Next, biographer Lawrence Sutin edited 1991’s In Search of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis, a volume that thrilled and frustrated a core of seekers for whom the text was increasingly taking on the status of legend. Less than three hundred pages long, In Search of Valis presented an array of enigmatic morsels that, for some, only raised questions as to what might be in the other 7,700 pages. When Paul Williams relinquished his role as literary executor in the mid-1990s, the Exegesis and other PKD manuscripts went into the custody of Dick’s children. For them, the unpublished trove was fraught, since it attracted unwelcome attention and threatened to undermine their father’s growing academic and literary reputation with its disreputable aura of high weirdness. For some of Dick’s admirers, even the novels written in the wake of the 2-3-74 revelations are at best a footnote to what they regard as his seminal writings and, at worst, an embarrassment. (An interesting Exegesis subplot consists of Dick’s reactions to meeting some of his earliest admirers in academia, whom he refers to as “the Marxists” and who were clearly perplexed by his metaphysical preoccupations. “I proved to be an idiot savant,” he writes, “much to their disgust.”)
The present editors have navigated this maze of perplexities in possession of a few useful axioms. One is that, putting aside any of the peculiarities earmarking his work or the circumstances of its creation, Philip K. Dick was one of the twentieth century’s great novelists. This makes the eventual public availability of his unpublished notes, journals, drafts, and other surviving papers not only desirable but inevitable. This is as true of Dick’s Exegesis as it is of the notebooks of Dostoyevsky or Henry James. If the fate of such material is to attract fewer readers than the writer’s novels—and who would wish otherwise?—it is nevertheless of clear importance that it emerge. Yet another axiom is this: the whole of the Exegesis is unpublishable, short of a multiple-volume scholarly edition issued at a prohibitive price or (more likely) in an online form.
Another belief we held going in: the Exegesis is terrific reading, of a kind. We might say, “If you take it for what it is,” or, “If you care for this sort of thing,” but those terms beg the question of what “sort of thing” “it” exactly is, and we are at a loss to answer that question. To give yourself to it completely, as Kinney and Sutin and ourselves—most especially the tireless Pamela—have done, demands a degree of mania and stupefaction we would not wish on another human (though we will undoubtedly not be the last). But to give yourself to it in part, at leisure, and in a spirit of curiosity can be entrancing. And to become entranced by it is—contradicting ourselves now—to want more. One last axiom, then: in the compromises and sacrifices that this effort, by its nature, imposed, we will satisfy no one. We have set another foot on Everest, reached a slightly higher station than others before us. But not the summit. That admission leads to a declaration: this book spearheads an effort to transcribe, reorganize (or, more rightly, “organize”), and, eventually, provide scholarly access to the entirety of the writing left behind by Philip K. Dick after his death. Much of what we excluded was repetitive and boring. Some was tantalizing but opaque, or defied excerpt. But no one will need to take our word for this forever.
or:
Science fiction writer Tim Powers recited these two limericks from memory, then explained, “He’d call you up at eleven in the morning and say, ‘I just figured out some stuff—I just figured out the universe—why don’t you come over.’ Possibly he’d written until six A.M., then slept from six to eleven. I’d say, ‘I’ve gotta go to work. Write it down so you don’t forget it.’ One day I said, ‘Oh, yeah, and can you write it as a limerick?’ When I showed up he gave me two versions.”
In the last decade of his life, Philip K. Dick’s friends and visitors became, one after the next, confidants of the iconoclastic human being who was both scribbling out the Exegesis and, in many senses, living it. These eyewitnesses offer evocative accounts that amplify the text’s human di mension; its tenderness, monologuing obsessiveness, irascibility, seductiveness, despair, irony, voraciousness, curiosity, anger, and wit, and above all its doubt and certainty, were Dick’s own.
Tim Powers continued: “Every day was starting again from zero. It was never cumulative. And every now and then he’d say: ‘It’s all nonsense. It’s all acid flashbacks.’ He’d be down, terribly depressed. For one thing it would mean he’d wasted years. Then he’d be off again. He called me one day and said, ‘Powers, my researches have led me to believe I have the power to forgive sins.’ I said, ‘Well, who have you forgiven?’ He said, ‘Nobody . . . I forgave the cat’s sins and went to bed.’ ”
Cartoonist Art Spiegelman, then a young fan who considered Dick “the only living writer I wanted to meet,” made his first visit to Dick’s apartment in February 1974: “It was one week before the vision. I planned a trip from S. F. to L.A., but he wasn’t answering his phone. We did our day at Disneyland, then I thought: I can’t not ring his doorbell. I stayed for three days. He was charming, eager for someone to talk to about his work. Only later did I find out he’d been in a deep funk. We’d talk, I’d fall asleep, he’d go in and begin typing, and then I’d wake up and we’d begin talking again.
“I think I have one of the earliest manifestations of what became the Exegesis. I wish I could find it. We wanted a collaboration with Phil for Arcade magazine—he gave us something sort of essaylike, clearly religious. It concerned taking Christopher to the hospital. This was the first clue I had that he was off in that territory, but I can’t remember it being a very big deal in ’74–75. He didn’t seem obsessive, didn’t seem manic.
“Later, visiting to recruit him for Raw magazine, I thought: This guy’s on the skids somehow. The apartment was the worst version of the Philip Marlowe housing complex. But he was studying Aramaic. I was struck, thinking, That’s intense! There’s not too many people doing that. Yet it didn’t seem like a good influence on him—he seemed burdened by all this stuff. Crushed. I do remember expressing excitement about one idea, and he lit up. He’d figured out why evil exists on earth: we were in a bubble, and God couldn’t get to us. I liked that image, and we talked about it for a while.”