FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID (2)
SF EYE #14, Spring 1996, p39
(PKD:) Now, when we got onto the business of FLOW MY TEARS, there's apparantly in the French edition a complete misunderstanding of what I meant. Let's assume that the editor was sincere, let's assume that he honestly believed that I was coming out for a law and order state. I'm not even sure that he was sincere, I have no evidence that he was sincere --
(A & F:) Was it the same publisher who published your other books?
(PKD:) I haven't noticed who published it. I have a copy but I just acquired the copy. The interviewers told me that he was extremely right-winged, equivalent say, in Germany, to the Nazi Party. Now if I were to just theorise on how he might get that idea that I come out for a law and order state it would be because Felix Buckman, who is the embodiment of the police establishment, is treated sympathetically. But he's treated sympathetically because he undergoes a conversion at the end to a feeling of love for the very kind of person who he has systematically persecuted, that is, a stranger. And the essence of police persecution, of course, is that all citizens are strangers and somehow to be suspected of evil intent. And he undergoes an almost religious conversion and instead of treating the black man at the gas station as a hostile stranger about who he, the policeman should be suspicious, Buckman actually embraces him and with a feeling of love.
What I was trying to show very simply was the possibility of the police apparatus undergoing a turning point in its attitude. {...}
{...}
(PKD:) But what I'd hoped to show was the vulnerability of this type of apparatus. That within this apparatus there are individuals who are capable of mitigating the tyrannical rule of which they are a spokesman.{...}
{Anton & Fuchs, 1977 Metz, tr. F.C.Bertrand}
(Dick:) I don't regret one thing. Well, that's not true. I regret it when they turn off my electricity. For instance, I went through periods when I sent off the manuscript of FLOW MY TEARS THE POLICEMAN SAID and didn't have enough money to send it first class. I had to send it by third-class mail. That's Pressure City when you get to the point where you can't pay the postage to mail off a manuscript after it's already been bought. We're back to the artist in the garret again. You know he's going to starve his ass off if he writes science fiction; he'll never get any recognition, and he'll never get any money. But he will have a hell of a lot of fun, and he ought to know what he's in it for. If he wants to go into writing for the money, let him go elsewhere. Writers are stupid if they think they're in it for money. Why did they get into writing in the first place? Whoever promised them a lot of money? Where was Ellison promised a lot of money? Where did it say that Malzberg was promised fame and money, as if it was his birthright, his patrimony. Nonsense. We're lucky they publish us at all. They could actually abolish the field of science fiction, and then we reallywould have to write something else. We're lucky that the category still exists. Let's hear it for the science fiction writers who are coming along and still writing science fiction and flip the bird to the people who want money.
{for more see:The Mainstream That Through The Ghetto Flows.}
SL:38 271
Dear Scott,
I want to give you a progress report on my new novel, FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID. I have now read over the rough draft, revised several scenes, added more material and built up the ending so that it is more effective. And then I have read the novel once again with all these changes. I think it is the best s-f novel ever written. Certainly it is the best thing I have ever done, and I have no idea as to how I managed to do it. At one point in 48 hours I wrote 140 pages. At other times I revised one sole passage again and again -- in one case 7 times -- until I had what I wanted. There will be no further changes in the novel when I go to do the final draft; the novel is done.
{... there follows a brief description of the plot by PKD...}
I only wish I could go on writing this novel forever, because it has given me intense joy in the writing of it. But, as I said, it is finished.
{...}
{PKD>Scott Meredith, Aug 2, 1970}
SL:38 304
Dear Valerie,
{...}
News about the novel I'm working on, FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID. Although I have not finished it, and they have not read it, Doubleday (the hard-cover house) has bought it! And for an extra thousand dollars!, on the strength of what I've told them about it. The novel is a good one -- I think one of the bestscience fiction novels written -- and a long one. It deals with a variety of forms of love, about ten kinds in all, ending with a form of love which I can't explain but which has to do with strangers. (It's explained in the novel, but it took me 320 pages, so obviously I can't do it here in one paragraph -- thank god ... because if I could, then there would have been noreason to write a 320 page novel about it.) At the end of the novel the protagonist lands at night at a 24-hour gas station in Los Angeles and hugs a big, well-dressed black man who is waiting forhis car to be gassed and ready. At first the black man is puzzled, and not pleased, but then he understands the kind of love the protagonist is feeling and he expresses something back, a kind of understanding. He invites the protagonist to visit him at home and meet his wife and children. They talk, and then the protagonist flies off. The novel is over. After I wrote the ending -- ninth in a series of endings -- I said to myself, "Maybe people who read it will think it's a plea for homosexuality." But then the other day in the newspaper I saw an article titled, HUGGING AND LEARNING.{...}
{...}{...}
Don't you agree that it seeems like a vote of confidence by
Doubleday toward me that they bought my novel without having read it? I told them,
"Look, I've written this novel and it's the best I've ever done, and one of the
best in the field, and it's long, and multifaceted, funny and sad -- sad as in the two
pages I sent you -- and dramatic and meaningful, with a new kind of love to offer."
And they said fine. They wrote me, "If anybody on the Doubleday book list can
do it, you can." It made me very happy.
I love my work; I mean, I don't love what I write but the act of
writing it, rereading it, altering, selecting, cutting, revising, adding to it, shaping it
again and again until, at last, it's what I want. Before this I have never really
been satisfied with any novel I wrote; I could sense the shortcomings but couldn't see how
to change or improve it.
{...}{...}
{PKD>Valerie McMillan, 2 Oct 1970}
GSM xerox collection:
Dear Herr Alpers:
{... ...}
My most recent novel, FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID, deals with the USA as a total police state (as you may know). What most readers of s-f do not know is that it was actually written back in 1970 (not in 1972 or 1973 as generally believed); I wrote the novel and then placed the manuscript -- the sole copy -- in my lawyer's safe to protect it. In 1971 my house was broken into and my files blown open and most of my business documents, records and written notes were stolen. I remain convinced to this day that it was an agency of the US federal government which did this; we have just learned, for example, that the FBI alone conducted 1,500 such illegal nurglaries. What most frightens me is to think what might have happened had they found the manuscript of FLOW MY TEARS, a book which so well depicts their own activities and nature. I am sure it would not ever have been published, and it is even possible that it was this particular manuscript which they were seeking. Ah, that such events could have happened here!
Cordially
Philip K. Dick
{PKD>Hans Alpers, 29 July 1975}
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