Dreamer of Dune (24 page)

A month after publication, Chilton arranged to have a two-minute advertisement run on the “Inside Books” radio program, including an excerpt from the novel. This was broadcast to five hundred commercial and educational stations, and another one hundred seventy Veteran's Administration Hospital stations. Chilton also mailed a few copies of
Dune
to reviewers around the country.

All in all the book did not receive much promotion.

Dune
came to the attention of only a few reviewers, and those who cared to look at it wrote scathing commentaries. They hated the book, said it was too long and difficult to understand. Not surprisingly, my father became embittered against reviewers, referring to them privately as “poseurs” and “frustrated authors”—people who attempted to boost their own shaky egos by denigrating the works of others. He often said that the only valid critic was “time.” If his work endured, he said, the comments of critics meant nothing.

From its eight-part serialization in
Analog,
which had a large circulation, science-fiction readers and writers were already quite familiar with the story and liked it. Arthur C. Clarke and Anne McCaffrey were among the first science fiction-fantasy writers to extol the virtues of the work. Clarke knew of nothing comparable to
Dune
, with the exception of J. R. R. Tolkien's
Lord of the Rings
. An epic story with larger-than-life, Machiavellian characters,
Dune
would soon become the standard against which other works were compared. It would be called the greatest novel of imagination of all time.

Science fiction writers voted
Dune
the 1965 Nebula Award for Best Novel, shared with Roger Zelazny's…
And Call Me Conrad
. The award was in the shape of a rectangular piece of clear Plexiglas on a square black pedestal, with a swirling, glittering three-dimensional nebula over a beautiful fragment of white, silver and lavender quartz. It measured nine inches high by four inches square around the base, and weighed six pounds.

Dad placed the award on the windowsill of his Fairfax study, so that it was visible against a backdrop of oak and bay trees that sloped down the hillside from the house. He described the award as a work of art, and with tongue in cheek suggested that there should be an “award for the award.” Other science fiction awards, he said, often resembled “glistening phallic symbols.”

Cal Berkeley was astir with political activity. The world-famous Free Speech Movement wasn't the only issue on campus. Most students were opposed to the war in Vietnam and the draft. They favored civil rights and women's rights and the allied free choice issue of abortion. They turned in or burned draft cards, held sit-ins at draft boards, burned brassieres in public, and generally railed against anything that smacked of “the establishment.”

Long-haired, bearded protesters were out every day on campus with signs and bullhorns. They set up tables on the paved “commons” between the Administration Building and the Associated Student Union Building, from which they distributed political literature. One day they commandeered a police car on campus and took over the Administration Building.

Finding myself unable to identify with the protesters, I didn't participate in the vibrant intellectual atmosphere of the school, though history and hindsight indicate that their free speech and anti-war causes were justified. I didn't care for their methods. They taunted people trying to attend class and blocked entrances. They thrust flyers in front of us. The constant blare of their bullhorns outside class was a distraction from my studies.

As far as I was concerned, the political activists were dirty, smelly hippies. To a large extent they wanted a free and easy life, without obligations or responsibilities. Free love, flower-children, uptight, out of sight, groovy, like wow, the New Left. So many new phrases and concepts entered the lexicon in those days. They were bohemians, real and mock, straight out of Kerouac's
On the Road
. When they opposed something, they rarely offered alternatives.

My negative opinions about the protesters of the day were formed, in no small part, by the fact that my father was a bohemian who wore a beard. He spent a lot of time in the North Beach area of San Francisco and often showed up in City Lights book store, operated by Kerouac's friend, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ferlinghetti agreed to stock
Dune
, and featured it in a window display.

When I was at Berkeley between 1964 and 1968, I was in the college drinking crowd, a binge drinker. Perhaps this explains why I heard very little mentioned about
Dune
or Frank Herbert.
^*
Besides,
Dune
was slow to get going. Chilton would not go into a second hardcover printing until 1968, my last year at the university. Ace printed a relatively small number of paperback copies in 1966, and they too went into a second printing in 1968.

Just before Christmas, 1966, Dad sold the Willits property. “We'll buy another piece when we can afford it,” he said. By this he meant, of course, another piece on which he could have his farm.

In 1966, science fiction readers voted
Dune
the Hugo Award as the best science fiction novel of the year. This award was a futuristic stainless steel rocket, fourteen inches tall, atop a maple base six inches square by four and a half inches high, with a total weight of four pounds. It was presented to my father at the World Science Fiction Convention in Cleveland, Ohio. He displayed it proudly on the windowsill of his Fairfax study next to the Nebula Award.

A rumor made the rounds that
Dune
also won the International Fantasy Award, but this, like similar rumors about
The Dragon in the Sea
, was inaccurate.
Dune
was the first novel to win both the Nebula and Hugo awards.

For years Dad kept copies of bad reviews, and as
Dune
became more successful, he retaliated by reading the remarks of critics at science fiction conventions and at writing conferences when he knew the authors of those pieces would be present. At one convention he confronted Harlan Ellison over an unfavorable review he had written years before on
The Dragon in the Sea
, disputing every point Ellison had made. These men, who had never met before, became fast friends.

Though revenues remained small,
Dune
was earning a little more each year. “I feel a groundswell building,” my father said. He was more convinced than ever that he had an important literary property on his hands. He was being told by respected people that he had elevated the quality of science fiction and had written a new novel form, one with complex layers that reached beyond science fiction to the heady realm of “literature.”

While Frank Herbert made many predictions that came true, including the eventual success of
Dune
, he was quite circumspect about those he made. When he spoke of the future, he drew a distinction between “the” future and “a” future. There were any number of possible futures that might occur, he said, not just one, not just “the” future that any one of us might foresee. And there were no rules concerning the process of prediction.

To demonstrate the multiplicity of futures, which he said were as varied as the methods of developing a story, Dad often mentioned a 1970 Doubleday anthology he contributed to,
Five Fates
. This consisted of five stories written by different science fiction authors—Poul Anderson, Gordon Dickson, Harlan Ellison, Frank Herbert and Keith Laumer. The project creator, Ellison, wrote a first page, which he duplicated for each writer with instructions for them to go on from there independently, without consultation with the others. Five very different stories resulted from a common beginning, including Dad's, which he entitled “Murder Will In.”

In
Dune
, Paul Atreides felt a “Terrible Purpose” building within, a sensation that both frightened and excited him. He was meant to do something important, but what? The young man had prescience, but it provided him with only fragmentary views of the future and his place in it. He, like Frank Herbert, saw a multiplicity of possible futures.

Three of Dad's novels were published in 1966. In addition to
The Green Brain
(Ace Books) and
Destination: Void
(Berkley Books), Berkley also published
The Eyes of Heisenberg
, shortly after its serialization in
Galaxy
as “Heisenberg's Eyes.”

In June,
Analog
published the short story “Escape Felicity,” and in August, “By the Book.” 1966 also saw publication of “The Primitives” (
Galaxy
, April), the solo effort that had originally been plotted as a Herbert-Vance-Anderson collaboration.

The noted Ace editor and science-fiction writer Terry Carr was on the election committee that year for officers in SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America), which had several hundred members. He asked Dad if he might be interested in running for either president or secretary-treasurer, but Dad declined the offer, saying he was too busy. He felt an urgency to survive as a
writer
, to break free of the financial shackles of a regular job. This had been a stated goal since his eighth birthday, and he couldn't divert from that course with volunteer activities.

Dad shifted to feature writing for
California Living
magazine, a joint publication of the
Examiner
and the other large newspaper in town, the
San Francisco Chronicle
. It was a position he called a “fur-lined cocoon,” since his hours were flexible, permitting him time to write. After a few months he developed a schedule of working three long days a week on the magazine, one for doing interviews and feature writing, another for setting up photographs, and another for page makeup. Thus, he streamlined his schedule while drawing a full salary and still performing an excellent job for his employer.

The British publisher Gollancz purchased the right to publish
Dune
in the United Kingdom in hardcover, and stipulated that they wanted the glossary of terms at the end of the book instead of the beginning. New English Library purchased United Kingdom paperback rights, and the Paris publisher Laffont came onboard for French language rights, so
Dune
was beginning to pick up an international audience.

With the income from
California Living
and science fiction writing, money flowed into my parents' household more plentifully. At my father's insistence, he and Mom took out another real estate loan, purchasing an old farmhouse on ten acres near Cloverdale, ninety miles north of Fairfax. This property, slightly closer to Fairfax than Willits had been, was the new site of his dream farm.

My mother could only hold on to his coattails. Even when he appeared to be settled, he really wasn't. Things were constantly jumping around in his mind. He plotted out his life as if it were one of his stories, experimenting with this avenue, that one and yet another. At least now, at my mother's wise insistence, he was investing in real estate, with the prospect of appreciation in value, instead of collecting rent receipts.

Frank Herbert intended to remodel the farmhouse himself on weekends, with the help of volunteers such as Jack Vance and myself. The three of us tore the roof off the house and began framing a full second floor, where previously there had only been an attic. Dad scrounged around for doors, pieces of marble slab, frosted glass and brass ship's portholes, which he intended to install in the home. For safekeeping, he stored them with Ralph and Irene Slattery a few miles south in Sonoma County.

Sometimes I brought along my girlfriend, Jan Blanquie, and her younger brothers, Dan and Gary, who helped with cleanup. One day a big mongrel dog came onto the land and bit Dad's leg. Chronically at odds with unruly canines, my father chased it off, hurling 2 © 4 scraps at it.

The Cloverdale property was a lovely spot, overlooking an oak and maple dell where a brook ran. Dad thought this would be an ideal place to write, farm, and conduct his Ecological Demonstration Project experiments. Unfortunately, he was about to face another detour.

I
N
1966, Dad was working on a new novel,
The Santaroga Barrier
—about an unusual, insular northern California town. The book had a framework based upon the thinking of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. In his classic 1927 work,
Sein und Zeit
, Heidegger presented a theory of man's existence in the world, which he called “dasein.” The protagonist of
The Santaroga Barrier
was Gilbert Dasein. His girlfriend was Jenny Sorge, and in the Heideggerian view, “sorge” represented “care”—things that were within the care of mankind or dasein. Heidegger believed that man became disoriented and drowned himself in the vastness of the world and in the minutiae of following society's rules. Each man's experiences were too small, too parochial, for him to develop a proper philosophy of existence.

While working on
The Santaroga Barrier
, Dad contracted pneumonia, which laid him on his back for several weeks. He also suffered two back injuries in this period—one while lifting heavy building materials for the Cloverdale house and the other in a fall down the icy outside stairs between the Fairfax house and garage. His spinal injuries were so serious and so painful that at first his doctor thought he might have to undergo an operation to give him a stiff “ramrod spine.” Before undergoing this irreversible procedure, my father asked for a second opinion. The second doctor thought swimming might benefit him, so Dad went regularly to a nearby public pool to exercise. This helped, but recuperation was slow. For several months his back hurt so much that he couldn't sit at his typewriter for more than two hours a day.

I think he had a black cloud over him. While at the laundromat one day, bleach that had been left on one of the washing machines got on his new clothes, ruining a new pair of slacks and a dress shirt.

It was no surprise, then, that the protagonist in
The Santaroga Barrier
suffered a succession of “accidents.” In a series of near-misses he is almost drowned, poisoned, shot with an arrow, crushed by a car, and firebombed! Lurton thought the story had too many accidents, but from my father's point of view they were in there for a reason…based on his own personal experience. Similar to Alan Watts, Heidegger said man could only come to a full understanding of life and the mysteries of existence by placing himself in challenging, even dangerous situations. My father concurred with this philosophy.

In his life and writing, Dad constantly placed himself and his characters in demanding situations where they had to adapt in order to survive. In an essay for “Saving Worlds” (1973), he said that we are “surfboard riders on an infinite sea,” and when the waves change we must adjust our balance. The single most important survival strength of mankind was adaptability, he said. It would prevent us from becoming extinct.

The influence of several great German thinkers could be seen in
The Santaroga Barrier
, harking back to studies my father made with the clinical psychologists Ralph and Irene Slattery in the early 1950s. The book was replete with concepts from Carl Gustav Jung, Sigmund Freud, Karl Jaspers, and others. In the town of Santaroga, the key industry was the Jaspers Cheese Cooperative, which produced a drug-laden cheese that bonded the members of the community within an alternate dimension. This, of course, bore more than a passing resemblance to the effects of the melange of
Dune.

Santaroga
bore another similarity with my father's most famous work. In the town of Santaroga, people attended the “Church of All Faiths”—a concept that bore a strong resemblance to the Commission of Ecumenical Translators of
Dune
, which attempted to eliminate a bone of contention between competing religions—“the claim to possession of the one and only revelation.”

The Santaroga cheese cooperative concept was based upon a famous cheese business in California, the Marin French Cheese Company in Petaluma, near Santa Rosa. My parents went there often. It was out in the country in a valley, and Dad imagined a town built up around it. In the mid-1960s, bohemian cooperatives were springing up everywhere. Dad used to go to one in Berkeley that was a non-profit enterprise run out of a big warehouse, selling groceries and consumer goods to members. It is interesting as well to recall my father's childhood experiences in which he grew up in the town of Burley, Washington, once a socialist cooperative.

When Frank Herbert was a star debater for Lincoln High School in Tacoma, he learned how to take either side of an issue. This was necessary in order to prepare for a debate, thus anticipating the attacks an opponent might make. A similar line of reasoning was required of him when he wrote political speeches for Republican congressional and senatorial candidates.

Remembering such experiences, Frank Herbert presented arguments in
The Santaroga Barrier
of equal strength to support and condemn the Santarogan lifestyle—a lifestyle of strict conformity quite different from that of the outside world. The book was a utopian novel, but presented in such a manner that the reader went away wondering how the author really felt about Santaroga. Dad called this concept utopia/dystopia: “One man's utopia is another man's dystopia.”

Around this time, the
Examiner
offered Frank Herbert the position of wine editor, in addition to his duties at
California Living
. Dad accepted the assignment, but told management he didn't feel entirely qualified for the position. Actually he knew quite a bit about wine, having spent some time in the Napa Valley studying vineyards and wine-making methods. Now, since he didn't want to appear inept, he took several days and stayed with a friend who owned a winery, receiving a crash course from him. To further Dad's education, the
Examiner
also agreed to purchase a number of expensive wine books for his personal library—one of the perks of the new job.

Before undertaking any writing task, Frank Herbert did his homework—a necessity, he joked, in order to avoid letters from readers that began, “Dear Jerk.” He also began making his own wine, using the bar area of his Fairfax study, which was a converted family room. He favored the Cabernet Sauvignon variety, referring to it as “queen of the clarets.” I recall seeing plastic wine vats and glass jugs on the floor of the study, with plastic tubes running between them in arrangements I didn't understand. On the counter nearby were black and gold stacks of his private wine labels bearing the face of Bacchus, the Greek wine god—an image from thousands of years before. He had five different labels: Cabernet Sauvignon, Rosé, Chenin Blanc, Semillon and a generic label, without a variety. Each said “Made by Frank Herbert.” Next to the labels were piles of corks and packages of wine yeast, along with jars of enzyme tablets and sodium bisulfate. He had a brew tester, a hydrometer and a number of other gadgets, too. He also had beer-making equipment.

In 1967, John Campbell of
Analog
turned down
The Santaroga Barrier
for serialization, saying it wasn't truly science fiction. He also felt there were too many loose ends in the novel. Frederik Pohl of
Galaxy
rejected it, too, feeling the plot was thin, without enough narrative hooks for serialization.
Amazing
liked it very much and offered a contract. They published it in their October 1967 through February 1968 issues. Tom Dardis of Berkley Books liked it as well, and published it in paperback in 1968.

The loose ends cited by Campbell were placed in the story intentionally by Dad to reflect the realities and uncertainties of life. After turning the last page, the reader was left feeling disturbed and uneasy, with his mind going a mile a minute—like an engine that “diesels,” refusing to shut off. This was done in
Dune
, too, as Dad intentionally sent his readers spinning out of the end of the book with fragments of it still clinging to them—fragments that would keep them thinking about the story. In large part this psychological element was why so many fans read my father's books over and over.

It was a storytelling technique he learned early in life, from reading such classics as
Tom Sawyer
and
Treasure Island
. After reading the books, he and playmates made up games and events based upon the stories. The stories had not ended with the conclusion of the printed texts.

Dad published a short story in 1967—“The Featherbedders” (
Analog
, August). He also sold a novel he had been working on for fifteen years,
The Heaven Makers
, serialized in
Amazing
in 1967 and then published in paperback the following year by Avon Books.
^*

In 1967, Dad's royalty income dropped slightly from the prior year, and would fall again in 1968.
Dune
still had not “cracked the nut” with either Chilton or Ace—that point where an author's royalties exceeded his advances, so that he received additional money.

The parents of my girlfriend, Jan Blanquie, did not approve of me because of my drinking habits, so that summer she and I eloped to Reno and were married. When we returned to Marin County, Mom and Dad let us live with them for a couple of weeks until we could find a place of our own, a cottage in nearby San Anselmo. At dinner the first night back, Mom took Jan aside and told her, “You'll never be bored married to a Herbert man.”

Mom consulted astrology and found the intersection of my path with Jan's—where we met. She predicted we would remain together for the rest of our lives. Years before, she had predicted that I would marry a blonde, and this beautiful young woman was very blonde, with French-Scandinavian features.

The year 1968 started off with an announcement from Terry Carr, the
Dune
editor at Ace, that they were going back to press for an additional twenty-five thousand copies. Three months after this printing, Chilton printed more hardcovers. Still, Dad wasn't seeing more than a trickle of earnings from writing sales. He was at work on a sequel to
Dune
, with the working title of
Fool Saint
at first and then
Messiah
, before settling on
Dune Messiah
. He also considered and discarded the cryptic title
C Oracle
, representing a coracle floating on a sea of time.

He also conducted occasional writing seminars at local schools, including San Francisco State University, whose president was the noted semanticist and future U.S. senator, S. I. Hayakawa. The works of Hayakawa had been influential upon my father in researching
Dune
, and when the men met they liked one another instantly.

Around this time, Mom came up with a promotional idea: a “Dune Tarot” deck, based upon descriptions in
Dune
. She thought it would go hand-in-hand with the book and its sequels, garnering additional attention and readership. Through her advertising contacts, she lined up a well-known San Francisco artist, who made several full-color prototype cards. Dad photographed the cards and tried to interest publishers and game manufacturers, without success.

Early in 1968, Dad again wanted to leave the
Examiner
and write full-time. He had in mind a book about American Indians on the Northwest Coast, a mainstream story he said had been boiling inside him since his childhood—about a modern-day clash between American Indian and white cultures. He had been told by government sources that he might obtain a federal grant from the National Foundation of the Arts to research and write such a book, because of the historical value of it.

Setting aside unpleasant memories of past attempts to penetrate the befuddling walls of bureaucracy, Dad contacted the agency. He requested a grant of fifteen thousand dollars for a project he estimated would take a year and a half to complete—nine months of research, and another nine months of writing. He wanted to hire his friend Howie Hansen as a research assistant, and planned to film and tape Indian rituals, along with many previously unrecorded legends and songs. After getting the run-around from a variety of departments in the agency, Dad was told he had contacted the wrong offices, that he should instead have gone through the National Endowment for the Humanities!

He was like a man who had waited in a long line, only to be told he had to go to the rear of another line and start all over again. Frank Herbert threw his hands in the air and gave up the effort, vowing to himself, “Never again!”

Jan was pregnant, and needed to learn how to drive a car to get back and forth to her doctor's appointments. My license had been suspended for a plethora of tickets and alcohol-related accidents, and I was hitchhiking to my busboy job at a restaurant in San Rafael and to school in Berkeley. While I was at school one day, Dad and Mom stopped by our cottage to visit Jan. When Dad learned she needed a driver's license, he volunteered to give her driving lessons. She accepted before I could warn her that he might not be the most patient instructor.

In ensuing weeks, Dad took time off from his busy schedule to give Jan lessons in our little red 1955 Volkswagen. To my surprise, she reported to me that he was exquisitely patient with her, almost to a fault. With my wife's stomach nearly touching the steering wheel, they drove around Marin County, from Fairfax to Novato. When Dad told her how to slow the car down, he said, “Now apply the brakes gently, as if you had a little old grandma in the backseat with eggs on her lap.”

Mom was as surprised at his patience as I was.

I don't recall thinking much in those days about the nice things my father did. I filtered that information out and from long experience living under his thumb, focused more on his bad side. What I was feeling about him was entrenched in my mind—little soldiers of hatred had bunkered in there, and would not surrender easily.

In April 1968, Jan had a nine-pound baby girl. We named her Julie, after Jan's paternal great-grandmother—and gave her the middle name Ann, the same as my mother's.