On December 16, 1928, in Chicago, Dorothy Kindred Dick gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. The babies were six weeks premature and very underweight. Unaware that she was not producing enough milk for both infants, and because no one—neither a family member nor a doctor—suggested to her that she supplement their diet with formula, Dorothy undernourished the twins during the first weeks of their lives. On January 26, 1929, the baby girl, whom her parents had named Jane, died. She was buried in the cemetery in her father’s hometown of Fort Morgan, Colorado. The little boy survived. His parents had his name, Philip, engraved alongside Jane’s on the headstone; under his name, next to the dash that followed the date of birth he shared with his sister, a blank space was left. Not long afterward, the Dicks moved to California.
* * *
A rare family photo shows a hatchet-faced Edgar Dick in a rumpled suit and wearing a fedora, the kind later made famous by Treasury agents in films like The Untouchables. And in fact Edgar was a federal employee, though with the Department of Agriculture rather than the Treasury. His job involved rooting out fraud in a federal price-support program that paid farmers to reduce their herds: he had to verify that farmers had actually slaughtered the numbers of cows they claimed; if not, he had to kill the animals himself. Hunched over the wheel of his Buick, he crisscrossed a California countryside hit hard by the Depression, encountering grim, suspicious locals along the way who might well show their hospitality to a government agent by shoving under his nose the rat they were roasting on a makeshift spit. The one bright spot in these trips was occasionally coming across a fellow World War I veteran with whom he could swap stories. Edgar, who had volunteered for active duty, had come back from Europe with stories of bravery, sergeant’s stripes, and a gas mask. Once, he took the mask out of its box and pulled it over his head to amuse his son, who was three at the time. At the sight of the round opaque eyes and the sinister-looking rubber trunk, the boy screamed in terror, convinced that a hideous monster, a giant insect, had eaten his father and taken his place. For weeks afterward Phil kept scanning his father’s face for other signs of the substitution. Edgar’s attempts to tease his son out of his anxieties only heightened the boy’s fears. From then on, Dorothy couldn’t bring herself to look at her husband without rolling her eyes and huffing self-righteously. She had her own ideas about how to raise children.
Dorothy had been a beautiful woman when Edgar married her, shortly after the war; people said she looked liked Greta Garbo. Age and illness took their toll, however, and left her looking rather like a scarecrow, bereft of the sex appeal she had once possessed although not without a certain seductive severity. A voracious reader, Dorothy divided humanity into two camps: those who devoted their lives to creative pursuits and those who did not. Unable to conceive of anyone of any worth who did not fall squarely within the first camp, she spent her life in a state of intellectual bovarysme, trying but never managing to break into that elite circle, the ranks of published authors. She despised her husband, who, apart from things military, was interested only in football. He tried to pass on his passion to his son, sneaking him out of the house and taking him to games. Phil, however, was his mother’s child, even when he disobeyed her; he couldn’t understand how grown-ups could get so worked up about a stupid game.
Phil was one of those pudgy, brooding little boys who grow up to become chess champions or musical prodigies; in fact, his childhood had much in common with that of Nabokov’s Luzhin or Glenn Gould (his contemporary and in some respects his spiritual cousin). People praised him for his maturity and his precocious appreciation of music. More than anything else in the world, though, Phil loved spending hours on end hiding in old boxes, silent and safe from the world.
He was five when his parents separated and divorced. Dorothy had taken the initiative, having been assured by a psychiatrist that her child would not suffer from the separation (he complained about it his entire life). Edgar had not wanted to sever all ties to his son and ex-wife, but his first visits following the divorce were so coldly received that he soon gave up and moved to Nevada. Hoping to find work that was both more interesting and better paid than the secretarial position in which she felt she had been stagnating, Dorothy took Phil and moved to Washington, D.C.
The next three years were horrendous. Having left Chicago as a baby, Phil knew only the West Coast and its mild winters; in Washington he discovered the dull misery of rain and cold, poverty and loneliness. Dorothy spent her days working at the Federal Children’s Bureau, editing and correcting the proofs of educational pamphlets. Every day Phil would come home from Countryside School in Silver Spring, Maryland, the Quaker academy where the children gathered silently in circles awaiting the direct experience of God, and spend hours alone in the dark, sad apartment waiting for his mother to return. Since she came home late, too tired to tell him stories, he had to tell himself stories he already knew. His favorite was the one about the fairy who grants three wishes to a farmer and his wife. The wife asks for a nice fat sausage, and instantly one appears before her, fat and juicy. Her husband is furious. “Idiot! How can you waste one of your wishes that way?” he asks her. “May this sausage always hang from your nose!” And no sooner does he utter these words than the sausage attaches itself to the woman’s nose; to get rid of it, they have to use the third wish. Phil invented endless variations on the theme. When he learned to read, he discovered Winnie-the-Pooh and not long afterward, an abridged version of Quo Vadis. This story, which seemed to bring to life everything he had been hearing at his Quaker school, troubled him deeply. Unbeknownst to his mother, Phil spent his afternoons for an entire winter playing at being one of the first Christians hiding in the catacombs.
* * *
Phil and Dorothy’s lonely exile in Washington ended in 1938, when Dorothy took a job in the U.S. Forestry Department office located on the Berkeley campus of the University of California. Mother and son could breathe again. Anyone who lived there for more than a week knew that Berkeley was the center of the world. A feminist and pacifist, a tireless proponent of progressive ideas, Dorothy blossomed in this academic enclave in which one could be both an office worker and a women’s rights activist. As for Phil, he loved to watch the water in San Francisco Bay sparkling in the sun; he also loved the green lawns of the Berkeley campus and the small creek running through it in which local children were allowed to play and the bells of Sather Tower, whose joyous, peaceful tones echoed over the rooftops. School was a different matter. Phil had asthma and episodes of tachycardia, and he took full advantage of his conditions to miss school at every opportunity. Even when she could tell he was faking symptoms, Dorothy played along and let him stay home. Deep down, she was delighted that he took so little after his father, that he hated sports, horseplay, and all those other mindless tribal activities that absorbed the interest of the average red-blooded American male. He was more like her—an artistic soul, an albatross whose enormous wingspan prevented him from walking on the earth.
By the age of twelve, Phil was already immersed in the things that would become his lifelong passions: listening to music, reading, and typing. He had his mother buy him classical records, 78s at first, and he soon developed a talent—of which both mother and son were not a little proud—for identifying any symphony, opera, or concerto after hearing only a few measures played or, for that matter, hummed. He collected illustrated magazines with titles like Astounding! and Amazing! and Unknown!, and these periodicals, in the guise of serious scientific discussion, introduced him to lost continents, haunted pyramids, ships that vanished mysteriously in the Sargasso Sea. But he also read stories by Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, the recluse from Providence, Rhode Island, whose protagonists face abominations too monstrous for them to name or even describe.
Early on, Phil stopped merely reading these writers and began to imitate them. In Washington he had written a few lugubrious poems—one about a kitty eating a birdie, another about an ant that drags the carcass of a bumblebee into the forest and leaves it there, a third about a tearful family burying its blind dog. Typing freed Phil’s creative energies. As soon as he had a typewriter of his own, he became a wizard at the keyboard. No one could type faster than Philip Dick or for as long; it took him only ten days to finish his first novel, a sequel to Gulliver’s Travels called Return to Lilliput (the manuscript has been lost). His first published works were macabre tales inspired by Poe; they appeared in the “Young Author’s Club” column in the Berkeley Gazette. The magazine’s literary editor, who signed her name “Aunt Flo,” favored realism of the Chekhov or Nathanael West school. Even as she continued to publish his work, she exhorted him to write about what he knew—everyday life with its actual little details—and to keep his imagination in check. At thirteen, feeling unappreciated and misunderstood, Phil founded a magazine of his own. Foreshadowings of the future Philip K. Dick are everywhere apparent in this endeavor: in its title, The Truth, in the editorial statement that opened the magazine’s first and only issue (“This paper is sworn to print only that which is beyond doubt the TRUTH”), and in the fact that this uncompromising truth took the form of intergalactic adventures, the fruit of the feverish daydreams of the prolix adolescent who was the magazine’s sole contributor.
* * *
Around this time Phil began having a recurring dream in which he found himself in a bookstore trying to locate an issue of Astounding! that would complete his collection. The rare, indeed priceless, issue contained a story entitled “The Empire Never Ended” that, if only he could get his hands on it, would reveal the secrets of the universe to him. The first time he had the dream he awoke just as he had worked his way down to the bottom of a pile of old magazines he was sure contained the prized issue. He waited anxiously for the dream to recur, and whenever it did he found the pile of magazines exactly as he had left it. Again he started rummaging through. With each recurrence of the dream, the pile became smaller and smaller, but he always awoke before he could get to the bottom of it. He spent days reciting the story’s title to himself, until he could no longer distinguish it from the sound of the blood beating in his ears when he had a fever. He could see the letters that formed the words of the title; he could picture the cover illustration. The illustration worried him, even though—or because—he couldn’t quite bring it into focus. Over the course of weeks, Phil’s desire to find the magazine turned into anxiety that he actually might do so. He knew that if he read “The Empire Never Ended” the world’s secrets would be revealed, but he also understood the danger of such knowledge. He had read it in Lovecraft: if we knew everything, we would go mad with terror. Eventually, Phil began to see his dream as a diabolical trap. The buried issue was lying in wait, ready to devour him whole. Instead of tearing through the pile of magazines as he had at first, Phil tried to slow his fingers as they pulled one magazine after another from the pile, bringing him closer and closer to the final horror. He became afraid to fall asleep.
Then, for no apparent reason, he stopped having the dream. He awaited its return, first nervously, then impatiently; at the end of two weeks, he would have given anything for the dream to come back. He remembered the story of the three wishes, how the last one had to be squandered to remedy the catastrophe of the previous two. He had wished that he could read “The Empire Never Ended”; then, sensing danger, he wished that he wouldn’t have to; now, once again, he wished he could. Then again, it was probably better for him not to get his third wish, because he wouldn’t get a fourth wish to undo it. Still, he was disappointed that the dream didn’t recur. He longed for it. Then he forgot about it.
* * *
Phil lived alone with his mother. Dorothy and he called each other by their first names, treating each other with a curious combination of formality and intimacy. At night they left their bedroom doors open and held conversations from their beds. Their favorite topics were books, diseases, and medications. A lifelong hypochondriac, Dorothy maintained a supply of pharmaceuticals nearly as extensive as her son’s record collection. When tranquilizers started hitting the market, right after the war, she was among the first to set off for the new chemical El Dorado. She tried Thorazine, Valium, Tofranil, and Librium the instant they became available; she ranked them according to the quality of the stupor they induced and enthusiastically recommended her favorite brands to her friends.
From time to time Phil saw his father, who had remarried and settled in Pasadena, where he worked for the Department of Commerce and became a regular on a local radio program called This Is Your Government. His broadcasts impressed the shy teenager, who dreamed of exercising power over others. Like everyone else during the war years, Phil was patriotic but he was also fascinated by Nazi propaganda, priding himself on being able to admire a plan for the way it was being executed even though he found its goals abhorrent. Within him, he felt, there was a leader among men, but, as he had no followers, he stuck close to his own little world.
He contented himself with ruling over that little world, filling it with possessions. His mother constantly begged him to straighten up his room, but he was one of those compulsive personalities who, like Sherlock Holmes, can date a file by the thickness of the dust covering it and relish being the only one who can make sense of the reigning chaos. In Phil’s case, the chaos was an imperceptibly organized jumble of model airplanes and army tanks, chess sets, records, science fiction magazines—and, somewhat better hidden than those other things, pictures of naked women.
Of course, Phil was starting to become aware of girls, and even though, thanks to his lack of self-confidence, his interest remained fairly theoretical, it was enough to threaten the osmotic unity of mother and son. This interest, coupled with Phil’s bad grades, introversion, and anxiety attacks, persuaded Dorothy that her son should see a psychiatrist. He was fourteen when she took him to his first session, the first in a series that would continue nearly uninterrupted until his death.
* * *
It took only a few sessions—along with hours in between spent leafing through books that his mother had feverishly annotated—for young Phil to begin speaking knowledgeably about “neuroses,” “complexes,” and “phobias.” He subjected his classmates to various personality tests of his own devising from which, without revealing the sources of his wisdom, he drew conclusions that were to varying degrees flattering and welcome.
Toward the end of the 1930s, psychological tests had begun influencing middle-class Americans’ notions of what was going on in their heads—as well as in the heads of their neighbors. Administered to over fourteen million recruits subsequent to America’s declaration of war, these tests revealed that more than two million of them had one neuropsychiatric disorder or another that was serious enough to disqualify them from military service. Before the establishment of these new, reputedly scientific parameters of mental illness, no one had suspected the number of misfits would be so astronomically high. The result was panic—as well as a vast infusion of public money into the mental health sector and growing, popular interest in psychoanalysis, which, it was hoped, would turn these problem cases into responsible, mentally balanced citizens.
Freud, who on his first visit to New York in 1909 had seen himself as bringing the plague to the New World, would have smiled at this naive confidence in the powers of psychoanalysis. American psychiatrists and psychoanalysts lagged behind their European counterparts; they were less up-to-date on the latest squabbles and newest theories. They had also tailored Freudianism to fit their pragmatic outlook; they were not so such interested in their patients’ gradual journey toward self-knowledge and self-acceptance as in helping them adapt to social norms. The tests they were administering—at every opportunity—evaluated the progress their patients were making toward normal behavior, or at least toward the appearance of normal behavior.
Phil himself became adept at taking these tests, learning to recognize the trick questions and figuring out the expected answers. Like a student who has managed to get his hands on the teacher’s manual, he knew exactly which answer bubbles in the Wordsworth Personal Data Sheet or the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory he should blacken if he wanted to please the doctor, which figures he should see in the Rorschach splotches if he wanted to confound him. At will he could appear normal, normally abnormal, or (his forte) abnormally normal, and, by varying his symptoms, he ran circles around his hapless first psychiatrist.
Phil’s second therapist, a San Francisco psychoanalyst, was more intelligent. He was, after all, a Jungian, and anyone in Berkeley who knew anything about psychoanalysis knew that Jungians were the crème de la crème, that they specialized in the creative personality. Twice a week, Phil took the ferry across the bay to San Francisco. He told a friend who wondered where he was going all the time that he was taking a course for people with exceptionally high IQs and—naturally—that he had gotten in by cheating on the exam. Anyone who succeeds in convincing someone else that he’s a genius, Phil added slyly, when his friend snickered conspiratorially, proves that he’s superior even to an authentic genius. The friend began avoiding him after that.
With his new psychiatrist Phil discovered the extraordinary effect he could achieve by talking about his dead sister. He understood that a trauma like Jane’s death made him interesting, and he spent long sessions speculating as to who had revealed to him the dramatic circumstances of his birth and on what occasion. Obviously it was his mother, and she must have told him fairly early on. But it seemed to him that he had always known. In his earliest recollections, he had an imaginary friend named Jane with black hair and dark eyes who had a flair for wriggling out of danger—so unlike Phil, the awkward, overweight little boy who hid in old cardboard boxes. He also claimed to remember his mother’s once screaming in a moment of anger that she wished he had died instead of Jane.
His psychiatrist’s revelation that Phil had a castrating mother felt to the boy like some sort of betrayal: why was Dorothy paying this man to say bad things about her? But the information didn’t fall on deaf ears. Indeed it soon became the source of new anxieties. The signs were all there: castrating mother, absent father, interest in art and culture. Phil was sure he was going to become a homosexual.
Fear of homosexuality was one obsession of Phil’s teenage years but not the only one. He suffered from dizziness and agoraphobia. He was afraid of public transportation and was incapable of eating even a sandwich in public. At fifteen, during a concert, he was suddenly overcome by a panic attack. He felt as though he were sinking away and looking at the world through a submarine’s periscope.
Another time he fell ill watching a newsreel that showed American troops on a Pacific island using flamethrowers to kill Japanese soldiers. What was worse than seeing images of men being turned into human torches was the delight of the audience. Phil ran out of the theater, followed by a horrified Dorothy; it was years before he set foot in a movie theater again.
He also stopped going to school, preferring instead to stay at home reading his schoolbooks while listening to records. He enjoyed studying German most of all, as it seemed to go so well with the music in the background. Choosing German had been a fairly brave thing to do; these were, after all, the war years. He reveled in the poetry, which seemed written to be sung. The melodies of Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms pervaded his existence. He could think of nothing better to do with his life than listen to music, and so, at the age of sixteen, he decided to make a profession out of it.
* * *
Phil took a part-time job at University Radio, a store that sold records, radios, record players, and the first television sets. The store also did repairs, and the repairmen constituted a kind of aristocracy among the store’s personnel. Philip envied them. These were men who could fix things—and fixing things was the essence of human genius. The heroes of his novels would often be tinkerers, handymen, jacks of all trades. Though this might seem a little strange, given that he had grown up in a college town and read voraciously, Phil made his choice very early on—well before anyone could accuse him of sour grapes. The university, the local hangouts where students talked endlessly about how to remake the world—these were not for him. He would always prefer the mom-and-pop store, the small establishments whose owners swept the sidewalk every morning before raising the metal shutters and greeting their first customers.
Phil’s job at University Radio was to shelve the classical records as they arrived from distributors, as well as to sweep the floors and change the toilet paper rolls in the bathrooms located behind listening booth number 3. It also meant buying records for his private collection at a discount and getting into debates with fellow employees and customers alike over the best recording of the Magic Flute. The store became his world, a stable and familiar environment where nothing disruptive would happen, a place that seemed to shield him from panic attacks and agoraphobia. His self-confidence grew. If he found a female customer attractive, he would take her into one of the booths and play the brilliant young baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who sang Schubert lieder as no one had sung them before. While the record was playing, Phil would watch the girl with his intense blue eyes, humming along, a little off-pitch, in the deep, resonant register that had now replaced the piping voice of his adolescence.
Phil dreamed of hosting his own radio show. What better way to pick up women? He worked at a station in Berkeley, but unfortunately not as a disk jockey. His job was to choose the music, while a guy with slicked-back hair, saddle shoes, and an argyle sweater whom he heartily despised wielded control over the microphone. In one of Phil’s favorite daydreams, he is an astronaut circling high above an earth devastated by atomic catastrophe. From the spaceship he is condemned to call home for the rest of his life, he sometimes receives radio messages from survivors on the planet’s surface. And he starts to broadcast back. After a while his listeners wait as anxiously and eagerly for his broadcasts as Resistance fighters did for the BBC during the war. He plays records for them, reads books, and relays news. Thanks to his tireless efforts, a bond forms between isolated groups of survivors, inspired by the warmth of his voice not to lose heart. People huddle around crude homemade radio sets, their most precious possession. Without them, and without that lonely but valiant disk jockey somewhere up there in the sky looking down at them, they would revert to a state of barbarism. If civilization were ever to take root again, it would be because he had somehow managed to protect its fragile seeds. For Phil, the most exquisite moment of this daydream was when he resisted the temptation of allowing himself to be treated like a god by the people below. He always managed to triumph over this temptation, but just barely.
* * *
Mother and son remembered differently the circumstances surrounding his moving out of their apartment. According to Phil, his mother took it hard and threatened to call the police to prevent him from leaving home and ending up the homosexual he would surely become without her to watch over him. Dorothy, on the other hand, maintained that she practically had to push her son out the door; he was too old to be living with her. Whichever the case, Phil moved his collection of books, records, and magazines and his beloved Magnavox record player into an apartment shared by a group of bohemian Berkeley students. Here only “great literature” had a place: academic interest in popular culture was still some ways off. Phil stopped reading science fiction, put away the pulp magazines that had fascinated him in his adolescence, and began to read Joyce, Kafka, Pound, Wittgenstein, and Camus. An ideal evening for him meant listening to Buxteude or Monteverdi while budding avant-garde poets recited long passages from Finnegans Wake by heart, stopping only to point out traces of Dante’s influence. Everyone was trying to write, engaging in frenetic name-dropping, exchanging manuscripts, and offering advice. Phil wrote a number of short stories which he tried unsuccessfully to place in magazines, and two novels, about which we know only what he later said about them. The first was a long interior monologue involving Jungian archetypes and a hopeless romantic quest; the second, set in Maoist China, was about the relationship of two men and a woman trapped in a complex web of secerts and lies.
Around this time Phil lost his virginity and, with it, his fear that he was a homosexual. The girl was a customer at the store whom a more experienced fellow employee had steered him toward. Refusing to sell her the saccharine Christmas carols she had come in to buy, he took her into a listening booth and played his favorite records. Then he took her down to the basement; its usual occupants, the repairmen, had gone to lunch. One week later he proposed, thus beginning his long career of compulsive monogamy. Phil and Jeanette rented a dark little studio apartment. There Phil discovered the rigors of being an impoverished newlywed; he also learned how little he had in common with his wife. She fell asleep as he read her William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience or his own short stories; she found Finnegans Wake incomprehensible. Worse, she got sick of listening to his records and after a few weeks started threatening to smash them: Phil knew then that it was over. The judge found the threat of smashed records less than compelling as grounds for divorce; Phil, on the other hand, never quite recovered from it. The idea that someone might destroy his precious record collection haunted him for years. Dick wrote novel after novel in which a cruel wife sets upon her husband’s cherished albums, and in his second-to-last novel, it is to the threat of this very action that Yahweh himself must resort to rouse the reluctant hero; nothing else has worked.
With Phil’s second marriage, the danger receded. Once again, he met his wife-to-be in the record store. She was perusing the Italian opera section as he hovered nervously nearby, unwilling to make a move until he made certain she had tastes similar to his. Kleo Apostolides was a dark, pretty nineteen-year-old from a Greek family; an avid reader, she was remarkably even-tempered compared with Phil’s future companions. Phil and Kleo married in June 1950. Borrowing money, they bought a ramshackle house in a working-class neighborhood down by the Berkeley waterfront. The roof leaked and the paint was peeling off the walls. Whenever it rained, they had to put pans everywhere. Neither Kleo nor Phil had realized how much work was involved in owning a house. The difficulties didn’t seem to faze them, though—Phil spent most of his money buying records and his free time listening to them, and Kleo was determined to resist anything resembling a bourgeois lifestyle. A stalwart foot soldier of local radicalism, Kleo wore jeans and horn-rimmed glasses and sang the songs of the Spanish Civil War that the members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade had sung as they marched on Madrid. She discussed everything with equal vehemence, whether out of enthusiasm or indignation. She especially loved feeling indignant.
A political science major at Berkeley, Kleo did odd jobs to pay her tuition. Phil spent his days at University Radio. Unlike practically every other young person in Berkeley, he was not a student. Several days after he had signed up for courses on Sturm und Drang and the philosophy of David Hume, a severe panic attack had put an end to his academic career. Not particularly ambitious in conventional terms, to say the least, he quickly got over whatever disappointment he may have felt. On the other hand, now that he had become a full-time record salesman with no prospects other than maybe—someday—managing the store, he began to worry that he might turn into another Berkeley eccentric, one of those old guys beloved of generations of students. Remember him? The guy at the record store who would rap for hours if you got him going on German idealism or the ’53 recording of Tristan where Schwarzkopf sings the top notes for Kirsten Flagstad?
Phil’s meeting a writer named Anthony Boucher at University Radio thus proved a turning point. Boucher was a sort of impresario of popular literature, writing, editing, and reviewing detective novels and science fiction under a variety of pseudonyms. Here, to Phil’s astonishment and, ultimately, to his relief, was a grown man, a person of obvious distinction and discriminating taste in music, who did not look down on a genre that Phil had felt obliged to abandon rather than risk the scorn of his former housemates. Shyness kept Phil from attending the weekly creative writing course Boucher gave at his home. But Kleo went, taking with her several of her husband’s pieces, including one science fiction story. Phil’s second great surprise came when Boucher told him that he found his work promising. Heartened, Phil gave up writing self-conscious and overwrought character analyses and interior monologues and let his imagination run free. Thus it was that in the October 1951 issue of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, of which Boucher was editor-in-chief, Philip K. Dick’s first published short story appeared. In “Roog,” a barking dog chases after the garbage men, sensing that they are predatory carnivores from another planet who make off with the earthlings’ garbage in order to analyze it, in preparation, one suspects, for their abduction of the earthlings themselves.
Phil was not paid much for the piece, but he was paid, and thereupon concluded that he could actually make a living from writing. He quit his job at University Radio and began writing full-time. He got an agent. In 1952, he sold four short stories; in 1953, thirty; in 1954, twenty-eight; and in 1955 he published his first story collection, as well as his first novel.