Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick Read Online Free PDF Page A

little babies much, didn't know Phil and his little twin sister were starving away. Three decades later, Phil would confide to his third wife, Anne, that "I heard about Jane a lot and it wasn't good for me. I felt guilty-somehow I got all the milk."
The trauma of Jane's death remained the central event of Phil's psychic life. The torment extended throughout his life, manifesting itself in difficult relations with women and a fascination with resolving dualist (twin-poled) dilemmas-SF/mainstream, real/fake, human/android, and at last (in as near an integration of intellect and emotion as Phil ever achieved) in the two-source cosmology described in his masterwork Valis (1981).

Jane's death shadowed, and ultimately shattered, the newly created family of three. The marriage of Edgar and Dorothy-at one time the seemingly perfect couple, each tall, slender, and with sharp, intelligent features-would not long survive. And the divorce would take Phil's father away.

Joseph Edgar Dick was born in 1899, the second oldest of fourteen brothers and sisters in a Scotch-Irish family. He spent his first sixteen years on two different small farms in southwestern Pennsylvania. In 1969, when he was seventy, Edgar wrote an autobiographical reminiscence, As I Remember Them, which includes careful character studies of his parents.
Edgar clearly preferred the warmth of his mother, Bessie, to the hard lessons of his father, William, who once whipped Edgar and fellow siblings for mimicking the way he gargled to treat a cold. Of Bessie, Edgar wrote like a son in love: "She would cry and laugh at the same time, just like an April shower when the sun was shining." Bessie's love for animals became a guiding principle for Edgar-after World War II, as a lobbyist in the California legislature, he would sponsor important animal protection legislation.
Did the young Phil hear, through Edgar, rhapsodic tales of this ideal mother who through the hard times managed to keep her many children healthy and well fed? Bessie's influence can be seen in the ideals of motherhood that Edgar and Phil shared, and in their judgment of Dorothy as falling short of them.
From his father, Edgar received the American work ethic tinged with fear and hellfire. The Bible according to William taught that it was a sin not only to be lazy but also to be poor, like the neighboring coal-mining families. But Edgar outgrew any belief in hell, and he never cared for the churches that spread fear of damnation while doing nothing for the needy in their midst.
Discomfort with religious institutions, the exaltation of simple human kindness over the uncaring functionary-these impulses, fundamentals of identity, Edgar passed on to his son. And something more.
There is, in the midst of Edgar's settled narrative, a single sentence that mirrors the worlds of Phil's SF novels-novels that Edgar never much cared for. "We had a difficult time," he recalls, "learning to know and understand the strange actions of creatures called people." You can see it in the struggles Edgar had with the church-with the world as it was, compared to the world insisted upon by his father. A sense of strangeness. Nothing could be assumed. Reality had to be eyed carefully.
Edgar enlisted shortly after America entered the war in 1916. The previous year the family had moved from Pennsylvania to homestead dusty government land at Cedarwood, Colorado. At seventeen, Edgar was fed up with farm chores and eager to see the world. Just before going off to Europe, he met Dorothy Kindred, from the nearby town of Greeley. There was a spark of sorts, but Edgar and Dorothy didn't correspond during the war. "You kind of got away from civilian life entirely," he later said. "I did."

Edgar described himself in Europe as "a corporal like Napoleon and Hitler." He showed considerable heroism carrying messages by night within range of the front lines. His Fifth Marines were the shock troops, Edgar recalled proudly, and he had marvelous stories