Norman Spinrad 1 Rue Frederic Sauton Paris 75004 France the TRANSMOGRIFICATION of PHILIP K. DICK by Norman Spinrad I Really Didn

Norman Spinrad 1 rue Frederic Sauton Paris 75004 France THE TRANSMOGRIFICATION OF PHILIP K. DICK by Norman Spinrad I really didn't want to write this essay, for Philip K. Dick was a close friend, his untimely death affected me deeply, and aside from a brief obituary I was cozened into writing at the time and an introduction to one volume of his collected short stories, I have been unwilling and perhaps unable to write about Phil since. But this book is intended as a critical overview of the modern literature, Phil Dick is arguably the greatest science fiction writer who ever lived and certainly a central figure in the literary history of the field, so SCIENCE FICTION IN THE REAL WORLD would not only have a gaping void at its heart if a consideration of Dick's work were omitted, it would do a disservice to his literary legacy. However, I will not be so disingenuous as to pretend to objectivity; indeed it is obvious from the two opening paragraphs that I cannot even decide upon a comfortable way of referring to my late friend and literary comrade. I cannot help but commit innumerable sins against conventional critical objectivity in this essay, which perforce must be as much a personal memoir as a piece of literary criticism. Furthermore, I freely admit that what finally moved me to break my grieved silence on the subject of Philip K. Dick was the growing amount of cultish rubbish written about Phil since his death, which, I believe, has done a disservice to the serious critical perception of the true greatness of his ouevre by obscuring its center, which has little to do with relatively minor works like VALIS and THE DIVINE INVASION, let alone the so-called "Exegesis." Gregg Rickman has entitled one book of interpreted interviews with Phil THE FINAL TESTAMENT and it concentrates mainly on VALIS, THE DIVINE INVASION, Phil's experience with the so-called "pink light" and the dybbuk of a 14th Century rabbi who supposedly dictated to him the material of the "Exegesis" upon which these novels were based. All too much of post-mortum examination of Dick's life and work has focused on this admittedly bizarre material, which R. Crumb has even turned into a comic strip. Given all this, given that Phil eventually died as the result of a stroke, given that VALIS and THE DIVINE INVASION have a certain air of babblement to the non-believer, it was perhaps not unreasonable for Eric Rabkin to opine that the "pink light" was a symptom of an earlier and smaller stroke that unbalanced Phil's brain on a biological level and led to the delusionary state in which he unfortunately produced his last works. But both Rabkin and Rickman ignore one fact--Rickman perhaps because it does not fit his mystical obsession, Rabkin because it obviates his otherwise cogent explanation for what he calls Phil's final insanity and what Rickman and others consider Phil's transcendental revelation. And that fact is that neither VALIS nor THE DIVINE INVASION nor the "Exegesis" nor Gregg Rickman's book of interviews is the "Final Testament" of Philip K. Dick. The final testament of Philip K. Dick is THE TRANSMIGRATION OF TIMOTHY ARCHER, the last novel Phil wrote, a work which is luminously lucid, eminently sane, a literary breakthrough for Phil at the end of his career and in a certain sense a piss-take on the Philip K. Dick of VALIS, THE DIVINE INVASION, and the "Exegesis." And here is where literary criticism must segue into personal memoir, for I had a hand in the genesis of this novel, or at least in the form that it took. I had returned to New York from Los Angeles before the "pink light" period and had only seen Phil a few times on visits back to the Coast. I am a lousy letter-writer when I am working and I felt, in a certain sense, that I had abandoned Phil during this difficult period. Had he really flipped out? Had I let him down? But on my next trip back, I visited Phil in Santa Ana, and things seemed much the same. Phil was not barbled. He was having the usual troubles with his car. He had spoken to me occasionally about the "pink light," his possession by the dybbuk of the 14th Century rabbi, the automatic writing of the Exegesis, et al, but even at the time, he had discussed all this on the same level as his transmission problems or his troubles keeping his weight down, and now he had put all that behind him and was in the process of trying to put some totally different material together into a new novel. It seemed that a female relative of one of his wives had had an ongoing secret affair with James Pike, the maverick Episcopal Bishop of California, who had eventually been relieved of his post by the hierarchy, and died in the Negev in Israel, apparently having ventured into the desert in a bad car in search of Essene sites or artifacts provisioned only with two warm bottles of Coke. Phil had come to know Pike through this connection, and wanted to write a novel about Pike's spiritual odyssey. Somehow, perhaps because he felt he was irrevocably typed as an sf writer, Phil had gotten it into his head that the only way he could get such a novel published was to tart it up with a lot of thriller-cum-sf paraphenalia involving CIA plots, alien invasions, and the usual razzmatazz. "Jeez, Phil," I told him, "you've got a great story here, you don't need all that crap. Why don't you just tell it straight?" "You think I could get it published?" I told him I thought he could, and he decided to discuss the matter with Russell Galen, his agent and friend, whom he really trusted. Galen concurred, encouraged Phil to go ahead, and the result was THE TRANSMIGRATION OF TIMOTHY ARCHER, which I believe is one of Phil's three or four best novels, and a return to the level of THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH and UBIK, after too many years of floundering around with lesser work. Certainly it is far superior to VALIS or THE DIVINE INVASION; utterly coherent, totally controlled, spiritually lucid, and filled with loving clarity. Dick, furthermore, narrated the novel in first person-- something he had never done before--he made that first person viewpoint character a woman, Angel Archer, who, in her detached distance from the Bishop Timothy Archer of the title, is a peculiar but effective transmogrification of Phil's own peripheral position in the story of James Pike. Timothy Archer is recognizably Pike, but, in his spiritual maunderings, his loss of faith, and its eventual transmogrified recovery after death, bears a certain resemblance to Dick himself, in his own wanderings through the quagmire of the Exegesis, VALIS, and DIVINE INVASION period into the clear white light that enabled him to write this very book. And Angel herself, Dick's sexually transmogrified alter ego, emotionally distanced and spiritually cynical throughout most of the telling of THE TRANSMIGRATION OF TIMOTHY ARCHER, finds a kind of spiritual center herself at the conclusion of the novel. That THE TRANSMIGRATION OF TIMOTHY ARCHER was Philip K. Dick's last novel is a tragedy and a triumph. It is a tragedy because it broke bold new literary ground, in terms of form, viewpoint, clarity, and control, for a writer who already had many great works behind him and was only in his fifties when he died. Where would Philip K. Dick have gone from here? It is a triumph because it is a fitting final testament for Philip K. Dick the writer and Phil the man--a return to the height of his literary powers at the untimely end of his career, a return to the true metaphysical vision and human insight of UBIK and THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE and THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH and MARTIAN TIME SLIP after a long period of secondary work. And it is also somehow the purest statement of the spiritual center of Phil Dick's work as a writer and his being as a man, as if Phil, like one of his own characters, knew somehow that the end was near, and left us this piece of clarity to give the lie to the obfuscatory cult he somehow knew was to come. There is a point in TIMOTHY ARCHER where Dick portrays the higher spiritual sanity of Bill Lundborg, a somewhat schizoid auto mechanic, through a long conversation with Archer and others in which the Bishop discusses Christian theology while he discusses the merits and flaws of various makes of cars. And makes it work. This is worth more than the whole Exegesis and all the gobbledygook surrounding it. This is Phil's true spirit shining through at the very end, and it not only works on a literary level, it is real. Even in death, Phil had the power to raise up the human spirit in this strangely humble manner. I last spoke on the phone to Phil from New York while I was waiting on a movie deal that was to make me more money than I had ever seen in one piece in my life and he was about to travel to Europe with his new girlfriend. He was in buoyant high spirits. He had seen a rough-cut of BLADE RUNNER and liked it.

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