Humpty Dumpty At Home

 Philip K Dick, Humpty Dumpty in Oakland, my choice this week. Going into abeyance. I always liked that word. I have been reading my America diaries, 1977 and 1980-1 and writing Monday Night At Home, after the radio programme, circa 1963, which I loved, where I first heard Ivor Cutler. Philip K Dick is never at home. No Direction Home. Not Monday nor any other night. The muddying of capitalism in Oakland, late nineteen-fifties. Humpty is a car mechanic, Dumpty is a car salesman. 

Why this was the choice a few days before going to Paris, I have no idea. Abeyance, perhaps. The chance to read afresh, in all innocence.

Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, Flann O'Brien

On a good day in September you talk to a few people in the market, take your place in the world for an hour or so, then go down to Vibes and Scribes to find something to read, and there are two books on the front display that will prime the change in the season.

Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick
How it is if you have paranoid tendencies and a missing twin. '... as if I'd been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane.' Dislocation of the real. As respite. The relief of spelling it out is only temporary.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
A story written by a library. 'I emerged from the library at age 28,'  says Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451 is the fantasy nightmare dream tale of a graduate of libraries who has absorbed hundreds of styles and aspirations.

Science fiction is a total misnomer. Dystopian fiction even worse. More like the usual warped autobiography. If we're prepared to be honest. Ragle Gumm in Time Out of Joint is at the centre of an invented universe. Guy Montag in Fahrenheit 451 is trying to escape with his books intact. Their names tell all. These are auto-explanations of a rational/passionate/desperate order.

The resident image, recurring as with dreams, is Truffaut's film of Fahrenheit 451, with its speaking book people to and fro in the dusk or the dawn at the end of the film: he's Plato she's Alice in Wonderland, he's the Third Policeman. They walk to and fro saying their books, being their books in open spaces between trees.

A new Desert Island Discs question: if you had to choose a book to learn by heart, to guarantee for your lifetime, what would you choose? Fahrenheit 451? A Robert Walser story. A la recherche du temps perdu? One of the four quartets? Orlando?

Ray Bradbury invented Guy Montag, the fireman (though he claims it was the other way around) because he had grown in books and could not do without them. So he writes, or is written, as above all a passion for books, a need for books and libraries. Truths less carved in stone than printed on the memory.

Within a few pages Montag the fireman who burns books (with relish), meets Clarisse, the self-confessed insane 17 year-old with the faintest breath of fresh apricots and strawberries about her; and begins his transformation.

This is a redemption story. Ray Bradbury is a golden labrador of a writer. His enthusiasm for what he has to say is infectious.

Philip K. Dick, or PKD, on the other hand, is not redeemed. (I can't think of an introspective breed of dog.) He makes his tragic discovery and it's recessive. Everything he knows quickly leads to doubting everything he knows. Every border an introduction to a new unreality.

'Maybe,' Phil Dick told a Vancouver convention in 1972, 'all systems .... are the manifestations of paranoia. We should be content with the mysterious, the meaningless, the contradictory, the hostile, and most of all the unexplainably warm and giving...'

Philip K. Dick, Humpty Dumpty in Oakland

The front cover of my copy of Humpty Dumpty in Oakland has faded to shades of light- and mid-blue, the colours of a lost morning. The reds are the first to go in colour printing. The Pontiac, if it's not a Chevy, on the front cover should be red, the office and its sign should be cerise. No champagne hour chez Philip K Dick. Everyone is too sad and unsuccessful, the view too veiled, too confused.

The last few chapters are best read in the bath, where a general softening of outlook allows Humpty Dumpty and his acquaintance fall down and pick themselves up over and over again, till by the last page you know this does not stop, a used car lot closes and another opens up, some die and some relocate, a record company called Teach is always looking for a new motif.

This is like Dashiell Hammett without the latent heroism. His detectives are laconic but they are heroes. Chez Philip K Dick, our used car salesman, our garage mechanic, our record company, our wives (who are Greek if not educated), strain for some kind of buoyancy. No heroes. No resolution. Prose is discarded talk. Plot is obfusc and fickle. Death tidier than most other states.

The used car salesman and the garage mechanic have lost all certainty of understanding the world in which they try to make their way, butting into obstacles that look like opportunity. They acknowledge no code of behaviour, no code at all, except, without conviction, a vaguely self-serving behaviour. If you make the right decision you'll probably die before you know it.

I don't get on well with Philip K Dick's science fiction. I find it hard enough to consider the world as it is, without taking on the world as it might have been. I have no room for imagined horrors. The novels contemporaneous with his Bay Area, Marin County, Sonoma/Petaluma experience I enjoy. They are discomfiting as Platonov's Central Asia or Walser's Middle Europe, if less poignant, or poignant without poetry, or rejecting the comfort that poignancy might bring.

The puff on the back cover from the Times Literary Supplement of the 80s includes words like Nescience and Anomie, which look quaint in today's strictly easy-peasy strain of enthusiasm. When my fellow students were reading Durkheim, Marx and Weber, I was reading Rimbaud, Rilke and Virginia Woolf. Anomie is a likeable word, secretive, detached yet warm, redolent of plant life, light winds, secure alienation. Nescience sounds like something George Clooney could sell.

I am an eclectic reader but science fiction is a step too far sideways, even though I have in the attic my brother's collection of science fiction books and magazines and for a period in my twenties I did read them, alongside Gödel Escher Bach and a lot of maths and philosophy I couldn't understand but which got me going in ways I didn't understand either. Who was I, poking around in other worlds achieved by knowledge not language? I was in danger of lift-off myself, with a head full of Mallarmé, Berlioz and the like.

I did like Blade Runner though, Harrison Ford in love with a replicant and endless rain in Chinatown, Darryl Hannah on the roof, Rutger Hauer biting heads off whippets. And in the nineteen eighties Philip K Dick was re-issued in paperback, including the non-science fiction novels. I bought Confessions of a Crap Artist.

It's a brother story, the eponymous crap artist is a brother who has a collection of rocks and electronics and a head full of unnatural ideas, such as regarding lamp posts as authority figures and believing his geometry teacher to be a rooster in a suit. He lost his job as a tyre re-groover because he stole a can of chocolate-covered ants from a supermarket.

When in exasperation – and fear– I had realised that his brain simply had a warp to it, that in distinguishing fact from fiction he chose fiction, and between good sense and foolishness he preferred foolishness. He could tell the difference – but he preferred the rubbish. 

This is the sister speaking.
This is the brother, the author.

I used to believe the universe was basically hostile. And that I was misplaced in it, I was different from it… I had a lot of fears that the universe would discover just how different I was from it… and its reaction would be normal: it would get me.  I didn't feel that it was malevolent, just perceptive. And there's nothing worse than a perceptive universe if there's something weird about you.

His clean, disconcerted paranoia slices through crass Californian human life like a kid on a bike in a mud patch. Information is the only escape, half an explanation of the weirdness and the effort, as well as an obscure warning: if all this is the case, then what?

Sunlight has weight. Every year the earth weighs tens thousand pounds more, because of the sunlight that reaches it from the sun. That fact has never left my mind, and the day I calculated that since I first learned the fact, in 1940, almost one million nine hundred thousand pounds of sunlight have fallen on the earth.

My preferred forms of weirdness are more claustrophobic (Kafka, Kharms, and other writers whose names begin with K), more abrupt and organic. But there are moments in Philip K Dick when I feel at one with his weirdness.

Every time there's a quake I ask myself: is this going to open up the crack in the ground that finally reveals the world inside? Will this be the one?