REVIEW-ARTICLES
- Carl Freedman. In Search of Dick's Boswell (Paul Williams. Only Apparently Real: The World of Philip K. Dick.
Gregg Rickman. To the High Castle--Philip K. Dick: A Life, 1928-1962. Daniel J.H.
Levack. PKD: A Philip K Dick Bibliography)
- De Witt Douglas Kilgore. The
Blue-and-Not-Yellow Sun (Darko Suvin. Positions
and Presuppositions in Science Fiction)
- Robert M. Philmus. English-Language
Science Fiction Via Italy
(Rudyard J. Kipling. Nel Mondo di ABC... ; Edward
Everett Hale. La Luna di Mattoni; William Morris. La Terra Cava e altri
racconti..)
- George Slusser. Le Guin and the Future of
SF Criticism (Bernard Selinger. Le Guin and
Identity in Contemporary Fiction; Elizabeth Cummins. Understanding Ursula K. Le
Guin)
BOOKS IN REVIEW
Carl
Freedman
In Search of Dick's Boswell
Paul Williams. Only
Apparently Real: The World of Philip K. Dick. NY: Arbor House, 1986.
184pp. $7.95 paper.
Gregg Rickman. To
the High Castle--Philip K. Dick: A Life, 1928-1962. Long Beach, CA:
Valentine Press, 1989. 451pp. $19.95 paper.
Daniel J.H. Levack. PKD:
A Philip K Dick Bibliography. Westport, CT: Meckler, 1988.156pp.
$35.00.
Although, as I have already discussed in the pages of SFS, the years since Philip K.
Dick's death in 1982 have witnessed a marked increase in the amount of critical attention
devoted to him, there has probably been even more biographical work on Dick in the last
eight years or so; and there is the promise of still more to come in the near future. Why
has the life of a troubled, often irresponsible man provoked more interest than the body
of fiction which I--and by no means I alone--take to be the most fascinating and important
produced by any American writer during the second half of the 20th century? One may be
tempted to conclude that, as Gore Vidal has often suggested, the regime of celebrity under
which we live has simply rendered novelists a good deal more interesting than novels for
most people. But there is, I think, a special factor at work in Dick's case. Most
biographical writing about Dick has been produced by personal acquaintances, who, whether
they knew the author intimately or more casually, seem to have been mightily struck by
Dick as a personality. They have, one gathers, accordingly been moved to try to convey to
the rest of us some sense of the author's presence; big chunks of Dickian talk are common
in Dick biography. An interesting precedent and comparison is suggested by Dr. Samuel
Johnson--and Dick, after all, appears to have been (at least in certain moods) a
splendidly egoistic talker very much in the Johnsonian tradition. The immense amount of
Johnson biography that appeared in the years just after the Doctor's death was motivated
less by the importance of Johnson's poetry and prose than by the desire to capture on
paper what the great personality and conversationalist had been like in the coffee house
and the sitting room. Unfortunately, this task--which may seem straightforward enough--is
in fact extremely difficult, and Johnson biography typically offers little more than
tentative glimpses of the presence that dazzled (and intimidated) contemporaries. The
exception, of course, is Boswell, and Boswell's rare success has often caused him to be
canonized as the greatest of all biographers.
Dick has yet to find his Boswell. Nor has he yet found that more dispassionate sort of
biographer--I think of Sartre on Flaubert, Isaac Deutscher on Trotsky, Richard Ellmann on
Joyce, or Erik Erikson on Luther, to pick a few diverse examples--capable of synthesizing
erudite scholarship, critical analysis, and Esthetic power into a biography which is
first-class both as a work of science and of art. All this is merely to say that Dick has
not yet found the biographer, whether of Boswellian or more academic type, that he
deserves; and given the odds (great biographers being rather rarer than great novelists),
he probably never will. But we need not therefore belittle the efforts of the Dick
biographers--such as the two under review here--whose work, however imperfect, is seldom
less than interesting.
Paul Williams is the Rolling Stone journalist who became one of Dick's closest friends,
whose early pro-Dick writings have an important and honorable place in the history of
Dick's literary reputation, and who currently serves as Dick's literary executor. He takes
a decidedly Boswellian approach to his subject. This volume is quite frankly a memoir by
the junior partner in a literary friendship rather than a work of scholarship; and
excerpts from the master's conversation amount to an even higher proportion of the text
than is the case with the Life of Johnson.
The comparison is not to Williams' advantage. Part of Boswell's genius lay in
understanding that the mere transcription of conversation rarely produces the same
impression on paper that the original did in person: in order to preserve the spirit of a
great talker's talk, it is often necessary to take some liberties with the letter,
pruning, revising, embellishing, and contextualizing. Williams seems to be too much the
honest plodding journalist to take such liberties. Doubtless as faithful in his way as a
tape recorder--he dutifully preserves an "um," a "yeah," and even a
"[pause]"--he falls short of the higher Boswellian fidelity. Was the experience
of hearing Dick's talk really much like the experience of reading it here? Was there
really as much whining and as (comparatively) little humor in Dick's conversation as
Williams' transcripts tend to suggest? I doubt it. And if so, it is hard to guess why so
many intelligent people found the author's presence so thrilling.
Still, Dick's meandering musings make for sympathetic, if often rather sad, reading;
and Williams is probably quite right to devote as much space as he does to what may in
some ways be the central event of the author's adult life: the notorious break-in and
burglary at Dick's home in November 1971, probably but not certainly the work of the FBI
or some other government agency. Dick rarely says anything that directly illuminates his
fiction in any significant way, but his recurring brooding and theorizing over this
traumatizing event--the sort of thing one might expect to happen to Joe Chip, Rick
Deckard, or Bob Arctor--resonates in an almost eerily profound way with the most searching
elements of the novels and stories. The greatest writer of paranoia since Kafka was
himself a paranoiac, but--just as an attentive reading of Ubik or Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep? or any number of his other works would lead one to
expect--Dick's paranoia had at least as much to do with the harsh realities of Nixonian
America as with his own inner state.
I suspect that Dick's paranoia was also related, though in ways still somewhat obscure,
to another outstanding feature of his personality, one that Williams shrewdly identifies
and that deserves fuller analysis than he gives it: the trait that Williams describes in
one of his chapter titles as "a life lived on paper." Williams' point is that
Dick was one for whom nothing was quite real unless and until he had gotten it down on
paper. The insight is eminently plausible (for one thing, Dick's immense productivity
cannot be fully comprehended by the usual explanation of economic necessity, real though
that necessity generally was); but the corollary would seem to be that what Dick wrote on
paper was ipso facto real for him and in a position to compete with the
"real" reality. If life can be lived on paper, then paper can colonize and
dominate "life." The system-building and megalomania at the heart of all
paranoia may thus have been at the heart of the writing process for Dick as well. Though
this is not the place to pursue this line of speculation, it seems likely that if a truly
great psycho-biographer--one of Sartrean or Eriksonian stature--should ever devote a
volume to Dick, the result could be a pathbreaking theoretical treatise on the relations
between paranoia and writing: which is to say, finally, between writing and the formation
of the ego itself. Lacan and Derrida would be relevant to such an endeavor, of course, but
I suspect that in the end Dick could throw nearly as much light on them as they on him.
Williams' biography, then, though less than truly great, can be recommended as an
interesting, thought-provoking effort. I should add that, in the several years it has been
on my shelves, I have most often gone back to it for the sake of the invaluable
bibliographical index. Though it is quite short --it covers only the novels and gives only
a few lines of information about each--Williams' special access to Dick's private papers
has enabled him to make many important contributions to our bibliographical knowledge of
the author, not only about the work unpublished in Dick's lifetime (thanks to Williams, it
has mostly been published since), but also concerning the order of composition of the
published novels, which did not always correspond to the order of their public appearance.
All in all, and despite the shortcomings of this volume, it is difficult to avoid
concluding that Dick, who probably made more than his share of mistakes in judging other
people, chose his literary executor well.
Those desiring more bibliographic detail than Williams offers may be referred to
Levack--but with some important cautions. When the first edition of Levack's bibliography
came out in 1981, it was a superb contribution. Its core is an alphabetical list of Dick's
books (novels and short-story collections), giving for each a description of content,
bibliographical data about multiple editions, and (a very thoughtful touch) reproductions
of cover art. There is a similar list of the stories, a list of adaptations of Dick's work
into non-literary media, a list of connected stories and continuing characters, and more.
It is difficult to imagine that anyone could have produced a much better Dick bibliography
in 1981. But--mainly because of Williams and the Dick estate--the general condition of
bibliographical knowledge about Dick was massively transformed between 1981 and 1988, and
one reasonably expects that a "revised" edition will reflect the changes. Not a
bit of it. Despite a few small corrections, this is basically the same book as in 1981,
often to the point of absurdity: for instance, Levack continues to include in a list of
unpublished manuscripts work that was in fact in the bookstores before his own allegedly
"revised" volume came out. Even the typesetting and pagination appear unchanged.
Levack continues to deserve a big debt of gratitude for his work a decade ago, but--if
such a thing were legally possible--he (or, perhaps more likely, his publisher) also
deserves to be sued for lack of truth in packaging. I wonder how many of Dick's readers
bought this edition expecting it to be as good by 1988 standards as the original was by
1981 standards--only to find that they had in effect thrown their money away.
Finally, it remains to consider the most ambitious of the texts under review here, the
first volume in Rickman's projected two-volume biography of Dick. Though Rickman was not
an intimate friend of Dick's--unlike Williams or Tim Powers (who contributes a highly
laudatory foreword)--he was personally acquainted with the author, and there is a
substantial Boswellian component to his biography--unsurprisingly, since among Rickman's
earlier works are Philip K Dick: In His Own Words (1984) and Philip K Dick:
The Last Testament (1985), both quintessentially Boswellian efforts, though Rickman
is as far as Williams from attaining Boswell's own remarkably high level. For the most
part, however, Rickman's new effort is more scholarship then memoir, and he is first of
all to be congratulated on his thoroughness.
If the second volume is of comparable bulk to the first, the final product will
approach a thousand pages. Admittedly, first-class editing could sizzle that bulk down
somewhat, for Rickman's style is often verbose and almost never genuinely elegant. Yet,
even allowing for that factor, there is quite enough substance here to give some
plausibility to Powers' generous claim that Rickman has captured "something close to
the totality of the man, in all his depth and contradictory aspects." Though we may
suspect Powers of a certain confusion of categories when he goes on to say that "to
read Rickman's biography is, in a real sense, to know Philip K. Dick better than any one
person ever did," I strongly suspect that Rickman's will indeed be considered in most
respects the standard Dick biography, perhaps for years or even decades to come.
It is not, of course, merely a matter of quantity. Though Rickman's general tone and
manner are more journalistic than academic, in point of conscientiousness he can lay claim
to the solid academic virtues. He has done his homework, having pored over Dick's own
published writings, having put in a good deal of time in the relevant archives (one
gathers that the ubiquitous Paul Williams was helpful in this regard), and having worn out
his share of shoe leather in interviewing not only Dick himself but many people who knew
him. But not only has Rickman assembled more material relevant to Dick's life and career
than anyone ever had before; he has also had the wit to understand that such material
needs to be organized in several different ways, that good biography approaches the
subject from various angles. To pick a few major examples, Rickman approaches Dick as a
psychological subject in formation (and deformation), as a cultural figure of mid-century
America, and--though the slant is of course less critical than biographical--as a great
novelist. In sum, Rickman has made a serious, worthy attempt at great Dick biography of
the academic (or quasi-academic) sort.
Yet he has not produced it. My main complaint is not with this or that particular
fault, but is simply that, though Rickman's effort is in almost every way competent, it is
in almost no way really brilliant. For instance, Rickman's psychological detective work
(perhaps the most original aspect of his book and of which there is more to come in the
second volume) is certainly interesting; in deriving much of Dick's character from early
experiences of child abuse, he not only propounds an interesting biographical thesis
but--most admirably--attempts to widen awareness of and thus help prevent this
particularly hideous form of suffering in the future. Yet he does not, finally, command
the kind of psychoanalytic background and depth which enable (say) Erikson's
reconstructions of Luther and Gandhi to enrich our understanding of the category of the
psychic itself. Similarly, though Rickman is aware of the necessity to situate Dick in
historical context (he rightly stresses, for example, Dick's horrified fascination for
Nazi Germany and his wide-ranging knowledge of the latter), he is not really a great
cultural historian; and though he is well-informed concerning Dick's fiction, he lacks the
theoretical equipment needed to be a major critic of it. There are also shortcomings of a
more general sort. I have already mentioned the relative drabness of Rickman's style, and
a similar insufficiency of aesthetic power or shaping joy is evident in the overall
organization as well. Although we will be better able to judge this matter when the second
volume appears (under the title Firebright: The Life of Philip K Dick 1962-1982),
thus far Rickman seems to me to incline rather too much to the
one-damn-thing-after-another mode of composition.
Having suggested these limitations, however, I should again stress that my implicit
basis of comparison is a work for which we have every right to hope but will probably
never in fact possess: a genuinely great life of Dick, an opus which would make to
American biography a contribution comparable in quality to that made to American fiction
by more than a dozen of Dick's novels and at least two dozen or so of his short stories.
If Williams' and Rickman's attempts fall definably short of full success, their
shortcomings are, after all, the sort of failure which Dick himself teaches us to expect,
especially in ourselves. I once, as an undergraduate, had a professor who propounded the
notion that the manners and mores of literary scholars sometimes seemed to be based upon
the authors they studied; thus, he maintained, Miltonists tend to be dour and harshly
judgmental of one another, while Burtonians or Joyceans are comparatively easy-going and
much given to vinous recreation together. Though I must confess no preference for the
drug-taking and mystical communion with other Dickians which might seem to be appropriate
according to my old professor's theory, I do think we ought to be--and generally
are--conscious of our own imperfections and tolerant of each other's. None of us, finally,
is really adequate to the situation at hand. All of us are in some way Joe Chips, none of
us a Glen Runciter--or, to be more precise, none of us is the commanding figure of
authority which Joe Chip at some points wrongly supposes Glen Runciter to be.
Stephen Dedalus, notoriously, described history as a nightmare from which he was trying
to awake. Certain literary realists and naturalists would reply that no such waking is
possible or desirable. Philip K. Dick's contribution to the controversy is, in effect, to
insist that you can awake as many times as you please, but the nightmare, in one form or
another, will still be there. In that spirit, we should be grateful to the biographers who
can tell us something about the personal nightmares of this portly, tormented, egoistic
performer who--victim of assorted horrors from child abuse to probable government
thuggery--achieved the most compelling vision of the nightmare that is the United States
of America during the second half of the 20th (the American) century.
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