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

difficulty of mourning a death and celebrating a birth at the same time." Overprotective fears can arise with respect to caring for the surviving twin. And there may be resentment, conscious or not, in the feelings of the parents toward the surviving child.
What is known of Edgar and Dorothy's reactions to Jane's death does correlate with these findings.
In Edgar's case, overprotectiveness showed in what Dorothy called his "germ phobias." He forbade Dorothy to kiss the baby or to allow him to crawl outside of his crib for his first eleven months. Dorothy sought to evade the first prohibition by kissing Phil "in places I thought I couldn't contaminate, like the back of the neck." She managed to obtain crawling freedom for Phil by agreeing to Edgar's condition that it be limited to an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon-if the entire apartment was first thoroughly vacuumed.
In Dorothy's case, the grief reaction was pronounced. In the first months of Phil's life, she kept a journal on his growth and behavior that testifies to her love for the baby and nowhere focuses upon the death of the twin. But Dorothy's enduring anguish showed clearly in letters and conversations over the years dwelling on Jane's death and her role in it.

The relationship between Phil and his mother, in its painful duality of extreme, dependent closeness and rage over errors and omissions in loving, was mirrored in every love relationship Phil ever had with a woman. Those who saw Phil and Dorothy together were often struck by the degree of resemblance between them-both were at home in selffashioned systems of abstract thought, both read voraciously and felt the writer's vocation (though Dorothy failed at her efforts at a writer's career). Throughout his life Phil turned to her for money, advice, even critical response to his manuscripts, and Dorothy never faltered in her encouragement of Phil the artist.
But Dorothy was a difficult mother for Phil to bear: physically undemonstrative, emotionally constrained, watchful and reproving, forbidding all demonstrations of anger, weak from pain and often bedridden. She gave Phil, as he grew, a respectful individual freedom, treating him like a little adult (by his early teenage years he called her "Dorothy"), yet somehow-in Phil's sense of things-she withheld approval, warmth, maternal affection, and protection from the world.
She was incapable of loving her children, Phil believed. She had proved that by letting Jane die. Later in life he accused Dorothy of having tried to poison him and so complete the destruction of her children.
Studies of surviving twins point to a sense of incompleteness that can make relationships, particularly with the opposite sex, very difficult. There is also the guilt of having survived, and a fear of death that causes the survivors to be overly concerned with health and safety or, paradoxically, to place themselves in difficult situations. These are all generalities that could be applied to Phil (including, of course, both of the paradoxical choices). What the studies fail to touch upon is the possibility of dwelling upon how it could have been different-to the point of sheer rage.
Cut to: Phil on the couch during a November 1974 interview with writer Paul Williams for Rolling Stone:
PKD: Yes. I get very mad when I think about my dead sister.
PW: Really?
PKD: That she died of neglect and starvation. Injury, neglect and starvation.
PW: How do you know?
PKD: My mother told me. I get very hostile when I think of it. [... ] 'Cause I was a very lonely child, and I would love to have had my sister with me, all these years. But my mother says, "Well, it's just as well she died, she would have been lame anyway, from being burned by us with the hot-water bottle." In which case I suppose- It's like Heinrich Himmler saying, "Well ... she made a good lampshade, you know, so I guess it worked out all right." You see what I mean?

In his grade school years, Phil invented an imaginary