Substance
Philip K. Dick, who had been blowing his mind for a living since the `50s, was right at home in the late-'60s counterculture.
PHILIP K. DICK, who died in 1982, is doing very well these days, embraced in places both high and low. His mind-bending science fiction novels -- a remarkable number of which are still in print -- bristle with blurbs proclaiming him the United States' Borges and its Kafka too. Hollywood has canonized him with adaptations ("Blade Runner," "
He's come a long way. Dick began his literary career as a prodigious hack, cranking out thirty stories a year for pulp sci-fi magazines like Astounding and Startling Stories. A highly impractical man, he was actually the most practical of writers, unconcerned with inspiration or perfection, and ready with a handy way around any blockage. Stalled plot? No problem. Simply consult the I Ching. Need a nap? Take some speed. "The words come out of my hands, not my brain," he once said. "I write with my hands."
Dick composed at the typewriter at the rate of 80 to 100 words a minute and could work, literally, for days on end. Concluding one marathon session on the 1972 story "A Little Something for Us Tempunauts," he stood up and passed out. The bulk of his work was completed on amphetamines, although he would later propose that a happy kink in his metabolism had actually prevented the drugs from ever reaching his brain. (A most Dickian claim, that -- speedfreak bluster with a twinkle in its eye.)
The prose produced under these conditions was of necessity rather thin. Dick had no time for style; his physical descriptions are perfunctory, his names boring: "Heather" or "Donna" or "Sherri" for the women, while the men are lumbered with B-movie clunkers like "Jason Taverner" and "Timothy Archer." There is, pervasively, no atmosphere in his writing. Or rather the atmosphere is all mental -- the physical world is littered around in the form of detritus and gadgets. When there is nothing else his novels will run on brain-fumes alone.
In "I Am Alive and You Are Dead" Carrere replaces the affection of Dick's previous biographer, Lawrence Sutin, with something like clinical attentiveness. Every whorl of Dick's mind, every delusion, every leap through the looking glass, is chronicled. The effect is powerful but numbing. Dick's genius is cranky, assaultive and -- for all its variations -- monomaniacal: You yield to him in bewilderment, as to some darkly impassioned mechanic or repairman who talks about valves until your head spins. "As to our reality being a projected framework," he explained in his 1978 essay "Cosmogony and Cosmology," "it appears to be a projection by an artifact, a computerlike teaching machine that guides, programs, and generally controls us as we act without awareness of it within our projected world." (And this was the first line of the essay.)
In the classic American style he went through a series of wives, wearing them out as if in pursuit of the Goddess herself, but Dick's only real muse was his own persistent ontological discomfort, his sense that we have been tricked, and things are not as they seem.
As a disbeliever in the ordinary he was ahead of his time, but not by much. With the arrival of the counterculture in the late `60s, Dick -- then in early middle age -- found his people. This was after all the time of the Great Questioning, the singular moment in history when it was deemed wiser, and perhaps more virtuous, to dynamite one's own consciousness with untested pharmaceuticals than to endure for another minute the drizzling bummer of consensual reality. Dick, who had been blowing his mind for a living since the `50s, was right at home.
On the heels of yet another domestic collapse (the departure of his fourth wife in 1970) he threw open his doors: in came the bikers and the burnouts, the street kids and the addicts. "Live it, or else," went the wisdom, and Dick -- in the company of the human fallout that now filled his house -- lived it. "We are all taking speed and we are all going to die, but we will have a few more years and we will be happy," he wrote in a letter in November 1970.
But the artist in him also lived outside it, saving it all up for his masterpiece: "A Scanner Darkly." He wrote it in two months. Bob Arctor is a user and dealer of Substance D, a street drug that eventually turns one half of an addict's brain against the other. He is also a narcotics officer named Fred, assigned to the surveillance of a user and dealer named Bob Arctor. Wearing the "scramble suit" that ensures none of his fellow undercover officers will recognize him, Fred/Bob "scans" himself with hidden technology, as Substance D slowly splits his personality down the middle.
"Scanning," taping oneself, narcing on oneself, turned out to be the metaphor of the `60s; at the decade's fractured end everyone was split-minded and self-suspecting. In the Oval Office Richard Nixon was smoothly activating the occult tape-reels. Fallen Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman, on the run from drug charges in Canada in 1976, was seen by a friend having an apparently schizophrenic conversation into a hand-held device. "Someone's taping us right now," he complained. To which the inevitable answer was: "Of course someone's taping us, I'm taping us."
Dick called Nixon's America "the betrayal state." He was certain the FBI was watching him. But as a writer he had been narcing on himself from the very beginning, observing the being called Philip K. Dick with a dispassionate and not entirely benevolent eye, policing its thoughts and processes, producing them in evidence. In his latest biographer he has found a willing collaborator.
James Parker is a writer living in Brookline.
