The Search for Philip K. Dick (10 page)

I believe Phil’s extremely dark novel
We Can Build You
reflected his mood at the time of this abortion. He was far more disturbed than he let on. This novel was the last of his attempts to write a literary novel. He added a spaceport and a real-estate project on Mars for its publication in 1972 to make it into science fiction.

Bob Bundy was based on our neighbor Pete Stevens. Maury Frauenzimmer was based on Phil’s friend Maury Guy (who had begun to study the New Age belief system Subud and was soon to change his name to Iskandar Guy). Phil punned on Maury’s name change in the novel when Maury Frauenzimmer decides to change his name by consulting the encyclopedia volume indexed as “Rock to Subud.” Sam K. Barrows was based on William Wolfson, Phil’s attorney. Phil was Louis Rosen, Leo Rosen’s son. Leo was based on Maury Handelsman. Louis/Phil says in
We Can Build You
that he is exactly like Lincoln. They are as alike as two peas in a pod. He diagnoses Lincoln as a manic-depressive or schizophrenic, and one of the deepest, most complicated humans in human history.

We Can Build You
is notable for the first appearance of Phil’s beckoning unfair one, the first “dark-haired girl,” Pris Frauenzimmer. Pris was a real rotter and schizophrenic to boot. I’m afraid Pris was at least partly based on me. (She was tiling my bathroom, anyway). He wrote:

I told Phil how delighted I was with the Stanton simulacrum and how thrilled I was at the moment in the novel when the Lincoln simulacrum comes to life: “Why, Phil, he’s more real than most real people.”

Phil was at his most funny and his most serious when he wrote about Dr. Horstowsky giving Louis Rosen hubrizene, “a pill that hums the opening of Beethoven’s Sixteenth Quartet. A person can almost hum this drug.” Louis now wants a pill of Beethoven’s Ninth Chorale. “If God exists, the angels say ‘yes.’” The doctor offers an alternative, a lobotomy.

As Phil worked in the study in the mornings, I did housework. My natural habit was to be in either a comatose or a meditative state at this time of day. Phil would emerge from his study frequently to read newly written paragraphs to me or talk about something in the news or something he’d just read. He was delightful but it wore me out. I needed some time to myself in the morning. I said, “Maybe you should get a place to work away from the house.” Phil thought that this was a fine idea. We found a beat-up old wooden building, ten by thirty feet, down the road a quarter mile away. Phil named it “the Hovel” and it really was. The ground showed through the floorboards. We rented the Hovel from Sheriff Bill Christensen, who lived around the corner. The first of each month Phil took his $30 rent money to Bill’s house and stopped to chat with him. They were both great talkers and enjoyed each other’s company. Bill was an interesting man who had fought in the Spanish Civil War and had a silver plate in his head to prove it. He was the only law enforcement person in the large area of West Marin, and some of his stories were amazing.

Phil hauled his Magnavox, some of his novels, his typewriter, and his desk over to the Hovel. He bought a stock of chocolate bars to give to the children when they came by on their way home from school. The minute he had finished moving, I was sorry that he was gone. But although I urged him to, he wouldn’t move back.

He said, “My mother taught me to take the consequences of my actions. I never chew my cud twice. Never look back. Something might be gaining on you.”

B
Y
1961,
MY
small inheritance and the money from the sale of Phil’s house were gone. I worried, “How are we going to manage?” Phil was concerned about money too and didn’t want to write any more literary novels. The five he had written in the past two years had been rejected by every publisher in New York. One day his New York agent sent them, plus six Berkeley literary novels, in a large box. When Phil opened it, I was impressed. “Some day these will all be published,” I told him as he put the manuscripts in the top of a closet in his study.

He thought for several weeks and came up with several different ideas for his career. Fascinated with the Eichmann trial, which was going on then in Jerusalem, he thought he might write a novel about another Nazi, Martin Bormann, who was thought to be hiding in South America. He made a brief outline and then abandoned the idea. Then he thought of writing a historical novel about the Middle Ages, a period when, he said, the port of Marseilles had been closed for a hundred years. He did some research but soon abandoned this idea, too.

About this time I started reading some of Carl Jung’s writings. Dorothy Hudner had been deeply influenced by Jung’s works, and when she heard about my interest she sent us one of the beautiful Bollingen editions. Both Phil and I read it and soon we acquired and read the whole set. I thought of going to Zurich to study with Jung. I dreamed about cooking dinner for him. In the dream, I opened the refrigerator but it was filled with rotten meat. I guess it’s just as well I didn’t go. We listened when BBC interviewed Jung arriving in England for a visit. They asked, “Dr. Jung, do you believe in God?” We were awed by his answer: “I do not believe. I know.”

Phil studied Jung’s volumes
Alchemy
and
Transformation Symbols in the Mass
. He was interested in Jung’s idea that a New World religion would soon arise, a religion based upon a quaternity instead of a trinity. The fourth force will be, Jung said, the force now regarded as demonic. This statement had a big influence on Phil.

I read Jung’s introductions to the
I Ching, The Book of the Golden Flower
, and
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
and bought these three books and some others: a book about the Hindu vedas,
The Bhagavadgita
, and some volumes about Zen Buddhism.

Phil became interested in the
I Ching
and Linus Pauling’s theory of synchronicity, which Jung describes in his introduction to
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
. Phil began to use the
I Ching
as an oracle several times a day. Once he asked it if we should sell our old Ford station wagon. The oracle replied, “The wagon is full of devils,” so we sold it and bought that Peugeot, which also turned out to be full of devils. Phil was quite chagrined when one day the oracle told him, “The learning of the self-taught is cumbersome.” He dreamed about an elderly Chinese sage with many outlines. He believed that this dream represented the many sages who, over the centuries, had written the
I Ching
. He thought the
I Ching
was alive, like the Bible, and that the
I Ching
had sent this dream to him.

I disagreed. I saw the
I Ching
as a sort of super “Dear Abby” with an Asian flavor. Finally, one day I asked the
I Ching
, “Is there a better oracle than you?” It replied something like this, “You yourself are a better oracle for your time, because I am very old and was written a long, long time ago. You are part of your own times, and with sufficient intuition, you can make out the seeds of the future better than I.” So I closed the
I Ching
and never consulted it again. Phil used it to the end of his life, although at times he became angry with its advice. Eventually he began using yarrow sticks instead of coins.

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:

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.