The truth as he knew it

“Often people claim to remember past lives,” Philip K. Dick told a sci-fi convention audience toward the end of his life. “I claim to remember a different, very different, present life.” This statement, in all its koan-like paradox, mystified his listeners, for what could it possibly mean?

It meant, for one thing, that the author of mind-bending works like “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” and “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” was perhaps not inventing anything when he wrote about the dark alternative realities and nightmarish government conspiracies in which his characters, over the course of some 50 novels, are freakishly ensnared.

That is, at least, French novelist Emmanuel Carrere’s take on the life and works of Dick in his brilliantly inventive biography “I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey Into the Mind of Philip K. Dick.” Carrere combines fact and fiction to form a new sort of genre, blending literary criticism and cultural history with a novelist’s earnest speculation. He emerges, somewhat bloodied by the experience, with a picture of a life by turns pathetic and heroic, but most of all plagued by a sense of feverish doubt and emptiness that nothing -- not heroin, not psychotherapy, not marriage, affairs, religion or any of the other standard panaceas of the 1960s and 1970s -- could quite subdue.

Seasoned readers of Dick’s stories will know what this great emptiness alludes to, but for others, consider a scene from “The Man in the High Castle,” widely considered to be Dick’s best work. The novel envisions an alternative present in which the United States is occupied by Japan and Germany, the Allies having lost the war. The Japanese, who have taken over the West Coast, are obsessive collectors of genuine Americana. Wyndam-Matson, a purveyor of fake antiques, shows a woman he’s been sleeping with two cigarette lighters:

“ ‘One of those Zippo lighters was in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s pocket when he was assassinated. And one wasn’t. One has historicity, a hell of a lot of it. And one has nothing. Can you feel it? ... You can’t. You can’t tell which is which.... You see my point. It’s all a big racket; they’re playing it on themselves. I mean, a gun goes through a famous battle ... and it’s the same as if it hadn’t, unless you know. It’s in here.’ He tapped his head. ‘In the mind, not the gun.’ ”

“In the mind,” says Wyndam-Matson. Which is to say, “not real.” The most disturbing aspect of this scene, however, is not that there is a “real” lighter and a “fake” lighter but that the two are essentially indistinguishable: “You can’t tell.” The interchangeability of true reality and ersatz reality is the terrible void that whistles below the feet of Dick’s characters, and it made itself felt in his life as well. One would think that a person who could write so rational and prescient a scene must himself have a strong sense of reality, but in Carrere’s estimation, Dick suffered from a debilitating split personality, so that while he understood that there were distinctions between “(a) writing that ... Nixon was a Communist (b) believing it, and (c) believing that it was true,” this understanding did not necessarily prevent him from swinging wildly from certainty on the one hand to doubts about the authenticity of the world on the other.

Time and again Dick’s works address the problem of distinguishing between reality and artificial illusion: Witness Douglas Quail in “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” whose humdrum reality begins to unravel when he receives a memory implant of Mars; or the androids with implanted human memories in “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” who refuse to believe they aren’t real.

These imaginings, far-fetched as they seem, were nevertheless rooted in the anxiety and myopic reality of postwar America that were heightened, for Dick, by his longterm residence in the San Francisco Bay Area. During the McCarthy era, FBI agents, suspicious of his first wife’s attendance at Socialist Workers Party meetings, suddenly arrived on Dick’s doorstep in Berkeley and began questioning him. Eventually they developed a wary friendship with him, even as they continued to push questionnaires full of assertions like: “The greatest threat to the Free World is (a) Russia (b) our high standard of living (c) subversive elements hiding in our midst.” During the 1970s, conspiracy moved to the sphere of drugs. Carrere writes that “narcs sometimes tried to pass themselves off as dealers and sold hash ... dealing served as a perfect cover.... Everyone knew that dealers could also become narcs and start informing on their associates and clients.... Cops, dealers, users -- they all changed roles depending on the circumstances and depending on what role others were playing.”

Such instability engendered a climate of mistrust, and mistrust spilled over into every aspect of Dick’s life. Pathologically jealous, he resented his partners -- he was obsessed with, married to or lived with at least six different women -- if they showed any streak of independence. At least one of his marriages ended in a peculiarly horrific way when Dick, who shared a psychotherapist with his wife Anne, suggested to the doctor that Anne was trying to kill him. Alarmed, the doctor sent the sheriff to take Anne away to a psychiatric hospital, and then Dick immediately began to doubt whether it was Anne or he who was psychotic. “Now that Anne -- zoned out on tranquilizers -- couldn’t tell him he was wrong, [Dick] was less sure he was right.” He tried to get Anne released from the hospital, but it was too late: she came home “a zombie.”

Doubt extended beyond his romantic entanglements and into the murkier realm of religion and the nature of consciousness. In the early 1960s, driven by a vision of a satanic face in the sky, Dick became a member of the Episcopal Church, mainly because the church, unlike psychologists, took his vision as an objective event, a real manifestation of evil rather than an indication of insanity. His religious feelings remained complex. He offered a stinging parody of the Eucharist in his 1965 novel “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,” and yet he remained a staunch Christian, defending his belief against debunkers. When his friend Bishop James Pike reported to him that the Gospels “were a fraud” and that Jesus was just a follower whom others had elevated into “a colossal scam,” Dick answered that this didn’t change anything. He still had faith.

This ability to contain a paradox -- to be both the champion and the adversary of any given point of view -- was part of Dick’s genius where the plots of his books were concerned. But as Carrere’s story unfolds, it becomes clear that it was also what crippled Dick in his everyday life. Lucidity and intelligence did not make him any less prone to paranoia; indeed, they apparently fueled it. “Perhaps if you know you are insane,” notes one of his characters in “The Man in the High Castle,” “then you are not insane.”

Dick battled the idea of being crazy and paranoid even as he suspected that it might be true. External circumstances periodically contrived to confirm both points. In 1971, his house in San Rafael was broken into and destroyed: “His first reaction was gratitude: now he knew he wasn’t paranoid.” But later, one of the jaded detectives assigned to inspect the scene asked Dick “why on earth he had done all this.” Dick himself eventually came to consider this a plausible explanation: “He had no memory of having [broken into his own house], but he also knew that that proved nothing.”

Fans of “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” or its Ridley Scott movie counterpart “Blade Runner” will recognize this episode as peculiarly Dickian, for in those works, the human bounty hunter hired to destroy android replicants suffers a similar loss of certainty. As he goes about his job, he is eventually beset by a nagging, unverifiable dread that he himself is not human but an android implanted with human feelings and memories: Just because he doesn’t know he is an android does not mean that he isn’t one. Carrere, in a section devoted to the fallow later years of Dick’s life, offers a hypothesis for Dick’s dwindling output as well as for the eerie connection between Dick’s life and his work: “[Dick’s] famous imagination was reputed to have dried up, but he himself knew the truth behind his writer’s block lay elsewhere. He had never had imagination; he had merely written reports.” That is to say, he didn’t need to invent his stories; they had happened to him. The government conspiracies, the capricious sense of self, the malevolent face in the sky: These were the truths of Dick’s existence, and of them he made powerful fantasies. He died quietly, in Santa Ana, of a stroke in 1982. He was 53.

Reading “I Am Alive and You Are Dead,” one is plagued by a certain amount of doubt. The book is consistently fascinating and brilliantly written, but as Carrere himself attests in the preface, it is not a biography in the purest sense of the word. Certain events, like the break-in of 1971, Dick’s failed relationships and his one-sided correspondence with the FBI about a Communist plot to brainwash him, are verifiable, but how, for example, would anyone be able to confirm what Dick was thinking during his heroin detox treatment at a center called X-Kalay? “[H]e could think of no place he would rather be than here,” Carrere writes. Or know how he interpreted the sight of his EEG screen as he lay in the hospital after a suicide attempt in his garage: “Vague thoughts stirring about in his dull brain produced tiny, irregular spikes in the horizontal sweep.... “

These questions matter, perhaps, but they seem to matter less given Carrere’s subject: This was a man, after all, whose concepts of himself and of reality were mercurial at best, and a “definitive” biography would be almost antithetical to the entire Dickian enterprise. In a way, then, Carrere is the perfect biographer for the high master of sci-fi literature, for he seamlessly weaves together facts and close readings of Dick’s fiction, using one to illuminate the other. What emerges is less a snapshot than an impressionist painting -- a portrait of a mind ceaselessly haunted by the flickering of a truth seen dimly, just beyond the scrim of the visible world.

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From I Am Alive and You Are Dead

In ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,’ Dick had invented the word ‘kipple’ to designate an entropic state of decomposition and chaos toward which all things naturally tend. Now his own life was becoming kipple. Moreover, what did it mean to say ‘my life’ when he was no longer sure that this life was his to begin with, or even that he was alive?

There was only one thing to do -- go back to the typewriter, to the row of letters, QWERTYUIOP, arrayed across the keyboard and start another book -- his 32nd or his 35th, he couldn’t remember. What he did know was that he had to write it to make some money and that if he didn’t -- if he didn’t, what then? He would have to overcome his disgust at his style, which had become so dry he feared the words would shrivel and crumble into dust on the page. His syntax was flat, repetitive, purely logical -- the syntax of an android. His vocabulary had grown increasingly abstract, cold and predictable.