In case you missed it, The New Yorker recently ran a litcrit piece about Philip K. Dick, one of the acknowledged giants of science fiction. While fairly lengthy, Adam Gopnik’s piece was less than effusive and at times arguably borderline insulting — resorting to olde anti-sci-fi canards about “adolescent” readers and suggesting that the French’s allegedly pivotal adoration of PKD had more to do with the books reading more beautifully in the translation (and, I daresay, more than hinting that PKD is the Jerry Lewis of science fiction literature).
Some PKD devotees have taken to eviscerating Mr. Gopnik, which I feel to be predictable, perhaps even understandable, but ultimately unfair. If nothing else, he’s allowed to his opinion. He does (rightly) call Ubik a “beautiful and hallucinatory” novel, and gives props several other landmark works (including The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich, which he — I think rightly — calls a turning point in Dick’s writing). And he rightly acknowledges Dick’s considerable impact on the genre, both in literature and in film.
That said, I also feel Gopnik seemed to lack a broader understanding of PKD’s work and its broader context. For example, he takes PKD to task for recycling ideas and stories. “He once wrote eleven novels in a twenty-four-month stretch. But one thing you have to have done in order to write eleven novels in two years is not to have written any of them twice.”
This is a fundamental misapprehension of PKD’s milieu, especially during the middle period of his career. In those days, like all other sci-fi writers except perhaps Asimov and Bradbury, he was being paid by the word and working under extraordinarily tight deadlines. Put simply, he did not have the luxury of numerous drafts. The uncharitable might say he was merely “recycling,” but to my eye a closer reading is much more nuanced. Often, I think, he was trying to find the correct form for the stories he wanted to tell, but the deadline pressures dictated that he simply deliver product. Reading his middle period novels, you will indeed find the same plot surfacing here and there. But the key is to read them in order of publication. In the earlier incarnations, you can almost identify the paragraph where he thought to himself, “Ah shit. I took the wrong fork two chapters back. But I gotta deliver this fucking thing, so I’ll just wrap it up and try it again next time.” And so he does, gradually honing until he hits the mark he was aiming for, at which point he moved on. Or evolved the meme to the next step.
As a result of pulp novel economics, we as readers have been given something of a treasure — the ability to watch a novelist craft a tale over time, in published works, without having to haunt musty archive bookshelves hunting for this or that draft. It’s a little like watching a jazz musician week after week at a standing gig at a local club growing from a mere talent to a true artist. This is, I think, borne out by his later works, which became increasingly focused and less “recycled.”
Was Philip K. Dick a Shakespeare? No. Gopnik is right (if unduly harsh); Phil was not a poet. But I defy anyone to read VALIS and Radio Free Albemuth (the latter published posthumously) back to back and not walk away marveling at the depth and complexity of the ideas he made manifest for us.
Aaanyway, there is much else I could say. But the whole point of this post is simply to point out that Mr. Dick’s third wife, Anne, who was married to him during the late ’50s and early ’60s, wrote a letter to the editors of The New Yorker rebutting Mr. Gopnik’s piece. The editors declined to run the letter in its entirety, but it was posted in full at David Gill’s blog.
I strongly recommend you read both pieces in their entirety.
(Thanks to Hell’s Donut House for the tip.)
The New Yorker ran a similarly dismissive piece recently on Charles Bukowski. As much as I love the magazine in general, I find these pieces elitist and even condescending — they seem to exist partly to reassure long-time readers that they haven’t missed anything significant in the cocktail-chatter canon, while simultaneously providing a handy bluffer’s guide for said circumstance: “Phil Dick? You mean that sci-fi writer who wrote the book that Blade Runner was based on? Well, you’d be a ‘visionary’ too, if you were swallowing speed like it was Reese’s Pieces.”
Thank you for illuminating one of the drivers of my father’s productivity. Having lived in poverty his entire life with few exceptions, writing for him was not only a creative process, it was the way he paid his bills. He famously wrote and talked about having to eat horsemeat from the Lucky Dog Pet Shop in the ’50′s. I think you captured the unique essence of the economics of the pulp publishing of the time. It was almost a perfect storm. I recently created a bibliography for myself. Having heard how prolific my father was all my life I internalized it. By typing out the titles of all those short stories he wrote and published in the 1950′s and the incredible number of SF novels he wrote in the 1960′s to release over the next few years to keep his income stream going while he focused on his realist writings. Thank you also for pointing your readers to my mother’s letter to the New Yorker. My father was a very complex man. Those of us who knew him and loved him felt the incredible warmth of his focus on us – like you were the most important person in the world and his wonderful sense of humor.
Hell’s: Methinks you have a point. I also can’t help wondering if such attitudes from such critics might not be emblematic of a certain classism — a reflexive disdain for authors of fiction who are not of the idle class and/or belaureled with degrees in literature and thus “legitimate.”
Hello Ms. Leslie — Thanks so much for stopping by, and especially for the kind compliment. You pretty much made my thus-far-mediocre week.
As a creative person in a journeyman trade with tight deadlines (web development), I have a great deal of sympathy for siblings of the “arts worker” guild and take umbrage when they get their chops busted unnecessarily. (Not that anyone is immune from fair critique, of course.)
Anyone who knows anything substantive about your father (and folks like him) has some appreciation of the complexity you mentioned. It’s lovely and genuinely heartwarming to know that despite that complexity, and even because of it, his children and even his exes continue feel love for him. That is the greatest tribute for any human being, artist or no.
Thanks again, and my very best to you and your family.
Spence — yeah, that’s basically what I was getting at. Elitism is all about separating “us” from “them,” and upholding accepted standards of “class,” so the subtext of that piece (as well as the one on Bukowski) is about reinforcing that investment, i.e. maintaining a bulkhead at the boundaries of accepted notions of “good taste.” And you know what Picasso said about that. (Hint: “The chief enemy of creativity is… [fill in the blank]“.)
Hell’s…clearly you are a Communist. Now, what have I told you about that, young man?