations. His new Berkeley address of 2208 McKinley Street was a warehouse, the upper floor of which had been converted into a rooming house. The rooms were occupied by some of the most notable young gay artists on the Berkeley scene. The leader of the group was Robert Duncan (then twenty-nine), who had just returned from a visit to Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth's
Hospital at Washington, D.C. Others in the shifting house population included poet Jack Spicer, in his early twenties, and Phil's high school friend Gerald Ackerman (a future art historian), who had become lovers with the charismatic Duncan.

  Ackerman recalls that Robert Duncan (himself a U Cal Berkeley dropout) and Phil would have long talks: "Being with Duncan was like being in a literature class." Phil also got on well with Spicer, who would come to Phil's room to listen to classical music. Writes Ackerman: "I remember once as they were listening to the Kipnis recording of excerpts from Boris Goudonoff, I waited for the music to end, and knocked on the door, thinking I was not interrupting their music, but I had wrecked, as they loudly lamented, their mood: Boris had just died." The fondness for marijuana by certain of the house residents was not shared, at the time, by Ackerman or Phil. "[T]hc giggling and talk Phil and I heard through the door made us think the 'ecstasy' produced by the drug was pretty silly."

  Phil's prize possession was a disc recorder, a floor model from University Radio that could produce shellac records. There were "game" sessions in Phil's room, in which Duncan and various visitors would gather to produce strange recordings. Ackerman recalls:

  George Haimsohn started out with a slow cut-time "Edna St. Vincent Millay, Millay, Millay," very nancy on the last name. Duncan came in with a deep "W. Somerset Maugham, W. Somerset Maugham, W. W. W. W. W. Somerset Maugham," as in a round. Then I came in with a high, piping "E. E. Cummings. E. E. E. E. E. Cummings E. E." And while this was all going along someone else started a loud Salute to the Flag. [... ~ Then we all broke down laughing.

  Phil's friendships with Duncan and others encouraged him along mainstream literary paths. His interest in SF fell off correspondingly. As for career, Hollis would provide the framework. As Phil recalled in his 1968 "Self Portrait":

  I would advance up the ladder, step by step, and eventually I would manage a record store and then at last I would own one. I forgot about sf, in fact I no longer even read it. Like the radio serial, "Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy!" sf fell into place as an interest of childhood. But I still liked to write, so I wrote little literary bits which I hoped to sell to the New Yorker (I never did). Meanwhile I gorged myself on modern classics of literature: Proust and Pound, Kafka and Dos Passos, Pascal-but now we're getting into the older literature, and my list could go on forever. Let us say simply that I gained a working knowledge of literature from The Anabasis to Ulysses. I was not educated on sf but on well-recognized serious writing by authors all over the world.

  In a 1977 interview, Phil allowed that he had continued to read SF, but that the Berkeley culture of the late forties "required you to have a really thorough grounding in the classics." An SF fandom was emerging, but only "freaks" read SF-who were as ignorant of the classics as the literati were of Robert Heinlein. "I chose the company of those who were reading the great literature because I liked them better as people." The earliest fans were "trolls," and "being stuck with them would have been like something in the first part of Dante's Comedy-up to your ass in shit."

  While Phil enjoyed the literary talk at McKinley Street, other aspects of life there-passes made at him by one of his housemates-disturbed him. Ackerman doesn't recall Phil having any affairs-homo or heteroduring his stay. "Phil may have begun to think that since he had similar tastes to the rest of us, he might have similar feelings. I would have told him not to worry."

  Meanwhile, a whole new social scene was opening up to Phil due to a new influx of hirings at the Hollis stores.

  Vincent Lusby, who joined on in 1947 to manage Art Music, imparted to Phil his enthusiasm for Gregorian chants and Dixieland jazz. In addition, Lusby was serious about writing (producing several wellcrafted, unpublished novels of a street-real bent); by the early fifties, he and Phil were exchanging manuscripts and criticism. Lusby also served as the first of many driving teachers for Phil; he recalls Phil as "erratic" behind the wheel. Another newcomer was Alan Rich (now a classical music critic), whose wit and musical erudition provided Phil with a worthy foil for debate. Chuck Bennett, a stylish Irishman from an upper-middle-class family, intrigued Phil as a Lost Generation type (there is something of Bennett and of Phil himself-in Stuart Hadley in Voices from the Street). Jose Flores, a salesclerk with whom Phil developed a particularly close friendship, was gay, a dancer whose skills were failing as he neared forty. When Jose later committed suicide after a failed romance, Phil was desolate.

  Among these new faces, Phil was still the youngest of the Hollis crew. At nineteen, Phil had developed a reasonably assured sales manner. His cartoons and graffiti were comic highlights on the walls of the employee bathroom. His typing speed earned him the bill-preparation chores, which he handled flawlessly. But Phil was subject to streaky moods, often starting the day by walking straight to the back of the store without turning his head-"as if on a beam," Lusby recalls. Phil later credited his sales work with providing useful discipline in curbing his temper. He preferred evening shifts, on the theory that passersby would be drawn to the lit-up TVs. In the process, he became a devoted on-duty viewer of Kukla, Fran and Ollie.

  Phil would sometimes go to hear Dixieland and jazz in local bars like the Steppenwolf, the Blind Lemon, and Hambone Kelly's. The Lu Wafters and Turk Murphy bands were the big draws. But by and large he was a hard guy to get out of the house. Vince Lusby recalls him as "agoraphobic." Whatever the label, it was more than an aversion to night life. The Art Music staff habitually lunched at the nearby True Blue Cafeteria. Phil would always choose a balcony table very close to the men's room-both to stay out of sight while he ate and to assure a quick trip if required.

  By early 1948, Phil was looking to move out of McKinley Street. He enjoyed Lusby's footloose company and confided in him his worries over being gay. (The irony: Phil had been initially fearful that Lusby was gay and that he would have to do some "ass-kissing" to get in good with the "old auntie" manager.) Lusby first pointed out differences in literary taste between Phil and his gay friends. When that failed, Lusby took more drastic measures:

  At that time we had some rather peculiar ideas about homosexuality. Philip, who was a virgin, thought he might be one. I thought it was a curable condition. A good piece of ass and it would be all over. So I availed him of a good piece of ass.

  And so came about, at age nineteen, Phil's first marriage-which lasted for six months in 1948, and of which he seldom spoke for the rest of his life.

  She was named Jeanette Marlin, a blond-haired regular customer with whom Lusby was acquainted. Edgar Dick, who met her after the wedding, recalls Jeanette as a "short fat little girl." Lusby's physical description is less flattering, and he adds that Jeanette was not particularly artistic or musical. She was no "girl," however, being, in her late twenties, several years Phil's senior. Jeanette was outspoken, with a frank approach to sex. They were introduced one day as she was browsing at University Radio. Phil led her to a listening booth and brought in his favorite classical recordings. Their talk became ever more friendly. There was a seldom-used storage room down in the basement, past the repair shop. Lusby notes that this room-in which Phil first made love with Jeanette-forms an important setting (as shelter, during the nuclear blasts, for the employees of Modern TV Sales & Service) in Dr. Bloodmoney.

  As Phil was below the age of majority under California law, Dorothy had to sign the certificate to make their spring 1948 marriage legal. She had her doubts but gave her consent in hopes that marriage would make Phil feel better about himself. At the least, from her point of view, it separated him from the McKinley Street scene. The new couple found a tiny apartment (located behind a drugstore) on Addison Way. Gerald Ackerman recalls the setting:

  All was dark, messy, disorderly; the usual painting of the new apartment had not taken place, nor did there seem to be any furniture of charm. I have the feeling that although they had been there some time, the place was full of unpacked boxes. [... ] And perhaps I was mad that he got married, as if that was a betrayal of our com
munal life. [...] At any rate, the visit was one of discomfort: the apartment was uncomfortable, the circumstances uncomfortable; the wife seemed to fit into no conception of Phil's or my life. I can only see her as either an unfriendly or frightened presence, standing behind a stuffed chair with her hands resting on the back, as if it were a shield. [... ] I can see now that they were just as bewildered to be there as I was to see them there.

  One could speculate that a brief account of a marriage in Gather Yourselves Together, written shortly after the divorce from Jeanette, expresses some of Phil's own feelings on their home life: "Her treasure was sold dearly; he found himself married, all at once, living in a one-room apartment, watching her string bras and underpants across the bathroom, smelling the starch and iron in the kitchen, and the eternal mechanical presence of pin curls next to him on the pillow. The marriage lasted only a few months."

  Phil told his fifth wife, Tessa, that when he and Jeanette had been married less than two months, she told Phil that she had the right to see other men. At this, he moved her things outside the apartment door, changed the locks, and refused to allow her to return. "Looking back," Tessa writes, "Phil realized his mother had been right, that they were too young to get married. At the time, though, it cut him to the quick."

  But the crowning blow to their marital bliss was Phil's love for his Magnavox. Jeanette complained that Phil kept her up at night by playing records over and over, records that Jeanette said she hated-the same records with which Phil had wooed her that first day in the listening room. Once she threatened to have her brother come over and break the damn things.

  The judge at their autumn 1948 court hearing said he had never heard more silly grounds for divorce than threatened record smashing, but granted it anyway. The one thing Phil liked about Jeanette, he would later say, was that she left him alone while he worked on storiesprimarily mainstream-that did not sell. The marriage might not have been a roaring success, but it did wonders for Phil's confidence. Three decades later, in the mid-seventies, Phil called Lusby long distance to thank him again for saving him from homosexuality.