Carrère - I Am Alive and You Are Dead

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For Anne

I am sure, as you hear me say this, you do not really believe me, or even believe that I believe it myself. But nevertheless it is true. You are free to believe me or free to disbelieve, but please take my word on it that I am not joking; this is very serious, a matter of importance. I am sure that at the very least you will agree that for me even to claim this is in itself amazing. Often people claim to remember past lives; I claim to remember a different, very different, present life. I know of no one who has ever made that claim before, but I rather suspect that my experience is not unique; what perhaps is unique is the fact that I am willing to talk about it.

FROM A SPEECH GIVEN BY PHILP K. DICK IN FRANCE, SEPTEMBER 24, 1977

The book you hold in your hands is a very peculiar book. In it I have tried to depict the life of Philip K. Dick from the inside, in other words, with the same freedom and empathyindeed with the same truthwith which he depicted his own characters. Its a trip into the brain of a man who regarded even his craziest books not as works of imagination but as factual reports. This is a book about the mind, its alterations, its remotest and most dangerous territories. Its about drugs and mystics, about the Zeitgeist of the sixties and the seventies and its legacy to our New Age. As I say, its a very peculiar bookhow could it be otherwise? Dicks life was as much marked by the fictions he created as those fictions bear the mark of his lived experiences.

But no account of a life, however tenuous its relationship to reality, can emerge ex nihilo, or solely from the mind of the biographer. And this account is no exception. Especially in my imaginative recreations of scenes in Dicks life and of his state of mind, I have drawn from a wealth of sources. After Dicks death, his survivors temporarily entrusted the role of literary executor to Paul Williams, the journalist who had aided and abetted him in the creation of his legend. A small van filled with papers, including his unpublished Exegesis and carbon copies of letters, was unloaded into Williamss garage in Glen Ellen, California, which would become a mythic place for Dickheads the world over. It was from this garage that the Philip K. Dick Society Newsletter issued forth from 1982 to 1993. For more than a decade, the newsletter recorded the progress of a cult that to this day endeavorsand actually managesto keep him alive.

The attentive ministrations of his fans, friends, and family, however, are only partially responsible for Dicks long and fruitful afterlife. Ridley Scotts film Blade Runner did much to enshrine him in the popular imagination in the United States and Europe, as did the film Total Recall, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, which was based on Dicks short story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, and, more recently, the screen adaptations of Dicks stories Minority Report and Paycheck. There has also been an opera based on Valis, numerous other film projects, dozens of books on Dick, books with references to Dick, and novels in which Dick is the protagonist. Given the uniform Vintage editions of his complete works and the many articles about Dick that have appeared in both academic and popular journals, his fans must feel a little like the early Christians did when their faith was officially adopted by the Roman Empire: triumphant, of course, but also slightly nostalgic for the days when they lived in the catacombs. The Happy Few cease to be happy when they are no longer few. Dick has become part of the mainstream. The present book is yet another indication.

My book has benefited from those that have preceded it. Lawrence Sutins Divine Invasions: The Life of Philip K. Dick served as an indispensable reference, as did In Search of Philip K. Dick by Anne R. Dick, which the author was kind enough to let me see even prior to its publication. I have read too many other books to note here and therefore cannot recognize all my debts, but there are two I must acknowledge: my understanding of the history of LSD in America was guided by Jay Stevenss inquiry in Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream; the game of Rat was describedI believe inventedby Thomas M. Disch. While Ive consulted and talked with Dicks contemporaries, my primary text throughout has been Dicks own work, which Ive approached as an admiring literary critic. In straddling the line between autobiography and fiction, Dicks novels and stories provide the best window onto a man who, in a far more radical way than any of his contemporaries, effectively abolished the difference between life and literature.

I would like to thank the Philip K. Dick Trust for graciously allowing use of extensive quotes from the works of Philip K. Dick. It should be noted that such permission is granted in the spirit of promoting discussion and debate about Dicks life and works, and in no way signifies the Trusts endorsement of or agreement with my portrayal of characters or events.

My thanks as well to Anne Dick, Ray Nelson, Joan Simpson, Tim Powers, Jim Blaylock, Doris Sauter, and Paul Williams, all of whom spoke to me about Philip K. Dick; Stphane Martin, who got me to read Ubik many years ago; Gilles Tournier and Nicole Clerc, for their hospitality; Hlne Collon and Robert Louit, for having generously opened their archives and their wisdom to me; Franois-Marie Samuelson and Elizabeth Gille, my agent and my editor, respectively, for having put their faith in such a hazardous project; everyone at Metropolitan Books for the same; and finally, those who kindly read the manuscript and helped me to improve it: Hlne and Louis Carrre dEncausse, my parents; Jacqueline-Frdric Fri; Franoise and Patrice Boyer; and Herv Clerc. My special thanks to Arthur Denner, without whose discernment and creativity this English version might not have seen the light of day.

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 oneneither a family member nor a doctorsuggested 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 fathers hometown of Fort Morgan, Colorado. The little boy survived. His parents had his name, Philip, engraved alongside Janes 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, sergeants 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 fathers face for other signs of the substitution. Edgars attempts to tease his son out of his anxieties only heightened the boys fears. From then on, Dorothy couldnt 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.