An Introduction to Philip K. Dick

Joel Margot

"When I was in France I had the interesting experience of being famous. I am the best-liked sf writer there (I tell you that for what it's worth)... It is fantastic to see all my books in expensive beautiful editions instead of little paperbacks with what Spinrad calls 'peeled eyeball' covers. Owners of bookstores came to shake my hand."

- Philip K. Dick

Everything began in Chicago on the 16th of December, 1928. Philip Kindred and Jane Charlotte Dick cried for the first time in their lives. Jane died after 41 days. Phil came to blame this on the carelessness of their mother, Dorothy Grant Kindred, who didn't take her to the hospital at the proper time, apparently a money matter. Phil had an unconscious culpability complex and we can understand perhaps a bit more why he felt anger toward his parents. Moreover, Jane would be found in many phildickian writings later on. Phil's father, Joseph Edgar Dick, had a nice job indeed: cutting the throats of pigs as an employee of the government. His mother censored official texts of the government's spokesmen. What feelings went through the young Dick about his parents? Censorship is one of the many important features in Philip K. Dick's writings: distinguishing truth from falsehood, the real from the imagined.

1930 was the year of his departure for Berkeley, California. In 1932 his parents divorced and three years later he and his mother moved to Washington, DC. 1938: back to Berkeley. In 1940, 1942 and 1943 they moved around in Berkeley. Phil let his friends call him Jim Dick. He entered Hillside School in northern Berkeley. There his originality made him very popular. His relationship with his mother was very distant, almost cold. Phil wrote some short poems and other brief texts. Already at 13 years old he was a reader of Astounding and Unknown, published at this time by the well-known John W. Campbell. In these periodicals he read Asimov and Heinlein, for instance, without forgetting Van Vogt, whose influence on Dick is certain (take a look at Solar Lottery). At 14 he wrote his first novel (now lost) called Return to Lilliput - influenced by Swift.

From 1944 through 1946 he underwent intensive psychiatric treatment for agoraphobia and some other psychological troubles. He had entered Berkeley High School in 1944. At 18 he left his mother's apartment, where he had been living since his parents' divorce. He moved to an apartment shared with artists and homosexual poets; doing so was probably to show his mother he could manage himself alone, since homosexuality didn't seem to attract him. He soon moved out to a small attic apartment, also in Berkeley. At this time he suffered tachycardia. He quickly became dependent on the medicine he was prescribed.

In 1947 he received a diploma for finishing high school, and worked in a TV sales and repair shop which also sold records. Music would remain his great passion; it stayed omnipresent throughout his works. In September 1949, after having moved to a real apartment (not just a small attic), he registered at the University of California in Berkeley and studied German and philosophy. In May 1948 Dick married Jeanette Marlin, divorcing six months later; he never saw her again. He met his second wife, Kleo Apostolides, a student at Berkeley, in 1949 and married her in June 1950. Kleo was three years younger than Phil; she was 19. The house they moved into was full of mice, which explained the large number of cats that could be found at 1126 Francisco Street in Berkeley.

Concerning Dick's reading, he admired various authors as different as H.P. Lovecraft and Fredric Brown, and still read a lot of Van Vogt. At 24 he began his literary career without an agent; that is, he was trying to put out his short stories with as much success as possible via US mail. His health was growing better.

At the end of 1951 he gave his resignation to the record shop. In June 1952 a certain fellow named Scott Meredith in New York agreed to be his literary agent. That year was the time of discoveries like Herbert, Sheckley, Farmer, Aldiss, Silverberg, Vonnegut and many others. In 1954, as Dick finished the manuscript of his first published novel, Solar Lottery, he and his wife met Poul and Karen Anderson; they stayed good friends. Let's state that money is a rare thing at the Dicks' of the fifties. An interesting story follows: during this period the Dicks were contacted by FBI agents who wanted them to go and study in Mexico and be their informants there. Because of ethics, they refused.

Between 1951 and 1958, our author wrote and sold about eighty short stories. In 1954 Dick met Van Vogt at the SF WorldCon in San Francisco. Between 1950 and 1960 he wrote eleven novels of pure fiction, but didn't sell any of them. Having sold in 1955 Solar Lottery to Ace Books, a firm that had been printing paperbacks for two years, he managed to write four novels in 1954 and 1955. I underlined Van Vogt's influence, but there also is Vonnegut's with his Player Piano (1952).

Nearing their thirties, Dick and his wife Kleo left Berkeley for Point Reyes in Marin County, California. Marin County appears in many mainstream phildickian novels. There he met Anne Williams Rubinstein, born 1927 in St. Louis. Five months after their move to Point Reyes in 1958, Phil and Kleo divorced; he married Anne almost immediately thereafter. Anne already had three children. Beginning in 1959 Dick let his beard grow. On February 25th, 1960 Dick became father of a girl named Laura Archer (Archer is also a very common name in his work). It was reported that the first thing he said after the birth was more or less, "And this is for Jane!". When in the fifties Dick wrote his dozen mainstream novels, it was probably to place himself in this mainstream literary genre, very "en vogue" in this period. None were sold and they were returned to him in 1963. Only in 1975 did a small press publish Confessions of a Crap Artist.

With the beginning of the sixties he suffered worse and worse breakdowns; the cause of this was the amphetamines that allowed him to hold the speed of sixty pages per day; this was the speed he needed not to starve. He received the Hugo Award in 1963 for The Man in the High Castle. Starting in late 1962 the third marriage began to fail, and it really collapsed in 1964. The same year he met Nancy Hackett, 21, fragile and just recovering from a nervous breakdown. They moved to San Raphael and were married in 1966. A girl, Isa (short for Isolde), was given to them in 1967, before they moved to Santa Venetia.

Dick's need for amphetamines didn't decline, nor did his frequent breakdowns. After a 1970 stay at the hospital because of a case of pancreatitis that almost cost Dick his life, Nancy left him, taking Isa with her. That was the really dark period in Dick's life; he was in deep despair. Dick filled his empty house in Santa Venetia with junkies. Nevertheless, he fell in love with a young dark-haired girl named Kathy Demuelle.

On the 17th of November, 1971 somebody broke into Dick's house. He was convinced at first it was the CIA. This troubling event marked the beginning of paranoia for Dick, as nothing of value had been taken away, just perishable food. It appears to have been more a military operation than a simple burglary. His safe had been opened with explosives.

Around 1972, Dick met K. W. Jeter and Tim Powers at Cal-State in Fullerton; they attended a lecture by a writing professor named John Schwarz. The next year he got many threatening phone calls. He sheltered in Canada without Kathy. There he gave his famous lecture, The Android and the Human, in Vancouver, first at the University of British Columbia and a day or two later as his Guest of Honor speech at the second annual Vancouver Science Fiction Convention; and met another dark-haired girl named Jamis. Back in California he stayed in Fullerton where he met first Linda and then Tessa Busby, whom he married on April 18, 1973. A son, Christopher, was born of this union the same year. In 1975 Dick was awarded the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.

Around this time Dick had one of his mystical experiences that account for the almost divine nature of his last novels. The rest of his life was primarily concerned with trying to figure out what had happened, as is the rest of this book. His last lecture took place in Metz, France in 1977. He died in March 1982 on a hospital bed, of heart failure, leaving an unfinished novel, The Owl in Daylight, and 8000 pages of handwritten speculations about VALIS. He was 53.