The Search for Philip K. Dick (35 page)

Edgar wrote a pamphlet, a piece of Americana, about his family and about his experiences in the Fifth Marines in World War I. He was the principal, the only resource for information about Phil’s early years except for what Phil and Dorothy had told me many years ago
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Even after fifty years, Edgar expressed a bitter animosity toward Dorothy and blamed her for Phil’s problems. He himself, he said, wanted Phil to be free, “free as a bird,” but Dorothy wanted to put Phil “in a box.” Later, in the formal interview situation when he was being taped, he spoke about what a good mother Dorothy was.

As an adult, Phil remembered that his early relationship with his father was a good one. He had liked his dad before his dad “left.” He remembered Edgar’s stories about World War I. “My father was a hero in World War I,” he said. Edgar showed little Phil his gas mask from World War I. It scared Phil. The face that Phil saw in the sky in Point Reyes in 1963 resembled this mask.

Phil got Edgar to take him to a radio station that broadcast a cowboy program. Phil wore his little cowboy suit and went with great anticipation. When they got there, there were just records, no cowboys. Edgar said, “I had to lie a little.”

Edgar taught Phil to always tell the truth. “If I scolded Phil, he’d analyze it and come back and tell me. We’d talk it over. I’d admit it when I was wrong.

“When Phil was little, he was irritable. I would explain things to him. He needed a little lift. I was second oldest of fourteen, and I knew how to handle little children.”

Father and son visited a friend of Edgar’s who had a pet bull snake that slept in the basket on the porch. Edgar, who was afraid of rattlesnakes, had taught little Phil how to recognize them. Phil came in from playing outside and said to his father, “Jingle snake on porch.” Edgar’s friend laughed and said, no, it was her pet snake. But Edgar went out to see anyway and found that it was a thirteen-rattle rattler, the biggest ever killed in that area.

On another occasion, love of animals led Edgar and Phil to take matters into their own hands instead of calling the authorities. The people at a nearby ranch kept some rabbits in a cage in the sun with no food or water. Phil wanted to set these poor animals loose, so while the family was at church on Sunday, Edgar and Phil went to the ranch and let the animals out. But the animals returned and were put back in the cage. The next time, Edgar and Phil drove them twenty miles away and then let them out. “Phil was so pleased,” he told me.

When Phil had to have his tonsils out, Edgar explained the operation to him in advance. He took him to the hospital on the bus. Phil said, “I’ll see you later on today,” confidently. “Dorothy took great care of Phil,” Edgar said, “though she was too involved with Phil’s glasses and his teeth and various medicines.”

Did Dorothy and Edgar compete for the love of this charming and brilliant child? Did Phil, precocious in his ability to influence people, play them against each other? Edgar remembered one time when Phil wanted to go for a ride in Edgar’s car. They were in the car waiting for Dorothy to come when Phil rolled up the windows and said, “Let’s go, let’s go, Daddy. Let’s not wait for Momma.”

Dorothy was the disciplinarian. Later, when the two of them lived alone and Phil had a tantrum, Dorothy would shut him in his room. Then he would tear his room and all his possessions apart. Dorothy taught him to take the consequences of his actions. In later years, Phil spoke approvingly to me of this aspect of his childhood.

In 1933, the Institute of Child Welfare, the University of California preschool that Phil attended, reported: “Philip has made excellent progress since his previous test. His highest scores are memory, language, and manual coordination. His reactions are quickly displayed, and just as quickly reversed. His independent initiative and executive ability are shown in rapidly varying techniques which are frequently replaced with strongly contrasting dependence. It might be well to guard against the development of this degree of versatility at his age.”

Dorothy told Edgar she wanted a divorce. He said, still astonished fifty years later, “It came out of the clear blue sky. There was no discussion or anything.” After Dorothy told Edgar she wanted a divorce, he asked her, “What about the boy?” Dorothy told him that she had consulted a psychiatrist, who said that the divorce wouldn’t affect Phil.

When I was married to Phil, I had asked Dorothy about her divorce. She told me that Edgar was always suspicious of her whenever she went out, suspicious of “other men,” except that there weren’t any other men. She got tired of this. However, she said, she probably wouldn’t have divorced him if she had realized how poor she and Phil would be afterward. Shortly after the divorce, Phil came to visit Edgar at his office, but he was restless and had to be taken home. In later years, Phil told Lynne, his stepsister, that he held the divorce against his mother.

It seemed odd to me that Phil had told me so much about his past when we were first married, but never had mentioned his grandfather, who had lived in Dorothy’s Berkeley household for a while. Kleo told me, “Phil was afraid of his grandfather.” Phil frequently expressed a strong hatred of old men. He told me on several occasions that there was “bad blood” in his family. I didn’t know what to make of this odd statement. It seemed to me to be a very self-denigrating thing to say about your own family.

Years later, in a letter to Mark Hurst, his editor at Bantam Books, Phil wrote, “The other side of this DNA memory business, as you may already know, is that these DNA gene pool structures acquired from our ancestors determine our life script…. [M]y script, for instance, was ‘written’ most likely by my mother’s father, and it programs me on a subliminal level and causes me to live the particular life … which has been plotted out for me, against my will and knowledge.”

After Dorothy sent Edgar away, she and her mother, Meemaw, began living together in Berkeley. Meemaw would take care of Phil and do the housework and Dorothy would be the breadwinner. Then Meemaw’s husband and Dorothy’s father, Earl Kindred, the wanderer, showed up. Meemaw must have persuaded Dorothy to take him in as the former had always done in past years when he returned from his wanderings. Although as a teenager Dorothy had been furious when Meemaw let Earl came back home, this time, for unknown reasons, she let him stay. Did she think that Earl would be a father substitute for Phil and tell Phil this? (“The Father-Thing”.)

Earl wasn’t the only man who “wandered” in the early 1900s. Life could be bleak, and some people in rural areas suffered psychological isolation as well as economic hardship. The men who wandered in the early years of the twentieth century, prefiguring the hobos of the thirties, were often seeking a life as well as a living.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
was written on the eve of Phil’s departure from Point Reyes. Palmer Eldritch, a supernatural being coming from deep space back to Earth after a long absence, passes “something” to each person he comes into contact with—like a vampire. Then each one of them becomes a Palmer Eldritch (palmer is an old word for “wanderer”). The “something” continues to be passed from person to person, and, finally, there are many Palmer Eldritches
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In 1982, Phil commissioned Gregg Rickman to be his biographer. Phil died a month later. Gregg spent the next twelve years of his life researching the life of Philip K. Dick and wrote three books about him. He became troubled by some of Phil’s actions, especially political ones, that didn’t mesh with everything else he had found out about this man whom he admired so much. He did extensive research. He has detailed a circumstantial case about a childhood trauma when Phil was four years old in his book
To the High Castle, Philip K. Dick: A Life 1928-1962
(Valentine Press, 1989)
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Some Philip K. Dick scholars think that the loss of his twin sister at birth created Phil’s psychological problems. Dorothy “went on” about this, Phil told me, and it wasn’t good for him. There must have been some effect on Phil’s psyche, perhaps more from his mother’s talk than the actual event
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In 1935, when the Great Depression was in full blast, Dorothy moved with Phil to Washington, D.C. She had obtained a job as an editor in the Children’s Bureau. There she wrote a government pamphlet on raising children. She put Phil in a Quaker boarding school at Sulphur Springs, Maryland. Phil told me, “I had trouble swallowing, didn’t eat, and started to lose weight. This was due to grief and loneliness. My mother had to take me out of this school.”

Phil attended day school, and the school reports from this period are uneventful. At times, Dorothy had housekeepers; at other times Phil was a lonely latchkey child, watching out the window of their apartment for his mother to come home.

Earl Grant Kindred died in San Francisco in April 1937. Later this year, eight-year-old Phil and his mother returned to Berkeley, and Dorothy became personnel director of the U.S. Forestry Department, a job she held until she retired. Meemaw lived with them again and took care of Phil.

The Berkeley that Dorothy came back to was like Athens during its Golden Age. Large, attractive homes on the hills overlooked the bay, across which the towers of San Francisco glittered in the clear air, Mount Tamalpais in the background. Light-colored stucco houses blended with frame and shingle houses on tree-lined streets that curved around the hills. In the pleasant climate, exotic trees, bushes, and flowers grew everywhere. Even the small bungalows down on the flat areas had their avocado and lemon trees.

Dorothy, always frugal, had managed to save a little money and wanted to buy property in Concord. Phil had a fit. He said he wouldn’t ever live way out there. Vince Lusby said, “Dorothy lost a million-dollar opportunity, the way Concord land values went up in the next few years.”

Berkeley was a special place. Professors and students from the great University of California dominated the cultural scene, creating an environment of fine art, music, and literature. Classical music stores stocked every record ever made. Bookstores, used and new, sat side by side on Telegraph Avenue, each with their own specialties. Avant-garde art galleries, movie houses, and coffee shops were scattered throughout the community.

At the political rallies being held at Sather Gate, intellectuals, students, and teachers from all nations and races mingled. The University of California at Berkeley was thought then to be the greatest university in the world. Every idea that made waves during the sixties and seventies was fermenting in Berkeley during the late thirties and early forties when Phil was growing up. There were many active members of the American Communist Party living in the community. The U.S. national presidential ballots of those years listed a Communist Party candidate for president as well as candidates for the Socialist and Socialist Labor parties.

Special programs were created for the children in the public schools and in the many parks. A club where the children could play chess, checkers, ping-pong, and pool was just down the street from Phil’s house. When he and his friends hiked up the hill to Tilden Park, they went past the Berkeley Rose Garden, past the Greek Theater, and past the world’s first cyclotron, where world-shaking breakthroughs in physics were occurring almost daily. Music was very important to Phil and to a number of his friends. One boy had a beautiful music room in his house, the closets and drawers bulging with sheet music by every conceivable composer. Another friend, down the street, was the son of a professor in the music department. Although Phil and his mother were poor, the culture he lived in was very rich.

For the spring semester of 1938, Phil decided to change his name, and Dorothy let him. He registered at the Hillside School as Jim Dick. Report cards from the Hillside School say about Phil, a.k.a. Jim: “Jim does fine work, his work shows good organization of thought and considerable maturity of expression…. Quite popular with his playmates. A fine sense of right … self reliant … a reliable boy … efficient … business-like … courteous when given a position of leadership. He has a great degree of poise and self-possession for a boy of his age…. It has been a great pleasure to teach Jim. He is original and has added much to the group…. [H]e has a fine future ahead.”

Phil and Dorothy lived in a small cottage in the backyard of a house at 1214 Walnut Street, a pleasant neighborhood a few blocks northwest of the University of California campus. Phil’s friends entered from the rear of the lot that bordered on Live Oak Park. George Koehler told me, “The household was minimal, but adequate, cluttered, but the bed was made.”

Dick Daniels was Phil’s best Berkeley High School friend. When I interviewed him, he told me I should contact another one of Phil’s best friends from junior high school days, George Koehler. I was able to locate George in Orange County through the California State Medical Board. George and his wife drove up from Los Angeles to Point Reyes in their motor home, and we spent an enjoyable afternoon picnicking and talking on my patio. George was a tall man who walked with a cane, the effect of the polio he’d had as a boy. He had studied psychiatry, medicine, and dentistry and ran an investment business. He had carefully thought about what he would say in the interview. His memories of Phil were organized and detailed
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Dorothy didn’t come home from work until six o’clock; Phil was out of school at 3:30 and completely on his own. Even when home, Phil’s mother, “didn’t seem to direct him at all. She gave Phil the freedom to go his own way and do what he wanted. She was not bossy or mean. If Phil wanted to stay out somewhere to dinner he would call home; he was very considerate. Phil was an independent person but I noticed that he felt abused—about what, I couldn’t make out.”