Confessions of a Philip K. Dick Biographer

Lawrence Sutin

So why did you go off and write a biography of Philip K. Dick?

It all started in early 1976, when a friend urged me to read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. It was by this guy named Philip K. Dick who'd just gotten a big write-up in Rolling Stone. I wasn't anything like an SF fan, but I had loved the stories of the Weird Tales group - Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard - as a kid, and so I was willing to give this guy Dick a chance even though he was in the SF gutter and my preferences back then were for Penguin Classics and Idries Shah Sufi stories. I read Three Stigmata in the cramped grey kitchen of my then girlfriend's apartment. We were about to break up, and I could hear her soft breathing as she slept and I read til 3 a.m. or so. I drank Three Stigmata down. Gulped it whole. Whoever the hell Philip K. Dick was, he had managed to write a novel in which conventional reality came apart not only for the characters - there were loads of 'existential" novelists who could handle that dreary chore - but also for me sitting there in that kitchen. I could see through the grey walls and the grey walls could see through me.

In 1981, I jumped in my car on a nasty winter Sunday to rush to the local bookstore and get my copy of VALIS, then just out. It had a lousy cover - some orbiting spaceship firing a beam of light at Earth. But then, most of Phil's books had lousy covers - I'd learned that hunting for them in the second-hand shops. VALIS, as befitted its plot, required a long twisting course of a read over weeks to come. My form of spiritual quest had been to ask countless questions and believe no answers. But Horselover Fat dived into beliefs, stretched them toward the heavens to which they aspired, and at last broke his heart believing. Nothing was really real, Fat knew that, but someday he and all the rest of us poor wandering humans would stumble upon the Real if we just kept searching and believing - in anything, however briefly (you never stop asking questions: there's always a new and better theory coming round the bend), so long as it kept our hearts alive.

I found all this immensely cheering, and wished that the novel had included more of those wonderfully weird Exegesis excerpts that read like the Presocratic philosophers but with added knowledge of Jung and computers and dark dark shafts of personal pain. It never occurred to me to think that Philip K. Dick, whoever the hell he was, was anything like crazy. Later I would learn that a good many readers of VALIS hated the Exegesis excerpts and thought Philip K. Dick was obviously crazy for writing a crazy novel like that.

In March 1982, there was a tiny obit filler box, headlined Death Elsewhere, in the Minneapolis paper. How I came to see it I don't know, as I seldom read the paper. But I did that day, and the little filler box told me Philip K. Dick was dead.

In April 1984, I quit my job and flew out on my own time and money to Glen Ellen, California, where Paul Williams (the guy who'd written that piece in Rolling Stone) lived and kept the PKD Estate papers in his garage which looked, to me, like a kids' clubhouse despite all the serious books and file cabinets. Although I had no impressive writing credentials, Paul was patient and helpful, letting me read through letters and Exegesis papers to my heart's content. He did gently mention (just how deluded was this strange guy obsessively rummaging through his garage, anyway?) that it was unlikely that any publisher, except perhaps for an out-of-the-way university press, would be likely to be interested in a biography of Philip K. Dick. I agreed with him; Phil's agent, Russell Galen, had said more or less the same thing when I'd called long distance as an utterly unknown name to ask a few questions. But I kept reading. Stayed up night after night in the Jack London Motel to make the most of the time I had. One evening I took a break, went to the local bar for a beer and a guy on the stool next to me asks what I'm doing in Glen Ellen. I say researching the biography of a writer. "Jack London," he says, nodding and smiling.

So I went home to Minneapolis and wrote up a 37-page proposal based on my beginning researches. The proposal won me an agent, Dorothy Pittman, who - one year and fifteen rejections later - sold the project to Harmony Books. I got next to nothing for an advance. But I was authorized, as it were, to find out more, more, more... everything I could about Philip K. Dick. Friends and relatives would put up with my questions and importunings if I had a contract to do a book.

As it turned out these friends and relatives did more than put up with me - they were gracious souls who were generous with their time. It was important to them that the story of Phil's life be told. I conducted over one hundred interviews, studied each and every scrap of paper in the Dick Estate archives and the U Cal Fullerton Special Collections. and completed the first reading of the Exegesis in its entirety, which took months and made my eyes sting. Then came well over two years of writing and rewriting and, voila, a biography entitled Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick is to appear, I'm told.

So what did you learn, Mr. Bigshot Biographer?

Well, I learned that Phil possessed tremendous passion and courage, driving himself to the limit by probing - in his fiction and in his daily thoughts - questions that most folks shunt aside as "metaphysical" and hence a waste of time. To Phil, the nature of reality and of the human soul were pressing, even painful concerns. I learned that the reality shifts of Phil's novels were mirrored in the reality shifts produced by so-called "objective" biographical research: The "Life" of Philip K. Dick is a tenuous concept indeed, given the multiplicity of lives recounted by Phil himself, as well as those who knew him. Still, the life Phil led is, for me, a unique source of inspiration. How many of us dare to value what we see, hear, feel, and think when it veers away from "official" constructs of reality? I also learned, quite unsurprisingly (it's all there in the novels), that Phil was brilliant, imaginative, funny as hell, as astonishingly ardent lover, and a man racked by a multitude of fears.

Was Philip K. Dick crazy? Was he? Was he?

This was the second most frequent question I was asked during my labors. (The most frequent was "Who is Philip K. Dick?") A good number of the people who asked it (including two psychiatrists of my acquaintance) were smiling in a faintly nasty way, waiting for me to give them the inside poop on just how crazy he was. It was as if they were yearning to hear me say "Yes!" so that they could safely dismiss the strange novels and stories that had somehow, despite themselves, gotten stuck in their heads.

To these people I wanted to say (but never did): "The word 'crazy' could be applied with precisely the same justice to Philip K. Dick as the word 'mediocre' could be applied to yourself."

Was Phil crazy? Some people who knew him think that, at times, he behaved as if he was. Others who knew him deny the label vehemently and even attempt to prove that it just can't be so (though we cannot prove ourselves sane or insane, much less anyone else). Psychiatrists and therapists who dealt with Phil over the course of his life reached no consensus on the issue. Phil himself sometimes feared that he was crazy, but as Anne Dick has shrewdly observed, Phil could be hypochondriacal about his mental state. At other times, he would vehemently defend his own sanity and resent the doubts that showed themselves in others. Then too, he often speculated in the Exegesis that in 2-3-74 he'd been granted (from Who? What?) a release, as if by grace, from the phobias and "psychosis" that had previously plagued him.

My own view is that the question of Phil's being crazy or not is a goddamn waste of time. Phil surely did live a strange and intense life. There were periods during which - due to lingering childhood traumas, amphetamine abuse, situational anguish, and the sheer lingering imperfection of the human condition, to name just a few potential contributing factors - he caused intense pain to himself and others. But Phil was also a dedicated professional who made a living writing books that he believed in, books that will endure. He loved a good many people - friends, wives, lovers - and was loved in return. If you slap a label of "crazy" on all this, what do you get in return? Certainly not a richer understanding of Phil's writings, or of his life, or of your own. The same holds true for the label of "temporal lobe epilepsy," which does not bear the same stigma as "schizophrenia" (though there is no good reason why there should be a difference in stigmatization between these two involuntary illnesses), but is equally futile - and ultimately unverifiable - as an encompassing explanation of Phil's life and work.

Either the books speak to you, or they don't. If they do, you had best pay attention to what they are saying - and put aside the reductive diagnostic labels (which so often change from decade to decade, according to zeitgeist fashions). The same holds true for the life, at least as I wrote it.

Did Phil really see God in 2-3-74? Did he? Did he?

Phil never finally decided on what he saw and heard and felt and dreamed in those decisive months. The Exegesis offers an efflorescence of theories. While the overall quality of the Exegesis varies considerably from section to section (how could this not be so, given that it was written white hot night after night for eight years?), there are often brilliant passages. Some of these - including a lengthy "theophany" of November 1980 in which Phil Dick matches wits and theories with God - are quoted in my biography. (I will, in the near future, edit a Selected Exegesis volume for Underwood/Miller.) Sometimes Phil did believe that he had encountered the Ultimate in 2-3-74. Sometimes he thought he had deceived himself. Or had been deceived by something Other. Suffice it to say, something, deception or revelation or a hologram-like blend thereof, happened. Phil did hold to that much. And that something dominated the remaining years of his life and lent - Phil himself felt - a new and vital impetus to his writing.

Just what attitude did you take toward Phil in your biography?

It was my deepest conviction that, if I managed to take Phil's life and turn it into a dull book, I would deserve prompt consignment to the seventh circle of Hell, reserved for those who betray what is most dear to themselves. I was fascinated - and at times anguished - by what I learned in my researches. I wanted to convey this fascination and anguish to my readers. I was scrupulous to an extreme in my efforts to learn the truth, but I never deceived myself that there was a single True account of Phil's life. I chose what seemed most vital - a heck of a lot, as it happened - and told the story as I understood it. Despite earnest entreaties from a few sources, I never undertook to "protect" Phil by omitting events that cast him in an unfavorable light. To do so would have been to patronize Phil (he doesn't require my protection) and to compromise my own writing.

I found it useful to remember that Phil's books will continue to be read even if all the biographers burn their researches. I also found it salutary that Phil himself, even in his works, never found it necessary to conceal truth from his readers.

What would Philip K. Dick have thought of your biography?

We'll never know. Deep down, it's my conviction that he would have enjoyed it greatly had it been about someone else named Philip K. Dick. See, by way of analogy, chapter fourteen of We Can Build You, in which protagonist Louis Rosen pushes aside Carl Sandburg's eulogistic biography of Lincoln (a hero for Rosen and for Phil, who resembles Rosen in significant ways) to get at the more intensive biographical analysis of the Britannica.

As for reading it as about himself, I'm fairly certain that he would have been pleased by my intense admiration for his life and writings and displeased by the recounting of private matters that were none of my damn business, and by my tendency to balance out - through the use of sources other than Phil himself - his fiercely negative evaluations of certain of the women in his life.

Early on in the writing, I had a dream in which I met Phil and, with trepidation, explained that he was a great artist, that I longed to write of his life, and that I would omit nothing of importance. He listened hard. When I was done, he hugged me. I'm grateful for the dream, from whatever source it sprang.

Peace be with you, Phil.