Some trepidation is normal when visiting a old friend with whom one has not passed any time for many years. One fears that he has changed, that you’ve changed, that neither of you are the persons who once shared the deep intimacies and easy bonhomie that make up true friendship. How pleasant it is, therefore, to find mere moments after your reacquaintance that the bond you’d created is still strong and unsundered, that the joy and stimulus you’d found in the other’s company was unalloyed and lively, that—to put it frankly—you still were friends.
Such was my happiness upon rereading Confessions Of A Crap Artist for the first time in decades. I immediately found myself swayed by Philip K. Dick’s deceptively simple language, his seemingly deep understanding of human thought, and his deft keenness at slicing apart the worst tangles of people’s snarled relationships. I have always loved Philip K. Dick’s works, and reading this novel, which was his only non-genre fiction published during his lifetime, reminded me why. But did I speak of ‘unalloyed joy’ above? Sigh. No, I can’t really speak of Crap Artist in such terms, for I found its pleasures somewhat tarnished by one of Dick’s two primary faults, and in the process I broke my cardinal rule of never learning about the lives of the artists who create the works I love. A brief line or two in Wikipedia was enough to lower my estimation of Philip K. Dick the man; I still feel, however, that his oeuvre and this novel in particular are works of genius that will always be well worth reading. I shall always love Confessions Of A Crap Artist, even if I am no longer sure that I would want to have had Mr. Dick as a friend.
The plot of the book is quickly told: A high-strung woman and her successful husband move her mentally defective brother into their beautiful house in the sparsely populated land of coastal Marin County during the mid-1950s. The brother becomes involved with a local UFO group while his sister becomes involved with a (slightly) younger married man who has recently moved into the area with his wife. Complications ensue. The end. [See below for Trigger Warnings.]
But of course nothing is that simple; it never is with Philip K. Dick. Each chapter is told from a different point of view, a completely realized internal voice of the brother, the sister, the husband, or the married man that Fay (the sister) begins an affair with. The spot-on accuracy with which Dick depicts the thoughts and concerns and internal dialogue of each of these quite disparate persons is a large part of his genius as a writer. It is not so much a stream of consciousness as a deft recreation of the monologue that (as I imagine) we each keep up with ourselves as we consider our troubles and our environment. Anyone who reads much of the writer’s work notes his penchant and proficiency for writing in this style. It is this which makes Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? an entirely different work than Blade Runner (though who really wanted to see Harrison Ford as a henpecked husband in a dead-end job as a glorified repo man?). Dick’s ability to perfectly project the perceptions and foci of his characters is, in fact, the entire plot of Eye In The Sky, the first novel of his I ever read and a work written only a year or two before Confessions Of A Crap Artist.
But entering into the thoughts of his characters means surfacing some unpleasant thoughts, some of which are very dark indeed. We find in Confessions not only something of an apology for wife beating, but also the unrelenting hateful thoughts of people trapped in relationships that they have both fallen into and have also carefully constructed, tangled knots of patterns so deeply tied into their lives that only a Gordian solution can resolve them, but of course the blade of Alexander severs more than mere threads. We want to ask: Do people really think this way? Do they obsess over the imperfections they see in their partners while remaining entirely ignorant of their own deep character flaws? Of course they do. At least, I know I do.
But even saying “something of an apology for wife beating” points out the difficulty inherent in a work like this one. There are many for whom such a characterization will be immediately disqualifying, either of my review or of the novel. Happy is he or she who has never come close to the psychic tendrils of a couple in deeply twisted, malformed love. There are such pairs, wounded themselves, who proceed to wound each other with emotional cuts which may indeed lead to physical blows. I myself once knew a couple whose relationship teetered upon an unstable fulcrum of bad feeling that all too often pivoted from suppressed loathing to hateful words and possibly worse. Unfortunately for me, they considered me part of the family. To write about such twisted relationships is a rare talent indeed, and Philip K. Dick had such a gift.
Besides the gift, of course, he also had the insight and knowledge, and that knowing was likely garnered from personal experience. As a victim? Or as a victimizer? Well … let me just say that one of Philip K. Dick’s two primary flaws is his deeply rooted misogyny. His female characters are almost always just one of two stereotypes: either a palely beautiful waifish free spirit living beyond the constraints of ordinary, dull reality, or—and this is always more likely in Dick’s works—a shrewish harpy of coldly calculating evil and near psychopathy. As my daughter might say, “Awwww, baby … Who hurt you?” But the record shows that the hurting was not only one-way in Philip K. Dick’s case.
I make it a rule not to learn anything about the personal lives of the authors, artists, actors, musicians, creators whom I like. If I truly love a particular poem, picture, or piece of music or prose, I fear that I’ll lose my pleasure in that work if I know, for instance, that the poet got involved with a petty squabble with a fellow poet over imperialist ideals, each sniping and badmouthing the other in the contemporary press and society. And I’ve always known that Philip K. Dick had problems. You don’t have the record of ‘serial monogamy’ that he did without some deep-seated issues. (I’m looking at you, Dad.) But while trying to look into the history of this singular straight fiction novel by the science fiction author (though published in a limited run in 1975, it was written in 1959), I read a single sentence about his personal life on his Wikipedia page with seriously lowered Mr. Dick in my esteem, and which I now fear I will drag behind me every time I read his novels or short stories.
And that would be a shame.
Because Philip K. Dick is a brilliant writer, whatever faults he had as a human being. Indeed, human faults are his forte, and perhaps no other writer so perfectly captured the inner life and language of we imperfect humans as we go about just trying to live our dooméd lives. (Or, perhaps more likely, it is only I who think in this same unabating nattering way.) He writes of people afflicted with neuroses and perhaps even psychopathy, of the difficulty of true human relationships, of the almost impossibility of communication between men, women, and others who paradoxically are compelled to expend endless words in the attempt. And Confessions Of A Crap Artist is one of Dick’s three best novels.
As the novel runs through the internal musings of first one then another character, the tortured marriage of Fay and Charley Hume is strained to the breaking point. Finally we come to a chapter of true noir nightmare, in which one of the characters shatters the fragile world they have constructed. I had forgotten that chapter from my earlier reading, had perhaps even suppressed it, and it is one of the reasons for the Trigger Warning section below. I initially thought that this denouement disqualified the powerful writing which had come before, but found that the close of the novel used the horrific events of this chapter to uncover deep truths and to somehow reveal an even deeper humanity (in its best sense).
For we are all flawed human beings (The Bible tells us so), or at least all the interesting humans are. And love exists, if it doesn’t always triumph, not in spite of, but through the flaws, transcending in some strange way the burdens we humans seem always to bring to every situation. The Confessions of Jack Isidore, the ‘crap artist’ of the title, as he confronts his own flaws—it is easy to look at others’—leave us better people for having read them, like all the great confessions of literature have always done.
Trigger Warnings: Spousal abuse, violence. Do not read this book if you are sensitive to the same topics as my wife. If you are unsure what I mean, email me at steve@educatedguesswork.com.
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