Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Whoa, you snuck that second letter in while I was writing the above.
  

    
Slippage, right.
  

    
There were no happy endings, in Phil's relations with women.
  

    
Slippage all over the place!

What I remember about the night we saw "A Clockword Orange" was
bounding up the stairs to Phil's apartment all excited and wanting to
tell him all about it, only to discover that in our absence we had
fallen into disfavor.

There was music playing, and a table full of snacks, untouched - Tim
and I both have an indelible memory of this bowl of M&Ms sitting there
all folorn, and both Phil and Tess were sitting on the couch, Phil's
arms were folded across his chest, and listened unresponsive and
stony-faced to my excited retelling of the movie which dwindled away as
the fact of their unchanging demeanor became evident.

It was one of those really twisted moments when you become aware that
reality had changed when you weren't looking; Phil was furious with us
for not coming to his party even though he knew full well the reason we
hadn't come was because he had sent us to the movies.

It wasn't the first time we would experience this.  Nor the last.
  

    
I don't remember it as fury at us, so much as general irritability
that nobody else had come to the party at all.  (At least _we_ showed
_up!_)  I do remember him saying, in a hollow, doomful
Old-Testament-prophet voice, "This party has been going on for _two
hours!"_  And I remember that we beat a quick retreat after it became
clear that our usual cheery ways wouldn't revive them.
  

    
That's a tragic blind spot in his self-awareness, shown in that last letter.
Very sad.
  

    
Really, you know, Martha - your comment sort of points up something
that I'm concerned about.  

I have any number of letters and other communications from Phil that
will speak to Phil's obsessions and his oddnesses (and okay, his
sanity), but I'm not real sure that it's the kind of information that
people are interested in.  Particularly because there isn't a lot that
Tim (or anyone) can respond to other than to acknowledge that, if Phil
perceived himself to be in love with you, you were in for a wild time.

I would think that hearing more about it would probably get real
boring in a hurry.

If I am wrong, please let me know, but in the meantime I think I
should step back out of the spotlight and shine it again on Tim.
  

    

In what ways do you think Dick was a better writer than you, Tim?

I ask because I find Dick's writing profoundly uneven -- even when it's
visionary, the prose is often clunky.
  

    

Or, as I've heard it put, PKD is one of the great raw genuises of 20th
century American literature, and if he'd written more second drafts, we
might be able to drop the "raw."
  

    
Good point, Linda -- "if Phil perceived himself to be in love with
you".  Serena pointed out that she and, for example, Viki Blaylock,
always had very smooth & amiable relationships with him; and of course
he hadn't _fallen in love_ with either of them!  And I do wonder how
good any of us would look, helpless under this kind of microscope.  Let
me repeat two things I wrote in my introduction to the fourth volume
of _The Selected Letters:_ "The publication of these letters
constitutes an invasion of privacy which is, I think, legitimate -- but
which is, nevertheless, merciless." -- and, "he was one of my perhaps
five closest friends."

Mike -- I agree, Phil's prose was often clunky; especially in the
'60s, when he was writing a lot of novels very quickly (as you note,
Ron!).  But even in those, the absolute brilliance and wit and pathos
of the dialogue, and the dimensions of the characters, carry it.  I'm
thinking of great bits from his books now, without going over to the
bookcase to haul 'em out: do you remember Eric Sweetscent's dialogue
with the automatic cab, at the end of _Now Wait for Last Year_?  And
any of the conversations with Pris, in _We Can Build You_ -- and Leo
Bohlen's conversation with the Kindly Dad robot, in _Martian Time-Slip
-- and really every thing in _A Scanner Darkly._  And look at the
images that somehow are indelibly conveyed through that prose -- the
huge, smoking, thumping, _moving_ building in _Maze of Death;_ the
nightmare AMWEB complex in _Martian Time-Slip;_ the sunken cathedral in
_Galactic Pot-Healer!_  In a way he's like Lovecraft, or Hunter
Thompson, or Charles Williams -- "I didn't know you could _get_ that
note on a horn!"

It occurs to me that there is an influence Phil's work has had on my
writing -- which is to torque the characters a little more than the
plot really requires, and to do it in a direction not previously
indicated.  (What do you mean, Powers?)  Well, I'm not exactly sure --
but I learned from him, I think, that extra stresses on a character are
never out-of-place, and that it's good to threaten their sanity as
well as life-&-limb.

And of course I learned from him that you must be aware of what your
characters do for a living, and remember that they're taking time off
work to go do whatever the plot requires!
  

    
I think vast imagination and deep empathy can simply outshine the
prose that conveys them, providing that prose is competent, which
Phil's always was.  Jeez, do you remember -- what was it in, _Now Wait
for Last Year_? -- the reject brains that somebody built little carts
for, huddling in boxes in an alley in the rain?

I'm often falsely modest, Mike (don't tell anybody) -- but I really do
think Phil is going to be in print long after I'm land-fill.
  

    
Not that I'm a _slouch,_ you understand!  Don't get the wrong idea ...
  

    
Years later, when I discovered the strange inverted towers of the
conversations on The WELL,  I vividly remebered _Galactic Pot-Healer_ and
that sunken cathedral.

PKD had made a metaphor I had to tuck away for 15 years until I found
something which fit it.   I guess that has to be genius.

Sure was one special effect. Not many read-em-on-the-bus SF paperbooks did
that for me. A couple of Lafferty stories, and Dick, pretty much define
Raw Genius for me.
 
  

    

So, Tim, Hi -- I'm at a disadvantage in not being familiar with your work, I
confess.  But a question about the science fiction community.  How important
was it for you to get to know writers as you honed your craft?
  

    
Hi, Gail!  Well -- actually you lead me into a self-contradiction. 
I've got to admit that it was very beneficial to bounce ideas & rough
drafts back and forth with Jeter and Blaylock (earlier I said
disrespectful things about "writers' groups").  I don't think any of us
really "talked shop" much with Phil Dick -- I hosted an
every-Thursday-night thing for some years, and Phil was generally
present, but I think at those we all mostly talked about books & movies
& Mexican restaurants and what had lately gone wrong with our
vehicles.  Certainly the guests weren't all writers, by any means.

But Phil did recommend me to his agent, and some years later I did
wind up with his agent -- whom I'm still with now, as a matter of fact.

I guess it's like going to conventions & meeting editors -- it can be
helpful if you don't approach it with the idea that it can be helpful! 
Does that make sense?  The thing is, I'd hate to give anybody the idea
that it's _necessary._  And I hope I never became friends with a
writer just because he _was_ a writer!
  

    
There is real value in talking shop, especially in hearing the
thoughtful advice of writers more experienced than oneself -- the real
technical insights & "tricks" & analyses of failed experiments -- but I
got most of these from people like Sturgeon, and Damon Knight, and
Poul Anderson, and James Blish, and Leiber and Lovecraft and Kingsley
Amis -- none of whom I had ever met.  The thing is, they wrote books &
articles (and, in Lovecraft's case, letters) about fiction-writing. 
Just off the top of my head, two books that really clued me in to a lot
of crucial things were Knight's _In Search of Wonder_ and Amis's _The
James Bond Dossier._
  

    
What I'm trying to say is, If you're an aspiring writer and you don't
know any other writers, that's not a handicap!  Aspiring writers (as I
vividly remember) are given so many fake handicaps to worry about
("can't get x until you've got y, & can't get y until you've got x")
that I'd hate to fuel another.  (Here's a valuable clue -- every time
someone is explaining to you why it's impossible for _you,_ in _your_
situation, to get published, and they use the phrase "Catch 22", their
advice is a lie.  They may not be the one who fabricated the lie, they
might just be relaying it from somebody else, but it is a lie, trust
me.)
  

    

So tell us what grabbed you about the Fisher King mythology.
  

    
I think it was mainly the contexts it showed up in, Mike -- when I
first wondered, "What the hell is this Fisher King business?" it was
because I had encountered the figure in Lewis's _That Hideous Strength_
and in Eliot's _The Waste Land._  Probably in Charles Williams too.

Right from the start -- at least in Lewis and Eliot -- there's this
numinous, half-familiar _goose-bumps_ response, you know? at the idea
that the land is ill, and that all previous history is sort of present,
observing.  And then the idea that there is a secret king, successor
to an infinite line of secret kings, whose injury is both spiritual &
physical and in some way _is the same as_ the injury the land has
suffered.  This just rings all kinds of Jungian bells for me!

I think in mythology it's always powerfully tempting to look for a
Grand Unified Theory -- sort of like Gell-Mann looking at all the
quarks and trying to figure out the 16-Fold-Way rule that will make
sense out of the tantalizing not-quite-chaos.  In mythology, even
remote mythologies of cultures that were isolated, there are so many
consistencies -- and I do think the Fisher King figure, and the
Dionysus figure too, are some kind of core clues.

With things like this I don't figure I need to understand it, or even
have much of a guess as to what's going on -- I figure that if it rings
my Jungian bells it'll do the same for the reader, so I've just got to
work at conveying the mysteriousness and compellingness of it, and
then point to these half-familiar-from-childhood-dreams signposts and
say, "You remember this stuff, don't you?" 
  

    
Powers, I am intrigued by the character in two of your books who
obtains Houdini's hands.  In _Expiration Date_ he actually finds
Houdini's house (which was something we had hoped to do at one point as
I recall).  Would you talk a bit about whether the house he found was
actually Houdini's house - did you find it?! - and also about those
hands and how they were or were not useful to the character who
possessed them.
  

    
Serena and I did find the house, though it was apparently the
servants' house; Houdini's main house burned down in the '30s.  If you
turn north on Laurel Canyon from Hollywood Boulevard, it'll sweep by on
your right just past the little market there.  When we went, the
one-time Houdini grounds were fenced off & abandoned & clustered with
makeshift tents and beer bottles -- we had to duck through a hole in
the fence, and then the only way to get up the stairs was to crawl
under fifty-years worth of fallen palm fronds.  We climbed & crawled
and slid all over it, me talking into my tape recorder & Serena
snapping pictures, and we did meet a crazy old guy there, as in the
book; and another time Ira & Laura Behr and John Shirley and us
scrambled all through it in the pitch-black middle of the night, with
flashlights.  I thought Shirley was gonna get himself killed, foraging
way on ahead of the rest of us.

The place has now apparently been bought by somebody, and is being
perfectly restored -- I'm glad of that, but I'm also glad we got to
sneak around when it was still overgrown & spooky.

Houdini did have plaster casts made of his hands, late in life, and he
did appear to set great store by them -- God knows why, really!  And
Houdini did know Lovecraft -- he got Lovecraft to do some ghost-writing
for him -- and once at a theater (as I recall from the HPL letters)
shortly before Houdini's death, he did a trick for Lovecraft in which
he appeared to pull off his own thumb.

In my book, having possession of the plaster hands and the severed
thumb can confer a sort of emergency-deployed "mask" on the person
carrying them -- if the person should be the object of supernatural
scrutiny, he takes on the physical appearance of Houdini.  This was a
decoy mechanism to protect Houdini, not of any benefit to the person
with the "mask" -- but the things would be useful in summoning
Houdini's ghost.

As I recall!  I haven't re-read the book since the paperback was
published.  And I remember saying in the book that the hands had been
dug up from Houdini's grave, which is in New Jersey, I think -- and
somebody _did_ vandalize the grave on the day I cite, though almost
certainly not to dig up plaster hands.  All this is the kind of thing
research provides -- I'd never be able to think all this weird business
up on my own.
  

    
When you do all this research, how do you remember it all?  How do you
organize it and physically place it at hand so that you can find it
again.

I'm getting to the point where I can't remember anything - I read a
lot - many online magazines and news sources, newspapers, books,
magazines (and of course The WELL!) - that contain lots of information
that I want to remember for later.  Then I forget that I have it, or
that I ever even knew about it, so I'm constantly experiencing the joy
of discovery.
  

    
        Mr. Powers, I've noticed that the firearms stuff in your books is
always spot-on, (It was your novels, along with Nabokov's _Lolita_, that
finally convinced me to buy a gun) and I recently learned of the existence
of a book called _The Seven Steps To Personal Safety_, dealing with handgun
usage, among other things, written by Richard B. Isaacs and Tim Powers.
Is this you or a different Tim Powers, and if so what was your motivation
for doing that particular book?
  

    
Well, Linda, I can't remember anything, either.  What I do with
everything -- right from the start, even just preliminary random
thoughts on plot & character -- is do 'em straight into the keyboard as
they occur in my head.  There are bits in my notes like, "He could, I
don't know, have a kid that died, right?  Or a dog.  Or a dog and a
kid.  Or ... the dog and the kid live, but _he_ dies ..." Any thought
that occurs to me I type out.  That way, later, I can review everything
I considered on the way to deciding some question; often I toss the
eventual conclusion but find something valuable among all those
thoughts above it, that led to it.

And with the research, I type every bit out, in chronological order if
possible, and cross-indexed every-which-way.  For the last book I had
about eight 100-page books of bound print-out, with labels like PHILBY,
SOV INTELLIGENCE, BRIT INTELLIGENCE, ARABS, ARARAT, and so forth.  And
I go over it all with highlighter.  Ultimately I don't need to have
any actual _memory_ at all! -- or that's my goal, anyway.  And I don't
know how I ever got along without the "find" function! -- I always
bracket a word, one I know I'll be looking for, with every other word I
might think of instead -- around "Arab clothing" I'll have a cluster
of words like "dress, costume, garment" in case I go looking for one of
those words instead of "clothing".

And of course I mark up my research books -- I cover the flyleaves
with notes & page numbers, and I generally add pencilled-in page
numbers to the (always inadequate) index.  And then I make it an
ironclad rule that no research book ever physically leaves my office --
I need to know that, even if there's a disordered pile of books by my
chair, at least every book I need is somewhere within two yards of me. 
(I can't imagine how writers get any work done on airplanes, or even
in hotels!)
  

    
Noah, I'm glad to hear that all the firearms stuff is accurate!  I do
get expert advice.  (One friend of mine was embarrassed to have, in a
book of his, a revolver leaving ejected shells behind at the scene.) 
And I always hate it when I read, "George pulled a gun from under his
coat" -- as a reader I see only a blur -- is it an automatic, a
revolver?  What color is it?  What caliber, for God's sake?  It's like
"George ordered a drink" -- what, a Martini, a scotch on the rocks, a
gin-&-tonic?  It makes a big difference!

_The Seven Steps to Personal Safety_ isn't by me.  I do wonder if that
Tim Powers minds it that amazon.com always lists his book as one of
mine!  I should at least read it.