Dreamer of Dune (15 page)

If one of the
verboten
words slipped from my mouth, I immediately wanted it back, a second chance. But there the word was, floating in the air, reaching his ears, causing his demeanor to change: a ferocious scowl on his face and loud commands from his ever-active mouth. I would cower and shake and watch for threatening movements from his beefy right hand, the hitting hand.

Of course there was an element of philosophical and moral truth in his concept, that the words “try” and “can't” were weak, indicating a person was not strong of character and was incapable of taking responsibility for his own actions. It was an important lesson of life, one I think of often to this day.

When I got to know my father many years later, I found to my surprise he was quite the opposite of what I had supposed. He was in reality a loving, caring man. But one who experienced problems with children. He was impatient around them, intolerant of youthful energies and mischief. It is true as well that Bruce and I were expected to undergo similar routines to those that Dad had experienced in his childhood.

Frank Herbert, ever the psychoanalyst, might be surprised to realize that a major component of his own behavior was mimicry, of the subconscious variety. He imitated the stern disciplinary measures taken against him by his father, F. H., who had received them in turn from his own father, Otto. It is interesting to note a curious habit that Otto had while living in Burley in the 1930s, a habit my father saw firsthand. It seems that the old man enjoyed listening to the news on the radio, and when his programs were on, no one could disturb him and no one spoke—at the risk of incurring his ire. Family members had to tiptoe around the house.

My father first learned about lie detectors from his policeman father, F. H., who said to him in the 1930s, “There are methods of determining when a suspect is telling the truth and when he is lying. Subtle things to notice…his gaze, the way the mouth is held, nervous ticks and mannerisms, moisture on skin surfaces…” He told the boy about lie detection machines and threatened to connect him to one if he didn't shape up. But he never actually brought a machine home.

The lie detector was a complete admission of failure on my father's part as a parent. He couldn't communicate with his sons, hadn't taken the time to bond with us, to learn what made us tick. Instead he tried to crush our will and spirit. There could be no deviation from the rules he prescribed. The environment around him had to be absolute serenity to keep his mind in order, so that he might create his great work.

I never saw Dad lift a finger against Penny, who came to stay with us that summer. One time he did get into a battle of wills with the tall, blonde teenager: He insisted that she eat her dessert and then rubbed it into her hair when she refused to do so. For the most part, she didn't receive the brunt of his anger, which in its most severe form became physical. I think he felt boys could (and should) take more punishment, in order to make men out of us.

Despite our chronic poverty, Mom was exceedingly proper about etiquette, a carryover from her maternal grandmother, Ada Landis. One time Penny brought a loaf of bread in its wrapper to the dinner table, and my mother hurled the loaf across the kitchen. Mom taught us the proper technique of holding silverware, and of sitting up straight as we ate. We were not to slurp drinks or soup, and bowls were always to be tipped away when we spooned the last of the soup—never toward us. “A well-mannered person is never eager to eat,” she said.

Dad was around thirty-five or thirty-six at the time, and I remember a habit he had of bounding up and down the stairs of our front porch, skipping steps. From my perspective, he was an old duffer, and I couldn't believe he had that much energy. He was impatient to get wherever the staircase led, not a man to dawdle with each step.

Frank Herbert had been clean-shaven since moving to Santa Rosa in 1949 for the job with the
Press Democrat
. Seven years later now,
The Dragon in the Sea
sold to a German publisher for a small amount of money, and the publisher wanted a book jacket photograph of him. Lurton said that readers in Europe expected writers to have beards, so Dad grew it back before having the photo taken. Mom said he looked nice in it, and he took a liking to it again. At first, Bruce, Penny and I thought he looked pretty strange, but gradually we grew accustomed to the change.

In the summer of 1956, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Congress, Phil Roth, offered Dad the position of public information officer, which he accepted. Roth was running against the Democratic incumbent, Edith Green. Roth, who had been in the Civil Air Patrol during World War II, piloted his own single-engine Cessna airplane on the campaign circuit, with “Roth for Congress” painted on the sides.

After accompanying the candidate on one such trip, my father picked up a bouquet of long-stemmed red roses for Mom on the way home. He presented them to her at the front door.

“You're a sight for sore eyes!” Dad exclaimed to her.

And she responded, “Sore eye! Sore eye!”

Roth was a supporter of Indian rights, and felt the reservation system was perpetuating second-class citizenship for them. Dad concurred with this position, and contributed his own knowledge of Indian affairs to Roth's speeches. A decade and a half later, these concerns would find their way into one of Frank Herbert's greatest and most powerful stories, the mainstream novel of Indian rage,
Soul Catcher
.

Unfortunately, Roth lost in the November general election. For the third time in two years, Dad found himself on the staff of a losing Republican candidate, and he was again thrown out of work. If any of the three had won, the career of Frank Herbert might have been dramatically different—for he could have become a political appointee.

Early in December, my father made a startling announcement. He said we would no longer celebrate Christmas on Christmas Day. Instead, we would wait until Twelfth Night, January 6th, the way it was done in Mexico for children. Except in our case it would apply to the entire family. He went on to explain that the Epiphany, January 6th, was an important Christian religious holiday, representing the day the manifestation of Jesus Christ appeared before the Magi.

It got pretty tough for Bruce and me when Christmas came around and other kids played outside with new bicycles and baseball mitts and model airplanes, while we had nothing.

On Christmas Day our tree had only a few presents under it, sent by friends and relatives. Dad and Mom started shopping the day after Christmas, picking up bargains at sales. It was great for their budget, but Bruce and I thought it left something to be desired.

By December 30th, Bruce and I had raised such a ruckus about our presents that Dad agreed to let us open one gift a day between New Year's Day and January 6th. Dad and Mom selected the ones we could open first, and the best were saved for the last day.

This practice continued for three years! Finally, after vociferous protestations and monumental whining, Bruce and I were successful in eliminating it from the Herbert household for all time.

W
ITH THE
campaign wars over and the Roth election lost, Dad felt burned out. He'd been beating his head against political walls long enough, and needed to get back to his writing. A number of stories had been churning in his mind, and he wanted to get them on paper.

For a long time he had been intrigued by the effect of heroes upon human history. A student of the flawed, tragic heroes of Greek mythology and Shakespeare, he also studied the gospels of a number of religions. He was especially intrigued with stories of great religious leaders—messiahs. Among his favorite nonfiction works were biographies of great leaders such as Alexander the Great, Napoleon and Washington.

Employing his increasing understanding of psychology, he wanted to write a novel from the perspective of a hero, venturing deep into the character's psyche. He sought to become that character as he wrote about him, understanding every motivation. He had faint sketches in mind, and some of the coloration. But no canvas and no plot. So he set the idea aside.

Another story kicking around in his head was a mainstream adventure set in Mexico, with no science fiction content. Two days after the election loss of November 6, 1956, he was hard at work on a novelette entitled
A Game of Authors
. He finished it in January—37,500 words—and sent it off to his agent.

With this course change, Dad was targeting the mainstream magazine market, thinking he could earn more money with sales to slick East Coast magazines. But he hadn't done any market research—a critical error. He didn't understand what needed to be done for success. With severe space limitations, those publications were particularly finicky about length. Dad wrote each story from the seat of his pants, without considering length.

With
A Game of Authors
he was going full circle, moving away from science fiction and back to the adventures he had written in the 1940s.
Dragon
was doing relatively well, but Dad didn't feel entirely comfortable with science fiction. He hadn't intended to become a science fiction writer; it just happened. Now he was having trouble selling stories in that genre and was reappraising himself, shifting gears. Science fiction was considered a literary ghetto by many anyway, and Frank Herbert felt it might be best to get away from it.

He also had a couple of stories in mind for the men's magazine market, including
Playboy
and
Rogue
, magazines that were doing better than others financially and were paying their writers well. He even considered television script writing for a time, but Lurton discouraged him from that, telling him it was too tough to break into with his background.

A Game of Authors
, a title taken from a card game, was about an American writer in Mexico, searching for a famous lost author. This was a familiar plot device in the works of Frank Herbert—a character investigating something, in the manner of a reporter. The story featured international intrigue, a
femme fatale
and a lake filled with piranhas. Unfortunately it was melodramatic, with poor use of suspense and thin characterizations. The story met the same fate as Dad's recent science fiction tales. In part this had to do with a length problem—it was too long for the extremely limited magazine markets, and around 12,500 words too short for a novel. Still, Lurton made every effort to sell it without changes. The best hope seemed to be serialization in a magazine.

Around this time, Dad wrote another mainstream story, “Paul's Friend.” Set on an island in the South Pacific shortly after World War II, it was told in the first person, with an unnamed character listening to a story about a mysterious black man whose bravery in a hurricane was legendary. “Paul's Friend,” while a salable length at four thousand words, did not find a publisher.

And he wrote a real gem, a wild 10,000-word story told in the first person. Bearing the improbable title “Wilfred,” it described a would-be singer of inferior voice and ludicrous appearance who happened to hit the right combination of acoustics in a recording session, producing beautiful music. Sadly, “Wilfred,” like Dad's other non–science fiction attempts, did not sell.

In another genre, science fiction book and magazine publishers continued to reject
Storyship
, which was only a couple of thousand words longer than
A Game of Authors
.

That spring, Universal Pictures offered four thousand dollars for the screen rights to
The Dragon in the Sea
. They presented an unfavorable contract, which gave them every conceivable right of recorded and filmed reproduction, a contract his film agent, Ned Brown, did not like at all. He wanted to hold out for a better offer. But Dad went for the bird in the hand, and said he would accept without further delay or negotiation. Reluctantly, Ned proceeded to have the contract drawn up.

While quite a bit of money for 1957, it disappeared quickly, going for old bills that had been accumulating. Dad remained confused about his writing, and was having trouble finding his literary voice. He contacted other writers for advice, to see what he might be doing wrong. Several gave him the cold shoulder—he was just another young writer to them, pestering them, taking them away from their writing.

For a time he had received advice from Lurton's brother, Wyatt, a successful short story writer—but their last contact had been a year before. One professional in Portland did offer quite a bit of advice, Tommy Thompson. A well-known screenwriter and short story writer, Thompson told Dad never to talk about a story he planned to write or that he was in the process of writing. “Just go ahead and write it,” he said. “Don't waste your energy trying to explain it.”

Thompson, who lived in Santa Rosa and Portland at various times, built a steam engine into an old Studebaker and ran the car on steam. It ran well, and set my father to thinking about alternative energy sources—a concept he would champion two decades later.

Referring to himself as a Jeffersonian, Frank Herbert was an admirer of the nation's second president, John Adams. These men—Jefferson, Adams and Herbert—were suspicious of the holders of power. Dad added a twist of his own, asserting that charismatic leaders were extremely dangerous. “It's one thing to make mistakes for yourself,” he said, “but if you're a charismatic leader and you blunder, millions of people can follow you over the cliff.”

In
The Dragon in the Sea
, the crew of the Fenian Ram followed Captain Sparrow slavishly—a perilous situation, in my father's opinion. This was a precursor to the dangerous power structure that formed around Paul Atreides, as Dad later described in the
Dune
series.

Dad missed the Puget Sound area of Washington State, where he had been born. It was his Tara and he had done his best writing there, including most of
Dragon
. It was a wild thought, perhaps, but in 1957 he felt in his gut that another move might provide the inspiration he needed.

Ever cooperative, my mother contacted retail advertising people she knew in the Seattle-Tacoma area. As luck would have it, an advertising copywriter position turned up at a large department store in Tacoma (The Bon Marche), at a slightly higher salary. She was hired, and management accepted her request for a summer employment date, after Bruce and I had completed our current school semesters.

Penny remained with her mother in Florence, Oregon—on the Pacific Coast.

Just before our departure for Washington State, a friend from the Hitchcock campaign told Dad about a U.S. Department of Agriculture research station that was, coincidentally, near Florence. It was in an area of unstable sand dunes that were being driven by wind over buildings and roads, inundating them.

By planting poverty grasses the USDA had discovered a successful method of stabilizing dunes, preventing them from traveling. It was a pilot project, and due to its success government officials were coming from all over the world to see it. Israel, Pakistan, Algeria and Chile were among the interested nations.

Dad was intrigued. He knew from his studies of history that the Sahara and other desert regions had not always been desolate. Once they had been green and fertile, sustaining great and powerful civilizations. Many of these civilizations were subsequently buried by slow-moving, relentless sand encroachment, causing more destruction than any human invader could.

Dad thought he might write a magazine article on the project. He chartered a Cessna 150 single-engine plane, with pilot, and flew to Florence. There he compiled notes and took photos. It was as advertised: the Department of Agriculture had stopped the sand.

On the way back, Dad gazed down on sand dunes that were like waves on a great sea, and he felt an emotional pull. He returned to Portland, and focused his attentions upon yet another move.

In the summer of 1957, we rented a house in Brown's Point, Washington, just north of Tacoma. One bedroom was on the main floor, on the street side, and Dad converted it to a study.

He had always wanted an antique roll-top desk, and shortly after the move he purchased a large one from a private owner who had advertised it. The desk was dark oak, with little drawers and cubbyholes, and writing boards that pulled out on the right and left sides.

In his new study, Dad placed a row of reference books along the top shelf of the desk. His Olympia portable typewriter went on a typing table by the desk. A “Singing Cowboy” rug (that Mom had crocheted from a drawing of mine) was laid on the floor, and his Mexican
serape
with silver clips went over a side chair. On the walls he hung a calendar and old maritime maps, with inaccurate but quaint cartographic impressions of the continents. He organized his musical tapes and set up his reel-to-reel tape deck and speakers so that it could fill the entire house with music. With all his preparations, we were in the house for nearly a week before he wrote a word.

Now he set to work on the magazine article, which he entitled, “They Stopped the Moving Sands.” The rapid, staccato hum of his typewriter became constant background noise, a machine drone that I almost filtered out. His schedule at the time was to begin writing at midnight and work until at least 8:00
A.M
. In this way he had quiet, uninterrupted time. The typewriter was my father's mistress, permitted by my mother. In this unpublished haiku poem he described what it was like at that time of night:

I've never seen anyone type as fast as Dad. I hesitate to call it “touch typing,” since his fingers moved so quickly over the keys that they didn't seem to touch them at all. When I interviewed Howie Hansen, my father's closest friend, he said to me:

Sometimes, remaining ever so quiet, I watched my father at work in his study, through the open door or from outside in the yard. When he wasn't typing, he edited pages with a pen or pencil, scribbling rapidly. He talked to himself in there, reading dialogue aloud. Not being a writer myself at the time, I had no understanding of the benefit of this technique, which makes dialogue more realistic, more flowing. Having heard that crazy people talked to themselves, I put the proverbial two and two together and decided he must be out of his mind. He was so different from other kids' fathers anyway, with his beard and Bohemian lifestyle. He didn't hold down regular jobs, didn't play catch with me in the backyard or go to baseball games with me the way normal fathers did. He didn't even allow us to have a television.

Each morning, Dad drove Mom to work at The Bon Marche department store in downtown Tacoma and then picked her up in the afternoon. Our car was a gray 1950 Studebaker that looked like some kind of a weird rolling airplane cockpit. This delivery service took him an hour and a half to two hours a day in all, and was necessary since my mother refused to drive, especially in city traffic.

She was dependent upon him for many things. Almost like a baby, so helpless without him. But he was just as dependent upon her, in other ways. She edited his manuscripts and typed the final drafts. She listened attentively and made suggestions as he read each story to her aloud. She found missing things for him, keeping his delicate emotional state balanced.

Dad was in reality completely helpless without her, but I would not realize it until many years later.

My brother and I shared an insatiable curiosity about the contents of our father's desk. I often saw Bruce in the dangerous inner sanctum of the study, and at every opportunity I was in there as well. I got into Dad's things most in the afternoons, when he was picking Mom up at work.

He had the most intriguing objects in his desk, and I spent hours at a time looking at them. He had a black and silver fountain pen, like Jack Vance's. I liked the pen very much. It felt good and substantial in my hand. In cubbyholes were piled stacks of 5 © 7 notepads with a drawing of a typewriter on top of each sheet, and the words, “FROM THE DESK OF FRANK HERBERT.” In cubbyholes and drawers and on the desktop were old eyeglasses, little prisms wrapped carefully in tissue paper, fortunes from Chinese fortune cookies, pens, pencils, slide rules in a variety of shapes, political campaign buttons, typewriter ribbons wrapped in plastic bags (to keep the ribbons from drying out), little boxes and little bags and things held together with rubber bands. There were boxes of bond typing paper and stacks of inexpensive newsprint, used by my parents for first drafts and carbon copies.