January 16, 1927

A biographical note:

'Anne Browning Williams...[(January 16, 1927, to April 28, 2017) was born in] in West Englewood, N.J. Her father, Arthur Williams Jr., was a Wall Street executive who was ruined in the 1929 crash. He died when Anne was still a child. Her mother, Hazel Johnson Williams, moved back home to St. Louis with her children.

'....[Anne] was a 20-year-old student at Washington University when she met her first husband, Richard Rubenstein, a poet from a well-off St. Louis family. He helped found the little magazine "Neurotica" — “for and about neurotics, written by neurotics” — which was an influence on the budding Beat generation.

'The couple moved to San Francisco, had three daughters, and immersed themselves in the vibrant local poetry scene. They started another poetry magazine, "Inferno", and then a third, "Gryphon", which published early work by Robert Creeley and Denise Levertov.

'On a whim, the couple moved again, in 1955, this time to Point Reyes Station, an isolated farming community north of San Francisco. In 1958, Richard Rubenstein was being treated in an East Coast psychiatric clinic for depression when he abruptly died, apparently from an allergic reaction to tranquilizers.

'Three weeks later, Anne Rubenstein met a new couple who had just moved to town, Phil and Kleo Dick. After a whirlwind affair, Dick moved in with Anne in the spacious modernist house she had shared with Rubenstein.

'“He used to help with the cooking,” Anne Dick said of the author. “He would mop the floors. He was lovely with the children.”

'Bored with science fiction and unable to interest publishers in his mainstream novels, Dick quit writing to help his new wife in her jewelry business. He liked that even less, and so he pretended to work on a new novel. To make it look realistic, he said in a 1976 interview with Science Fiction Review, he had to start typing.

'What emerged was “The Man in the High Castle.” It was dedicated, cryptically and not altogether favorably, to his wife, “without whose silence this book would never have been written.” (In the 1970s, Dick changed the dedication, dropping Anne Dick entirely.)
.....
'Much of Philip Dick’s work explores the slippery nature of reality. His third marriage proved no less elusive.

'“I never did understand why he left me; I don’t think people really understand other people,” Anne Dick said. “It took me years to get over him. I swear, I thought about him almost continually, obsessively.”

'The couple had a daughter, Laura. “I think he was like another child,” Ms. Dick said. “He was really a very, very nice husband.”

'Nice, except for when his paranoia kicked in. One day they were driving out of a field after putting lumber in the barn. Philip Dick opened the gate; Anne Dick gunned the motor, and he ran off.

'“I guess he thought I was trying to kill him,” she said.

'She often gave as good as she got, however. Dishes flew during quarrels, and so did furniture. Husband struck wife, and wife struck him back.

'She remained in the same house in Point Reyes Station for the rest of her life. In later years, as her jewelry business waned, she used it as a bed-and-breakfast inn. For about $100 a night, people could rent the room where Dick had worked on “High Castle.” In truth, though, most visitors were focused on hiking the nearby national seashore....'

The same article notes that of his wives, it was Anne Dick who exercised an extraordinary effect on his writing.

'Philip K. Dick was a writer of modest accomplishment when he met Anne Rubenstein in late 1958. By the time the couple broke up less than six years later, Dick had written more than a dozen novels and was well on his way to eminence as one of the most influential of the postwar American writers.

'The events and emotions of that marriage turn up again and again in Dick’s novels, transfigured into science fiction. Anne Dick, ... made custom jewelry, which was a major plot element in his best-known novel, “The Man in the High Castle.”'

Later, and her daughters grown, Ms. Dick was inspired to revisit the marriage. Her memoir, The Search for Philip K. Dick, was published in 1995. Anne Dick in her book about her husband (she never remarried) recalls, as the couple was returning home once, that

'Phil, seeing a dead cat in the road, pulled the car over, picked up the cat, and gently, almost reverently, laid the little cat body on the grassy shoulder....'

A lovely tribute to Dick, and to his wife, who relayed the incident.