The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick 1938-1971: Volume 1

371 Pages·1997·36.805 MB·English

by  Philip K. Dick

Introduction by James Blaylock
UNDERWOOD BOOKS
Grass Valley, California
THE SELECTED LETTERS OF PHILIP K. DICK 1938-71
Trade edition: ISBN 1-887424'20-2
Slipcased edition: ISBN 1-887424-21-0
Copyright © 1996 by The Estate of Philip K. Dick
Book design by Underwood Books
Printed in the United States of America
All Rights Reserved
An Underwood Books book by arrangement with The Estate of Philip
K. Dick. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval
systems without explicit permission from the author or the author’s agent,
except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages. For information address
the publisher: Underwood Books, PO Box 1609, Grass Valley, CA 95945.
Caution: These letters are offered for the insight they may provide into
their author; they cannot be considered reliable sources of information
about any other persons.
Special thanks to Allan Kausch for coordinating the preproduction of
these volumes.
Library of Congress Cataloguing^in-Publication Data
(Revised for volumes 1 and 2)
Dick, Philip K.
The selected letters of Philip K. Dick
Includes indexes.
Contents: v. 1. 1938-1971. —v. 2.1972-1973 —v. 3. 1974. —v. 4.
1975-76. —v. 5.1977-79 —v. 6. 1980-82.
1. Dick, Philip K.—Correspondence. 2. Authors, American—20th
century—Correspondence. 3. Science Fiction—Authorship. I. Title
PS3554.I3Z48 1991 813’.54“B” 89-25099
ISBN 1-887424-20-2 (trade ed.: v. 1)
ISBN 1-887424-21-0 (slipcase ed.: v. 1)
Publisher's Note
Major effort has gone into presenting these letters as closely as possible
to the way they came out of PKD’s typewriter— even to preserving many
instances of incorrect grammar and typographical errors.
We thank the dedicated staff of typists and proofreaders— Kathy
Claar, Jim Clary, Lonnie Davis, Ron Drummond, John Fairchild, William
D. Gagliani, Chris Gordon, Lance Hardie, Steven Lidster, Jeff Makos,
Frank Miele, Lisa Morton, Judd Muskat, Diane L. Newman, David
Nielsen, Valerie Owre, Jason Peterson, Kevin Sisemore, Don Slaughter,
Jasmine Star, and Jeff Steven Svoboda— and coordinator Allan Kausch for
their assistance.
A Ticket on the Nonpareil Lines
by James Blaylock
There is rarely any rising action in the story of a life—no plot, not much
focus. To me, Phil’s letters read like the chronicle of time passing in a frightful
hurry: friends coming and going, sometimes in anger, sometimes in death;
marriages started and failed: cars bought and broken down; books conceived
and written and sold in high hopes, and then the hopes dashed and swept
away on the receding tide. Seasons turn, years fall away, and there’s the
inevitable sad promise of a last letter signed and dated...
The first real letters here are mailed home from the boarding school near
Ojai: “I am not used to being beaten up by kids who are 18 years old,” Phil
writes. “My Social Studies teacher says not to read Fantastic magazines.”
“Send Sugar Ration Card to me, please.” “Hurt my finger.” “We play marbles
alot, and go to the beach.” “I am learning to swear, I’m afraid, they do it alot
here. Write millions of times a week.”
“Don’t be lonely...” And he signed this last one, “Your little boy, Philip
Dick.”
And in The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, Angel Archer says, “Don’t
do it. Don’t live alone.”
The letters in this volume are full of people—editors and agents, lovers
and wives, friends and relations—and yet I can’t shake the notion that the
ghost of desolation hovers over the pages and that in some fundamental way,
despite the people and the high times and the hope of better things pending,
Phil always lived alone. Martian Time Slip, arguably one of his best books, had
a certain dreadful authenticity at least partly because Phil understood, in his
heart, Manfred’s autistic silence. I think it was the flip side of Phil’s own
compulsion to use language to order an often dark and chaotic world.
The sheer mass of letters in this collection is staggering. Add to it the
million-word “Exegesis,” the dozens of novels, the hundreds of short stories,
vii
viii THE SELECTED LETTERS OF PHILIP K. DICK
and what you come up with is a lifetime defined and redefined by words,
words ordered and reordered in an effort to phrase something “worthy of his
dreams.” Words, it seems to me, can as easily be a veil of protective noise, like
those recordings of ocean waves and train sounds, or like a television left on
all night. Susan Cheever wrote that John Cheever, her father, had a mortal
fear of bridges, so profound that he would nearly lose control of the car
crossing from one end to another. Once, while crossing some unremembered
bridge, he said to her in a dead panic, “Talk to me.” “About what?” she asked.
And he replied, “It doesn’t matter, just talk.”
A. A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Comer, was always one of Phil’s favorite
books, the last few pages of which are some of the saddest ever written,
especially if you’ve got children. Phil had a hard time reading those pages
without crying. “What do you like to do best in the world, Pooh?” Christopher
Robin asks. Pooh, essentially, says that he likes to eat. “I like that too,”
Christopher Robin says, “but what I like doing best is Nothing.” Then, a couple
of pages later: “I’m not going to do Nothing any more.” “Never again?” asks
Pooh, not quite getting it. “Well, not so much. They don’t let you.” And so
Christopher Robin puts away childish things...
To my vast amazement, I’ve run into people who can read those pages and
shrug. Sentimental rubbish, they say. Some of them honestly don’t get it. They
can’t recall that they left anything much behind. They don’t care that they
had to “grow up” from some place where they’d dwelt when they were
children, that there was a time when it was their job to do Nothing, and that
saying goodbye to all that cost them something. Christopher Robin fills up
Pooh’s head with “things” that he’s learned: “... something called Factors, and
a place called Europe, and an island in the middle of the sea where no ships
came, and how you make a Suction Pump...” Phil is sent off to Ojai where
he’s beaten up by 18 year olds, and, figuratively speaking, he learns how to
make a suction pump and, as Pooh put it, “what comes from Brazil.”
I don’t believe he was ever very happy with the tradeoff. The cost was too
high. In some big way it broke his heart, and he never recovered. He said
goodbye to doing Nothing and to the peculiar, sheltering, timeless place of
childhood, and what he got in trade was a suction pump and the suggestion
that he throw his pulp magazines into the trash.
There’s plenty of evidence, of course, that his childhood wasn’t all that
happy; there were no doubt enchanted places, but there were other places too,
colder and darker. Perhaps that darkness made the enchanted places seem all
the more bright. But probably the unhappiness of certain parts of his
childhood magnified that which was wrong with the world, that which he
feared, and cast the threatening shadow which clouds nearly all his
novels—the iron prison, the half-life decay, the shifting landscapes, the people
like androids, the unsettling knowledge that things fall apart. He never
stopped believing in the enchanted places, though, however you want to
THE SELECTED LETTERS OF PHILIP K. DICK ix
define them. He searched hard to recover them all his life, and it’s that search
that redeems and brightens his life and his work.
Fortunately for us he saw something funny in the world. In his novels he
had a fine sense of proportion and perspective and humor. What seemed to
come from Brazil looked like nothing else on earth when Phil got done with it,
and if one of his characters went to the hardware store to buy a suction pump
it turned into a slip of paper with words on it, and the man behind the counter
was Elijah or had just stepped in through a portable hole from the future.
Glimmung sets out to make a ponderous speech and falls through the floor.
Herb Asher displeases God, and God destroys his stereo.
In Death of a Salesman Happy says, “They don’t raise a man to a position
of responsibility who whistles on elevators.” I remember that a man from Time
magazine once came out to Orange County to interview Phil. All signs
indicated that it was time for the world to take Phil and his books seriously.
Phil was ready for the man, full of his own burning question, which he asked
the man in deadly earnest: whether toads can talk. The interviewer hurried
away, and the interview never appeared in Time. Phil had this way of whistling
on elevators, not to put too fine a point on it, and they never raised him to a
position of responsibility while he was alive, although I think they might now
that he’s dead.
One time when I was at Phil’s apartment he decided that he had to get a
bouquet of flowers for a woman he’d just met. We drove down to the local
flower shop and walked in, and Phil picked up the first mixed bouquet he
came to and stepped up to the counter, hoping to get in and out quick. In
front of us were two German men, trying to talk with the florist, who was
apparently baffled with the conversation. Phil saw an opportunity to help out,
and said something in German—I couldn’t tell you what it was. The Germans
didn’t turn around. They were oblivious to him. Phil might as well have
spoken Chinese. He tried again, louder—a couple sentences, gestures, the
whole business—simply trying to get their attention now. But he was invisible.
He didn’t exist. The Germans abruptly left, chatting with each other. The
door swung shut, and we were left alone with the florist, who was wiping the
counter with a rag and seemed surprised to see us standing there. Phil paid for
the flowers without speaking. On the way back up Seventeenth Street he was
utterly silent. Ten minutes earlier he’d been telling funny stories, but now
nothing was funny anymore.
There’s a slight chance, I suppose, that the Germans were deaf and that
neither had any peripheral vision, but I don’t think so. I don’t know what to
think, but there was a chilling element of depersonalization about the incident
that wrecked Phil in an instant, as if this was exactly the kind of thing he
feared...
A life, I suppose, is full of things that you just can’t make sense of,
although you’re tempted to try. Biography is literary fakery: a person’s life is
translated into words so that a structure can be imposed upon it by the
THE SELECTED LETTERS OF PHILIP K. DICK
biographer, who, full of both fraud and truth, sits behind the curtain like the
wonderful wizard, cleverly manipulating knobs and levers, shining a light here,
casting a shadow there, creating metaphors out of random incident, giving the
life a meaning that he can write out neatly, in so many words. But in a book of
letters there is no structure, only a clock ticking, and “vacant shuttles weave
the wind.” No one’s pulling levers, and if there’s any destination the signpost
too often turns out to be the shadow of the gravestone.
Ragel Gumm arrives at the bus station in Time Out of Joint, certain that
“they” are monitoring his movements. He doesn’t know who “they” are. He’s
not sure who he is, for that matter. He wants a bus ticket out of town. “After
forty-five minutes he still stood in the same spot. Can a lunatic go out of his
mind? he wondered. What does it take to get a ticket on the Nonpareil Lines?
Will I be here forever?”
Speaking of signposts, I found a hundred things in these letters that led
me back to the novels, and I ended up rereading some of my favorites, trying
to reconcile things, to make some neat and definitive sense out of the wild
mixture of humor and tragedy in his books and his letters and his life. Here’s
what I came up with: I think that whistling on elevators, for a writer like Phil,
is more than a little bit like whistling in the dark.
Contents
Introduction by James Blaylock vii
A PKD Chronology xviii
The Letters:
Serra--------- Nov. 30, 1938 1
Dorothy K. Dick May 12, 1939 2
Dorothy K. Dick May 1940 2
Dorothy K. Dick July 21, 1940 3
Dorothy K. Dick July 25, 1940 3
Dorothy K. Dick August 2, 1940 3
Dorothy K. Dick August 2, 1940 3
Dorothy K. Dick August 2, 1940 4
Dorothy K. Dick August 2, 1940 4
Dorothy K. Dick September 21, 1942 4
Dorothy K. Dick September 30, 1942 5
Dorothy K. Dick Early October 1942 6
Dorothy K. Dick Early October 1942 7
Dorothy K. Dick October 22, 1942 8
Dorothy K. Dick October 23, 1942 9
Dorothy K. Dick November 1, 1942 10
Dorothy K. Dick November 2, 1942 11
Dorothy K. Dick November5, 1942 11
Dorothy K. Dick Mid'November 1942 13
Possibly Dorothy K. Dick Unknown, with 1942 Ojai Letters 14
Dorothy K. Dick Unknown, with 1942 Ojai Letters 14
xi
THE SELECTED LETTERS OF PHILIP K. DICK
Dorothy K. Dick March 26, 1943 15
Dorothy K. Dick April 28, 1943 16
Dorothy K. Dick May 1943 16
Herb Hollis December 16, 1949 17
Fellow Employees at Art Music Spring 1950 18
J. Francis McComas October 29, 1951 19
Anthony Boucher &. J. Francis McComas Novembers, 1951 19
]. Francis McComas January 9, 1952 20
Editors, Fantasy & Science Fiction February 11, 1952 20
Anthony Boucher March 5, 1952 21
Anthony Boucher & ]. Francis McComas March 19, 1952 22
Anthony Boucher April 12, 1952 22
Anthony Boucher April 13, 1952 23
Editors Fantasy & Science Fiction May 7, 1952 23
Anthony Boucher & J. Francis McComas June 23, 1952 24
J. Francis McComas October 29, 1952 24
J. Francis McComas November 22, 1952 27
Fellow Employees, Tupper & Reed Music 1952 or early 1953 27
Anthony Boucher & J. Francis McComas February 16, 1953 29
Anthony Boucher May 18, 1953 29
San Francisco Chronicle July 7, 1953 30
Anthony Boucher & J. Francis McComas September 2, 1953 30
Anthony Boucher & J. Francis McComas September6, 1953 31
Anthony Boucher December 16, 1953 31
Anthony Boucher April 8, 1954 32
Mr. Haas September 16, 1954 32
Scott Meredith May 16, 1955 34
Bill Hamling September 2, 1955 34
Time October 3, 1955 35
Anthony Boucher June 3, 1957 35
Anthony Boucher June 6, 1957 37
Anthony Boucher September 17, 1957 38
Alexander Topchiev February 4, 1958 39
James Blish February 10, 1958 40
Anthony Boucher October 29, 1958 42