Books Acquired:
Classic Crews, Harry Crews
I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon, Philip K. Dick
The White Album, Joan Didion
The Caltraps of Time, David I. Masson
Against the Country, Ben Metcalf

Books Offloaded:

Progress Made:
The Divine Madness of Philip K. Dick, Kyle Arnold
The White Album, Joan Didion

Books Finished:
Radio Free Albemuth, Philip K. Dick
I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon, Philip K. Dick
Messiah, Gore Vidal

The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those who he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way; not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not.
—Philip K. Dick

Last summer I noted that Bishop James Pike, friend of Philip K. Dick and model for the character of Timothy Archer in The Transmigration of…, was “the subject of a famous essay by Joan Didion,” and added, “I guess I’ll have to read that now.”

As the relevant volume, The White Album, is a famous and popular one, I figured I was sure to run across a used copy in my compulsive bookstore forays. But it never happened. Well, if nobody’s selling their copy, it must be a great book, right? So finally I broke down and resorted to eBay. And so far I am quite impressed.

The title essay, which takes up the first 50 pages, is quite a thing — a wide-ranging memoir that bounces from intimate personal details to widescreen cultural commentary. The Beatles do not make an appearance, but the Doors pop up, as does Linda Kasabian of Manson Family fame.

It is followed by the Pike essay, which turned out to be a wry, pitiless, pretty convincing takedown of the man PKD lionized. In Didion’s portrait Pike is almost Trumpian in his heedless narcissism; the sort of man who, when unpacking a new dress shirt, lets the packaging fall to the floor and never thinks of it again. Brilliant and driven, but with his head in the clouds… which may be why he and Phil got along.

The last act of the Pike story remains mysterious. He drove out into the Judean desert in search of the historical Jesus, carrying only two bottles of Coca-Cola as sustenance, and died there. Somehow this detail — it wasn’t even water, just Coke — makes the story all the more haunting. It wasn’t technically suicide, but then again it was; a weird ending to a weird life.

The White Album has been pure delight so far; it’s great to be able to put yourself in such sure hands. If indeed Joan Didion is capable of writing an inelegant sentence, which cannot be confirmed, certainly none made it through to the finished product.

I almost gave up on Messiah — Gore Vidal’s “science fiction” novel — early on, annoyed by its ludicrously florid prose. I mean, get a load of this:

That I am by a devious and unexpected route arrived at a great old age is to me a source of some complacency, even on those bleak occasions when I find myself attending inadvertently the body’s dissolution, a process as imperceptible yet sure as one of those faint, persistent winds which shift the dunes of sand in that desert of dry Libya which burns, white and desolate, beyond the mountains I see from the window of my room, a window facing, aptly enough, the west where all the kings lie buried in their pride.

Unlike when he wrote those “Edgar Box” mystery novels, in which Vidal nimbly adapted his style to the genre, here he seems overeager to prove that he’s a Real Writer. But after a while the style settles down a bit, and I was able to get through Messiah’s 200 pages in fairly short order.

Despite the fact that the words “A Ballantine science fiction classic” are emblazoned across the front cover, this is not really sci-fi at all; speculative fiction, maybe. Messiah is a dark fable not unlike A Stranger in a Strange Land (which it predated by seven years). It follows the emergence of a prophet named John Cave, who preaches that death is preferable to life.

“We are small,” said Cave. “In space, on this tiny planet, we are nothing. Death brings us back to the whole. We lose this instant of awareness, of suffering, like spray in the ocean: there it forms… there it goes back to the sea.”

The book follows Cave’s cult as it grows, develops a bureaucracy, and moves inexorably toward its logical conclusion. I can’t necessarily recommend it, nor would I warn anyone off it; I’m still trying to parse it.

Likewise, I’m still parsing Radio Free Albemuth, a mostly dark piece of work that ends with Phil Dick and his alter ego Nicholas Brady locked in a losing struggle with the repressive government of Ferris F. Fremont (a thinly veiled Richard Nixon). This description of Fremont’s America gave me the chills, rather:

We now dwelt in a very large prison, without walls, bounded by Canada, Mexico, and two oceans. There were the jailers, the turnkeys, the informers, and somewhere in the Midwest the solitary confinement camps. Most people did not appear to notice. Since there were no literal bars or barbed wire, since they had committed no crimes, had not been arrested or taken to court, they did not grasp the change, the dread transformation, of their situation. It was the classic case of a man kidnapped while standing still.

I find myself wondering, again, what Phil would make of our current predicament, and of our current president — at once a cruder and more advanced version of Nixon, who seems disarmingly human in comparison. The current guy is, in his way, a perfect politician — utterly without those vague scraps of conscience that usually limit what one is capable of.

The nadir of RFA comes when PKD is told that the government has a plan for him:

“We will keep you alive, Phil; we will release books under your name which we will write. For several years we have been preparing them; they already exist. Your style is easy to imitate.”

What would Phil have to say about AI? Well, actually, he thought a lot about these things, as far back as 1979:

Bob Bibleman had the impression that robots wouldn’t look you in the eye. And when one had been in the vicinity small valuable object disappeared. A robot’s idea of order was to stack everything into one pile. Nonetheless, Bibleman had to order lunch from robots, since vending ranked too low on the wage scale to attract humans.

“A hamburger, fries, strawberry shake, and—” Bibleman paused, reading the printout. “Make that a supreme double cheeseburger, fries, a chocolate malt—”

“Wait a minute,” the robot said. “I’m already working on the burger. You want to buy into this week’s contest while you’re waiting?”

“I don’t get the royal cheeseburger,” Bibleman said.

“That’s right.

It was hell living in the twenty-first century. Information transfer had reached the velocity of light. Bibleman’s older brother had once fed a ten-word plot outline into a robot fiction machine, changed his mind as to the outcome, and found that the novel was already in print. He had to program a sequel in order to make his correction.

That’s from the story “The Exit Door Leads In,” which appears in the posthumous volume called I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon. This collects stories from the last years of PKD’s life, along with a seemingly random smattering of ones from the Fifties and Sixties. There’s also a long essay called “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall
Apart Two Days Later,” which has the feel of a college commencement speech; I have no idea where it actually comes from. But it’s a worthwhile read, as he rarely wrote so forthrightly about his own life. You can find a PDF here.

And if you’ve made it this far into this meandering jumble, you deserve a treat. Please give yourself one, whatever it may be.