Tomorrow's History, Yesterday's Future:

Philip K. Dick's Version of the 1950s

Andrew Butler

There is a moment in Philip K. Dick's novel Time Out of Joint when something appears to be badly wrong:

A lovely shiny red Tucker sedan sailed majestically by her. Both she and Sammy gazed after it.

"I do envy that woman," she murmured. The Tucker was as radical a car as the VW, and at the same time wonderfully styled. But of course it was too large to be practical. Still...

Maybe next year, she thought. When it's time to trade in this car.

[TOJ 1:12. Ellipsis original.]

Philip K. Dick began publishing in the 1950s. I wish to talk about two of his SF novels and one non-SF novel which date from that period, which are all set in the 1950s. It should be said that Dick's vision of the 1950s is different than the version we are familiar with from films such as Robert Zemickis' Back to the Future, where the hero travels back to the time of his parent's courtship and has a hand in inventing rock-and-roll, or George Lucas' American Graffiti. It lacks the style and mock 1950s chic of David Lynch's postmodern soap opera Twin Peaks, or his earlier Blue Velvet. It is not as kitsch as Bob Balaban's film of small town cannibalism, Parents. Dick's is a grimier, and therefore apparently more realistic version of the 1950s.

Dick's novel Time Out of Joint opens with a portrait of 1950s America. The Kinsey Report on sexuality has recently been published and there is talk of "The recession... Five Million unemployed as of this February of this year" [TOJ 1:6]. Eisenhower is President, and the Cold War is just beginning; there are worries about "H-bombs and Russia and rising prices" [TOJ 1:11]. Everything seems authentic, everything seems true; this could be a historical novel or, as we know it was written in the late 1950s, a contemporary document.

And yet at the end of the first chapter of the novel, when Margo is driving with her son Sammy she sees a Tucker motorcar. The Tucker motor car never went into production; only a few models were ever made. This means that it is extremely unlikely that the above incident would take place. The novel is set in a reality where the Tucker did become an automobile available to buy, rather than a concept muscled out by General Motors. None of this would be news to the novel's original readers, for whom it was recent history, but the 1990s audience is not likely to know this.

Later in the novel, when Margo knows about the inauthenticity of her surroundings, we get her thoughts again:

Her intuition, then, grew. A sense of the finiteness of the world around her. The streets and houses and shops and cars and people. Sixteen hundred people standing in the center of a stage. Surrounded by props, by furniture to sit in, kitchens to cook in, cars to drive, food to fix. And then, behind the props, the flat painted scenery. Painted houses set farther back. Painted people. Painted streets. Sounds from speakers set in the wall. Sammy sitting alone in a classroom, the only pupil. And even the teacher not real. Only a series of tapes being played for him.

[TOJ 14:174].

The date is actually 1998 and another war is under way, between the Luna colonists and Earth, with the so-called Lunatics launching atomic weapons from the far side of the moon. Ragle Gumm, hat designer and owner of artificial aluminum making factories, can somehow predict the pattern of the falling bombs, but becomes disenchanted with working for Earth (the isolationists) rather than supporting the Luna colonies (the expansionists). According to one of the people controlling Gumm:

He got himself into a dilemma, and the only way he could solve it was to go into a withdrawal psychosis. ...He withdrew into a fantasy of tranquility," Black said, winding the clock that Junie had brought over. "Back to a period before the war. To his childhood. To the late 'fifties, when he was an infant.

[TOJ 14:176]

Mentally, Ragle has travelled in time, and so a whole town had to be constructed in order to accommodate his psychosis and maintain his aid to the isolationist cause; Ragle is isolated in a small town, and any efforts to leave are thwarted. It is surely no accident on Dick's part that Black has a clock in his hands when he explains the deception, nor that Ragle learns part of the truth about himself from the January 14, 1996 issue of Time rather than any other magazine; the magazines Look or Life for example. Dick's manuscript of Time Out of Joint was called Biography in Time, quoting the end of chapter thirteen: "Ragle began to read his biography in Time" [TOJ 13:169]. A series of odd experiences - memories of somewhere else, disappearing objects, all suddenly make sense.

We have here a complex situation. For a reader in the 1950s the characters are really living in the future, but think that they are living in the present of the 1950s. But for a 1990s audience Ragle has regressed to a constructed 1950s from what is our present, or our near future in the 1990s, imagined in the 1950s. This is a formidable series of chronological displacements. The text remains the same, but its reception has altered. To Dick in the 1950s, the 1950s felt false. He recalled in his journal - the Exegesis - in 1977: "Back in the Fifties when I lived at 1126 Francisco St. actually, as expressed in Joint that world seemed unreal; in actuality, 'it was decades later' (in Joint). But now that it is decades later, that past time & place seems real (or anyhow the past somehow) & this a fake" [X 1991, 168]. And to us, as a depiction of the 1950s, Time Out of Joint seems as real as the genuine 1950s. Only someone with an intimate knowledge of fifties could tell the difference, a knowledge which is not open to anyone under thirty.

Time Out of Joint is a novel which looks at the real world through SF eyes; it imitates the mainstream at the start and gradually forces readers to respond to the text with an SF reading, until it finally becomes SF. This is ironic since the shift from representation to misrepresentation of reality corresponds to Ragle's journey from fake world to a real one.

I wish to move on to another novel by Dick, Eye in the Sky, which was written in a two week burst, and received by Dick's agents on February 15, 1955. The novel opens with the explosion of the Bevatron - a sort of particle accelerator - on October 2, 1959, about four-and-a-half years into the future. It then flashes back to an interrogation of Jack Hamilton about the pro-Left sympathies of his wife, Marsha. Jack, although now suspended from his job, goes with Marsha and the security guard McFeyffe to see the Bevatron being tested, and they are caught up in the explosion along with Bill Laws, a black guide, and four tourists. At first it seems that everything is fine and that they have all survived; instead they are all unconscious and experiencing hallucinatory environments constructed from the private world view of one of them. For example in Edith Pritchet's private world view anything unpleasant, including racism and pollution, is abolished. After passing through four of these hallucinatory environments, Jack discovers that McFeyffe is a Communist agent but cannot prove it. They all seem to return to the original world and Jack goes into business with Bill Laws.

The loyalty of Marsha and the security risk that Jack might be thought to pose draws upon the McCarthyism that had swept America in the five years prior to the writing of the novel, making at least the opening sections an historical fiction, from a viewpoint slightly in the future. President Truman had established loyalty oaths for government employees, but wished to keep any investigations confidential. Senator Joseph McCarthy demanded that they be made public and started making allegations about the number of Communists working in government. McCarthy was censured by the Senate for his behavior on December 2, 1954, and then further discredited a few days later for his attack on President Eisenhower. It seems almost certain that Dick wrote Eye in the Sky in the immediate aftermath of these events, with McCarthy discredited, but McCarthyism still in progress.

The charges against Marsha Hamilton are as follows:

She signed the Stockholm Peace Proposal. She joined the Civil Liberties Union... She signed the Save the Rosenbergs appeal... she spoke at the Alameda League of Women Voters in favor of admitting Red China to the U.N. - a communist country.

[ES 1:10-11]

Dick echoes these charges in an Exegesis entry where he retrospectively forms a link between the besieged American left of the 1950s and the world opposed by the late 1960s and early 1970s counterculture:

Consider the 50s. The concept of "unamerican" held power. I was involved in fighting that; the spirit (counterculture) of the 60s evolved successfully out of the (basically) losing efforts by us "progressives" of the 50s - we who signed the Stockholm Peace Proposal, & the "Save the Rosenbergs" etc. - losing, desperate efforts. Very unpopular & very unsupported. Berkeley was one of our few centers; this takes me back to EYE IN THE SKY etc.

[X 174]

Given that a personal knowledge of the 1950s is involved in Dick's writing of Eye in the Sky, a reader in the 1990s needs to do some reconstruction of the 1950s and late 1940s to understand what is going on. I will now attempt some of that reconstruction. Dick had settled in Berkeley, California with his mother in June 1938 and with the exception of the school year of 1942-43 lived there until September 1958. He graduated from Berkeley High School in 1947, curiously enough in the same year as SF author Ursula LeGuin, but several years later than would be usual due to continual periods of ill health and phobias.

The next phase is difficult. It is known that he spent a term at the University of California, Berkeley, before dropping out but the date of his attendance is not certain. Paul Williams in his memoir Only Apparently Real suggests 1947 in his chronology of Dick's life, but 1948 in the book itself [51-56]. Gregg Rickman's biography [1989, 424] writes of an attempt to attend university in late 1948, but cites evidence that Dick withdrew on November 11, 1949 and was granted a dismissal on January 3, 1950 [194]. Lawrence Sutin's biography [1989, 62-63] puts it in 1949. If people who knew Dick, or people who have presumably conducted extensive research into Dick's life disagree so widely on what should be a reasonably well-documented attendance at a university, then what hope have we? Can we ever really construct a true history?

Personally I would favor a date of autumn 1949, not just because of the two documented dates, but because, to be blunt, it makes a better story of Dick's knowledge of the radical movement. This would have been the period of a controversy. According to the historian Lipsett: "Berkeley was the only major institution to sustain a major faculty revolt against restrictive anti-Communist personnel policies in the form of the loyalty oath controversy of 1949-50" [Lipsett 1972, 137]. In fact this was nothing new: the campus had seen trouble as early as 1885 in the form of an uprising against moral controls, and in 1964-65 the first student sit-ins occurred at Sproul Hall on campus.

I am thus suggesting that Dick was taking a very personal interest in the McCarthy movement, not because he was a communist, but because he had first-hand knowledge of the treatment of radicals. In the private worlds of Eye in the Sky Dick depicts several totalizing viewpoints: first a fundamental religious world, where God immediately punishes any wrong-doing, then a world where prudery censors anything which challenges American values, a world of paranoid suspicion, and finally a communist-dominated world. All of these are worlds where the individuals can be oppressed by belief systems; just as McCarthyism was such a system.

But after all these false worlds, and with the fakery of the 1950s in Time Out of Joint, is the 1950s at the end of Eye in the Sky real? It is certainly true that the text is incomplete: Dick wrote a prologue where the characters give their opinions about the novel. Bill Laws, the black guide who goes into business with Jack Hamilton writes, "A kind of rosy, optimistic glow seems to hangs over this, an anachronistic faith that things will somehow turn out all right. In real life that simply doesn't happen" [Dick, 1987b 11], much the most perceptive comment of the eight. The key word of course is "seems", implying that this might not be the case. The book seems to end in the real world of the first chapter, with one attempt at a plot twist. For a second that characters fear that they have returned to the private world of Arthur Silvester where sins are immediately punished: "'An earwig. Crawled up my sock and bit me.' Grinning uneasily, Laws added, 'Just a coincidence.'" [ES 16:255].

But there is more than a binary opposition being set up here between one private world and the original real world; eight people were involved in the Bevatron explosion but only four private worlds are actually described. In other words there may be four more private worlds to pass through before the real world is reached. In chapter 14 Jack sees Bill, Marsha, McFeyffe, David Pritchet and himself as realists and therefore unlikely to generate a private world. Since he is wrong in the specific case of McFeyffe, there is no reason to accept the veracity of the statement.

Of course it would help if there could be a proven difference between the settings of the opening and closing chapters. It is difficult to be certain in the brief amount of text available, but it seems there is at least a hint that there is a difference. Jack has talked early on about "The Hamilton Trinaural Sound System... the Hamilton Musiphonic Ortho-circuit!" [ES 3:29-30] as if these were feasible, and these seem more advanced than the hi-fi sets he is proposing to manufacture with Bill. The two are portrayed as visionary at the end of the novel, anticipating listening to music as a mass leisure activity. However in the real world there had already been the hits of Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent and Buddy Holly, as well as the explosion in jazz recordings over the previous decades.

If the environment at the end of the novel is false, there arises the question of whose private world has generated it. I would suspect that it is David, the youth of the novel, who has built a radio set and is interested in electronics. However I can find no further supporting evidence for this; it could equally have been, Jack's, Marsha's or Bill's.

So far I have confined myself to talking about two of Dick's SF novels, written in and ostensibly set in the 1950s. But Dick's output was not confined to SF. In the 1950s and early 1960s he wrote a series of non-generic, straight, mainstream novels, only one of which, Confessions of a Crap Artist, was published in his lifetime, and even that was in 1975. These novels deal with small town or Californian life in the 1950s, and are often set around shops, drawing on Dick's experience of selling records. They deal frankly with adultery, and relationships which cross barriers of race and age. This is no nostalgic idealization of the 1950s, nor is it a sordid underbelly juxtaposed with paradise. It is grimy and gray. But is it real? Is the world the novels describe authentic?

I chose to talk about In Milton Lumky Territory. I chose this at random, but was guided by it being the novel he wrote directly after Time Out of Joint. The plot revolves around Bruce Stevens, a successful buyer, who meets Susan Faine, the joint owner of a deteriorating typewriter shop. Within days she employs him to run the shop for her, they have sex, move in together and they get married. There is a complicating factor: she is ten years older than him, and she taught him in 1944, when he was 11.

The tone seems realistic enough: their luck is poor and they argue, they bicker. Dick portrays Bruce's embarrassment when he goes to buy a packet of condoms, and then shows Bruce's ignorance of Susan's methods of contraception. It seems authentic, but is it? Is there a detail like the Tucker motor car in Time Out of Joint? Did they have electric Japanese typewriters in 1958? Or is there a Tucker owner who has driven another route when Bruce is in his 1955 Mercury, and thus never appears in the text? Is there perhaps Doc's Delorean parked quietly out of sight?

In fact without any of these speculative - if not to say perverse -suggestions there is a scene which casts doubt on the authenticity of some of the novel. In chapter sixteen Bruce has moved out of the house and is lying on a bed, thinking back to the time that Susan taught him in 1944. She set the class a composition about a trip to New York, which he refuses to do because he has never visited the city and feels unable to imagine it. She asks him what he wants to write about: "'I think I'll write about what's going to happen,' he said. I'll imagine ahead a few months. Even more; several years . . . [I'll] put together an imaginary composition" [IMLT 16:204] The next scene is a few months later, and Bruce and Susan get back together, first moving to Montario and then Denver. Years pass, and Bruce is happy, just as Dick promised in the note at the start of the novel: "This is actually a very funny book, and a good one, too, in that the funny things that happen happen to real people who come alive. The ending is a happy one. What more can an author say? What more can he give?" [IMLT 5].

But is it a happy ending, or have we been mislead? By the end of the novel Bruce is 26. If he was 11 in 1944 then the year must be roughly 1960, a full two years after Dick wrote the novel. So is the ending authentic? Perhaps the events occur as Dick describes them. Alternatively, Bruce could be still lying on the bed, imagining the next few years after 1958. On the other hand, the whole section, if not most of the book, could be imaginary, and he is in a classroom in 1944, writing his imaginary composition. None of the book could be real accept for the classroom and the teacher. The past, present and future come together in this instant, and cannot be distinguished.

To close then, all I have to offer is skepticism. Dick has written an account of what is to us historical, but is in fact writing stories. When I talk about the real world at the beginning of Eye in the Sky, I mean to say "real within the framework of fiction". The world described at the end of the novel seems to be "false within the framework of fiction". But can I - or we - talk of something being "real" or perhaps "true" "within the framework of history". As I have demonstrated, it seems impossible to establish the fact of the date of Dick's university attendance. Certainly the date is trivial within the broad sweep of history, but at some quasi-fundamental level, history is composed of such events, which fit into a story. Indeed, I told a narrative of Dick's political experiences based on such a "fact". Perhaps in history - and here I should make a pun on the "story" part of the word - we only have fictions which tell a story about where - or indeed when - we really appear to be.

Bibliography

Philip K. Dick, 1969. [TOJ]. Time Out of Joint. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

--- 1971. [ES]. Eye in the Sky. London: Arrow.

--- 1987a. [IMLT]. In Milton Lumky Territory. London: Paladin.

--- 1987b. "Prologue to Eye in the Sky", PKDS Newsletter 13.

--- 1989. Confessions of a Crap Artist. Introduction by Paul Williams. London: Paladin.

--- 1991. [X]. In Pursuit of VALIS: Selections from the Exegesis, edited by Lawrence Sutin. Underwood/Miller.

Seymour Martin Lippset, 1972. Rebellion in the University. London: Routledge.

Gregg Rickman, 1989. To the High Castle: Philip K. Dick, A Life (1928-1963). Foreword by Tim Powers. Long Beach: Fragments West/The Valentine Press.

Lawrence Sutin, 1989. Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick. Introduction by Paul Williams. New York: Harmony Books.

Paul Williams. Only Apparently Real.