The Prescience of Philip K. Dick's Voices From the Street

Before we begin, let's get one thing straight: despite what you may have heard, Philip K. Dick didn't always want to be a mainstream writer. There's a common misconception that, though Dick made his career in SF, he wished desperately to break out of the genre and gain wild success as a "literary" author. There's a kernel of truth in this, but it's the "always" that gets it wrong. Dick hoped for mainstream success in the years while he was writing mainstream novels. But when Man in the High Castle won the Hugo in 1964, his attitude toward SF and mainstream writing changed. In 1976, he wrote an essay entitled "The Short, Happy Life of a Science Fiction Writer" in which he described his love for the genre. He stated that, despite the poor pay and lack of broad recognition in the SF field, he continued writing it anyway because it was precisely what he wanted to do:

"My point is that (1) twenty-five years of devoted writing haven't in any way given me financial security; (2) the fact that I am sure that my new novel, A Scanner Darkly, is my best novel doesn't stop the fear; (3) I am not quitting. It's going to take more than all this to make me give up science fiction writing, for one simple reason. I love to write it."

By contrast, in a 1974 interview published in Gregg Rickman's Philip K. Dick: In His Own Words, he described the process of writing the mainstream novels as "slave labor." Emmanuel Carrere is right to characterize the desire for mainstream success as something imposed on Dick from outside—by his wives, by his friends who looked down on genre fiction—rather than a desire that originated within. In other words, the apparent rejection of SF was youthful folly. SF was what he loved and had always loved, and by his death he had even turned that love into a theology of pulp. His mainstream novels are good, but the suggestion that he always wished he could get out of SF implies a repudiation of the genre, and that sort of genre chauvinism is something that I utterly oppose.

Nevertheless, the mainstream novels are an essential step in the development of the 20th Century's greatest writer, and it's a shame that they're so difficult to find. Voices From the Street is the last extant manuscript to be published, but all the others (barring Confessions of a Crap Artist) were released in the '80s by small presses and immediately fell out of print. Some of them books fetch obscene prices—I've never even seen a copy of Gather Yourselves Together. It's wonderful that Tor has given Voices From the Street a broad release, and even more wonderful that they apparently plan to release several more of the mainstream novels in the near future.

Prior to its publication, I knew very little about Voices, mostly limited to Lawrence Sutin's brief review of it in his biography Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick. Of the extant early manuscripts, it is Dick's second, following the above-mentioned Gather Yourselves Together. Sutin sees little to recommend in the novel, and on his one-to-ten scale he rates it a two. Now, having read the novel, I think that either Sutin was being unfair to it or that the manuscript passed through an excellent editor on its way to press. (The latter actually seems quite likely—the extant draft was nearly 600 pages and the published version is half that.) In any case, Voices is a far stronger novel than I expected. It tells the story of Stuart Hadley, a young radio salesman who is uncomfortable in the life that has grown around him. (Parallels with Dick's own life are certainly just coincidences. Really.) His attempts to escape from his world—joining an apocalyptic religious movement, starting an affair that leaves him feeling just as uncomfortable as his marriage—ultimately lead him to a nervous breakdown. The novel is clunky in parts—some sequences drag, and the self-consciously purple prose of the opening pages doesn't work nearly as well as the spare style Dick soon settled into for the remainder of his career. But there's some real power in the characters' interior monologs and the overall arc of Hadley's decline into paranoia.

What surprised me most about Voices, though, was the extent to which religious ideas fascinated Dick even at this early point in his career. The first third of the novel focuses on Hadley's infatuation with an apocalyptic group called the Society of the Watchmen of Jesus and its charismatic leader, Theodore Beckheim. In 1952—over 20 years before the religious experiences described in VALIS and the Exegesis, 11 years before he joined the Episcopal Church and began seriously studying religion—Dick's earliest novel meditates on faith, apocalypse, and revelation. The first part of the novel closes with a 6-page sermon from Beckheim that's every bit as theologically rich as later essays like "Man, Android, Machine." The general theme of the sermon relates to nuclear war in a manner that presages the postapocalyptic Dr. Bloodmoney, but it also contains the kernels of some ideas that reappear in Dick's post-1974 religious writings. Beckheim's words on omnipresence, for example, could have come out of Radio Free Albemuth:

"The ancients did not understand that God was always among them, that it is impossible to imagine God not present. They had lived with God all their lives; God is present in every physical object—what they knew as a physical object was a spatial manifestation of Him. In every man, God is present in His actual form: as a moving spirit. The physical object is an expression of God: the mind of man is God—a part, a unit, of the total Spirit.

"Therefore, our forefathers failed to realize that the signs they anticipated would not be thrust magically into the framework of everyday life. The momentum of the universe is itself the process anticipated by the prophets. Not a sudden cessation of this process, but the direction of the process itself is the hand of God at work. And if we examine this so-called natural process, we will see everything that was predicted working itself to completion." (p. 81)

Like the character of Hadley, Dick is merely flirting with Beckheim's theology, not yet ready to throw himself fully into the questions of ontology, salvation, and faith that the sermon suggests. But seeing this deep a religious exploration so early in Dick's career was a very pleasant surprise for me. Voices From the Streetis by no means a perfect novel, but there are some true gems contained within it, signposts to the greatness that was to follow.

Comments

[palmer_eldritch]

Enjoyed your review - I was also struck by how well the novel stands up to his later work.

[Kathleen Mary]

It was strange to read that quote from 'Voices...' that is pure Christian gnostic mysticism i.e. that God is in all things. He is not up there on a distant cloud, he is not a man with a long beard- He is Among us, an energy, a consciousness that expresses as light. This is my belief - that if you open up spiritually, meditating, you can sense the energy of the divine that flows through the ALL. "The all is one, the One is All. " It's not the only way the Divine expresses itself, but it is one of the ways. I wonder if P. Dick studied gnosticism or the Tarot?