Philip K. Dick - Confessions of a Crap Artist

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CONFESSIONS OF A CRAP ARTIST
by Philip K. Dick
Copyright 1975 by Philip K. Dick. All rights reserved.
Cover design & art by Michael Patrick Cronan.
ISBN 0-9601428-2-7
Type set by Michael Labriole; printed in U.S.A.
Hardcover published 1975; limited paperback 1977; this new edition first published June 1978. 5 4
3 2 1
Distributed by Bookpeople, 2940 Seventh St., Berkeley, CA 94710.
Individual copies available @ $3.95 from Entwhistle Books, Box 611, Glen Ellen, CA 95442.
The publishers would like to thank the Special Collections Library at California State University,
Fullerton, for help in preparing the manuscript and for providing reference materials used in
writing the introduction.
To Tessa,
the dark-haired girl who cared about me
when it mattered most; that is, all the time.
This is to her with love.
Introduction
Paul Williams
_Confessions of a Crap Artist_ was written in 1959. It is a _tour de force_, one of the
most extraordinary novels I've ever read. There are, I believe, two essential reasons why it has
taken Philip K. Dick sixteen years to get this novel published. The first reason is the intensity
of the picture the author paints. This is the sort of book that makes editors shiver with (perhaps
unconscious) revulsion, and leaves them grasping at any sort of excuse ("I don't like the shifting
viewpoint") to reject it and get it out of their minds. The people are too real.
The second reason is that it is a "mainstream" novel written by an author who had already
established himself as a fairly successful science fiction writer. It is easier for a camel to go
through the eye of a needle, than for a science fiction writer to be accepted as a serious
novelist when he's not writing science fiction.
Philip K. Dick was born in 1928. He began writing professionally in the early 1950's, and
although he steadily submitted short stories and novels to mainstream publishers as well as
science fiction markets throughout the 1950's, it was only as a science fiction writer that he was
able to get into print. His first short story appeared in _The Magazine of Fantasy & Science
Fiction_ in 1952; his first novel, _Solar Lottery_, was published by Ace Books in 1955. Since
then, he has had thirty-one other books published in the United States, all of them science
fiction.
Despite Dick's considerable popularity--in North America and especially in Europe (where
over 100 different editions of his books are in print)--_Confessions of a Crap Artist_ is the
first non-science-fiction book by Philip K. Dick that has ever been published. It is one of at
least eleven "experimental mainstream novels" (his term) that Dick wrote during the first ten
years of his professional career.
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_Confessions_ is "experimental" only in that it was written without regard for novelistic
conventions. Dick's value as a writer lies in his unusual and unusually vivid perceptions of the
world we live in and the way people behave, especially the way they behave towards each other.
These perceptions dictate the form and substance of his novels. In this case, the story is told in
the first person by each of three different characters, in different chapters; there are also
sections where third person narrative is used. This is unusual, but it works; those few novels of
Dick's where he has tried to shoehorn his perceptions into a "novelistic structure" that did not
originate within himself do not work half as well. Dick's books are uniquely structured, not out
of self-conscious experimentation in the manner of writers who are aware of themselves as part of
some "avant-garde" movement, but out of simple necessity.
Dick made some fascinating comments about his attitude towards writing in a letter to
Eleanor Dimoff at Harcourt, Brace and Company, written February 1st, 1960, at a time when Dick was
most actively engaged in trying to market his "mainstream" novels:
Now, I don't know how deeply to go into this, in this letter. The intuitive--I might say,
gestalting--method by which I operate has a tendency to cause me to 'see' the whole thing at once.
. . .Mozart operated this way. The problem for him was simply to get it down. If he lived long
enough, he did so; if not, then not. In other words, according to me (but not according to you
people) my work consists of getting down that which exists in my mind; my method up to now has
been to develop notes of progressively greater completeness. . . If I believed that the first
jotting-down actually carried the whole idea, I would be a poet, not a novelist; I believe that it
takes about 60,000 words for me to put down my original idea in its absolute entirety.
Philip K. Dick has three particular talents that have allowed him to not only "put down"
his visions but to bring them to life: his ability to create believable, sympathetic characters;
his sense of horror; and his sense of humor.
_Confessions of a Crap Artist_ is the story of four people who live in and perceive very
different universes but whose lives get hopelessly tangled together through the usual combination
of destiny, accident, and their own deliberate actions (stress on the latter--the novel is at its
most acute in the scenes where each character assesses his own situation and then deliberately
acts in such a manner as to dig himself deeper into the pit). Jack Isidore, the "crap artist" of
the title, is a simple-minded lost soul, fascinated by bits of information and incapable of
distinguishing fact from fantasy--seeing the world through his eyes is a bizarre, unforgettable
experience. He is not an idiot in the tradition of Faulkner's and Dostoievski's famous idiots; his
idiocy is close enough to our normalcy to scare us.
Fay Hume, Jack's sister, is an intelligent, attractive, hopelessly selfish woman, married
to a beer-drinking, inarticulate regular guy named Charley Hume who owns a small factory in Marin
County. They live in an absurdly non-functional modern house in Point Reyes, a rural outpost
several hours north of San Francisco, with two daughters and some livestock and an incredible
electric bill. Charley's purpose in Fay's life seems to have been to build her this dream house;
that done, he withers in her eyes and she turns her attention to a young married man named Nathan
Anteil. Nathan is a true intellectual, a law student; he spots Fay for what the is immediately,
but is drawn to her anyway. Why? He doesn't know; perhaps even the author doesn't know; he only
knows that it's true, this is the way people are.
And the story is disturbing, hilarious, and utterly believable because the reader, too,
can't help recognizing the truth when he sees it, however crazy it is. Charley attacks his wife
because she makes him buy Tampax; it's ridiculous, but who among us can fail to see the sanity
underneath Charley's madness? Who can fail to identify with Fay in her moments of self-
realization, such as the following soliloquy? It's funny, of course; but it's too accurate not to
also be painful:
Almost at once I felt, acutely, that I was a hysterical nut. They shouldn't trust you with the
phone, I said to myself. Getting up from the bed I paced around the bedroom. Now it'll get all
over town, I realized. Fay Hume calls up some people in Point Reyes and raves like a drunk. That's
what they'll say: I was drunk. Sheriff Chisholm will be by to take me away. Maybe I ought to phone
him myself and eliminate the middleman.
The reality of Philip Dick's characters stems quite simply from the fact that they are
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real to him; he hears them talking, in his mind, and records their conversations and thoughts--his
dialogue, in almost all of his novels, is excellent. He is especially good at capturing the
interactions between people; the authenticity of his work lies not so much in what people say as
in how they respond to each other. In a conversation in 1974, Dick told me, "Well, the idea of a
single protagonist, I never could understand that too well. . . .What I've felt is that problems
are multipersonal, they involve us all, there's no such thing as a private problem. . . . .It's
only a form of ignorance, when I wake up in the morning, and I fall over the chair and break my
nose, and I'm broke, and my wife's left me-- It's my ignorance that makes me think I'm an entire
universe and that these miseries are my own and they're not affecting the rest of the world. If I
could only look down from a satellite, I would see all the world, everybody getting up and, in
some analogous way, falling over a chair and breaking something."
The humor in the novel, in everything Dick says and writes, is self-evident ("I stood in
the middle of my room doing absolutely nothing except respiring, and, of course, keeping other
normal processes going"). Dick writes from the center of some vast despair that is, however, never
final; the reverse of cynicism is at work here. No matter how miserable and absurd his characters'
actions and thoughts are, Dick's attitude toward his characters is always, finally, sympathetic--
he loves and understands them, his books affirm a faith and affection for humanity, in spite of
all our idiocies. The result is somehow comic. In _Confessions_ particularly, every little
hilarious detail of the awful vanity of our minds is mercilessly exposed. It is possible a woman
could drive a man to such a state that he would assassinate his own pet theep? You better believe
it.
But the humor in no way dilutes the horror. The horror in all of Dick's novels is that the
world around us is cruel and insane, and the more courageously we struggle to remove the blinders
from our eyes and see things as they really are, the more we suffer. Awareness is pain; and Dick's
characters are cursed with awareness, like the autistic child in _Martian Time-Slip_ who hears the
noise of the universe decaying. In _Confessions of a Crap-Artist_, the horror is that human beings
torture each other, and fail repeatedly to do what is best both for the people around them and for
themselves. We are dimly--sometimes even acutely--aware of the interconnectedness of our lives,
but we don't seem to be able to put that awareness to work for us, in fact our efforts to do so
only make things worse. The novel is summed up in Jack Isidore's poignant observation: "In fact,
the whole world is full of nuts. It's enough to get you down."
Here are Philip K. Dick's thoughts on _Confessions of a Crap Artist_, from a letter dated
January 19, 1975:
When I wrote _Confessions_ I had the idea of creating the most idiotic protagonist,
ignorant and without common sense, a walking symposium of nitwit beliefs and opinions... an
outcast from our society, a totally marginal man who sees everything from the outside only and
hence must guess as to what's going on.
In the Dark Ages there was an Isidore of Seville, Spain, who wrote an encyclopedia, the
shortest ever written: about thirty-five pages, as I recall. I hadn't realized how ignorant they
were then until I realized that Isidore of Seville's encyclopedia was considered a masterpiece of
educated compilations for a hell of a long time.
It came to me, then, back in the '50's, to wonder, What if I created a modern-day Isidore,
this one of Seville, California, and had him sort of write something for our time like that of
Isidore of Seville, Spain? What would be the analog? Obviously, a schizoid person, a loner, like
my protagonist. But underneath, most important of all, I wanted to show that this ignorant
outsider was a man, too, like we are; he has the same heart as we, and sometimes is a good person.
In reading the novel over now, I am amazed to find that I agree even more that Jack
Isidore of Seville, California, is no dummy; I am amazed to see how, below the surface of gabble
which he prattles constantly, he has a sort of shrewdly appraising subconscious which sees maybe
very darkly into events, but shit--as I finished the novel this time I thought, to my surprise,
Maybe ol' Jack Isidore is right! Maybe he doesn't just see as well aswe do, but in fact--
incredibly, really--somehow and somewhat better.
In other words, I had sympathy for him when I wrote it back in the '50s, but now I have I
think even more sympathy, as if time has begun to vindicate Jack Isidore. His painfully-arrived-at
opinions are in some strange, beautiful way lacking in the preconceptions which tell the rest of
us what must be true and what must not be, come hell or high water. Jack Isidore starts with no
preconceptions, takes his information from wherever he can find it, and winds up with bizarre but
curiously authentic conclusions. Like an observer from another planet entirely, he is a kind of
gutter sociologist among us. I like him; I approve of him. I wonder, another twenty years from
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now, if his opinions may not seem even more right on. He is, in many ways, a superior person.
At the end, for instance, when he realizes he was wrong, that the world is not going to
end, he is able to survive this extraordinary (for him) realization; he adjusts. I wonder if we
could do as well if we learned that he was right, and we were wrong. But perhaps most important of
all, as Jack himself observed, didn't we see all the normal human beings, the sane and educated
and balanced ones, destroy themselves in truly dreadful ways? And see Jack steer clear,
throughout, of virtually all moral wrongdoing? If his common sense, his practical judgment as to
what is, and as to what he can or can't do, is fucked, what about his refusal to be led into
criminal and evil acts? He stays free; from a realistic standpoint he is doomed and damned, but
from a moral one, a spiritual one if you will, he winds up untarnished. . .and it is certainly his
victory, and a measure of his shrewd judgment, that he realizes this and points it out.
So Jack has insight into himself and the world around him to an enormous degree. He is no
dummy. From a purely survival standpoint, maybe he will--and ought to--make it. Maybe, like the
Emperor Claudius of Rome, like "The Idiot," he is one of God's favored fools; maybe he is an
authentic avatar of Parsifal, the guileless fool of the medieval legends. . .if so, we can use
him, and a lot more like him.
This forgiving man, capable of evaluating without prejudice (in the final analysis) the
hearts and actions of his fellow men, is to me a sort of romantic hero; I certainly had myself in
mind when I wrote it, and now, after reading it again so many years later, I am pleased at my
inner model, my alter self, Jack Isidore of Seville, California: more selfless than I am, more
kind, and in a deep deep way a better man.
_Confessions of a Crap Artist_ is, in Phil Dick's opinion, easily the finest of his non-
science fiction novels, and one of the best books he has ever written (ranking, in the
undersigned's opinion, with Dick's Hugo-Award-winning _The Man In The High Castle_ and his equally
brilliant _Martian Time-Slip_). It is also, I think, one of the most penetrating novels anyone has
written about life in America in the midtwentieth century.
Philip K. Dick was living in Point Reyes, California, when he wrote this novel, Shortly
after completing it, he married the woman who had inspired him to create Fay Hume, and they lived
together for the next five years.
New York City, February, 1975
CONFESSIONS OF A CRAP ARTIST
(one)
I am made out of water. You wouldn't know it, because I have it bound in. My friends are
made out of water, too. All of them. The problem for us is that not only do we have to walk around
without being absorbed by the ground but we also have to earn our livings.
Actually there's even a greater problem. We don't feel at home anywhere we go. Why is
that?
The answer is World War Two.
World War Two began on December 7, 1941. In those days I was sixteen years old and going
to Seville High. As soon as I heard the news on the radio I realized that I was going to be in it,
that our president had his opportunity now to whip the Japs and the Germans, and that it would
take all of us pulling shoulder to shoulder. The radio was one I built myself. I was always
putting together superhet five-tube ac-dc receivers. My room was overflowing with earphones and
coils and condensers, along with plenty of other technical equipment.
The radio announcement interrupted a bread commercial that went:
"Homer! Get Homestead bread instead!"
I used to hate that commercial, and I had just jumped up to turn to another frequency when
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all at once the woman's voice was cut off. Naturally I noticed that; I didn't have to think twice
to be aware that something was up. Here I had my German colonies stamps -- those that show the
Kaiser's yacht the Hohenzollern -- spread out only a little way from the sunlight, and I had to
get them mounted before anything happened to them. But I stood in the middle of my room doing
absolutely nothing except respiring, and, of course, keeping other normal processes going.
Maintaining my physical side while my mind was focussed on the radio.
My sister and mother and father, naturally, had gone away for the afternoon, so there was
nobody to tell. That made me livid with rage. After the news about the Jap planes dropping bombs
on us, I ran around and around, trying to think who to call up. Finally I ran downstairs to the
living room and phoned Hermann Hauck, who I went around with at Seville High and who sat next to
me in Physics 2A. I told him the news, and he came right over on his bicycle. We sat around
listening for further word, discussing the situation.
While discussing, we lit up a couple of Camels.
"This means Germany and Italy'll get right in," I told Hauck. "This means war with the
Axis, not just the Japs. Of course, we'll have to lick the Japs first, then turn our attention to
Europe."
"I'm sure glad to see our chance to clobber those Japs," Hauck said. We both agreed with
that. "I'm itching to get in," he said. We both paced around my room, smoking and keeping our ears
on the radio. "Those crummy little yellow-bellies," Hermann said. "You know, they have no culture
of their own. Their whole civilization, they stole it from the Chinese. You know, they're actually
descended more from apes; they're not actually human beings. It's not like fighting real humans."
"That's true," I said.
Of course, this was back in 1941, and an unscientific statement like that didn't get
questioned. Today we know that the Chinese don't have any culture either. They went over to the
Reds like the mass of ants that they are. It's a natural life for them. Anyhow it doesn't really
matter, because we were bound to have trouble with them sooner or later anyhow. We'll have to lick
them someday like we licked the Japs. And when the time comes we'll do it.
It wasn't long after December 7 that the military authorities put up the notices on the
telephone poles, telling Japs that they had to be out of California by such and such a date. In
Seville -- which is about forty miles south of San Francisco -- we had a number of Japs doing
business; one ran a flower nursery, another had a grocery store -- the usual small-time businesses
that they run, cutting pennies here and there, getting their ten kids to do all the work, and
generally living on a bowl of rice a day. No white person can compete with them because they're
willing to work for nothing. Anyhow, now they had to get out whether they liked it or not. In my
estimation it was for their own good anyhow, because a lot of us were stirred up about Japs
sabotaging and spying. At Seville High a bunch of us chased a Jap kid and kicked him around a
little, to show how we felt. His father was a dentist, as I recall.
The only Jap that I knew at all was a Jap who lived across the street from us, an
insurance salesman. Like all of them, he had a big garden out on the sides and rear of his house,
and in the evenings and on weekends he used to appear wearing khaki pants, a t-shirt, and tennis
shoes, with an armload of garden hose and a sack of fertilizer, a rake and a shovel. He had a lot
of Jap vegetables that I never recognized, some beans and squash and melons, plus the usual beets
and carrots and pumpkins. I used to watch him scratching out the weeds around the pumpkins, and
I'd always say:
"There's Jack Pumpkinhead out in his garden, again. Searching for a new head."
He did look like Jack Pumpkinhead, with his skinny neck and his round head; his hair was
shaved, like the college students have theirs, now,'and he always grinned. He had huge teeth, and
his lips never covered them.
The idea of this Jap wandering around with a rotting head, in search of a fresh head, used
to dominate me, back at that time before the Japs were moved out of California. He had such an
unhealthy appearance -- mostly because he was so thin and tall and stooped -- that I conjectured
as to what ailed him. It looked to me to be t.b. For a while I had the fear -- it bothered me for
weeks -- that one day he'd be out in the garden, or walking down his path to get into his car, and
his neck would snap and his head would bounce off his shoulders and roll down to his feet. I
waited in fear for this to happen, but I always had to look out when I heard him. And whenever he
was around I could hear him, because he continually hawked and spat. His wife spat, too, and she
was very small and pretty. She looked almost like a movie star. But her English, according to my
mother, was so bad that there was no use of anybody trying to talk to her; all she did was giggle.
The notion that Mr. Watanaba looked like Jack Pumpkinhead could never have occurred to me
if I hadn't read the Oz books in my younger years; in fact I still had a few of them around my
room as late as World War Two. I kept them with my science-fiction magazines, my old microscope
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and rock collection, and the model of the solar system that I had built in junior high school for
science class. When the Oz books were first written, back around 1900, everybody took them to be
completely fiction, as they did with Jules Verne's books and H.G. Wells'. But now we're beginning
to see that although the particular characters, such as Ozma and the Wizard and Dorothy, were all
creations of Baum's mind, the notion of a civilization inside the world is not such a fantastic
one. Recently, Richard Shaver has given a detailed description of a civilization inside the world,
and other explorers are alerted for similar finds. It may be, too, that the lost continents of Mu
and Atlantis will be found to be part of the ancient culture of which the interior lands played a
major role.
Today, in the 1950s, everyone's attention is turned upward, to the sky. Life on other
worlds preoccupies people's attention. And yet, any moment, the ground may open up beneath our
feet, and strange and mysterious races may pour out into our very midst. It's worth thinking
about, and out in California, with the earthquakes, the situation is particularly pressing. 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?
Sometimes at the lunch hour break, I ye discussed this with the guys I work with, even
with Mr. Poity, who owns the firm. My experience has been that if any of them are conscious of non-
terrestrial races at all, they're concerned only with UFO's, and the races we're encountering,
without realizing it, in the sky. That's what I would call intolerance, even prejudice, but it
takes a long time, even in this day and age, for scientific facts to become generally known. The
mass of scientists themselves are slow to change, so it's up to us, the scientifically-trained
public, to be the advance guard. And yet I've found, even among us, there are so many that just
don't give a damn. My sister, for instance. During the last few years she and her husband have
been living up in the north western part of Marin County, and all they seem to care about up there
is Zen Buddhism. And so here's an example, right in my own family, of a person who has turned from
scientific curiosity to an Asiatic religion that threatens to submerge the questioning rational
faculty as surely as Christianity.
Anyhow, Mr. Poity takes an interest, and I've loaned him a few of the Col. Churchward
books on Mu.
My job with the One-Day Dealers' Tire Service is an interesting one, and it makes some use
of my skill with tools, although little use of my scientific training. I'm a tire regroover. What
we do is pick up smoothies, that is, tires that are worn down so they have little or no tread
left, and then I and the other regroovers take a hot point and groove right down to the casing,
following the old tread pattern, so it looks as if there's still rubber on the tire -- whereas in
actual fact there's only the fabric of the casing left. And then we paint the regrooved tire with
black rubbery paint, so it looks like a pretty darn good tire. Of course, if you have it on your
car and you so much as back over a warm match, then boom! You have a flat. But usually a regrooved
tire is good for a month or so. You can't buy tires like I make, incidentally. We deal wholesale
only, that is, with used car lots.
The job doesn't pay much, but it's sort of fun, figuring out the old tread pattern --
sometimes you can scarcely see it. In fact, sometimes only an expert, a trained technician like
myself, can see it and trace it. And you have to trace perfectly, because if you leave the old
tread pattern, there's a gouge mark that even an idiot can recognize as not having been made by
the original machine. When I get done regrooving a tire, it doesn't look hand-done by any means.
It looks exactly the way it would look if a machine had done it, and, for a negroover, that's the
most satisfying feeling in the world.
(two)
Seville, California has a good public library. But the best thing about living in Seville
is that in only a twenty-minute drive you're over into Santa Cruz where the beach is and the
amusement park is. And it's four lanes all the way.
To me, though, the library has been important in forming my education and convictions. On
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Fridays, which is my day off, I go down around ten in the morning and read _Life_ and the cartoons
in the _Saturday Evening Post_, and then if the librarians aren't watching me, I get the
photography magazines from the rack and read them over for the purpose of finding those special
ant poses that they have the girls doing. And if you look carefully in the front and back of the
photography magazines, you find ads that nobody else notices, ads there for you. But you need to
be familiar with the wording. Anyhow, what those ads get you, if you send in the dollar, is
something different from what you see even in the best magazines; like _Playboy_ or _Esquire_. You
get photos of girls doing something else entirely, and in some ways they're better, although
usually the girls are older -- sometimes even baggy old hags -- and they're never pretty, and,
worst of all, they have big fat saggy breasts. But they are doing really unusual things, things
that you'd never ordinarily expect to see girls do in pictures -- not especially dirty things,
because after all, these come through the Federal mails from Los Angeles and Glendale -- but
things such as one I remember in which one girl was lying down on the floor, wearing a black lace
bra and black stockings and French heels, and this other girl was mopping her all over with a mop
from a bucket of suds. That held my attention for months. And then there was another I remember,
of a girl wearing the usual -- as above -- pushing another girl similarly attired down a ladder so
that the victim-girl (if that's what you call it; at least, that's how I usually think of it) was
all bent and lopsided, as if her arms and legs were broken -- like a rag doll or something, as if
she's been run over.
And then always there's the ones you get in which the stronger girl, the master, has the
other tied up. Bondage pictures, they're called. And better than that are the bondage drawings.
They're really competent artists who draw those. . .some are really worth seeing. Others, in fact
most of them, are the run-of-the-mill junk, and really shouldn't be allowed to go through the
mails, they're so crude.
For years I've had a strange feeling looking at these pictures, not a dirty feeling --
nothing to do with sexuality or relations -- but the same feeling you get when you're high up on a
mountain, breathing that pure air, the way it is over by Big Basin Park, where the redwoods are,
and the mountain streams. We used to go hunting around in those redwoods, even though naturally
it's illegal to hunt in a state or Federal park. We'd get a couple of deer, now and then. The guns
we used weren't mine, though. I borrowed the one I used from Harvey St. James.
Usually when there's anything worth doing, all three of us, myself and St. James and Bob
Paddleford, do it together, using St. James' '57 Ford convertible with the double pipes and twin
spots and dropped rearend. It's quite a car, known all around Seville and Santa Cruz; it's gold-
colored, that baked on enamel, with purple trim that we did by hand. And we used moulded fiber-
glass to get those sleek lines. It looks more like a rocket ship than a can; it has that look of
outer space and velocities nearing the speed of light.
For a really big time, where we go is across the Sierras to Reno; we leave late Friday,
when St. James gets off from his job selling suits at Hapsberg's Menswear, shoot over to San Jose
and pick up Paddleford -- he works for Shell Oil, down in the blueprint department-- and then
we're off to Reno. We don't sleep Friday night at all; we get up there late and go right to work
playing the slots or blackjack. Then around ten o'clock Saturday morning we take a snooze in the
car, find a washroom to shave and change our shirts and ties, and then we're off looking for
women. You can always find that kind of women around Reno; it's a really filthy town.
I actually don't enjoy that part too much. It plays no role in my life, any more than any
other physical activity. Even to look at me you'd recognize that my main energies are in the mind.
When I was in the sixth grade I started wearing glasses because I read so many funny
books. _Tip Top Comics_ and _King Comics_ and _Popular Comics_. . . . . those were the first comic
books to appear, back in the mid 'thirties, and then there were a whole lot more. I read them all,
in grammar school, and traded them around with other kids. Later on, in junior high, I started
reading _Astonishing Stories_, which was a pseudo-science magazine, and _Amazing Stories_ and
_Thrilling Wonder_. In fact, I had an almost complete file of _Thrilling Wonder_, which was my
favorite. It was from an ad in _Thrilling_ that I got the lucky lodestone that I still carry
around with me. That was back around 1939.
All my family have been thin, my mother excepted, and as soon as I put on those silver-
framed glasses they always gave to boys in those days, I immediately looked scholarly, like a real
book worm. I had a high forehead anyhow. Then later, in high school, I had dandruff to quite an
extent, and this made my hair seem lighter than it actually was. Once in a while I had a stammer
that bothered me, although I found that if I suddenly bent down, as if brushing something from my
leg, I could speak the word okay, so I got in the habit of doing that. I had, and still have, an
indentation on my cheek, by my nose, left over from having had the chicken pox. In high school I
felt nervous a great deal of the time, and I used to pick at it until it became infected. Also, I
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had other skin troubles, of the acne type, although in my case the spots got a purple texture that
the dermatologist said was due to some low-grade infection throughout my body. As a matter of
fact, although I'm thirty-four, I still break out in boils once in a while, not on my face but on
my butt or arm pits.
In high school I had some nice clothes, and that made it possible for me to step out and
be popular. In particular I had one blue cashmere sweater that I wore for almost four years, until
it got to smelling so bad the gym instructor made me throw it away. He had it in for me anyhow,
because I never took a shower in gym.
It was from the _American Weekly_, not from any magazines, that I got my interest in
science.
Possibly you remember the article they had, in the May 4th 1935 issue, on the Sargasso
Sea. At that time I was ten years old, and in the high fourth. So I was just barely old enough to
read something besides funny books. There was a huge drawing, in six or seven colors, that covered
two whole opened-up pages; it showed ships, stuck in the Sargasso Sea, that had been there for
hundreds of years. It showed the skeletons of the sailors, covered with sea weed. The rotting
sails and masts of the ships. And all different kinds of ships, even some ancient Greek and Roman
ones, and some from the time of Columbus, and then the Norsemen's ships. Jumbled in together.
Never stirring. Stuck there forever, trapped by the Sargasso Sea.
The article told how ships got drawn in and trapped, and how none ever got away. There
were so many that they were side by side, for miles. Every kind of ship that existed, although
later on when there were steamships, fewer ships got stuck, obviously because they didn't depend
on wind currents but had their own power.
The article affected me because in many ways it reminded me of an episode on Jack
Armstrong, the All-American Boy, that had seemed very important to me, having to do with the
Elephants' Lost Graveyard. I remember that Jack had had a metal key that, when struck, resonated
strangely, and was the key to the graveyard. For a long time I knocked every bit of metal I came
across against something to make it resonate, trying to produce that sound and find the Elephants'
Lost Graveyard on my own (a door was supposed to open in the rock somewhere). When I read the
article on the Sargasso Sea I saw an important resemblance; the Elephants' Lost Graveyard was
sought for because of all the ivory, and in the Sargasso Sea there was millions of dollars worth
of jewels and gold, the cargoes of the trapped ships, just waiting to be located and claimed. And
the difference between the two was that the Elephants' Lost Graveyard wasn't a scientific fact but
just a myth brought back by fever-crazed explorers and natives, _whereas the Sargasso Sea was
scientifically established_.
On the floor of our living room, in the house we rented back in those days on Illinois
Avenue, I had the article spread out, and when my sister came home with my mother and father I
tried to interest her in it. But at that time she was only eight. We got into a terrible fight
about it, and the upshot was that my father grabbed up the _American Weekly_ and threw it into the
paper bag of refuse under the sink. That upset me so badly that I had a fantasy about him, dealing
with the Sargasso Sea. It was so disgusting that even now I can't bear to think about it. That was
one of the worst days in my life, and I always held it against Fay, my sister, that she was
responsible for what happened; if she had read the article and listened to me talk about it, as I
wanted her to, nothing would have gone wrong. It really got me down that something so important,
and, in a sense, beautiful, should be degraded the way it was that day. It was as if a delicate
dream was trampled on and destroyed.
Neither my father nor mother were interested in science. My father worked with another
man, an Italian, as a carpenter and housepainter, and, for a number of years, he was with the
Southern Pacific Railroad, in the maintenance department at the Gilroy Yards. He never read
anything himself except the San Francisco _Examiner_ and _Reader's Digest_ and the _National
Geographic_. My mother subscribed to _Liberty_, and then, when that went out of business, she read
_Good Housekeeping_. Neither of them had any education scientific or otherwise. They always
discouraged me and Fay from reading, and off and on during my childhood they raided my rooms and
burned everything in the way of reading material that they could get their hands on, even library
books. During World War Two, when I was in the Service and overseas fighting on Okinawa, they went
into my room at home, the room that had always belonged to me, gathered up all my science-fiction
magazines and scrapbooks of girl pictures, and even my Oz books and _Popular Science_ magazines,
and burned them, just as they had done when I was a child. When I got back from defending them
against the enemy I found that there was nothing to read in the whole house. And all my valuable
reference files of unusual scientific facts were gone forever. I do remember, though, what was
probably the most startling fact from that file of thousands. Sunlight has weight. Every year the
earth weighs ten thousand pounds more, because of the sunlight that reaches it from the sun. That
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fact has never left my mind, and the other 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.
And then, too, a fact that is becoming more and more known to intelligent persons. An
application of mind-power can move an object at a distance! This is something I've known all
along, because as a child I used to do it. In fact, my whole family did it, even my father. It was
a regular activity that we engaged in, especially when out in public places such as restaurants.
One time we all concentrated on a man wearing a gray suit and got him to reach his right hand back
and scratch his neck. Another time, in a bus, we influenced a big old colored woman to get to her
feet and get off the bus, although that took some doing, probably because she was so heavy. This
was spoiled one day, however, by my sister, who when we were concentrating on a man across a
waiting room from us suddenly said,
"What a lot of crap."
Both my mother and father were furious at her, and my father gave her a shaking, not so
much for using a word like that at her age (she was about eleven) but for interrupting our mind
concentration. I guess she picked up the word from some of the boys at Millard Fillmore Grammar
School, where she was in the fifth grade at that time. Even that young she had started getting
rough and tough; she liked to play kickball and baseball, and she was always down on the boys'
playground instead of with the girls. Like me, she has always been thin. She used to be able to
run very well, almost like a professional athlete, and she used to grab something like, say, my
weekly package of Jujubees that I always bought on Saturday morning with my allowance, and ran off
somewhere and ate it. She has never gotten much of a figure, even now that she's more than thirty
years old. But she has nice long legs and a springy walk, and two times a week she goes to a
modern dance class and does exercises. She weighs about 116 pounds.
Because of being a tomboy she always used men's words, and when she got married the first
time she married a man who made his living as owner of a little factory that makes metal signs and
gates. Until his heart attack he was a pretty rough guy. The two of them used to go climbing up
and down the cliffs out at Point Reyes, up where they live in Marin County, and for a time they
had two arabian horses that they rode. Strangely, he had his heart attack playing badminton, a
child's game. The birdie got hit over his head --by Fay-- and he ran backward, tripped over a
gopher hole, and fell over on his back. Then he got up, cursed a blue streak when he saw that his
racket had snapped in half, started into the house for another racket, and had his heart attack
coming back outdoors again.
Of course, he and Fay had been quarreling a lot, as usual, and that may have had something
to do with it. When he got mad he had no control over the language he used, and Fay has always
been the same way -- not merely using gutter words, but in the indiscriminate choice of insults,
harping on each other's weak points and saying anything that might hurt, whether true or not -- in
other words, saying anything, and very loud, so that their two children got quite an earful. Even
in his normal conversation Charley has always been foulmouthed, which is something you might
expect from a man who grew up in a town in Colorado. Fay always enjoyed his language. The two of
them made quite a pair. I remember one day when the three of us were out on their patio, enjoying
the sun, when I happened to say something, I think having to do with space travel, and Charley
said to me,
"Isidore, you sure are a crap artist."
Fay laughed, because it made me so sore. It made no difference to her that I was her
brother; she didn't care who Charley insulted. The irony of a slob like that, a paunchy, beer-
drinking ignorant mid-westener who never got through high school, calling me a "crap artist"
lingered in my mind and caused me to select the ironic title that I have on this work. I can just
see all the Charley Humes in the world, with their portable radios tuned to the Giants' ballgames,
a big cigar sticking out of their mouth, that slack, vacant expression on their fat red faces...
and it's slobs like that who're running this country and its major businesses and its army and
navy, in fact everything. It's a perpetual mystery to me. Charley only employed seven guys at his
iron works, but think of that: seven human beings dependent on a farmer like that for their very
livelihood. A man like that in a position to blow his nose on the rest of us, on anybody who has
sensitivity or talent.
Their house, up in Marin County, cost them a lot of money because they built it
themselves. They bought ten acres of land back in 1951, when they first got married, and then,
while they were living in Petaluma where Charley's factory is, they hired an architect and got
their plans drawn up for their house.
In my opinion, Fay's whole motive for getting mixed up with a man like that in the first
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place was to finally wind up with a house such as she did wind up with. After all, when he met her
he already owned his factory and netted a good forty thousand a year (at least to hear him tell
it). Our family had never had any money; we ate off a set of dime store blue willow for ten years,
and I don't think my father ever owned a new suit at any time in his life. Of course, by winning a
scholarship and being able to go on to college, Fay started meeting men from good homes -- the
frat boys who always horse around with big-game bonfires and the like. For a year or so she went
steady with a boy studying to be a law student, a fairy-like creature who never did appeal much to
me, although he liked to play pin ball machines -- to learn the mathematical odds, as he explained
it. Charley met her by chance, in a roadside grocery store on highway One near Fort Ross. She was
ahead of him in line, buying hamburger buns and Coca-Cola and cigarettes, and humming a Mozart
tune which she had learned in a college music course. Charley thought it was an old hymn that he
had sung back in Canon City, Colorado, and he started talking to her. Outside the grocery store he
had his Mercedes-Benz car parked, and she could see it, with that three-point star sticking up
from the radiator. Naturally Charley had on his Mercedes-Benz pin, sticking out of his shirt, so
she and the rest of the world could see whose car it was. And she had always wanted a good car,
especially a foreign one.
As I construct it, based on my fairly thorough knowledge of both of them, the conversation
went like this:
"Is that car out there a six or an eight?" Fay asked him.
"A six," Charley said.
"Good god," Fay said, "Only a six?"
"Even the Rolls Royce is a six," Charley said. "Those Europeans don't make eights. What do
you need eight cylinders for?"
"Good god. The Rolls Royce a six."
All her life Fay had wanted to ride in a Rolls Royce. She had seen one once, parked at the
curb by a fancy restaurant in San Francisco. The three of us, she and I and Charley, walked all
around it.
"That's a terrific car," Charley said, and proceeded to give us details on how it worked.
I couldn't have cared less. If I had my choice I'd like a Thunderbird or a Corvette. Fay listened
to him as we walked on, and I could see that she wasn't too interested either. Something had
distressed her.
"They're so flashy-looking," she said. "I always thought of a Rolls as a classic-looking
car. Like a World War One military sedan. An officers' car."
Consider to yourself if you've ever actually seen a new Rolls. They're small, metallic,
streamlined but also chunky. Heavy-looking. Like some of the Jaguar saloon models, only more
impressive. British streamlining, if you get the picture. Personally I wouldn't have one on a bet,
and I could see that Fay was wrestling with the same reaction. This one had a silver-blue finish,
with lots of chrome. In fact the whole car had a polished look, and this appealed to Charley, who
liked metal and not wood or plastic.
"There's a real car," he said. Obviously he could see that he wasn't getting across to
either of us; all he could do was repeat himself in his customary clumsy way. Besides his gutter
words he had the vocabulary of a six year old, just a few words to cover everything. "That's a
car," he said finally, as we got to the house we had come to San Francisco to visit. "But it would
look out of place in Petaluma."
"Especially parked in the lot at your plant," I said.
Fay said, "What a waste it would be -- putting all that money into a car. Twelve thousand
dollars."
"Hell, I could pick up one for a lot less," Charley said. "I know the guy who runs the
British Motor Car agency down here."
No doubt he wanted the car, and, left to himself, he possibly would have bought it. But
their money had to go into their house, whether Charley liked it or not. Fay wouldn't let him buy
any more cars. He had owned, besides the Mercedes, a Triumph and a Studebaker Golden Hawk, and of
course several trucks for the business. Fay had told the architect to put radiant heating into the
house, the resistance wire type, and up in the country where they were, it would cost them a
fortune in electricity. Everyone else up there uses Butane or burns wood. On the cow pasture Fay
was having a swanky modern San Francisco type of house built, with recessed bath tubs, plenty of
tile and mahogany panelling, fluorescent lighting, custom kitchen, electric washer and drier
combination -- the works, including a custom hi-fl combination with speakers built right into the
walls. The house had a glass side looking out onto the acres, and a fireplace in the center of the
living room, a circular barbecue type with a huge black chimney stuck over it. Naturally the floor
had to be asphalt tile, in case logs rolled out. Fay had four bedrooms built, plus a study that
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