Dreamer of Dune (21 page)

I find pieces of our family history throughout my father's writings, and particularly in
Dune
. Lady Jessica, with her beauty, intelligence, loyalty and love, represented the way my father felt for my mother. She was perfection to him, all things that were right with his life. She was his strength and sustenance, nurturing all of us. Like the busy Duke Leto Atreides, my father was too wrapped up in his work to pay adequate attention to his offspring. Much of this responsibility was left for Lady Jessica, just as it was left for my mother in our family.

Lady Jessica's etiquette, like my mother's, was always impeccable. Such women knew how to behave in different, often challenging, situations—no matter the faces each situation presented. In Lady Jessica's case, if she needed help with a decision, she searched her Bene Gesserit past lives to determine the best course of action. It is interesting in this vein to note that “adab,” the demanding and instant memory of the Bene Gesserit, is a word in Turkish Arabic for etiquette and politeness.

The Bene Gesserit genetic memory and the surrealistic effects of melange were occult phenomena, akin to the interests and powers of my “white witch” mother. These literary creations were linked with events in my father's life, including “Rhine consciousness” card predictions he made in the 1930s, his studies of Jung's collective unconscious theory, and personal experiences with hallucinogenic drugs.

Frank Herbert himself was in many of the characters in
Dune
, for they sprang from his mind. He was the dignified, honorable Duke Leto, and the heroic Paul as well. He was the swashbuckling risk-taker in Paul and in the loyal Duncan Idaho as well. Dad's religious and philosophical beliefs closely approximated those of Paul Atreides, combining the wordless, enigmatic elements of Zen with the self-determination of Existentialism.

My father once told me he felt he was most like the Fremen leader, Stilgar. This surprised me until I realized that Stilgar was the equivalent of a Native American leader in the story—a person who defended time-honored ways that did not harm the ecology of the planet. Stilgar was an outdoors man like my father, a person more comfortable in the wild reaches of the planet than in its more “civilized” enclaves. Such a strong name, Stilgar, combining the phonetic elements of “steel” and “guard.” He was the stalwart and determined guardian of Dune, a position not dissimilar from the one my father placed himself in with respect to Earth.

Portions of the book were semi-autobiographical. Only a short while before, in 1961, Dad had been at the lowest point of his literary career, unable to write. He had been forty-one at the time, with a chronic sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, a fear that he had wasted his life. Recollections of that crisis come instantly to my mind whenever I read this excerpt from “Dirge for Jamis on the Funeral Plain” in
Dune
:

I lived with my father during the years he worked on
Dune
, and I understand a great deal about the making of the work. Nonetheless, the creation of this magnificent piece remains to me almost beyond comprehension. I find something new and intriguing in it on nearly every pass through the pages. My father was a man who spoke to me often of the importance of detail, of density of writing. He understood the subconscious, wrote his books in vertical layers. He said a reader could enter
Dune
on any one of numerous layers, following that particular layer through the entire work. On rereading, the bibliophile might choose to follow an entirely different layer.

Despite all the work
Dune
required, my father said it was his favorite book to write. He used what he called a “technique of enormous detail,” in the process of which he studied and prepared notes over a four-year period, between 1957 and 1961, then wrote and rewrote the book between 1961 and 1965. In all, it took the better part of a decade to complete the work with all the changes his editors wanted.

Dune
is not a novel to be grasped entirely on first reading. There are important messages beneath the adventure, deftly intertwined with the action of the story. The layer of action is the most obvious one, the one most readers follow and remember best. It is an essential component, my father told me, for without structuring a book well, without remembering to entertain first, an author cannot hope to hold a reader's attention.

Frank Herbert said he was in love with language, particularly the English language.
Dune
is a marvelous tapestry of words, sounds and images. Sometimes he wrote passages in poetry first, which he expanded and converted to prose, forming sentences that included elements of the original poems. There are natural rhythms to life, to the desert, to forces of nature, and he wanted his book to echo such rhythms. This required careful word selection and sentence formation, with onomatopoetic words that imitated the sounds they were describing.

As he worked, he enjoyed listening to a wide variety of music, with the volume turned up. So it is not at all surprising that his best writing took on musical qualities. Writing was like a “jazz performance” for him, he said. He composed it as he went along. He could slow it down, speed it up, soften, intensify…

Some poetry in
Dune
was modeled after Provençal lyrics, the court poetry of troubadours in southwestern France and the Mediterranean between the late eleventh and mid-thirteenth centuries. To understand this style, Dad read the lyrics of poets of the period, including the work of Bernard de Ventadour, whose “courtly love” poetry is considered the finest surviving example of that style. He also enjoyed Japanese tanka verse, with thirty-one syllables.

He even studied and wrote Italian and Shakespearean sonnets. Like Provençal lyrics, much of this poetic form originally concerned the subject of love.

The subjects commonly found in these poetic forms are interesting, as they correspond with key subject matters in
Dune
: Nature (in haiku and tanka) and Love (in Provençal lyrics and in sonnets). Thus the atmosphere of a universe was constructed, with small and large pieces, layer upon layer, like a painter.

In interviews later, including one with his friend and collaborator, Bill Ransom, Dad said poetry was like a baseball player swinging three bats as he walked up to the plate. Frank Herbert was building the muscles required for prose writing, developing a powerful sense of rhythm and word selection.

The Japanese haiku is a Zen Buddhist art form. And the prana-bindu discipline of the Bene Gesserit was based upon Zen disciplines. Aware of a simmering women's liberation movement in the early 1960s and the desires of women in religious service for more recognition, Dad decided to postulate a “sisterhood” in control of an entire religious system. He thought readers would accept the premise of women with occult powers of memory, since females have traditionally been said to have “women's intuition.”

St. Paul the Apostle was considered the greatest advocate of Christianity, so it seemed appropriate to Frank Herbert to name the messiah of his new desert religion Paul. The Christian thread in
Dune
is strong. An Orange Catholic Bible is in the book, suggesting a future merging of Protestantism and Catholicism, and there are numerous references to Christian ethics. Dad's early religious influence was Catholic, from his maternal aunts, which formed one of the bases of the Bene Gesserit. “Gesserit” was a name selected intentionally to sound like “Jesuit.” Dad referred to the Bene Gesserit as “female Jesuits.” My mother's early religious influence was strongly Protestant.

Many entries in the Orange Catholic Bible were Zen, speaking of sensing alternate worlds that were all around, and of great truths not easily expressible in words. Through his association with Irene Slattery, Dad knew of the studies of Professor Gilles Quispel of the Netherlands, a well-known religious historian. In the mid 1950s, Quispel became aware of an archaeological discovery near Naj Hammadi in Upper Egypt. An Arab found several ancient papyrus manuscripts in a large pottery jar there, many of which involved Gnostic Christian scripture that for political reasons had never been included in the Bible. At Quispel's urging, the Jung Foundation in Zurich purchased one of the manuscripts, a leather-bound codex.

That codex contained
The Gospel According to Thomas
, which included a number of astonishing quotations ascribed to Jesus Christ—passages that sounded more like Eastern religious thought than Western. This was one: “Bring forth what is within you, and you will be saved.” The Orange Catholic Bible of
Dune
, with its cryptic, mystical entries, had a strong basis in historical fact.

There were sandtrout in the deserts of Arrakis, and the fish was an early Christian symbol. When in a sequel to
Dune (Children of Dune
, 1976) a character allowed sandtrout to attach themselves to his body, this was based in part upon my father's own experiences as a boy growing up in Washington State, when he rolled up his trousers and waded into a stream or lake, permitting leeches to attach themselves to his legs.

There is much of the outdoors man Frank Herbert in
Dune
. The technique of “sandwalking,” in which a person moves without producing a rhythm that might attract giant worms, is a technique my father learned in his childhood. The hunter moves silently and downwind from wild game, so as not to alert the prey of his presence. The fisherman does not make a disturbance in or near the water, for fear of frightening away the fish.

Frank Herbert knew from personal experience that living in harmony with nature was best, moving through it without disturbing it—taking from it, but only in ways that permitted renewal. One day he would become a leading proponent of wind and solar power, and would even propose obtaining methane from chicken droppings: “Use every part of the chicken except the squawk,” he would quip.

On a philosophical level, living in the desert was not so different from the forest or the farm. Man had to pay close attention to resource preservation and recycling, to the preservation of systems. Nothing was wasted. The land was not to be stripped of its nutrients if it was expected to be usable in the future by our grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Dew precipitators were set up on the deserts of Arrakis to catch precious moisture, and humans traveling in desert regions wore stillsuits to recycle and preserve bodily fluids.

When Stilgar and Paul set hooks in giant worms and climbed up them to the top, it was like mountain climbing, driving metal pins into rock and ice for footholds. The hooks in worms were reminiscent of fishing as well, but an extrapolation beyond anything most people could ever imagine.

The Mentats of
Dune
, capable of supreme logic, were “human computers.” In large part they were based upon my father's paternal grandmother, Mary Stanley, an illiterate Kentucky hill-woman who performed incredible mathematical calculations. Mentats were the precursors of Star Trek's Spock, first officer of the starship Enterprise.

Frank Herbert was an investigator who turned over rocks and made human creatures scurry out of hiding places. A modern-day Socrates, he tore into what he termed “unexamined linguistic and cultural assumptions,” and in so doing he extrapolated words and traditions he thought might exist in the future. He observed that bits and pieces of the diversified past were entrenched in our own language and culture, and he saw no reason why this pattern of creation would not continue to hold course. He said there would be segments of the past…of today…nestled into words and customs thousands of years from now, like nearly forgotten detritus.

This accounts for the diversity of religious fragments encountered in
Dune
. It also accounts for Frank Herbert's exceedingly broad selection of words. Many of the words in
Dune
were rooted in Arabic and Hebrew, and in numerous cases he combined syllables from two languages, two cultures, or even two religions. He referred to Zensunni teachings, for instance, whereby Zen Buddhism and the mystical Islamic denomination Sunni were joined.

Such words suggest past historical events without detailing them. They also point to a fact of history: Languages change. They are in a constant state of flux, never static. Words appear and evolve.

The words and names in
Dune
are eclectic. The word “sihaya” is Navajo; “Bene Gesserit” is rooted in Latin; “sietch” is Chakobsa, a language found in the Caucasus; Tleilaxu is based upon a word for salamander in the Nahuatl dialect of the Aztecs. Atreides, as I have said, is based upon House Atreus, from Greek mythology. The “Padishah” Emperor ruling the universe of Dune is from Persian, East Indian, and Turkish tradition. Jamis is an Old English name my father found when researching genealogical records.

“Jihad” is Islamic for holy war, and this word has the same meaning in Arabic as it does to the people of Dune. The Fremen language is based upon colloquial Arabic, in a form my father believed would be likely to survive for centuries in a desert environment. Alia is a name given to female descendants of the prophet Mohammed, a name that means “noble one” or “beloved of God.”

His desert is a great sea with giant worms diving into the depths, Shai-Hulud's domain. Dune tops are like the crests of waves, and there are powerful storms out there, creating extreme danger. On Dune, life emanates from the Maker (Shai-Hulud) in the desert-sea; similarly all life on Earth is believed to have originated in our seas. Frank Herbert drew parallels, used metaphors, and extrapolated present conditions into world systems that seem entirely alien at first blush. But close examination reveals that they aren't so different from ordered assemblages we know…and the book-characters of his imagination aren't so different from people familiar to us.