[Rarebooks] Offering: 4 Page Philip K Dick TLS & Signed Book

[Michael John Thompson]

Philip K. Dick
American Author 1928-1982
Noted works:
THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, 1962 (Hugo Award winner for Best Science 
Fiction Novel of the year, 1963)
DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP, 1968 (Filmed as BLADE RUNNER, 1982)

Typed letter Signed. 4 pages, 2600 words. Dated May 20, 1972. Signed "Love, 
Phil" at end. In original mailing envelope with handwritten return address 
signed
"Philip K. Dick". To Miss Beverly Davis of Vancouver BC. An intensely 
personal document pertaining to the author's state of mind and his intimate 
relationships.

UNPUBLISHED.

Accompanied by a paperback copy of the author's book UBIK, Dell Books, 
1970, 1st paperback edition (stated), inscribed in an unknown hand on the 
inner front
cover "Best Regards / To Phil / from Brian" and with an additional 
inscription on the dedication leaf from the author to the recipient of the 
letter "to Bev / with Love /
Philip K. Dick".

I have included full scans of the letter, envelope and book.  A full 
transcription of the letter is also included in this description. It is, 
simply put, an amazing and
breathtaking piece.

Letter from Philip K. Dick to Bev Davies


May 20th, 1972


Dear Bev,
I’m so sorry not to have written you sooner, it being now over a month 
since I left Vancouver, but I dislocated my shoulder, and my right arm and 
hand have been immobilized. This really bumtripped me. Anyhow, how are you? 
I think about you and your little boy a lot. I tell people here about you; 
especially I tell the guy I’m living with how kind and warm and full of 
life and humor and like that you are, and how really nice you treated me 
when I was up there. Bev, you were nicer to me than anybody else I met in 
Canada, and I’ll always remember that. You made me feel like a person. Such 
a happy little home you two had, you and your baby; you made me feel 
welcome. I miss you very much. “Maybe I ought to go back up there.” I was 
saying to Joel the other day (the guy I live with). He’s a guy whose wife 
and little baby just moved out when I arrived here; he was alone, like me, 
missing and remembering a family that no longer existed. “Yes, you ought to 
go back up there where she is,” Joel said, and then he said, “I wish I had 
a Bev Davies in my life, now. You’re lucky.” I had described you and what 
you are like. Maybe I should go back to Vancouver. What do you say?

It is super nice here, in many ways. Fullerton is a small modern stable 
very right-wing college town, about 50 miles south of Los Angeles. It’s hot 
and dry, here. No scenery, just level and brown. The buildings consist 
mainly of Spanish-style apartment complexes, some extremely large, like 300 
units. Not too expensive, though. The streets are clean. Cops are 
everywhere. Little crime, no dope. Some good left-wing political activity 
around the campus, and many bright, super nice students. Excellent 
restaurants. Except, of course, for the 25 million McDonald Hamburger 
stands, which are also modern and nice-looking. I’ve been over to the 
college lecturing, meeting students. Much science fiction activity, 
including other writers such as Ray Bradbury. Primarily, I’ve become 
involved with a black-haired groovy spaced-out foxy chick (as we say here), 
a wild, self-destructive, beautiful girl named Linda whom I love very much, 
but who is hurting me and whom, I’m afraid, I’m hurting too. It’s a 
love-suffering-grief-sorrow-laughter relationship, a great life-death 
struggle between us and between our separate heads; there is a sort of 
perpetual misunderstanding between us, and yet a continual attempt on both 
our parts to keep going, keep trying to figure each other out. It is 
melancholy, but punctuated with flashes of keen black humor by both of us. 
Linda had written me while I was in Canada, and, when I got off the plane 
at L.A. International, there she was waiting, with the others, to meet me. 
Destiny in a miniskirt.

All this, you see, is a trippy, heavy number I’m doing with her, but it is 
a massive fuck-up for both her and me, I think. Breaking it off, while I’m 
living here, evidently is out of the question. I don’t want to break it 
off, and she has notified me that she won’t let me even if (sometimes, 
temporarily, when) I want to. “I’ll keep coming back,” Linda says 
cheerfully, “whether you want me to or not.” Durability as you know, Bev, 
permanency, is what I want most of all. That’s why,  remember, Jamis 
bumtripped me so much, her always bopping off – like your boy friend did. I 
think you and I were looking for the same thing. That, I think, I do have 
with Linda; it appears to be a durable relationship. But there is too much 
pain in it. And Linda is, really, a chick rather than a woman. She likes to 
be squired around, to restaurants and bars, to fancy places, and then she 
drops me off at my apartment and drives over to hers where she and her 
roommate Alice live, each in her own plastic, isolated room. Linda alone at 
night, Alice alone at night, me alone, Joel alone – atomized individuals 
waiting for the alarmclock to wake each of us to life, the daytime. Each 
alone in his cubicle, like so many unborn bees. There is no abiding 
relatedness.

-2-

What I want is a family. Joel and I both had families, once: not a wife but 
a wife-and-child, an equation of several people. Watching day by day the 
future, in the form of the child, appear before us. We see a lot of people; 
I take Linda out, I take Mary the pretty red-haired actress in the next 
apartment out, Joel and I take Susan and Merry Lou and so forth out, but 
always it is a dating game: for a few hours each day in the evening we have 
dinner together at a restaurant, then go somewhere, and divide up again, so 
that our being together is merely a good-time interval to break the 
monotony of the day. Linda has never so much as fixed a cup of  coffee for 
me, let alone fixed dinner for me (I fixed dinner once for her and me, but 
neither of us could eat it; it wasn’t very good).  This is not a putdown of 
Linda, it just shows how she regards her apartment and mine: plastic 
cubicles where we spend as little time as possible, doing all the important 
things out somewhere else. God, we have no homes, let alone families. We 
have pretty plastic cells, and we visit each evening to forget that 
individually we have nothing. We do not even watch TV when we are alone; we 
just cease to exist. If possible, we go to sleep. But Linda can’t sleep; 
she tells me she cries a lot at night and  suffers nebulous physical pain. 
And, over all, a sense of emptiness, as if she doesn’t exist. Well, it 
seems clear to me that she – and the rest of us here who live, either 
voluntarily or involuntarily, this sort of life – will never come into 
genuine existence until she develops a relationship with someone that does 
not begin at six p.m. and ends at eleven p.m. The relationship, that is, 
not the person
 although for her under the circumstances the person, the 
other person in her life, which I suppose is me, does in effect come into 
existence at six and then wink back out at eleven. But essentially it is 
she who disappears before and after those times, because I have a better 
sense of continuity than she; I have lived, before this, a full-time life, 
a twenty-four-hour-a-day life, with a wife and child. Someday, I suppose, 
she will have that. But as yet she does not even want it; she does not even 
seem to know of such an existence. And yet, by herself at night, she cries 
and suffers and wishes – as she tells me – that there was someone to hear 
her crying and respond to it.

I pointed out to her, in a letter which I wrote and handed to her, that 
perhaps there is a connection between her dumping me off at my apartment at 
eleven and then driving home to hers, alone, and there being no one at 
night to hear her crying. “If you don’t want to sleep with me,” I wrote, 
“then at least you can have my bed and I’ll sleep on the living room on the 
couch. And that way I’ll hear you and you will hear me. And there’s no sex, 
if that’s what’s bothering you. Think about it. Why drive home? Why not 
stay here with Joel and me? What do you say? Doesn’t this make sense?” 
Linda read the letter and put it away in her purse. “What’s your response?” 
I asked her. “I’ll write you a letter back and let you know,” she said, and 
left, driving home (it was ten-thirty p.m.) to her own apartment. The next 
day I phoned her at work and asked her if she was going to be writing me in 
response. “I’m afraid I’m too busy these days to write anything or even to 
read,” Linda said, and changed the subject. There was no change in her 
behavior after reading the letter. After reading it she departed even 
earlier than before. This is not to put her down. It simply shows the gulf 
between the thinking of two people who although they are very close and 
care a lot for each other are really living in two separate worlds.

And yet oddly enough a sort of mellowness has set in between us. Our 
relationship has reached a stasis; it is going nowhere, and if nothing good 
can happen, then anyhow nothing bad can. Linda doesn’t have to be afraid of 
what lies ahead. It is as if we have a fossilized, three-thousand-year-old 
relationship, now;

-3-

I am an old friend in the bad sense of the word: I can be taken for 
granted. If I haven’t split now I never will. It has become a compromise 
between two highly intense personalities. It works, like an old marriage. 
But it is barren. There is respect but not love. Predictability but not 
spontaneity. We have sort of tacitly agreed not to zap each other 
unexpectedly: surprises are bad – they have bumtripped us both – so there 
will be no surprises. But, both very good and in a sense very 
unanticipated, both Linda and I have come around to the space where we are 
each of us, on his own, defending the other against outsiders. Instead of 
each of us half-way agreeing with everybody else that the other was causing 
us misery, she and I independently have begun drawing toward each other, 
rather than away, when the other is attacked by well-intentioned – or 
otherwise – friends. This is very good. This is a sort of simple shit 
loyalty that has gradually come about between us, out of nowhere. The 
forces around us which always before tended to pull us apart, as was the 
intention, are moving her and me more solidly together. We have heard all 
the assorted urgent reasons for not seeing each other, and then we have 
gone on being glad when we next run across each other as if we had heard 
nothing. This is another example of the absolute split between logic and 
reality, I guess, with reality – fortunately – winning. It shows you can’t 
think your way through life. You feel your way through.

I wonder, sometimes, if Linda will ever want to have a child. “There’s 
something I want you to buy me.” She said last week. “You asked me if there 
was anything you could get me, and there is something. We’ll go shopping 
for it together; I want you to come along. It costs sixteen dollars, 
though. But I really want it.” I asked her what it was. “A doll,” she said. 
Her room is full of dolls already, and they talk to her, she says. When she 
has bad dreams at night she wakes up to find her doll Snoopy on her chest, 
trying to rouse her. Such a pretty, wistful, sad girl, just beginning to 
become an adult,  As the days go by I find myself thinking about her more 
and more, and I love her more and more although I try to show it less. My 
feelings are meaningless to her. She sees me primarily as something that 
responds to her, that does not reject her or desert her no matter what she 
does or says. Toward me she has no strong feelings at all, she says. I 
listen to her funny little trippy things that she says; I perceive the 
absurd, inventive creativity that she shows with words; I encourage her 
unique, enormous linguistic ability; “I want to be with you,” she says, 
“because you make me feel good. Nobody else does.” Looking at me she sees 
herself reflected, a better self than she perceives when I’m not there. It 
is Linda viewing Linda favorably. It is a good thing for us both that I 
care a lot about her – care more for her than I do for myself, She needs it 
and I don’t mind. But who is going to care for me? When I dislocated my 
shoulder a couple of weeks ago she drove me to the hospital but she did not 
care; she did not speak to me the whole way. She had no feelings 
whatsoever. It made her mad because it meant that we couldn’t go (that is, 
she couldn’t go) to a party that evening. So, for two hours on the freeway, 
she did not utter a word to me. But she was so good about getting me to the 
hospital. She wasted no time and drove superbly. Upon the latter, life 
depends. It was not until I was all put back together that she ceased 
talking to me; before she punished me for being faulty, for getting 
injured, she made sure I was okay. The kind of love that gets you medical 
help is more valuable in the sustaining of life than emotional, sentimental 
love. “Here is help” is better than “I’m sorry you feel bad.” I never will 
get Linda’s sympathy, but I do have her attention, and it is an expert, 
intelligent attention in a bright little mind. I guess I would rather have 
Linda Levy’s awareness than anyone else’s love. The effectiveness of her 
response to my injury shows me that most kinds of love are merely gestures.

-4-

I think for me knowing Linda and being with her puts out of my mind a 
certain despair that comes when your attention wanders from the present and 
back to former times. I always had the feeling that things used to be 
better. It’s hard for me to drop that perpetual attitude
 A.E. Houseman put 
it like this in “A Shropshire lad”:

Into my heart an air that kills
    From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
    What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
     I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
                    And cannot come again.

This is where my head would be if it weren’t for Linda. This is where my 
head has been at most of my life. When I was in Canada, for instance, I 
thought back always to San Rafael, to Katherine, and when I was with 
Katherine I’d recall my wife and child. If anything happened to Linda, or 
to our relationship, my ability for the first time in my life to live 
actually in the present would be abolished and once again my attention 
would flow backward into lost time, lost people, other, former places. 
Whether that relationship will end I do not know. Most relationships do. If 
it does, I will come back to Canada. I suppose. It depends on what is 
waiting for me there, and this largely depends on where your head is at. 
What are you up to now, Bev? What is your life all about? I remember so 
vividly your living room, the TV set, the overstuffed chair I sat in, you 
drinking tea, your bathroom with the weird soup ad, your little boy. Is all 
that still there? I hope so.

Put your arms around me, Bev. Hold me. Nobody else ever will.

Love, Phil


Philip K. Dick
3028 Quartz Lane Apt. #4
Fullerton,
Calif 92631
U.S.A.


Accompanied by:

Paperback 1st printing of UBIK, Dell Books, 1970. Some wear & tear, good / 
very good copy, intact. Inscribed by Philip K. Dick to Bev Davies.

Note: There is a passage somewhere, in DARK HAIRED GIRL perhaps, in which 
Phil Dick refers to "sitting on the chair at Bev Davies house". I haven't 
tracked this down as yet, but it's another connection.


Price: $1500 US - net to all

Full scans are here:

http://www.mjtbooks.com/images/pkd01.jpg

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http://www.mjtbooks.com/images/pkd04.jpg

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http://www.mjtbooks.com/images/pkd07.jpg

http://www.mjtbooks.com/images/pkd08.jpg

http://www.mjtbooks.com/images/pkd09.jpg




---
Michael Thompson, Bookseller
Dunlop Point 1-3
Hornby Island, BC
Canada V0R 1Z0
250-335-1182

http://www.mjtbooks.com