The Shifting Realities of PK Dick

"The Short, Happy Life of a Science Fiction Writer" (1976)

I would like to speak to my friends, here, to let them know that (1) all the dreadful things they have heard have befallen me have indeed befallen me, and (2) I am fine anyhow. In February I had a heart attack. The paramedics came -- I was alone in the house at the time -- and it was just like a scene in the TV program Emergency. They arrived two minutes after I phoned them, and pretty soon they were monitoring my vital life signs, and then it was to the county hospital to the Intensive Cardiac Care Unit. I hovered between life and death, telling jokes and falling in love with one nurse named Beth, who always wore pink.

But I write this to say that I recovered completely, until I saw the bill for $2,000 anyhow, which brings up the point that it was to the county hospital that I was taken; I didn't have any money, and none of the other Orange County hospitals would accept me. My view here is, Thank God for a hospital that will take you if you're broke, asking no questions, just saving your life and billing you later. But...

When I was sprung eleven days later I had forty cents, no more. Some food at home in the freezer. My total income for that month was nine dollars. March was no better, and by mid-April they were going to shut off the utilities. Every phone call was someone wanting money. My agent, God bless him, loaned me money, and here is where I want to say something that at the time didn't affect my head, but that when I told it later to a dude, he got really funny and said, "That sums up the situation of the artist better than I've ever heard it summed up before." There was a French royalty check on its way by mail from Paris to my agent, and I phoned, desperately, to see if it had arrived yet, since much of it was to go to me. The check arrived, the previous day. My agent could hear the fear in my voice, the shaking; I was three months overdue in my child support payments -- and he said, in an oddly soft voice, "You know, Phil, you are one of the most respected writers in the world." I barely listened; all I knew was that I wouldn't be spending thirty days in Orange County jail for nonsupport, as Jim Croce says in one of his songs.

What I want to stress is not that I am either one of the most respected writers in the world or that my agent thinks so or said so but that here I am, after twenty-five years of professional SF writing, getting notices that they are going to turn off the water and gas and electricity if I don't pay in three days, and I say, What has it all been for? Well, recently I read an article by Barry Malzberg in F&SF [Fantasy and Science Fiction, a prominent SF magazine] in which he says he's leaving SF forever because -- well, read it yourself; it is the greatest bunch of whining I ever heard in my life. I don't propose to whine, although probably what I've said so far seems to be whining. Really, though, I am more asking a question than making a statement, whining or otherwise. What have twenty-five years of work done to make me financially secure? I have a new novel coming out next January [1977] by Doubleday (A Scanner Darkly), which I honestly believe to be the best work I've ever done. I have the collaboration with Roger Zelazny coming out this year, the novel Deus Irae [1976] -- there was that long article on me in Rolling Stone ["The Worlds of Philip K. Dick," November 6, 1975, by Paul Williams], which gave me a lot of publicity, and (and here it comes; get ready) I am just about to make it big. The key words: just about to. It is another case of waiting for Godot; the little boy says, "Mr. Godot isn't coming today, but surely he'll come tomorrow." But I say, If it does come for me, will it matter? Will it make up for twenty-five years of shivering with fear as to whether, when I get up in the morning, the electricity will still be turned on?

One time in early 1972 I came home and the utility company had shut off the electricity, and put a padlock on my circuit-breaker box. I got my tool kit, got out tools, and cut through the padlock and turned the power back on again. Technically, that's a crime, but the utility people were so surprised that they let me get away with it. I paid them the next day, but if you cut that padlock, you go into the slammer. I cite this to show that my fears are not merely neurotic. And the house that I was in then -- it was repossessed by the finance company that held the mortgage. So these are real and valid fears. After I moved down here to Southern California I had to start out from the bottom all over again; no car, no furniture, no house. And one day down here I got up and the electricity had been turned off. In early 1973 down here I was in bed with pneumonia, with no phone, no money to go to a doctor, to buy medication -- I remember that very well, because while I was lying there propped up in bed (so I could breathe), Mr. Death walked into my bedroom. Really. I saw him as clear as I see you now, my friends. He wore a sharp, modern, polyester suit and carried a briefcase, which he opened to reveal some simple puzzles, the sort you give grammar school children. I failed to pass, and Mr. Death said, "Then you can come with me." And I saw (I'm not kidding you) a vision of a long winding road up a hillside, with many trees, to a sort of lovely large safe-looking old building, which was a sanitarium of some kind. "I'm taking you there," he said. "These tests prove that your brain is totally burned out, so now you can rest. You can rest up there at the top of the hill forever." And I was flooded with a sense of total joy and relief. However, at that moment my chick came into the bedroom, on impulse, to see how I was. And I realized who I'd been talking to. After that I began to mend.

You will say, now, that this piece I am writing rambles, and it is supposed to, having no topic but the head of the author writing it, which is well known to be a rambling head that produces rambling writing -- with even a bit of chaos thrown in. What is my point? My point is that (1) twenty-five years of devoted writing haven't in any way given me financial security; (2) the fact that I am sure my new novel, A Scanner Darkly, is my best novel doesn't stop the fear; (3) I am not quitting. It's going to take more than all this to make me give up science fiction writing, for one simple reason. I love to write it. I am working on a thing now, called, To Scare the Dead, and already I've done two hundred thousand words of notes. It won't produce any financial security. The big break, just around the corner, will never come. One of these days I'll be back in the hospital, sick as hell, but I'll no doubt get out... and receive another $2,000 bill I have to pay off or go to jail. There are, in human beings, irrational drives. "Why don't you get a real job?" people say to me, mostly in fun, but not always in fun, and sometimes I say it to myself. They [sic; the big break] will always be on its way but not quite here yet; my agent will always help me (I should mention that he is Scott Meredith, and I've been with him about twenty-four years, and in 1973 when my son Christopher was born, Scott sent him the most beautiful silver rattle you ever saw) -- I guess there are eternal verities in the universe, all right, and the one that appeals to me is that man will keep on striving no matter how many times he is pushed down, which was what Faulkner said so thrillingly in his Nobel Prize speech. Man will be planning and scheming amid the ruins; the sound of his voice will still be heard.

So that is what's happened to me recently: three times in the hospital in a couple of years (plus the pneumonia), months of really being poor... one day I had to box up and mail off my collection of Unknown and Unknown Worlds, which was complete and which I had held on to through thick and thin, just to pay the landlord, BUT:

In this business of being an SF writer I have met either face-to-face, or talked with on the phone, or gotten letters from, some of the best goddamn human beings in the world. Schoolkids, for instance. Last week a black chick in Oakland. Today a guy from West Germany. Yesterday I wrote to a Swedish guy who came to this country mainly to meet me (sorry if that sounds egoish, but the point is, that was back in 1971, and we're still writing back and forth: Goran Bengtson; you may have seen letters of his printed in fanzines). I'm looking now in the stack, very huge and sloppy, beside my typewriter. A chick who did her master's thesis on me.

Oh yes. I find another letter, too. The return address:

OFFICE OF THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY.

So you can see what I mean, as my heart skips a beat and thuds itself with the old, old fear.

Dear Carl [editor of Scintillation, in which this piece appeared],

You should have received by now the five-page piece I wrote for you, yesterday. Well, I decided to send the carbon off to Germany, to Uwe Anton, who has asked me for something and to whom I'd already sent some fragments of Deus Irae, the new novel coming out by me and Roger Zelazny (Anton is putting together a PKD issue, you see). Today I added three more pages to go with the five, to be printed in Germany only, and then I thought, Shit. Why not send you the carbons on these pages and see if you want to add them, perhaps explaining that Phil had originally intended them for the German printing only... although I sort of say that in the pages themselves. It's up to you. In any case, here are three additional pages to the untitled piece I mailed you on May first, and you are welcome to print them or not. Okay? But on second thought it seemed sort of chicken-shit for me to say stuff abroad and not here in the U.S. You'll see what I mean when you read the enclosed.

This ends the part written to be published in the United States, but for my German friends I would like to add a little more. [The subsequent language did appear in the U.S. publication.]

During 1974 we who opposed the Nixon tyranny here exhausted ourselves in forcing that tyranny out of office, only to discover, the next year, that underneath it lay an even greater abuse of power and threat to freedom: a secret police apparatus that had worked since the forties, completely invisible in terms of its lawless acts against Americans. In fact, something much like the police state that I depicted in Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said has come to light, and really to the astonishment of us all. I recall that back in the fifties, about 1953, two FBI agents came to visit me and asked me to spy on my wife, who at that time was attending the University of California at Berkeley and knew people -- students -- who were politically active. From then on, the secret political police apparatus grew.

And yet it was a thrilling year in 1974 when we began to dislodge what we thought was the tyranny... but then found the greater one, the intelligence community one, which really we cannot dislodge. The American people have lost the will to combat this tyranny; it has lasted too long, and we are tired. I am tired. As the disclosures came about the CIA and FBI, I could not believe them. What could I do? What could anyone do? It was not a question of one particular evil president, but all the presidents starting with Franklin Roosevelt: even our heroic ones, such as Kennedy. Freedom won only a limited victory in August 1974 when Nixon was forced out of office; the political police apparatus remains and will remain, and we cannot vote on this issue. I myself have given up, as our newspapers say most Americans have, with a sense that we are helpless. True, under the Freedom of Information Act, I was able to get the CIA to admit that they had indeed opened my mail to the Soviet Union and photographed it, and also I obtained my file from the FBI, or anyhow portions of it; I would have to go to court to get the rest. At that point, perhaps only a coincidence, I suffered my heart attack, as if my body had given up. As if my body was saying, "No more. It is futile." Now the thirty-day time limit is past; I can't go to court. And perhaps it's just as well. Perhaps my days of being a fighter for freedom are over, due to age, due to worry, but due mostly to the discovery -- and existence -- of the enormity of the secret political police apparatus that has so long existed in this country, and the dreadful things they have done (e.g., to Dr. King, for instance, who was a hero to me).

Personally, back in March 1974, I had the overwhelming conviction that God Himself had decided to depose Nixon. Few of my friends believe in God, much less that He would or was actually intervening. I mentioned it to Marcel Thaon of Robert Laffont publishers, France, and he wrote in an article accompanying their printing of my novel Eye in the Sky:

On sait combien l'affaire Watergate a frappe qui a ete en butte par ailleurs a de nombreuses agressions voilees de I'administration Nixon. Comme le disait Klein a I'epoque, Dick propose que le decrochage systematique de I'ordre etabli -- par la desobtissance civique par exemple -- pent seul faire tehee au pouvoir. II pense par ailleurs que c'est Dieu qui un jour en a eu assez de Nixon et s'en est debarrasse -- melangeant une fois de plus politique et religion.

[One knows how much the Watergate affair affected those who were exposed, in addition, to the other hidden aggressions of the Nixon administration. As Klein said at the time, Dick proposes that the blowing up of the established order -- by civil disobedience, for example -- could only check their power. He thinks, in addition, that God had had enough of Nixon and got rid of him -- blending politics and religion one more time.]

I write this to my German friends and not to my American friends because my American friends, like myself, have become too weary to fight or care anymore. We fought a wonderful battle to dislodge Nixon, but our energy was gone, then. Perhaps, as I truly believe, that energy came directly from God, Who inspired and animated us, Who hurled us into battle. But what now? Months of depression have fallen over us here, we who were the activists. On TV, Senator Frank Church (God bless him) said that the U.S. intelligence organizations had become as bad as the KGB. Ach Weh!

So my novel in progress [ultimately crystallized as Valis (1981)] has nothing to do with politics; it has to do with the mystery religions of the first century B.C. and what they had discovered about restoring the faculties that man possessed before the Fall (Calvin spoke of man once having "supernatural faculties which were stripped away," and this fascinates me as the basis for a novel). But I am no longer politically active, and this will show up in my writing. This is sad, but I grow old; I grow old. I have not made my peace with the "straight" society, but at the same time I am too weak, too worn out by illness and fear, to do anything but try to make financial ends meet; I mean, to pay the water bill and gas bill and electricity bill. Perhaps it will not be the political secret police who will get me in the end but the district attorney for failure to pay back child support, an entirely unpolitical crime!

And yet... God may return, and inspire us again, to fight when the time is right. In my heart I wait for that day. Will it be long in coming? "Wenn kommst du mein Heil... Ich komme dein Teil." (When comes my salvation... I come as your portion.) And meanwhile I say to myself, "Hab' Mut!" (Have courage!)

[The following letter, to the editor of the fanzine Scintillation, in which this essay was first published, was attached as an epilogue.]

Just within the last two days I've read two separate articles, one in Rolling Stone, the other the editorial in the May 17, 1976, New Yorker, which so horribly bear out my fears expressed in the last three pages I sent you that I want to call them to your attention. Hopefully, you can call them to your readers' attention. The RS piece is titled: "The Hughes-Nixon-Lansky Connection: The Secret Alliances of the CIA from WWII to Watergate," by Howard Kohn. Look for it. Anyhow, the article suggests, incredibly, that Nixon may have been set up by the CIA, since "Deep Throat," who provided all the leaked secrets to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein at The Washington Post, turns out to be Robert Bennett, a CIA front man... which Woodward and Bernstein never realized. There seem to have been crucial segments of the puzzle that Woodward and Bernstein never got on to.

Carl, I think we were sold another crock; the exposure of the cover-up was itself a cover-up! What the RS piece points to is truly dreadful, far beyond what Woodward and Bernstein found. Would you believe that "Watergate," as they found it, was a CIA red herring? Incredible.