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Crazy like a fox
Emmanuel Carrère examines Philip K Dick in I Am Alive and
You Are Dead.
Michael Moorcock on one of science fiction's strangest sons
Saturday June 4, 2005
The Guardian (UK)
I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of
Philip K Dick
by Emmanuel Carrère, translated by Timothy Bent
336pp, Bloomsbury £17.99
Like Hammett, Chandler, Faulkner and Eudora Welty, US writer
Philip K Dick was first taken seriously in England and
France. New Worlds magazine serialised his "breakthrough"
novel Time Out of Joint in 1959 and I believe mine was the
first published essay on Dick to suggest that he was
something more than a good genre writer. People such as
Maxim Jakubowski began to publicise him in France. New
Worlds commissioned the late John Brunner to write the first
appreciation of Dick to run in a national magazine.
In 1965, after The Man in the High Castle won Dick his only
Hugo award, I contacted his agent on behalf of the publisher
I was advising. The agent said we could have any four Dick
titles for £600, and an option to buy the next four at the
same price. The publisher, perhaps believing books that
cheap couldn't be any good, passed. I wrote to Dick saying
he was being undersold. Dick, notoriously his own worst
enemy, did not, as I suggested, change his agent. Had it not
been for Tom Maschler, impressed by the enthusiasm of other
writers, Dick might have been as indistinguishably published
in the UK as he was in the US. At Cape, Maschler presented
Dick, like Ballard, as non-generic, bringing him to a wider
if not more lucrative audience. Younger writers such as Fay
Weldon and Martin Amis became fans. And Dick's legend as the
Acid Sage of Berkeley (though he only ever took one trip, a
bad one) was established. Initially, he did nothing to
dispel it. Already a mythomane to rival SF writer L Ron
Hubbard, founder of Scientology, he discovered the
reputation passingly useful as he enjoyed guru-status with
the Berkeley young.
In 1952, Anthony Boucher, founding editor of Fantasy & SF,
serial mentor and customer of the classical record store
where Dick worked, had published his first story. After
that, Dick's chief inspiration, when he began turning out
fiction for the dwindling magazine market, was his need to
pay the rent. He wasn't the only SF writer of his generation
to make wholehearted use of dexadrine and valium but for a
while he allowed readers to think inspiration came from
acid, far more chic in the 60s. Mostly, he was running, as
prolific writers generally do, on adrenaline and caffeine.
Emmanuel Carrère thinks the posthumously published social
novels Dick produced were done to please snobbish friends
and lovers. However, Dick was continually looking for the
form which would best suit his ideas. No great stylist, his
problem was that he had a hard time putting a story together
without the conventions of genre fiction. His best work uses
the methods developed in the pages of Galaxy by a group of
writers including Pohl, Kornbluth, Bester, Sheckley and
Harlan Ellison. What we today recognise as the "PKD future"
is actually a collaboration between these socially conscious
writers responding to Eisenhower's and J Edgar Hoover's
America and specifically to McCarthyism. Unlike the
conservative techno-SF writers, they actually predicted the
world we know today.
Dick began to produce twists on conventional dystopias. He
lacked Bester's sophistication, Pohl's Marxism, Sheckley's
irony or Ellison's eloquence, but he captured the readers'
imagination as previously only HP Lovecraft (Carrère's other
literary hero) had done. Educated by Quakers, raised in
radical Berkeley, a born-again Episcopalian by 1964, he
accepted the malignity of the consumer state, but questioned
the nature of its reality.
By the early 60s he had written The Man in the High Castle,
Dr Bloodmoney and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and
was consistently exploring the themes which would make his
wider reputation. Not all his contemporaries found his
obsessions stimulating; they saw, in fact, the ruination of
a talent. Ellison expressed it with his usual laconicism:
"Took drugs, saw God. BFD." But Dick was on a roll, helped
by God and the I-Ching. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
(on which the film Blade Runner was based), Ubik and A Maze
of Death led steadily away from his generic roots. Meanwhile
he divorced his third wife, left the relative isolation of
Marin County, returned to the city and married again,
increasingly losing his grip on reality, eventually coming
to believe that a spirit guide had saved him and his
new-born son from madness and death. After a short spell in
a Canadian rehab clinic, he left admirers and hangers-on
behind, and wound up in Fullerton, outside LA.
When Dick finally began to make money from foreign sales and
film rights, he credited his spirit guide with helping
release a secret store of cash. Living off this money,
struggling with mental instability and an imagination no
longer reined by genre demands, Dick produced little
publishable work in the last years of his life. He devoted
himself to a kind of sequel to The Man in the High Castle,
called Exegesis, in which he tried to develop the notion
that his world where Hitler and Hirohito had won the second
world war was no more the real world than was this one. He
became so strange that when I was living in southern
California in 1979/80 I felt no desire to visit him. Some
paranoiacs seem touched by divinity but equally they can be
touched by banality. As with William Burroughs, listening to
conspiracy theories could be exhausting.
Never leaving his home for weeks, sitting in the dark,
playing Dowland and the Grateful Dead, he became
increasingly absorbed in his own myth, fed back to him by
fans who, like Tolkien's crankier readers, could fairly be
called disciples. Yet at an SF convention in Metz, he
seriously disappointed fans who had expected a divine junkie
and got a Christian missionary. He died in 1982, leaving
hundreds of thousands of unpublished words, many of which
have yet to see the light.
It's a shame this book contains no index and does not refer
to the half-a-dozen or so other critiques and biographies of
PKD, nor to interviews, such as Charles Platt's, which was
done towards the end of Dick's life and is a rather better
journey into his mind. In his excellent Who Writes Science
Fiction? Platt spoke respectfully of his subject, revealing
a courteous, self-mocking man and recording a classic piece
of monologue. Off-tape, Platt wanted to know if Dick was
discussing his fiction or whether he really believed all he
had talked about in his interview.
Fairly typically, Dick switched to ironic mode: "Why, no, of
course not. You'd have to be crazy to believe in something
like that."
Another friend, Tom Disch, had his own interview terminated
by the intervention of Dick's spirit guide who said it was
time for Disch to leave. A courteous soul, he complied.
"Do you think he's crazy?" I asked later.
Disch smiled tolerantly. "Like a fox," he said.
Michael Moorcock's Mother London is published by Scribner.
--
Dan Clore
Now available: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://www.wildsidepress.com/index2.htm
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587154838/thedanclorenecro
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"It's a political statement -- or, rather, an
*anti*-political statement. The symbol for *anarchy*!"
-- Batman, explaining the circle-A graffiti, in
_Detective Comics_ #608
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