Part 16 Philip K Dick 1971 Interview
James Holmes: How about it, have you read any Borges, Jorge Luis Borges?
Philip K Dick: What nationality is that?
James Holmes: Argentina.
Philip K Dick: This guy who came over from Sweden, from Swedish tv, sent me a copy of some of his stuff, said he was very good, I didn’t really get too much out of it but.
James Holmes: You’re right, it’s mostly short stories, they’re all really amazing.
Philip K Dick: Well this guy from Sweden, I forget his name, is a foreigner of some sort, thought this Argentina fellow, another foreigner would really be one of the greatest people in the field, that may be true, but I’m interested more in the novel anyway, I would not tend to respond to short stories. If I were going to talk in terms like that though, that is really literary type stuff this Argentina fellow. I would get out of the field entirely, I would talk about Ionesco for instance and Beckett, I wouldn’t even restrict myself at all in the field. In a way it depends on where you limit, the definition of the field, how far are you going to extend the genre term, what are you going to include, like the Naked Lunch, include Burroughs. I would not include Burroughs. In England he’s included. I would just simply go right into stuff, which bore no, I would just say this is science fiction, I would list Ionesco, people would say why, and I’d say why not, and they would never be able wrangle me out of. I would go into things like Watt for instance, Samuel Beckett’s stuff especially, Malone Dies, all those things of his. Really strange things, people are treated as if they were planets in the solar system, rotating around one another with nothing but the most meager and indirect evidence of each others existence and finally of their own existence. Where human life is reduced to what he finds progressively to be the sole essential constituents, and each piece he writes he finds fewer essential constituents, people wind up living in garbage cans, End Game. That’s horrible, End Game is horrible. There it’s reduced to a point where there is really degradation, there’s no humor, there’s nothing but degradation, I mean who wants to live in that garbage can when you can live in Santa Venetia. Before he got to the end where he was reduced to that extent, it was pretty good stuff, there was still humor, and still a perspective and people were not yet planets in the sense of being inanimate. As you do get in the final stuff, you know like, Craps Last Tape, have you read that or seen that? Did you like that?
James Holmes: [um-hm]
Philip K Dick: I liked that a lot, because of just one thing, where he says, he’s sitting there eating a banana, he turns the tape on and recorded 20 to 30 years earlier in his life, when Tape starts out he hears his own voice say I’m going to get rid of the habit of eating bananas today, or something like that. And he’s still eating bananas 20 years later. Now without that kind of touch, that stuff is drear, and he excluded that kind of element I think finally, but like in that you still have that element and that transforms something like Craps Last Tape. Which otherwise is a kind of entropic thing you know, continual downhill thing as you get throughout most of Beckett, toward an equal distribution of heat into an utterly impotent purposeless, as the New Merriam Webster says toward ultimate silence, stillness and death. Silence, coldness and death. There aren’t a dictionary page, he still had humor like the banana thing, and therefore is alive even though, I mean if they were living in a garbage can and they said my garbage can is better than yours or something like that, then I could carry it even farther in my own mind.
James Holmes: They don’t have to talk all then, they just sit.
Philip K Dick: That’s really man, now Ionesco I don’t think ever got to that kind of thing, he was still great. All his characters in one play were named the same name, I don’t know how they staged that, really funny things like talking about Aristotle. A guy says he was a wog, another argument, very profound, he said I’m going to bite your nose, and stuff like that, to me it was, it’s really absurd, It’s the Theatre of the Absurd.
Philip K Dick: … But to me it makes sense. I mean, I can’t tell the difference anyway whether things make sense or not. I just enjoy them and I really enjoy Ionesco. Did you see Zero Mostel in Rhinoceros?
James Holmes: No, I didn’t.
Philip K. Dick: I didn’t either. They say that was unbelievably good because he did on the stage what, ya know, happens in the script; he did turn himself right on the stage into a rhinoceros like, ya know, the way Barrymore did it in the silent film of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with no make up he just turned himself into Mr. Hyde. Darndest thing I ever saw. I wish I could do that. But to me Ionesco, for instance is writing the kind of stuff that I conceive of myself as writing. I mean it’s not set in the future and it’s not… nobody, I think, has ever called, Ionesco science fiction. But it is the zeitgeist that compels my attention. A mixture of chaos, ya know the absurd. You go back to Kafka where the universe doesn’t make any sense and you carry it one step further where it doesn’t make any sense and it’s also funny. Now, cause like if God is conspiring to destroy and God screws it all up and can’t find you when the day comes, ya know. When judgment day comes and God’s got the records all mixed up and he condemns somebody else in line by mistake. To me, this kind of relief from the inexorable conspiratorial view of the universe is the thing about the modern world, or the really modern world, that I like. For instance, Goethe mentions this like in Egmont; this is the thing that even the conspiracies of God are screwed up by the chance commingling of people and events. Nobody, even God, can predict what is going to happen. Look what happened at the Garden of Eden. God had it all worked out, it screwed up somehow, which is good probably. And this introduces not merely chaos and the unfathomable and mysterious but chance and randomness enhance humor, because humor is based on a response to the unexpected, to something other than cause and effect you know, which is inexorable. Something happens, in other words, you mix five eggs, some flour and all that other stuff and you get, for instance, the Bible, you know; you open the oven and there’s the Bible sitting in the pan. This is always funny; the unexpected is always funny unless it’s horrible. And if you can shut out the sense of the horrible, then it’s funny. And sometimes you can do this even when you are being executed. Like “you fellas couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn door” and the next second that guy is blown to bits. If he can still keep that mood, I would like to see how he does it, you know. Then there’s some hope. Not for him maybe, but maybe one of those soldiers goes home and says “You know, he’s right, I missed him entirely. I’ll have to go practice some more and do better next week.” I don’t really know, there’s a Jewish joke, where it’s during the Crimean war and they’re firing back and forth in the lines and this Jewish soldier has been dragooned into one of these sides. So he leaps up and says, “Why are you shooting at me, ‘here steyt ein mensch’ ” which is Yiddish for ‘here stands a man’. It makes no sense at all because who else are there on both sides except men. But the fact that the guy can’t figure out how they can be shooting at him if he’s a man in a way it makes no sense and in a way it makes complete sense. The thing that’s missing though is his realization. Everybody else on both sides, every other individual could also say that if they thought about it. Jewish humor is that way, it’s not funny and it is funny just like Chaplin you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I would prefer to laugh. I cry and they arrest me for being a homosexual or something like that.
James Holmes: What do you think of Kafka
Philip K. Dick: Laugh myself sick. Especially reading Metamorphosis
James Holmes: But, Kafka laughed.
Phillip K. Dick: You’re putting me on.
James Holmes: No. He laughed all the way through. What if he’d, like, read them to his friends.
Philip K. Dick: He laughed?
James Holmes: Yeah he had friends read them and he just laughed himself silly.
Philip K. Dick: You must be putting me on. Even like in “The Penal Colony”?
James Holmes: Yes. Even “The Penal Colony”. He just, from what I’ve read, of people, not in his diaries or anything like that but people writing about his life and he..
Philip K. Dick: Jesus Christ.
James Holmes: He would just laugh the whole way through it.
Philip K. Dick: So like my idea of
James. Holmes: “The Castle” is just the one. You know there’s a section of “The Castle” where he had his friends read them over again and again.
Philip K. Dick: It’s like the Adolf Hitler joke book, it’s a fine idea but what do you put in as the first joke, besides Adolf Hitler’s birth? And that, you can’t start laughing there. I don’t know what to think; if Kafka thought those things were funny, like one day Joseph K. woke up one day and found out he was a giant cockroach, you know, I wouldn’t find that funny at all. I’ll have to go back and look at my article that I wrote on Kafka. I did not mention that Kafka thought those things were funny. That’s bad news. That’s like, the Soviet Union published an article once that Hamlet was really written as a comedy and it was the end scene where everybody is dead on the stage and you’re supposed to die laughing and the proof of this is that Hamlet is described as being fat and everybody knows that fat men are funny or at least they were so thought of then. And this immediately inspired me to all kinds of thoughts. Like a humorous musical on Ecclesiastes, something like Oklahoma and all kinds of awful things like the Nuremberg trial documents set to music like, oh Jesus Christ don’t get me started on that.
James Holmes: Have you seen any movies lately?
Philip K. Dick: Yeah.
James Holmes: Any that you’d like to remember?
Philip K. Dick: Yeah. The Planet of the Apes and Under The Planet of the Apes. Beneath? I always get it wrong. Those were really marvelous. Those were like to me The Schiller trilogy, the Wallenstein trilogy. It was worth the $2.00 it cost for all nine of us to get in. They were really wonderful. And as I drove away, I thought next time we’d go back and see it again we’ll offer them a banana instead of $2.00 and see what happens. That this was really like pop art, mass culture, man that is really something because the span of attention alone required in sitting there in your cold car watching those three films and that’s about as long as a Wagnerian opera and a hell of a lot better. Now I thought when that was over, I don’t really have to say anything because the guys that made this, they did it really damn good. That was really wonderful. And I would recommend seeing that. I saw another movie that I would not, well I recommend seeing it as a scientific curiosity of the way things should never be and that was something called ‘Carnal Knowledge’ and after this girl and I got out, we went to the movies because we were feeling depressed, we got out of that and we drove around and tried to buy a cup of coffee and they wouldn’t serve us because we had such strange looks on our faces. That I would recommend only as I would recommend reading the Nuremberg trial documents and the contrast between the two is the contrast between life and death.
James Holmes: Are they searching back?
Philip K. Dick: Yeah searching back, I always think of “All Quiet On The Western Front” the old Lew Ayres film which I finally saw on TV. like I saw “Children of Paradise” on daytime TV. To me that, “All Quiet On The Western Front”, that was the greatest dramatic moment in my life that is you know sitting before any kind of dramatic production. I never recovered from that, I was never the same person. I’ve seen a lot of really fine movies since then, “Ballad Of A Soldier”, that Soviet film, or whatever it was called, it was the about the soldier on leave during World War II. It was simply a slave looking for this girl; it had no politics or anything. That was a great film. I thought “Ben Hur” was a great film, believe it or not, I got really strange taste. I thought that “Potemkin” was a great film. I thought the “Circus of Dr. Lao” was a great movie, nothing though was like “All Quiet On The Western Front” to me.
James Holmes: Your all time favorite movie?
Philip K. Dick: Absolutely. That and the first “Dracula” film.
James Holmes: Ha ha, with Bela Lugosi?
Philip K. Dick: Yeah well that one. There was a silent German “Dracula” which I saw. Did you ever see that?
James Holmes: No, I don’t think so.
Philip K. Dick: That was pretty scary too. But I was thinking of the first Bela Lugosi one. With the people coming, the women all three coming forward from their coffins; to me was like out of Jung; it was a great archetypal moment. There are a lot of other, there are really many, many fine movies, there’s so many fine movies that you can’t really sit, like you can, list them. You can draw up a list of the 10 best science fiction novels cause at most there are 10 but there are so many great movies. I also can name some of the worst movies I ever saw too. But there are many of those too.
James Holmes: What’s the absolute worst?
Philip K. Dick: What was that thing about where Rhett Butler at the end says “Frankly, I don’t give a damn” whatever that was that was it. What was that?
James Holmes: “Gone With The Wind”?
Philip K. Dick: “Gone With The Wind”. Yeah, the worst movie ever made. All time worst movie.
James Holmes: That’s also the all time biggest money grossing movie ever made.
Philip K. Dick: I wouldn’t touch that with a 10 foot pole. That’s cause it had a dirty word at the end of it. The word “damn”. You know it’s really tragic when you think about, well I can never see that thing and I get dragooned into seeing it. Without thinking of what happened to Vivian Leigh at the end of her life in comparison to what happened to her as the character in there. To me, the contrast between the two, if I was teaching a course on the relationship between wish fulfillment, fake, lousy, what they call plastic culture stuff and life I would contrast that movie with what happened to her in real life. Which to me, was an authentic tragedy. In which, if I were to write, I would write that kind of thing into my writing. That was really terrible. If you don’t know what happened to her I ain’t gonna tell you cause I’m not gonna lay that number on you. In a way you could do that a lot of times. Do you remember a German film called “The Blue Angel”?
James Holmes: I think I’ve seen it.
Philip K. Dick: In the 40s when I was going to Cal or whatever it was, that was considered to have been the finest movie around in the old days and that was Marlene Dietrich and I forget the guy, it was the guy, it wasn’t Harry Bauer it was somebody else but anyway, the ending, it was study of how a human being can be degraded systematically step by step until at the end this guy who had been a professor in this school is breaking eggs over his head in a circus and going cock a doodle do and he goes back finally, as he’s dying, to his classroom and after sitting there for awhile he gets out an egg and breaks it over his head and says cock a doodle do or something and by that point I had freaked out too much, that was a great movie. And that is the kind of thing that I would write about but I would not end it there because if it ends there like that then it opens the door to the deluge like we were talking; about that was a Weimar Republic thing it said there was no hope man cannot survive he will become a thing that breaks eggs over his head in a circus and that opened the door to the national socialist period the mystique of blood and so forth and so on, so it isn’t even a practical idea to end. I mean, you can express that stuff but that is life unredeemed through art; that is you know, like, you pick up the Chronicle and it says “Embalmed baby sits in living room holding Shirley Temple drink in hand for 22 years”, or something really unbelievable or “Drunken father eats own baby”, and I used to stick these things into my novels and these awful headlines would take like 10 words and then it would take me 55,000 words to rationalize a way that that one headline like “Drunken father eats own baby” or “Man drowns in giant vat of slowly hardening chocolate found by his brother in law”. I would be obsessed by those things and I would write books to excoriate the image created by those actual fragments of reality. I’ve got a whole drawer full of them. I could blow anybody’s mind with three of them, at random. “Pittsburg Pirate Batboy toe taps $330,000.00 to buy Pittsburg Pirates”, figured out he had to toe tap $25,000 a day for all his life, that kind of thing, it can’t happen, all kinds of stuff like that appears in the newspapers. And art consists of explaining away one article in the Chronicle to me, Ernest Faust has written his finest in one Chronicle article. I’ve got to stop taking the Chronicle it’s getting to me again. My periods of elation/depression
madness always coincide with subscribing to the Chronicle. “Drunken father dies in huge vat of slowly hardening chocolate while trying to eat drunken baby”; that would not serve to help at all. It does take 55,000 words. Trouble with reality is it contains elements which cannot be reconciled with anybody’s philosophy and this is also its virtue, fortunately. It can’t be. Because if it could be, I think things would be worse. Like it could turn out that articles like that were made up by somebody at the newspaper for want of something else to do and there never was a guy that drowned in the bottom of vat of slowly hardening chocolate, that would be worse even. Like I wrote in a letter the other day, you find out the lies people are telling you, telling about you behind your back they just made up. Actually all the lies they are telling behind your back are true and they’re all favorable. It’s like the adultery Bible which was always my favorite version and the Commandments, it was printed about 1522, thou shalt commit adultery and all the copies were printed that way and of course that guy was burned at the stake. But that is what has come down to be known as the adultery Bible, thou shalt commit adultery. That’s the saving typographical error that unhinges 952 pages by leaving out a couple of letters, completely destroys the rest of the thing.
James Holmes: Well, what would you, as an epitaph to your life, what would you…
Continued in:
Part 17 Philip K Dick 1971 Interview