|
source
|
|
Written in 1997 by Jake Stuiver, university of colorado student.
|
|
|
|
Philip K. Dick
|
Although his mind was not invaded until 1974, Philip Kindred Dick was born in Chicago on December 16, 1928. Although his twin sister, Jane Charlotte Dick (some documents have her middle name also as Kindred), died forty-one days after their birth, she remained a part of his life until the day he died.
The children were born about a month premature, and suffered from what some describe as "marasmus," or "failure to thrive," a condition usually found in infants who are neglected, abused, or malnourished. For this reason, Dick had always blamed his sister's death on his mother's negligence, saying that Jane could have been saved had his mother, Dorothy Grant Kindred Dick, notified the hospital of her complications sooner. From the dawn of his awareness of these circumstances, Dick felt a deep hatred, or at least an extreme dislike, of his mother. These early childhood circumstances played a significant role in the shape Dick would take in his writing career.
Two years later, Dick moved with his father, Joseph Edgar Dick, and mother to Berkely California, by which point his parents' marriage had broken down. In 1933, they divorced and Dick moved with his mother to Washington, D.C. In 1939, they returned to Berkely, where Dick enrolled in Hillside School. His relationship with his mother continued to be distant and cold. It was during this period that Dick began his career as a writer. From the age of 13, he was already reading the publications Astounding and Unknown, which contained works by Heinlen and Asimov. He was also an avid reader of A. E. Van Vogt, whose influence on Dick is said to have endured throughout his entire career. This influence is allegedly most evident in the novel Solar Lottery. When he was 14, Dick wrote his first novel, Return to Liliput, which was unfortunately lost. He had also written some poems and short stories by this point, many of which he had published in a local newspaper.
Another aspect of Dick's life that originated in his youth and remained with him perpetually was his agoraphobia and other psychiatric conditions. In 1945 he graduated from Berkely High School, to which he had transferred a year before, and soon after developed tachycardia, which drove him to dependence on prescription medications, which itself became another ailment that never left him. Some of the phobias Dick developed at this point were allegedly so extreme that he spent much of his last year of high school at home, with a home teacher and regular psychotherapy sessions.
During his high school years, Dick developed a passion for and comprehensive knowledge of classical music. This interest led him to work for a few years at a T.V. sales and repair store that also sold records. Dick's love of music is also said to have influenced many of his stories. Although Dick briefly attended the University of California at Berkely, studying German and philosophy, he dropped out in 1947 resulting from grievances with the mandatory ROTC program. During his short fling with higher education, however, Dick did interact with many intellectuals and radicals, and became deeply immersed in much of the popular literature of the community, including realists such as John Dos Passos, Richard Wright, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemmingway, and James Joyce. Dick also admired authors such as H. P. Lovecraft and Fredrik Brown.
Because Dick had not dated much throughout high school, not really interacting with romance at all outside of distant crushes, his mother chided him and accused him of being a homosexual. Dick protested this by leaving home, right before college, to live in a small apartment with a number of homosexuals. He apparently did this to irritate his mother. A few months later, however, he met the woman who would soon become his first wife, Jeanette Marlin, whom he said he did not really love, but simply married because he was naive. Their marriage lasted six months; after the divorce, Dick never saw her again. In 1950 he married his second wife, Kleo Apostolides, who was a student at Berkely.
After meeting Anthony Boucher, editor of Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and attending some of his workshops, Dick was inspired to return to writing with renewed vigor, and he was even more attracted by science fiction for the genre's lack of boundaries. Dick said science fiction excludes no types of ideas.
In October 1951, Dick left the record shop at which he had worked for many years, and dedicated his life to writing science fiction as a full-time occupation. The field was expanding at a high rate, and it seemed that more sci-fi magazines popped up on the newsstands every day. Dick freelanced to many of them, and by 1954 he had sold more than sixty stories. In 1952, a New Yorker named Scott Meredith became Dick's literary agent. Dick's first published novel, Solar Lottery, came out in 1955, and shows the heavy influence of Van Vogt in its complex, twisted structure of conspiracies. Dick soon developed his own unique writing style, but he always retained his themes and convoluted plot structures that illustrated the relationship between perception and reality.
Dick continued to write science fiction novels throughout the 1950s, but toward the end of the decade the genre was in a slump. Dick attempted to break into the literary mainstream and be accepted as a realist writer, but publishers rejected his works. The best of these, Confessions of a Crap Artist, was finally published in 1975.
In 1958, Dick and his wife, Kleo, moved to Point Reyes in Marin County, California. He soon fell in love with Anne Rubenstein, which resulted in another divorce and remarriage. Anne already had three children, and in 1960 she and Dick had Laura Archer.
Although Dick was much more prosperous in the 1960s with his publications and with a renewed general interest in science fiction, he was only paid one or two thousand dollars per novel, and he had to write at an amazing rate for he and his family to survive. He won the Hugo Award in 1962 for The Man in the High Castle, and had other popular works such as The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) and Now Wait for Last Year (1966). Still, however, Dick continued to depend on amphetamines for energy and initiative, and this worsened his physical and mental health. His breakdowns continued, and he earned only an average of $12,000 per year, and this was maintained only by taking speed to sustain a very high productivity rate. His family life also remained unstable. His marriage to Anne collapsed in 1964, and that same year he married Nancy Hackett, with whom he had another daughter, Isa, in 1967.
The 1970s were a more solemn, sinister period for Dick. His fourth wife left him, taking Isa with her. Then, in 1971, a bizarre occurrence troubled Dick and sent him spiraling deeper into a world of disturbed paranoia. A break-in occurred at his house in which somebody blew open his front door and opened his safe with explosives. The unusual circumstances of the event were in the fact that although the break-in itself was elaborate, the only items taken were perishable food and processed checks dating back twenty years. Dick became convinced it was the CIA, although he also suspected militant political organizations. He felt it may have been connected to the fact that, in the 1950s, Dick had refused to help FBI agents inform on people in Mexico.
Dick stopped writing for a while and got even deeper into drug use. He attempted suicide in Vancouver, entered a drug rehabilitation center and then moved to Southern California in 1972, where he met and married Tessa Busby in 1972, and divorced again in 1976. By the end of the decade, however, a series of mystical experiences that had affected Dick since the late 1960s came to a head: He experienced what he described as an invasion of his mind by a transcendentally rational mind, which was like an artificial intelligence.
The most critical point in this period was during March and April of 1974, when Dick experienced what he interpreted as communications from a higher being. He called this being Valis or Zebra. The revelations he attained from this "communication" became the focal point through which he perceived the meaning of his life and works. Dick undertook an immense project to explain and theorize about these experiences. He called it the "Exegenesis," and it consisted of two file cabinets of handwritten pages he scribbled from 1974 until his death.
Dick's own descriptions of these events pit them as the culmination of a series of steps he took, throughout his life, toward enlightenment. In retrospect, Dick found that a number of strange and mystical occurrences, starting in high school, had been foreshadowings of this ultimate revelation. Dick felt that he was in his "darkest moment of dread and trembling" when he was "contacted." At that point, Dick had said (not necessarily in all seriousness), he became a Buddha. He wrote a fictionalized account of this experience in Valis (1981), one of his most popular works, and continued the theme in The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.
Dick died on March 2, 1982, of a stroke. His death came just at the beginning of his critical acclaim and increased novel sales. In the few years before his death, Dick had finally seen some prosperity from his writing. The novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) was made into the popular film Blade Runner in 1982 and the sale of the rights brought Dick a good living. Dick had also earned a good deal of critical acclaim in the literary community, and some of his older titles were being reprinted.
Had Dick survived another eight years, he would have acquired even more fame and wealth when his short story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" was made into the film Total Recall.
|
|
|
|
