Anne R. Dickの回想

SCOTT TIMBERG “Philip K. Dick’s Masterpiece Years” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/23/books/23philip.html

フィリップ・Ｋ・ディック*1の夫人だったAnne R. Dickは現在83歳で、フィリップとの生活を綴った回想録The Search for Philip K. Dickが桑港の出版社Tachyonから刊行された。ただ、これは既に1990年代に刊行されたものの完全版。

The book, while refraining from literary analysis, is invaluable for Dick fans and scholars because it’s told by the one person he was close to at an important turning point in his career. He wrote or developed roughly a dozen novels during his time in west Marin, including “The Man in the High Castle” (1962), his only novel to win the Hugo Award, science fiction’s biggest prize. While there were stretches of Dick’s life in which he had roommates, a series of girlfriends or a tight group of male friends, the Point Reyes years were his most domestic.

This was a remarkably placid interval for Dick — a writer associated with paranoia, political extremism, various kinds of madness and heavy drug use — at least outwardly.

Ms. Dick, who does not suffer fools, recalls Point Reyes Station as a cow town, literally. She remembers the years with Phil, as she calls him, as mostly idyllic. He helped her bring up her three girls from her marriage to Richard Rubenstein, a San Francisco poet who had died suddenly. The couple raised fowl and black-faced sheep. Each morning Dick would walk through a barbed-wire-and-wooden-post fence and across a grassy meadow to a cabin he called the Hovel, where he did much of his writing.

アンと結婚生活をしていたこの時期にフィリップは代表作のひとつである『高い城の男』を書いているが、アンは『高い城の男』の創作に大きな知的影響を与えているようだ；

Ms. Dick recalls wide-ranging, universe-spanning conversations, and lending books to her autodidact husband. In 1961, in the heyday of Freudian and Jungian theory, she gave him several books with introductions by Carl Jung. One, the I Ching, the ancient Chinese Book of Changes, would show up as a plot point in “High Castle” and guide its composition.

高い城の男 (ハヤカワ文庫 SF 568)

易経〈上〉 (岩波文庫)

易経〈下〉 (岩波文庫 青 201-2)

それにしても、このふたりの結婚の破綻は痛々しい；

The marriage began to crumble as Dick’s self-doubt and paranoia increased. “Anne and I were having dreadful violent fights,” he wrote to a friend, “slamming each other around, smashing every object in the house — the kids were running in terror.”

The couple’s once idyllic domestic life ended quite unambiguously in 1963: Dick told neighbors his wife was trying to kill him, and, at a time when the rights of wives were less advanced, had her committed to a psychiatric institution for two weeks.

After she returned home, and Dick left to live with his mother in Berkeley, Ms. Dick found a large bill from the local pharmacist, listing drugs she did not know her husband was taking.

*1:See http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20100501/1272697153