The Penultimate Truth

by Philip K. Dick

  I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946. We were both war heroes, and both of us had just been elected to Congress. We went out one night on a double date and it turned out to be a fair evening for me. I seduced a girl who would have been bored by a diamond as big as the Ritz.

  In every respect but one An American Dream is a more accomplished novel than The Penultimate Truth, but that one respect was crucial to its (failed) ambition. An American Dream does not succeed as an evocation of the zeitgeist of the dawn of the assassination era—for the sufficient novelistic reason that Mailer has murders to discuss much closer to his own heart. However, both novels share the same courtier's fascination with the intrigues presumed to be the reality behind the myth of Camelot/Talbot Yancy, and both find something glamorous in the ruthless exercise of power by well-placed criminals.

  It must be admitted, however, that the hugger-mugger surrounding the Machiavellian schemes of the smarmily villainous Brose and the Byronic David Lantano is the central weakness of The Penultimate Truth. Brose's plot for entrapping Runcible is so unnecessarily preposterous, and involves such needless multiplication of hypotheses, and is at last so irrelevant to the outcome of the story, that one might wonder at Dick's willingness to permit such an obvious blemish to remain, except that one knows, from his own admissions and from other internal evidences, that Dick's method of work was to plunge on ahead and never look behind. If he'd been Orpheus, Eurydice would have had nothing to worry about backwards-looking-wise (as Dick would say).

  I'd like to intrude a long parenthesis here concerning the faults of the book, which are, pretty obviously, the result of Dick's chosen manner of writing, a manner comparable to downhill racing. The results can be spectacular, though often the spectacle provided is one of disaster. But rather than appearing to guess at Dick's technique of composition on the basis of internal evidence, let me quote his account of the matter, written to an editor at Harcourt, Brace early in 1960:

  I wonder why you say I write so much; that is, produce so much. My anxiety is that I produce too little—that if I bore down I could produce a lot more. Most of the work, for me, lies in the pre-typing stage, in the note-taking. I generally spend five to six months doing no typing, but simply outlining. At best I can now bring forth no more than two novels a year. . . . Under certain conditions, however, I can write very fast, even without notes. The Lippincott book was written in two weeks, proof read and then retyped in two more. . . . My work tends to force a pace on me; I'll do forty to sixty pages a day for days on end, until I'm exhausted, and then not uncover the machine for several months . . . I wait until I am sure of what I want to put down, and then away I go.

  After winning a Hugo for The Man in the High Castle in 1963, Dick was actually able to increase his rate of production to a little better than three novels a year, a rate he maintained almost to the end of the sixties.

  The downhill-racing style of novel-writing is not uncommon in science fiction or other genres, and when it is brought off well, there is a fizziness and exhilaration to such books that is not to be found in more carefully wrought novels, however favorably they might otherwise be compared. Often, however, speed-written novels run out of steam sporadically. Forty to sixty pages a day means a week's continuous work for a novel the length of The Penultimate Truth, and it is difficult to scintillate virtually non-stop for an entire week. Often it is all that bleary eyes and weary fingers can do to type coherent sentences. Take as a for-instance Chapter 14, four labored pages of dialogue in which two minor characters rehash a situation the reader is already well aware of, arrive at no conclusions, and can't refrain from dropping hints right and left as to how low Phil Dick is feeling at that late hour, after his seventeenth cup of coffee: "A Yance-man, female, named Arlene Davidson, who has a demesne in New Jersey; the Agency's top draftsman. Died of a massive coronary during the past weekend. Late Saturday night. . . . She may have been given a deadline for something major; overworked. But that's conjecture . . ."And then, a page later: "Still shuffling his documents, trying to come up with something of use, trying and unhappily failing, the abstract-carrier Footeman said, "I wish you good luck. Maybe next time. . . ." And he wondered if, for Runcible, there would be a further report. This inadequate— admittedly so—one today might well be the last . . ."

  The wonder is how often Dick was able to produce work of real interest and wit in these marathons of typewriting. For readers who read at a pace proportioned to his speed of writing (as most sf fans learn to do, or else cease being fans), the dull patches disappear into a haze of white powder as they careen down the slopes of the narrative. It is the ideas they are after, and Dick always provides more than a sufficiency of these.

  Indeed, for slower readers like myself, who are so old-fashioned in their tastes as to demand some kind of consistency and continuity in the plot of a book, this profusion of ideas often is a bigger stumbling block to the enjoyment of Dick's lesser novels than the chapters written on automatic pilot. Take the way Dick picks up, and throws away, and again picks up, the idea of time travel in The Penultimate Truth. First he posits a "time scoop" that can propel objects back into the past, a device Brose intends to use to plant false archaeological "proofs" of an extraterrestrial invasion of fifteenth-century North America. Brose's plot comes to nothing, though several chapters are devoted to its preparation. Then, fudging the explanation like mad, Dick asks us to believe (1) that one of the yance-men, David Lantano, is actually a Cherokee Indian who has managed to ride the (now two-way) scoop back into the twenty-first century; (2) that in a manner never fully explained this Lantano's physical age oscillates between young manhood and old age, when he becomes the real Talbot Yancy; and (3) that he has taken a few starring roles in the intervening five centuries.

  None of which has much to do with what the book set off to be about, nor does it impinge very much on the resolution of the plot. Yet, it is clear from scattered footprints, broken twigs, and other spoor of the downhill-racing novelist what Dick would have liked this stew of impossibilities to accomplish. Lantano first appears as the yance-man most likely to succeed—and to succeed the hero, Joseph Adams, as The Agency's most accomplished speechwriter. Adams envies the way Lantano, in one of the speeches he has written for the Yancy simulacrum, is able to "openly discuss the fact that those tankers down there are systematically deprived of what they're entitled to." Here is how Dick, using the mask of Lantano (who is using the mask of Yancy), describes the characteristic deprivation of the tankers' (i.e., working class) lives:

  Your lives are incomplete, in the sense that Rousseau had meant when he talked of man having been born in one condition, born brought into the light free, and everywhere was now in chains. Only here, in this day and age . . . they had been born onto the surface of a world and now that surface with its air and sunlight and hills, its oceans, it streams, its colors and textures, its very smells, had been swiped from them and they were left with tin-can submarine—figuratively——dwelling boxes in which they were squeezed, under a false light, to breathe repurified stale air, to listen to wired obligatory music and sit daylong at workbenches making leadies for a purpose which—but even Lantano could not go on here.

  But Lantano's place in the scheme of the novel isn't limited to his rhetorical abilities. He is meant to be the redeemer of a humanity not simply downtrodden but buried, a Christ figure whom Nicholas St. James, his evangelist, at once recognizes as such, murmuring when they first meet, "He was oppressed and despised," a misquotation that Lantano himself corrects to "despised and rejected of men." However, about the only way that the Cherokee Lantano resembles Christ is in having been appointed the task of harrowing hell—that is, of being the agent by which the subterranean tankers will win release and inherit the earth. Yet, the means Lantano adopts resemble those of Danton much more than those of Christ, for Lantano proves to be the sneakiest and most ruthless of the book's sundry schemers, and in this he represents Dick's own ambivalent—and unfonnulated—feelings on the questio
n of how human liberation is to be achieved.

  The same ambivalence is mirrored—but more coherently—in the opposition between the two chief protagonists of the novel. Nicholas St. James is an ideal proletarian, the "president" of his ant tank, resourceful, courageous, and a dupe. Joseph Adams has only one thing going for him, apart from a certain ineffectual "liberal" goodwill— the fact that he is not a dupe. Dick admires Nicholas St. James, but he identifies with Joseph Adams (who is, accordingly, the only character in the book with an intermittently plausible inner life).

  With regard to plot construction, therefore, Lantano is an unnecessary complication, a deus ex machina whose powers prove almost as illusory as those of the figurehead of Yancy with which he is identified. At the end of the novel, as a result of Lantano's coup, humanity is to be released from its bondage, but this has been accomplished without any recourse to Lantano's special characteristics as a time-traveling, Christ-like Cherokee warrior.

  What, then, was the purpose of such "ideas"? Were they no more than a kind of conceptual padding, a way to pump up the premise of the original stories to novel length? After the fact, perhaps yes, but in the pell-mell of writing I think Dick's throwaway ideas represent a kind of self-pitched curve ball that he honestly hopes to knock over the stadium wall. There are similarly transcendental elements in the plot of another novel from 1964 (and one of his best), The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

  If Dick had stopped to think (but that's something a downhill racer can't do), he might have realized that there was an essential dramatic disparity between the two stories he was trying to weld together. The Yancy part of the plot generated a story about dirty tricks in high places, a genre for which Dick possesses little flair (compare Le Carr­ and his better imitators), while that element of the story that all readers remember, after the lapse of however many years, is the notion of the human race imprisoned in underground factories because they've been tricked into believing that a nuclear war has destroyed the world. It's an extraordinarily resonant idea. One thinks of the dwellers in Plato's cave who know nothing of the reality but the shadows cast on the wall; of the similar destiny of Wells's Morlocks; of the prisoners in Beethoven's Fidelio; and of ourselves, living in the shadows of a nuclear threat that is only bearable by pretending that it does not exist. To have recognized that our situation is a kind of madness ("What, me worry?" sang the Titanic's passengers) has not helped us toward a solution, for our situation with respect to the bomb is not much different in 1983 than it was in 1964. And for that reason The Penultimate Truth, for all its flaws, remains a book that can speak to the terror that is the bedrock of our social order.

  Sources Quoted Other Than The Penultimate Truth

  "The Defenders," from the collection The Turning Wheel and Other Stories by Philip K. Dick (London: Coronet, 1977); published in U.S. as The Book of Philip K. Dick (New York: Daw, 1973).

  A Letter from Philip K. Dick, published by the Philip K. Dick Society and copyright 1983 by his estate.

  The Fate of the Earth by Johanthan Schell (New York: Knopf, 1982).

  "The Life of Kennedy's Death" by Christopher Lasch in the October 1983 issue of Harper's magazine.

  An American Dream by Norman Mailer (New York: Dial, 1965).

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Philip K. Dick (1928—1982) was born in Chicago, Illinois, and spent most of his life in California. The author of 35 novels and six short story collections, Dick received the 1962 Hugo Award for his novel, The Man in the High Castle. In 1974 he was awarded the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. His novel, Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep? (1968) was produced in May, 1982, as the movie Bladerunner.

  He was married five times and had three children. In his memory, there has been established an annual Philip K. Dick award for best original paperback novel, since much of his finest work initially appeared in that medium.

  Philip K. Dick died on March 2,1982, in Santa Ana, California, of heart failure following a stroke.

  "The fact that what Dick is entertaining us about is reality and madness, time and death, sin and salvation—this has escaped most critics. Nobody notices that we have our own homegrown Borges, and have had him for thirty years."

  —Ursula K. Le Guin,

  The New Republic