FLOW MY TEARS

Num	N	S	Writing Date	Pub. Date	Previous	Next	Back Cover, 1st Ed.
161	48		1970 - 1973	1974	OUR FRIENDS FROM FROLIX 8	THE BOOK OF PHILIP K. DICK (Col.)

It was a struggle taking place in the arena of human history and I was a Son of Light who had come here, forgotten his origin, identity and purpose, but regained memory and understanding of all this after I had done my work -- which was done when FLOW MY TEARS was published.

FIRST EDITIONS:

Nominated for 1975 Hugo for Best Novel, 1974 Nebula for Best Novel, and won the 1975 John W. Campbell Jr. Award for Best Novel.

The one major thing that Philip K. Dick began in 1970 was his famous novel FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID.

It all started in May of 1970 when PKD took some mescaline. This trip had a powerful affect on him. In a letter to Sandra Meisel in August he explains:

I have just finished the rough draft of a new, long, s-f novel, FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID. {...} I've reworked it and reworked it; I rewrote the final section seven times, plus holographic changes. At one point in the writing I wrote 140 pages in 48 hours. I have high hopes for this. It is the first really new thing I've done since EYE IN THE SKY. The change is due to a change that overtook me from having taken mescalin, a very large dose that completely unhinged me. I had enormous insights behind the drug, all having to do with those whom I loved. Love. Will love.

And in another letter about the same time he again refers to this mescaline trip and his insights:

With acid I never had any genuine insights, but on mescalin I was overwhelmed by terribly powerful feelings – emotions, I guess. I felt an overpowering love for other people, and this is what I put into the novel: it studies different kinds of love and at last ends with the appearance of an ultimate kind of love which I had never known of. I am saying, "In answer to the question, ‘What is real?’ the answer is: this kind of overpowering love.["]

But, as referred to in this last letter, Dick was also in FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID trying to answer the question, What is real? This question having been brought up by Terry Carr. We’ll let PKD explain:

(PKD:) St. Paul said, "If I have not love then I am jack shit"... or something like that. So anyway, I worked for three years on FLOW MY TEARS, then when Terry Carr wasn't looking, I began to go back to the question of what is real.

This, then, is how the novel began. To Dick himself the novel was essentially finished by Aug 2, 1970. In a letter to his agent, Scott Meredith dated then he rhapsodizes about FLOW MY TEARS:

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.

But even though PKD wrote to Meredith that the novel was done by the beginning of August, this was not really true. Dick acknowledges this in an October letter to correspondent Valerie McMillan:

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 best science 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 no reason 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 for his 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." {…}

Don't you agree that it seems 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.

But FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID was not to be finished for several more years. With all the turmoil of life and the stress on Nancy, Phil and baby Isa of drug abuse, lack of money, sickness and death, something broke and Nancy left Phil in September 1970, taking along the baby. This was devastating for Dick. His fourth marriage: collapsed. Alone again with one foot in the streets. To continue writing FLOW MY TEARS was impossible for him following Nancy’s exit. How can one write about love when one’s life is a total disaster?

… there really was no point in writing. As a matter of fact, when you conceive of how you write – one writes by going off into privacy, alone – one hour of solitude would have meant my demise, after Nancy left with my little girl, it was too risky. I had to be with people. I flooded the house with people. Anybody was welcome. Because the sound of their voices, the sound of their activity, the din in the hall, anything, it kept me alive. I literally was unable to kill myself then, ‘cause there was too much going on.

Drugs, particularly amphetamines – white cross speed – became an even larger part of Dick’s life. But the side-effects of too much speed are edginess and paranoia. And loss of financial control. This last resulted in failed mortgage payments and news that his house was being foreclosed in early 1971. Two brief visits to psychiatrists followed and the second one in August resulted in Dick giving his attorney the manuscript for FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID.

This was a fortunate happenstance as only a few months later, while Phil was enduring the mandatory waiting period before he could pick up his new gun, his house in San Rafael was broken into and smashed, trashed and ripped-off. Particularly noticeable among the wreckage was his fireproof file cabinet which had been blown open by what looked like plastic explosives. All his papers were gone. Among them would have been the manuscript for FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID. Of the break-in PKD wrote in 1975:

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 burglaries. 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!

To pick up on the progress of FLOW MY TEARS then we must move forward to the end of 1972 when Dick, now living in Fullerton with Tessa, his soon-to-be fifth wife, wrote to his attorney requesting his manuscript back. This was duly returned to him. Paul Williams explicates:

It arrived January 6, 1973, and Dick retyped it over the next four weeks and mailed it to his agent in New York. The agent received the completed manuscript on February 7, 1973. On April 6, 1973 Dick learned that Doubleday had accepted the novel, and a few days later he received a letter from his editor at Doubleday, Diane Cleaver, telling him how much she liked the book and offering a few editorial suggestions.

These suggestions and Dick’s replies, Williams goes on to relate, were contained in a series of letters between Dick and Cleaver in April 1973 with a few follow-ups later in the year. Here are a few excerpts, courtesy of PKDS:

Cleaver to Dick (Apr 24, 1973): "Thank you for taking so generously to my suggestions on FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID." {...}

The cuts suggested by Cleaver in the discussion between Ruth Rae and Jason Taverner in the novel would eventually take on a life of their own, particularly in the French editions of the novel. And under the title "The Different Stages Of Love" they were published in The Philip K. Dick Society Newsletter in 1992. This is an interesting sidelight and we’ll go into it soon. But first, we’ll continue with the main line of progression for FLOW MY TEARS.

On April 6, 1973, the day he learnt of Doubleday’s acceptance of the novel, PKD wrote to Charles Brown, editor of Locus Magazine, and talked more of the situation anent FLOW MY TEARS at that time:

I thought I’d give you a piece of news that for me, anyhow, is exciting: I have just now sold my new large sf novel, FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID, to Doubleday. I’ve been working on this novel since mid-1970 and finished it in January of this year.

Ashmead suggested I continue to work on the novel until I was thoroughly satisfied with it – no contract deadline. This is exactly what I did. Two complete revisions, before I at last sent it off.

One more letter followed shortly in May, this one to his Swedish translator, Goran Bengtson:

For me the big news (besides me and Tessa getting married) is that I have sold two new novels to Doubleday, the first of which is FLOW MY TEARS. I have said to you that I considered it perfect and finished; it was neither -- I had to do a total rewrite before sending it off at last. Ten rewrites, the last of which was monumental! Anyhow now it is bought and will be coming out. But for me the later one, A SCANNER DARKLY, which is only finished in rough, is the one now. TEARS, when I reread it early this year before typing it up, turned out to be sentimental; so much for what I called 'the perfect' novel.. Only in the final draft did I get any bite into it, any grit.

Tessa gave birth to baby Christopher on July 25, 1973, and in another letter to Diane Cleaver two days later Dick proudly announced the birth of their son. He also used the occasion to excuse his tardiness in completing the rewrite of FLOW MY TEARS.

But by November the novel was truly done and PKD was editing the galleys that month. In a letter to Patrice Duvic, PKD’s editor at the French publisher Editions Opta, Dick mentions this:

Because of my flu I couldn't complete my editing of the galleys on FLOW MY TEARS. I hope it makes sense. It seems to me that my agent is supposed to send you a copy of the MS; did he do so?

This letter to Duvic was probably the start of the divergent French editions of FLOW MY TEARS.

The novel was finally published by Doubleday at the beginning of 1974 and Dick wrote to Lawrence Ashmead, his editor at Doubleday, thanking him:

The book came out looking wonderful -- in my opinion by far the best so far. I wanted to tell you, too that the cuts which Diane suggested, and which I made, greatly improve the novel, as she thought they would. Also, I want to thank and commend your copy editors who built the missing bridge across one of the cuts; they did a superb job. I could only have done worse.

This first Doubleday edition of FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID exists in three states, each valuable to collectors. These states are:

1). The true first edition, described by bibliographer Levack: ‘Bound in rust-colored cloth with silver lettering on the spine. Date code '050' [50th week of 1973] at lower left margin of page 231. States 'First edition' on the copyright page… '1974' on the title page of the first printing only. According to the author there were about 7500 copies of the first printing

2). The first edition, according to Levack: ‘was reprinted with a date code of 'P7' [7th week of 1974] on page 231 and this printing was remaindered. The later printing leaves out the statement 'First edition' on the copyright page -- normal practice for Doubleday’. The remaindered copies can be told by the purple splotches on the bottom edges of the book; the normal way to mark remainders used by Doubleday.

3). Remaindered copies of the true first edition. Levack: ‘Among the remaindered copies… were some first printings’. These remainders also had the Doubleday purple splotches.

Copies of the true first edition in near-fine condition sell for over $500 and even an ex-library copy can fetch $100. The remaindered second printing, too, is valuable, and sells for about $100. One can assume that a remaindered true first edition would be very expensive indeed.

The English first edition came from Gollancz in October 1974. And a UK SFBC edition followed in 1975 from Reader’s Union publishers. Both of these British editions can be found for less than $100 in reasonable shape.

FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID was nominated by the fans as the Best Novel of the year and Dick’s fellow writers nominated it for the Nebula Award for Best Novel of 1974. The novel actually won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award or Best Novel in 1975.

Now it’s time to look at the excerpt from FLOW MY TEARS known as "The Different Stages of Love" and its connection with the French editions of the novel.

The name, "The Different Stages of Love" was applied to the excerpt by Paul Williams, as we’ve noted. The excerpt can be found in the 28^th issue of The Philip K. Dick Society Newsletter. It was cut from the published edition of FLOW MY TEARS starting less than one page into chapter 11.

But what has this to do with the French? Well, Gerard Klein, an editor at the French publisher ‘Editions Laffont’, read a copy of FLOW MY TEARS in 1974 but decided not to publish it in his line of science fiction books known as ‘Ailleurs et Demain’. The novel ended up at a less-prestigious publishing house, ‘Le Masque Science Fiction’, who published the novel under the title LE PRISM DU NEANT in 1975. Years later, Klein had the opportunity to read the novel again and recognized along with other critics that the translation was not the best:

Indeed, it was said in many places that the translation was not what it should have been. I reread the available American edition, I read the French translation, done by a translator usually faithful, in fact excellent, and a friend of long standing, Michel Deutsch; and I did notice some singularities, not to say anything worse, for which he was certainly not responsible. And I finished by being in a position to repair my error, to give the French reader, at last, a version of FLOW MY TEARS that was reasonably close to the original.

Klein asked translator Isabelle Delord to do a comparison of the Le Masque edition and the original English-language edition. Delord found seventeen cuts in Chapter 12. Klein notes:

These cuts were certainly not the doing of Michel Deutsch but were without the least doubt the work of an editor frightened by the description in the mutilated chapter of a homosexual episode, a description that stopped far short of anything pornographic.

But what was much more surprising was that the French text also contained eight interpolations, that is to say, eight passages, often quite substantial, that were not in the text of the DAW Books edition which had served as our reference.

Mr. Klein goes on to suggest that the original translator, Michel Deutsch, made his translation from a manuscript that differed from the published Doubleday (and DAW) editions. After much research, Philip K. Dick's literary executor, Paul Williams, discovered a 1970 draft of FLOW MY TEARS in the Fullerton Archives. It is not known if this is the same manuscript that went to France. It does contain, however, the material cut from the English language version of the published novel. It may well be, too, that the copy of the manuscript sent to Dick’s French agent, Patrice Duvic, in 1973 by the SMLA was an uncut version. Or, as Williams said,

This suggests that a manuscript did go from the American agent to the French agent, and thence to French publishers; another possibility is that the American agent sent an uncorrected set of galleys to his French counterpart.

At any rate, Klein went on to publish a new French edition of FLOW MY TEARS in 1985. I’m not certain but I think he asked the original translator, Michel Deutsch, to write the new version from Editions Laffont titled COULEZ MES LARMES, DIT LE POLICIER.

So for the reader to get a fuller – or at least slightly different – version of the novel, he or she must needs combine the text of "The Different Stages of Love" as found in PKDS-28 with the existing text starting in Chapter 11 of the American editions.

Seeing FLOW MY TEARS through to publication was a triumph for Dick over many obstacles. And it was important to him:

Close of 1973 and opening of 1974: realization that I could not regain what I had lost, for several reasons, but still professional pursuit of my work; i.e. seeing TEARS through to its publishing in Feb of 1974 and awareness of a mysterious importance of this, as well as a mysterious threat or danger to me and the book, stemming from the same forces which had assaulted me at the close of 1971.

He speaks further of the mysterious, precognitive nature of FLOW MY TEARS to interviewers Apel & Briggs in 1977:

All this is, of course, was preparatory to PKD’s notorious ‘pink beam’ experiences of Feb-Mar 1974.

We’ve noted Dick’s concern about the manuscript for FLOW MY TEARS in 1971; his giving it to his attorney for safe keeping just before his apartment was raided by persons unknown and his papers stolen. But what is it in the novel that PKD thought might arouse the attention if not the ire of the authorities?

Perhaps it’s the notion that police officials can be human, can experience love and be changed by it? In the dialectic of the 1970s political world such a notion was anathema to those on the left wing who considered political agents like the police to be the henchmen of established capitalist institutions and to be despised. And on the other hand, in the violent decade of the 1960s and its aftermath in the 70s, paranoid authorities would certainly not look kindly on a writer who actually proposes a hazy solution to the problem of police and, hence, state or corporate sponsored violence. A solution in favor of the ordinary man and not in favor of the authorities. For, surely, like Ghandi, PKD had seen the power of non-violence to curb the excesses of the police state. The hippies had found this answer too and it nearly toppled the American government of the time. Even Nixon’s downfall can be attributed to this insight into the nature of revolutionary thought. The answer to authoritarian violence was put simply and best by John Lennon: All you need is love. On this Dick had this to say:

… what I'd hope 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. Now, Buckman has already been presented as making attempts to diminish the effect of the concentration camps. He has sought ways of assisting the persecuted and what we have seen here is the fact that these are all innocent human beings.

I guess if you read about a totalitarian government and you read about one of the police officials as being human at all, you are liable to the accusation that you are somehow defaming the apparatus or not defaming the apparatus. I'm simply saying that within the apparatus there must exist individuals who come to doubt the moral mandate through which they govern. In fact it's specifically stated that Buckman had been reduced in rank from, I believe, a commission as Marshall to a commission as General, because of his humane attitude.

In England, a review came out that this was the first book I'd ever written in which the establishment spokesman is created sympathetically. This then gave rise to the mistaken idea that I had mellowed out in my attitude toward the tyrannical, totalitarian police state. But of course I haven't mellowed out toward that. What's happened is that in the book one of the spokesmen of the police state has begun to mellow out in terms of his relationship, vis-à-vis those who he normally persecutes. And what I was trying to do was anticipate - and, I think, successfully - the collapse of the tyrannical American State, because that tyrannical apparatus did disintegrate in America.

… 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. {...}

In his EXEGESIS written after his experiences of 2-3-74, PKD combines his mysticism with his anti-authoritarianism:

The idea that seized me twenty-seven years ago and never let go is this: Any society in which people meddle in other people's business is not a good society, and a state in which the government "knows more about you than you know about yourself," as it is expressed in FLOW MY TEARS, is a state that must be overthrown. It may be a theocracy, a fascist corporate state, or reactionary monopolistic capitalism or centralistic socialism -- that aspect does not matter. And I am saying not merely," It can happen here," meaning the United States, but rather, "It did happen here. I remember. I was one of the secret Christians who fought it and to at least some extent helped overthrow it.

The mystical apprehension that Dick refers to here and, generally, in many of his post-Pink Beam writings is that the common world we live in is in some way an illusion. The true reality is that we are still living in Christian times and are still under Roman rule. And Dick, as he said, was one of the secret Christians dedicated to the overthrow of the Roman empire. In the short excerpt from his EXEGESIS quoted immediately above he even says that he helped overthrow the empire in some small way. His novel FLOW MY TEARS is critical to Dick’s new world view after March 1974. Within the pages of the novel, hidden from the eyes of the Roman authorities, was embedded a secret cypher. Dick’s friend and fellow science fiction writer Tim Powers refers to this:

On p151 0f VALIS, Fat tells his friends "The two-word cypher signal KING FELIX" was sent out in Feb '74, and that "the United States Army cryptographers studied it, but couldn't discern who it was intended for or what it meant." Fat's friends ask him how he knows that, but he won't say; nor does he explain in what form it appeared.

Phil himself, though, was less reticent, and once pointed out that on p218 of the first edition of FLOW MY TEARS the last paragraph break juxtaposes the word "king" directly over the name "Felix". The novel was published in Feb 1974, and Phil said Doubleday told him that the Army did buy -- as I recall -- more than 400 copies of it.

But to explain this complex world-view further we must wait until we look at Dick’s novel VALIS; for as Paul Williams notes, much of Dick’s EXEGESIS is taken up with interpretations of his earlier novels, particularly UBIK and FLOW MY TEARS "in terms of the VALIS universe."

Before we move on though, here’s another teaser in which FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID figures:

(PKD:) And I remembered an existence in which the world described was the same as the world in FLOW MY TEARS

(PKD:) You got it. You got it. Exactly right. Only it took me three years to figure it out. For three years, I spent between four and eight hours a day doing research and trying to understand how I could have a previous existence in the present.

If I were to detail that world, it would be completely congruent with the world in FLOW MY TEARS. Then I asked myself, Does this explain where the corpus of my writing comes from? And the answer is Yes. The entire corpus of my writing deals with a landscape... a kind of world which is somewhat like ours and somewhat different. And all my books interrelate. Ursula LeGuin pointed that out -- that all my books seemed to take place on a particular alternate world. And in 1974, I actually remembered being in that world. Some of the technology was more advanced than ours, like in my books. They made great use of advanced hydraulics, for instance.

But it was a ghastly garrison state, with forced labor camps. And in that other world, I was an active political revolutionary. I was not just a passive opponent of the Establishment. I remember we blew up a big fortress, a big prison. Actually blew it open, like you'd blow open a safe. I remember being pursued by that authorities.

The Establishment was just like it was shown to me in FLOW MY TEARS. In that world, all civil rights movements had failed. Most amazing of all, Christianity was outlawed.

(PKD:) That I don't know. I inferred that what happened was that in the world, Christianity had been completely absorbed by the Roman Empire and a Romanesque civilization, along those lines.

Apparently I got zapped in that other world. We were Christians, but more in the political revolutionary sense; you know, blowing up prisons. Anarchistic. A lot of people were in prisons or forced labor camps.

FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID is a favorite of Dick’s fans. Here’s comments from two of them:

Quite simply the ultimate expression of everything PKD's genre novels were about: identity, paranoia, redemption, shifting worlds...

FLOW MY TEARS has the most touching, beautiful, needy, human, crazy kind of scene where Felix hugs a hapless stranger under the fluorescent lights of a gas station. Aren't we (really) all desperate to one degree or another for human connections?

The novel has been turned into theatre form by Linda Hartinian and the script published in 1990. The play has been performed by various theatre groups in Boston, New York and Chicago. In the 1990s a teleplay was shot of a performance at the Propp Theatre in Chicago and made available on videotape.

As for the plot of FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID, there is no better brief description than that of Philip K. Dick:

This is the whole basic plot of the novel: One morning Jason Taverner, popular TV and recording star, wakes up in a fleabag dingy hotel room to find all his identification papers gone, and, worse yet, finds that no one has ever heard of him -- the basic plot is that for some arcane reason the entire population of the United States has in one instant of linear time completely and collectively forgotten a man whose face on the cover of Time magazine should be a face virtually every reader would identify without effort. In this novel I am saying, "The entire population of a large country, a continent-sized country, can wake up one morning having entirely forgotten something they all previously knew, and none of them is the wiser." In the novel it is a popular TV and recording star whom they have forgotten, which is of importance, really, only to that particular star or former star. But my hypothesis is presented here nonetheless in a disguised form, because (I am saying) if an entire country can overnight forget one thing they all know, they can forget other things, more important things; in fact, overwhelmingly important things. I am writing about amnesia on the part of millions of people, of, so to speak, fake memories laid down. This theme of faked memories is a constant thread in my writing over the years. It was also Van Vogt's. And yet, can one contemplate this as a serious possibility, something that could actually happen? Who of us has asked himself that? I did not ask myself that prior to 1974; I include myself.

This concept of fake memories is a main reason why FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID figures in PKD’s post-Pink Beam ontology.

FLOW MY TEARS is certainly a turning-point in Dick’s career. The novel is longer than usual for PKD and took longer to write. And after FLOW MY TEARS Dick took much more time to write his novels. No more one draft, retype then mail it off to the SMLA. The novel wins ó ó ó ó ó in at least one alternate world.

FOREIGN EDITIONS:

Once they notice you, Jason realized, they never completely close the file. You can never get back your anonymity. It is vital not to be noticed in the first place. But I have been.

NOTES

PKDS-2 7:

After completing FLOW MY TEARS which he had begun before his previous wife had left him, he wrote A SCANNER DARKLY

PKDS-3 13:

A major portion of the EXEGESIS is taken up by Phil's reinterpretation of his earlier novels (esp. TEARS and UBIK) in terms of the VALIS universe.

PKDS-4 1:

... Close of 1973 and opening of 1974: realization that I could not regain what I had lost, for several reasons, but still professional pursuit of my work; i.e. seeing TEARS through to its publishing in Feb of 1974 and awareness of a mysterious importance of this, as well as a mysterious threat or danger to me and the book, stemming from the same forces which had assaulted me at the close of 1971. {PKD to Joan, 5-20-77}

PKDS-4 5:

On p151 0f VALIS, Fat tells his friends "The two-word cypher signal KING FELIX" was sent out in Feb '74, and that "the united States Army cryptographers studied it, but couldn't discern who it was intended for or what it meant." Fat's friends ask him how he knows that, but he won't say; nor does he explain in what form it appeared.

(KWJ:) I think there were about three different periods. There was that period where he wrote very fast without revision, simply because of economic pressure, when he was up in the Bay Area. That accounted for that period. Then there was a later period in the 70s which would include FLOW MY TEARS and A SCANNER DARKLY, books like that, where he was no longer under that economic pressure, and he did go through drafts and drafts of his books. I can't say for sure, but I would have been very much surprised if there were more than one or two drafts of VALIS, and, uh --

(KWJ:) Yeah, Son Of VALIS, or VALIS Regained, which was Phil's original title for it. {Andy Watson and K.W. Jeter}

PKDS-6 12:

(PKD:) I finally decided that I liked the last part of FLOW MY TEARS, but as a whole, I don't like it. I don't think it's totally satisfactory. My appreciation now is directed at A SCANNER DARKLY... {Apel & Briggs, 1977}

The unpublished prescript to FLOW MY TEARS by Philip K. Dick.
Editor's note: this essay was found in the PKD papers currently housed at Cal State Fullerton, in a folder with a ms of FLOW MY TEARS. It is titled simply "Prescript". I believe it was written in the summer of 1970, soon after completion of the first draft of FMT, but cannot confirm this. As far as I know this was not included when the ms was finally submitted to Doubleday in 1973 -- PW}

"This novel begins with a famous man telling a joke over network television and ends with an unidentified person loving and cherishing a blue pot..." {See: PKDS-12 for the complete text of this Prescript}

(JB:) I had it down that the first thing he started after the long, well, hiatus, was "A Little Something For Us Tempunauts", a short story.

(TD:) Not really. He'd gotten the manuscript for FLOW MY TEARS. Doubleday was bugging him; he owed them two novels: DEUS IRAE and FLOW MY TEARS. He'd left the ms of FLOW MY TEARS with his attorney in Marin County, so he wrote for the ms to be sent down to him at Fullerton. The attorney sent it, along with a letter that said, "You'd better be in court, October 21^st (1972)!" So he did show up in Court for his divorce.{Tessa Dick to J.B.Reynolds, 1986}

FLOW Play To Be Published. Linda Hartinian's dramatization of PKD's novel FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID, which has been performed by Mabou Mines in Boston and New York and by the Prop Theatre in Chicago (see Dan Sutherland's article this issue), will be published, probably in 1990, by the Dramatic Publishing Company of Woodstock, Illinois, a leading theatrical publisher. Dramatic will also be leasing stock and amateur acting rights to the play. This means that it will become available to be performed by local theatre groups, amateur and professional.

{PKDS 28 contains much bibliographic material for FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID as well as an excerpt (The Different Stages Of Love) from an early draft of the novel. Here are some truncated notes from PKDS 28 – Lord RC}

{...} I have just finished the rough draft of a new, long, s-f novel, FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID. {...} I've reworked it and reworked it; I rewrote the final section seven times, plus holographic changes. At one point in the writing I wrote 140 pages in 48 hours. I have high hopes for this. It is the first really new thing I've done since EYE IN THE SKY. The change is due to a change that overtook me from having taken mescalin, a very large dose that completely unhinged me. I had enormous insights behind the drug, all having to do with those whom I loved. Love. Will love.

[In late 1972, after he had been living for some months with his future wife Tessa, Dick signified his willingness to resume his writing career -- which had effectively come to a halt in 1970 -- by asking his attorney to return the FLOW MY TEARS manuscript to him. It arrived January 6, 1973, and Dick retyped it over the next four weeks and mailed it to his agent in New York. The agent received the completed manuscript on February 7, 1973. On April 6, 1973 Dick learned that Doubleday had accepted the novel, and a few days later he received a letter from his editor at Doubleday, Diane Cleaver, telling him how much she liked the book and offering a few editorial suggestions:]

Cleaver to Dick (4/5/73): "The only other thing is something I think you'll feel strongly about -- Ruth Rae. Her long discussion with Taverner really is too long and I think destroys the movement of the story and it could be cut somewhat without ruining the point you're making about Taverner {...}"

Dick to Cleaver (4/9/73): "Re: paragraph three of your letter, the Ruth Rae section, which I regard as the mid-section of the novel. Here is my feeling about that. I will cut this section. I will go over it entirely and tighten. {... ...}

Cleaver to Dick (4/24): "Thank you for taking so generously to my suggestions on FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID." {...}

{After many delays and Tessa having a baby (PKD uses this as an excuse in a letter to Diane Cleaver dated 7/25{1973?}) followed by a nasty bout with the flu, PKD sent a manuscript to Patrice Duvic, French editor and friend (11/20/73):

"Because of my flu I couldn't complete my editing of the galleys on FLOW MY TEARS. I hope it makes sense. It seems to me that my agent is supposed to send you a copy of the MS; did he do so?" [This suggests that a manuscript did go from the American agent to the French agent, and thence to French publishers; another possibility is that the American agent sent an uncorrected set of galleys to his French counterpart. {Paul Williams]{PKD>Patrice Duvic, 20 Nov 1973}

Dick to Lawrence Ashmead, editor-in-chief, Doubleday:
"The book came out looking wonderful -- in my opinion by far the get so far. I wanted to tell you, too that the cuts which Diane suggested, and which I made, greatly improve the novel, as she thought they would. Also, I want to thank and commend your copy editors who built the missing bridge across one of the cuts; they did a superb job. I could only have done worse. {PKD>Lawrence Ashmead, 23 Jan 1974}

{Paul Williams then goes on to discuss the effectiveness of the cuts and PKD's possible loss of interest in FLOW MY TEARS in 1973 -- he'd written it first in 1970 and was in 1973 working on A SCANNER DARKLY. A final letter follows:}

Dick to Goran Bengston {his Swedish translator}

"For me the big news (besides me and Tessa getting married) is that I have sold two new novels to Doubleday, the first of which is FLOW MY TEARS. I have said to you that I considered it perfect and finished; it was neither -- I had to do a total rewrite before sending it off at last. Ten rewrites, the last of which was monumental! Anyhow now it is bought and will be coming out. But for me the later one, A SCANNER DARKLY, which is only finished in rough, is the one now. TEARS, when I reread it early this year before typing it up, turned out to be sentimental; so much for what I called 'the perfect' novel.. Only in the final draft did I get any bite into it, any grit. But with SCANNER -- it is all bite, all grit; it is a great tragic anti-dope novel, an autobiographical account, set as science fiction, of what I saw in the dope world, the counterculture, during the two years after my wife and daughter left me. I believe nothing in fiction matches it in the hell it portrays..." {PKD>Goran Bengston, 4 May 1973} {See also: The Different Stages Of Love}

See PKDS-28 1. CONCERNING PAGES ARISING FROM NOTHINGNESS by Gerard Klein. A preface to the second French edition of FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID (Editions Robert Laffont, 1985) translated by Paul Williams.

Fan Fave: FLOW MY TEARS has the most touching, beautiful, needy, human, crazy kind of scene where Felix hugs a hapless stranger under the fluorescent lights of a gas station. Aren't we (really) all desperate to one degree or another for human connections? -- Deborah Eley, LA

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.

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.

See GSM xerox collection: {PKD to Charles Brown, Locus Magazine, Apr 6, 1973. Also found on philipkdick.com.}

    (PKD:) "...They say I have to say what reality is, and I never had any intention of doing that. And the reason that I never had any intention of doing that is that I don't know -- I have no knowledge at all of what reality is. All I can do is plaintively inquire "Hey, gang, what is really real?" And then here is Terry Carr -- the great anthologizer -- and a major figure in the field -- and he says "All right!" and he blows on his little whistle, like the Recreation Director at camp has. . ."All right! Time to write about what reality is!"
    {...}
    So I discovered -- as amazing as it may sound -- that it was a lot harder to say what it was than to ask what it was.

(PKD:) Damned if I know! {(...)} But I thought: I'll fake it. So in 1970 I started working on FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID. And it was my intention to resolve the problem by the discovery of what reality really was. So that meant there was a three year ellipsis in my writing...

(PKD:) Yeah. Well, I just sort of sat there at the typewriter. I did eleven drafts of that novel. I mean literally; I'm not using that as hyperbole. I had a complicated code system worked out so I wouldn't start feeding old drafts back in, in which case I guess I'd still be there today.

I decided the thing that was really real was love. Then I thought, Y'know, somebody else said this; now who the hell was it that said this? Well, actually, a lot of people have said it. My revelation which I'm about to lay on the world is not going to come as a complete surprise.

But another thing happened then -- because your question had to do with working habits. Working all those years on FLOW MY TEARS, doing all those drafts, changed my working habits. I'd never done more than a rough draft and a final on a novel before. And there were eleven drafts. God -- I was reshaping it word by word. Once in, never out; I couldn't go back to doing a rough draft and a final draft, just like that. So the next novel was A SCANNER DARKLY , and it took years to write SCANNER; it just took years. The idea came to me in the early part of 1972, and it wasn't until 1976 that I sent the manuscript off to Doubleday... {PKD - Apel & Briggs 1977}

(PKD:) That precognitive thing in my novels has really spooked me. It's really there. You can see how I would become aware of it in direct proportion to the number of books I wrote: if there was such a factor, the more I wrote, the more I'd begin to notice this.

Let's establish just for the record examples thereof. In the rough draft of FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID, there's a girl named Kathy. Her husband's name is Jack. She is nineteen years old. She appears to be working for the criminal underground, the anti-establishment thing, but actually -- because she hopes to get her husband out of a forced labour camp through cooperation -- she is working for the police. The policeman she is working with is on the Inspector level, which is unusual.

Now, that was written in 1970 and the first draft put aside. In December of 1970 I met a girl whose name was Kathy, who was nineteen years old, who appeared to be a dope dealer, who, it turned out much later -- I didn't know this for one year -- had been arrested and had made a deal to inform to the police if they'd drop the charges. Her boyfriend was named Jack, and the policeman she worked with was an Inspector. That's when the precognitive thing in my books really hit me. My novel was so close it was damn near actionable. I could just see an attorney listing all this stuff, you know. Precise details.

I have really spent a lot of time thinking about this stuff since I began to notice it. I mean, several people have said to me they thought there were precognitive elements in my books, but it didn't really strike me until this thing about FLOW MY TEARS. God, I met the Inspector she was working with. That's how I found out about it. She and I went into a restaurant and she stopped dead and said, "We can't go in there; Inspector So-and-so is in there." And in my book, he wears a grey coat, or something like that, and there he was, sitting there in a grey coat.

I really had to ask myself about this. And what I began to notice was that the precognitive material was coming to me in my sleep, in dream form. That was in 1972, and I began to pay real attention to my dreams from that standpoint. The more time passed the more I was forced to face the actuality of the precognitive elements.
{For continuation see: TDC 88}

(PKD): Anyway, we were discussing the precognitive elements in FLOW MY TEARS. Now, this is something I really would like to talk about. This is something you won't find other writers saying. {...}

OK... By the time I read over the final draft of FLOW MY TEARS and realised that I had shown real precognitive elements, I had to accept something which I'm not really interested in, which is the ESP stuff. Its not really something which I particularly like. I mean, I don't get off on it. I've written books and stories where parapsychological talents were employed, you know, but I can't honestly say I've ever believed in them as real things.

But there was something about that book that really freaked me. There's a dream sequence... General Buckman's sister is dead, and he's flying home, and he's really grief-stricken. And he has this dream. His main feeling is hatred... the desire to kill Jason Taverner. Buckman has set up Jason Taverner to be busted. Taverner has actually committed no crime. And Buckman in his psychotic grief at the death of his sister -- which was purely accidental -- has lost touch with reality. He's forgotten he's setting up an innocent man. He was looking for a collar on Taverner, then his sister dies in Taverner's proximity, and Buckman begins to talk about shooting Taverner, just as if he thought that Taverner had actually done it. So he makes this complete psychotic break. He's on his way home, and he's all screwed up about this. And he goes to sleep and has this dream. It's set in a rustic background, where Buckman lived as a child. He dreams of a posse of men on horseback, wearing helmets and multi-colored robes. There's one who looks like a wise old king... he has a snow white beard, like wool. And there's a man whom the posse is going to kill, sealed up in a nearby building. The man cannot see them coming, but he hears them coming and lets out a great shriek of fear. At which point Buckman's psychotic rage -- his desire to kill Taverner-- is completely transmuted into grief for this man hiding in the building in the darkness; grief for this man who is going to be killed.

Buckman is brought back to sanity by this dream. He's brought out of psychotic anger at an innocent man -- previously Buckman's been talking about taking a piss on Taverner's shoe; he takes it that personally -- to an appropriate affect, which is grief. He comes out of the dream and he lands his vehicle at an all-night gas station and he embraces the first human being he sees. It happens to be some black guy standing there while his tires are being rotated. He embraces a complete stranger.

So the dream brought Buckman back to sanity. That's the part that I rewrote very carefully. That's also the part -- I've been told -- for which the John W. Campbell Committee presented me with their award for that book; mainly for that specific episode.

I actually had that dream. There was a case where I consciously wrote something that I dreamt in my writing. But when the book came out, I had the curious feeling that I wrote more than I realised. I couldn't put my finger on exactly what it was. You know, you hear the phrase, "the author wrote more than he knew"... well, I had this feeling. Very, very strong feeling. I was waiting for feedback from my readers. I'm very, very responsive to reader criticism. Not so much professional critic criticism, but reader criticism. I thought someone might let me know what was going on.

FLOW MY TEARS came out in 1974. Now this is where my head was at in February 1974. This was a very stressful period for me. I was having wisdom teeth removed and receiving regular injections of sodium pentathol. Meanwhile I was experimenting with Linus Pauling's orthomolecular vitamin program, and my thoughts began to go very fast. I had read that orthomolecular vitamins, used with schizophrenics, produced more synchronous neural firing, but that it also speeded up neural firing. What occurred to me was, "Well, it can't hurt." (laughter) Evidently. That's the thing about water-soluble vitamins, y'know; they're not gonna leave traces of heavy metals in the neuroreceptor sites...

(PKD:) And I remembered an existence in which the world described was the same as the world in FLOW MY TEARS

If I were to detail that world, it would be completely congruent with the world in FLOW MY TEARS. Then I asked myself, Does this explain where the corpus of my writing comes from? And the answer is Yes. The entire corpus of my writing deals with a landscape... a kind of world which is somewhat like ours and somewhat different. And all my books interrelate. Ursula LeGuin pointed that out -- that all my books seemed to take place on a particular alternate world. And in 1974, I actually remembered being in that world. Some of the technology was more advanced than ours, like in my books. They made great use of advanced hydraulics, for instance.

The Establishment was just like it was shown to me in FLOW MY TEARS. In that world, all civil rights movements had failed. Most amazing of all, Christianity was outlawed.

(PKD:) That I don't know. I inferred that what happened was that in the world, Christianity had been completely absorbed by the Roman Empire and a Romanesque civilization, along those lines.

(PKD:) in FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID the world of one character invades the world in general and shows that by "world" we mean nothing more or less than Mind -- the immanent Mind which thinks -- or rather dreams -- our world. That dreamer, like the dreamer in Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, is stirring and about to come to consciousness. We are within that dream; these manifold dreams are about to fold into themselves, to disappear as dreams, to be replaced by the true landscape of the dreamer's reality. We will join him as he sees it once again and is aware that he has been dreaming. In Brahmanism, we would say that a great cycle has ended and that Brahman stirs and wakes again, or that it falls asleep from being awake; in any case the universe which we experience which is an extension in space and time of its Mind is experiencing the typical dysfunctions that take place at the end of a cycle. You may say if you prefer, "Reality is collapsing; it's all turning to chaos," or, with me, you may wish to say, "I feel the dream, the dokos, lifting; I feel Maya dissolving: I am waking up, He is waking up: I am the Dreamer: we are all the Dreamer." One thinks here of Arthur Clarke's Overmind.

(PKD:) I myself have derived much of the material for my writing from dreams. In FLOW MY TEARS, for example, the powerful dream which comes to Felix Buckman near the end, the dream of the wise old man on horseback, that was an actual dream I had at the time of writing the novel.

…The irony of this ending -- Abendsen finding out that what he had supposed to be pure fiction spun out of his imagination was in fact true -- the irony is this: that my own supposed imaginative work THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE is not fiction -- or rather is fiction only now, thank God. But there was an alternate world, a previous present, in which that particular time track actualized -- actualized and then was abolished due to intervention at some prior date. I am sure, as you hear me say this, you do not really believe me, or even believe that I believe it myself. but nevertheless it is true. I retain memories of that other world. That is why you will find it again described in the later novel FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID.

The world of FLOW MY TEARS is an actual (or rather once actual) alternate world, and I remember it in detail. I do not know who else does. Maybe no one else does. Perhaps all of you were always -- have always been -- here. But I was not. In March 1974 I began to remember consciously, rather than merely subconsciously, that black iron prison police state world. Upon consciously remembering it I did not need to write about it because I have always been writing about it. Nonetheless my amazement was great, to remember consciously suddenly that it was once so-- as I'm sure you can imagine. Put yourself in my place. In novel after novel, story after story, over a twenty-five year period, I wrote repeatedly about a particular other landscape, a dreadful one. In March 1974 I understood why, in my writing, I continually reverted to an awareness, in intimation of, that one particular world. I had good reason to. My novels and stories were, without my realizing it consciously, autobiographical. It was -- this return of memory -- the most extraordinary experience of my life. Or rather I should say lives, since I had at least two: one there and subsequently one here, where we are now.
{"If You Find This World Bad..." (1977)}

Examine the text of FLOW MY TEARS and, keeping in mind that it was written in 1970 and published in 1974, make an effort to construct the previous events that would have had to take place, or not take place, to account for the world depicted in the novel as lying slightly in the future. One small but critical theme is alluded to twice (I believe) in FLOW MY TEARS. It has to do with Nixon. In the future world of FLOW MY TEARS, in the dreadful slave state that exists and evidently has existed for decades, Richard Nixon is remembered as an exalted, heroic leader -- referred to, in fact, as the "Second Only Begotten Son of God." It is evident from this and many other clues that FLOW MY TEARS deals not with our future but the future of a present world alternate to our own. Blacks, by the time FLOW MY TEARS takes place, have become an ecological rarity, protected "as are wild whooping cranes." In the novel one rarely sees blacks on the streets of the United States.. But the year in which FLOW MY TEARS takes place is only eleven years from now: October 1988. Obviously the fascist genocide against the blacks in the United States in my novel began long before 1977; a number of readers have pointed this out to me. One of them even pointed out that a careful reading of FLOW MY TEARS not only indicates that the society depicted, the US police state of 1988, had to be an alternate-world novel, but this reader pointed out that mysteriously, at the very end of the novel, the protagonist, Felix Buckman, appears somehow to have slipped over into a different world, one in which blacks were not exterminated. Early in the novel it is stipulated that a black couple is allowed by law to bear only one single child; yet, at the end of the novel, the black man at the all-night gas station proudly gets out his wallet and shows Police General Buckman photographs of his three children. The open manner in which the black man shows the pictures to a perfect stranger indicates that for some weird and unexplained reason it is now no longer illegal for a black couple to have several children. Somehow, just as Mr.Tagomi slipped over briefly into our alternate present, General Buckman in FLOW MY TEARS did the same thing. It is even evident in the text of FLOW MY TEARS when and where the police general slipped over. It was just before he landed his flying vehicle at the all-night gas station and encountered -- hugged, in fact -- the black man; the slipover, which is to say the moment in which the absolutely repressive world of the bulk of the novel faded out, took place during the interval in which General Buckman experienced a strange dream about a king-like old man with white wool-like beard, wearing robes and a helmet and leading a posse of similarly helmeted robed knights -- this king and these helmeted knights appearing in the rural world of farmhouse and pastureland where General Buckman had lived as a boy. The dream, I think, was a graphic depiction in General Buckman's mind of the transformation taking place objectively; it was a kind of inner analog to what was happening outside him to his entire world.

This accounts for the changed Buckman, the very different police general who lands at the all-night gas station and draws the heart with an arrow piercing it, giving the piece of paper with its drawing to the black man as a communication of love. Buckman at the gas station in encountering the black stranger is not the same Buckman who appeared earlier throughout the book: The transformation is complete. But he is unaware of it. Only Jason Taverner, the once-famous television personality who woke up one day to find himself in a world that had never heard of him -- only Taverner, when his mysteriously taken away popularity seeps back, understands that several alternate realities -- two upon a cursory reading, but at least three if the ending is studied scrupulously -- only Jason Taverner remembers, This is the whole basic plot of the novel: One morning Jason Taverner, popular TV and recording star, wakes up in a fleabag dingy hotel room to find all his identification papers gone, and, worse yet, finds that no one has ever heard of him -- the basic plot is that for some arcane reason the entire population of the United States has in one instant of linear time completely and collectively forgotten a man whose face on the cover of Time magazine should be a face virtually every reader would identify without effort. In this novel I am saying, "The entire population of a large country, a continent-sized country, can wake up one morning having entirely forgotten something they all previously knew, and none of them is the wiser." In the novel it is a popular TV and recording star whom they have forgotten, which is of importance, really, only to that particular star or former star. But my hypothesis is presented here nonetheless in a disguised form, because (I am saying) if an entire country can overnight forget one thing they all know, they can forget other things, more important things; in fact, overwhelmingly important things. I am writing about amnesia on the part of millions of people, of, so to speak, fake memories laid down. This theme of faked memories is a constant thread in my writing over the years. It was also Van Vogt's. And yet, can one contemplate this as a serious possibility, something that could actually happen? Who of us has asked himself that? I did not ask myself that prior to 1974; I include myself.

You will recall that I pointed out that after Police General Buckman slipped over into a better world he underwent an inner change appropriate to the qualities of the better world, the more just, the more loving, the warmer world in which the tyranny of the police apparatus was already beginning to fade away as would a dream upon the awakening of the dreamer. In March 1974, when I regained my buried memories (a process called in Greek anamnesis, which literally means the loss of forgetfulness rather than merely remembering) -- upon those memories reentering consciousness I, like General Buckman, underwent a personality change. Like his, it was fundamental but at the same time subtle. It was me but yet it was not me. I noticed it mostly in small ways: things I should have remembered but did not; things I did remember (ah, what things!) but should not have... ...

The idea that seized me twenty-seven years ago and never let go is this: Any society in which people meddle in other people's business is not a good society, and a state in which the government "knows more about you than you know about yourself," as it is expressed in FLOW MY TEARS, is a state that must be overthrown. It may be a theocracy, a fascist corporate state, or reactionary monopolistic capitalism or centralistic socialism -- that aspect does not matter. And I am saying not merely," It can happen here," meaning the United States, but rather, "It did happen here. I remember. I was one of the secret Christians who fought it and to at least some extent helped overthrow it." And I am very proud of that: proud of myself in time track A. {...}

For absolute reality to reveal itself, our categories of space-time experiences, our basic matrix through which we encounter the universe, must break down and then utterly collapse. I dealt with this breakdown in MARTIAN TIME SLIP in terms of time; in MAZE OF DEATH there are endless parallel realities arranged spatially; in FLOW MY TEARS the world of one character invades the world in general and shows that by "world" we mean nothing more or less than Mind -- the immanent Mind which thinks -- or rather dreams -- our world... {PKD}

(PKD:) Now, when we got onto the business of FLOW MY TEARS, there's apparently 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 --

(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 theorize 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): In Flow My Tears, Buckman is typically persecutory. He takes an innocent man, Jason Taverner, who he knows nothing about and merely because he knows nothing about him he systematically proceeds to have him framed and brought to trial. Now, how anyone could interpret that as a favorable attitude toward the police state? This would be someone as editor, writing from the standpoint where he must approve the idea of persecuting people about whom you know nothing seems perfectly natural to him; that the government should, upon discovering that they know nothing about a person, immediately begin to harass, persecute, arrest, try to convict and hope to murder the person. Apparently, this editor felt that was within the novel confines of the effective state. To me it somehow smacks of an indecent form of government.
    But what I'd hope 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. Now, Buckman has already been presented as making attempts to diminish the effect of the concentration camps. He has sought ways of assisting the persecuted and what we have seen here is the fact that these are all innocent human beings.
    I guess if you read about a totalitarian government and you read about one of the police officials as being human at all, you are liable to the accusation that you are somehow defaming the apparatus or not defaming the apparatus. I'm simply saying that within the apparatus there must exist individuals who come to doubt the moral mandate through which they govern. In fact it's specifically stated that Buckman had been reduced in rank from, I believe, a commission as Marshall to a commission as General, because of his humane attitude.
    In England, a review came out that this was the first book I'd ever written in which the establishment spokesman is created sympathetically. This then gave rise to the mistaken idea that I had mellowed out in my attitude toward the tyrannical, totalitarian police state. But of course I haven't mellowed out toward that. What's happened is that in the book one of the spokesmen of the police state has begun to mellow out in terms of his relationship, vis-à-vis those who he normally persecutes. And what I was trying to do was anticipate - and, I think, successfully - the collapse of the tyrannical American State, because that tyrannical apparatus did disintegrate in America. {SF EYE, #14, Spring 1996. Anton & Fuchs, 1977 Metz, tr. F.C.Bertrand}

Fan Fave: FLOW MY TEARS THE POLICEMAN SAID. Quite simply the ultimate expression of everything PKD's genre novels were about: identity, paranoia, redemption, shifting worlds... -- Peter Fenelon, NY

(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 really would 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.}

To himself, but aloud, he said, "You have bumped the door of life open with your big, dense head. And now it can't be closed."

Simon Finch Rare Books: FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID, Doubleday, hb, 1974 (1ST). NF/NF. $613.12

Phildickian: FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID, Doubleday, hb, 1974 (1st). VG. True unremaindered first with code 050 on page 231. This is an x-lib with usual markings. The book is cocked but still relatively tight. The dust jacket is crisp with moderate rubbing, sci-fi sticker to lower end of the spine. $75

Phildickian: FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID, Doubleday, hb, 1974 (2nd). NF/VG+. This is the second printing with code P7(1974 7th week) on page 231 and remaindered, Levack. Book is clean and tight. The dust jacket is lightly rubbed, but otherwise free of chips rips & tears. $100

Powells: FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID, Doubleday, hb, 1974 (2nd). VG/VG. $100

Phildickian: FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID, Reader's Union, hb, UKSFBC, 1975. VG+/VG+. Book is tight with a slight lean and minor shelfwear. The dust jacket is rubbed with some edge-creasing, but otherwise free of chips rips & tears. $65

Gravity Books: FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID, Reader's Union, hb, UKSFBC, 1975. VG. bound in black cloth, silver spine decoration and lettering. $37.29

Phildickian: FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID, DAW, pb, #146, 1975. VG+. Very clean copy showing a hint of rubbing but no creasing.

Phildickian: FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID, DAW, pb, #146, 1975. G. This is just a good reading copy. There is heavy damage to the spine, number to the inside front cover, and light rubbing to the edges. $3

Alibris: FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID, DAW, pb, #146, 1975 (1st pb). G-. Corners torn off of first four pages, crease to front wrap, stains to rear wrap, though book pages are clean and book is solid it is a reader. $4.95

Phildickian: FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID, DAW, pb, UW1266, 1976. VG+. a very clean copy looking as though read only once, and carefully at that. $10

Phildickian: FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID, DAW, pb, UW1266, 1976. VG. no reading creases. There is however light rubbing to the edges. $10

Phildickian: FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID by Linda Hartinian, Dramatic Publishing Company -- Woodstock, IL, wraps, 1990. NF. This is the screenplay based on the novel. A clean unread copy with just a hint of shelfwear. $100

23rd Lane Books: FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID, Vintage, tp, 1993. FINE. $15

Phildickian: FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID, Vintage, tp, 1993. NF. Bright, unread copy. $8

Books on The Green: FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID, Voyager, pb, 1996. VG. Cover slightly creased. $8.51

		Zysk i Ska -- Poznan, Kameleon, 1996, ?, ? (?) {tr. into Polish by Zbigniew A. Krolicki as PLYNCIE LZY MOJE, RZEKL POLICJANT}

		Mondadori, ?, ? 1998, 260pp, Lit 22000 (?) {tr. into Italian by Vittorio Curtoni as SCORRETE LACRIME, DISSE IL POLIZIOTTO}ISBN: 88-04-44936-5

		Mondadori, pb, 1394, Aug 2000, ?, ? (?) {tr. into Italian as SCORRETE LACRIME, DISSE IL POLIZIOTTO} Urania

		?, pb, ?, ?, ?, ? (?) {tr. into Japanese}

Credits Navigation philipdick.com Novels Short Stories References

FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID

"Buy this one and brace yourself..." -- Theodore Sturgeon

FIRST EDITIONS:

FOREIGN EDITIONS:

NOTES

PKDS-2 7:

PKDS-3 13:

PKDS-4 1:

PKDS-4 5:

PKDS-6 12:

		Doubleday, hb, 00887-2, 1974, 231pp, $6.95, (One Plus One) {Levack: "Bound in rust-colored cloth with silver lettering on the spine. Date code '050' [50th week of 1973] at lower left margin of page 231. States 'First edition' on the copyright page. This book was reprinted with a date code of 'P7' [7th week of 1974] on page 231 and this printing was remaindered. The later printing leaves out the statement 'First edition' on the copyright page -- normal practice for Doubleday. Among the remaindered copies (which can be told by the splotched purple sprayed on the lower edges -- the normal marking for a Doubleday remainder) were some first printings. '1974' on the title page of the first printing only. According to the author there were about 7500 copies of the first printing."}

		Gollancz, hb, 01880-1, Oct 1974, 231pp, L2.20, (?) {Levack: "Bound in maroon paper boards with gold lettering on the spine. '1974' on the title page."}

		?, pb, 3D, 1981, ?, ? (?) {tr. into Japanese}

		?, ?, ?, 1981, ?, ? (?) {tr. into Dutch as DE TRANEN VAN DE POLITIEMAN}

		Notabene, hb, ?, 1984, 171pp, ?, (?) {tr. into Danish by Jannick Storm as STROM MINE TARER, SAGDE POLITIMANDEN}

		Laffont, pb, ?, 1985, ?, ?, (?) {tr. into French by Michel Deutsch as COULEZ MES LARMES, DIT LE POLICIER}ISBN: 2-221-04246-8

		J'ai Lu, pb, 2451, 1988, 281pp, ? (?) {tr. into French as COULEZ MEW LARMES, DIT LE POLICIER}ISBN: 2-277-22451-6 (could be a '0' here). SDM: 8901089

Credits Navigation philipdick.com Novels Short Stories References

FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID "Buy this one and brace yourself..." -- Theodore Sturgeon

FIRST EDITIONS:

FOREIGN EDITIONS:

NOTES

PKDS-2 7:

PKDS-3 13:

PKDS-4 1:

PKDS-4 5:

PKDS-6 12:

FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID

"Buy this one and brace yourself..." -- Theodore Sturgeon