Scott Timberg writes in the LA Times about Philip K. Dick’s years in Orange County, “Philip K. Dick: A ‘plastic’ paradox”.
It would certainly be hard to find more of a polar opposite of Dick’s Bay Area nature than the “nightmarish,” Nixon-infused landscape of Orange County in the 70s.
[…] after moving to Southern California, Dick often fell back on Bay Area reflexes. “He kept comparing Southern California to Disneyland,” remembers [ex-wife] Tessa, “and said it was plastic, wasn’t real.”
Dick was aware of the cliché. In the novel “Radio Free Albemuth,” a narrator named Phil Dick speaks of Orange County, “far to the south of us, an area so reactionary to us that in Berkeley it seemed like a phantom land, made of the mists of dire nightmare… . Orange County, which no one in Berkeley had ever actually seen, was the fantasy at the other end of the world, Berkeley’s opposite.”
Novelist Jonathan Lethem, editor of the three Library of America Dick collections, calls this “a period where he seems less grounded in place.” The author’s work, Lethem says, reveals a “very strong alienation from any real environment — it’s about Disneyland, about condos where you park your car under the building, where you barely get to know your neighbors. It’s about Nixon. It’s almost as if Dick was a spy in Orange County.”
That dissolution of real place, along with Dick’s increasing obsessions and visions, raises the question of whether the phantasms his mind constructed originated as much in his real-world location as in his head.
Some other “two-three-seventy four” event could have taken place in Berkeley instead of Fullerton, setting him on his path to a new personal cosmology, but what might it have been like, incubated in another culture? What would have become of his great 1970s works had he stayed on in Northern California or elsewhere?
Too many “What If” questions to get a useful answer, but the possibilities are intriguing.
The article includes interview excerpts with Tessa Dick, as well as with Dick’s daughter Isa.
