Dreamer of Dune (8 page)

M
OM'S MOTHER
, Marguerite Forbes, gave us a piece of property on Vashon Island, near Seattle and Tacoma. When I was around a year old, Dad started construction on a small home there, with Mom helping. Unfortunately we ran out of funds. The home, half-completed, was repossessed by the bank, along with the land.

Early in 1949, Dad accepted a job with the
Santa Rosa Press Democrat
in Sonoma County, California—just north of San Francisco. This was just one of many moves we would make during my childhood. In all, we lived in twenty-three different places.

I remember how books filled our little rented house in Santa Rosa, in bookcases in the living room, in the kitchen and in my parents' bedroom. One of my earliest memories, when I was a toddler, was of my mother looking patiently up from a book on her lap as I spoke to her. She taught me that books were sacred; I was never to dog-ear pages or write on them.

My father and mother had many friends, and when they came over, Dad told stories. Heavy laughter often accompanied what he was saying. One regular visitor to our home was Bernard Zakheim, a Polish-born Jew who was a painter and sculptor. Bernard lived in Sebastopol, California, where he owned an old farmhouse with a large apple orchard. They met when Dad did a
Press Democrat
story about a terra cotta figure Bernard had cast from one of his wood carvings. The figure, which I have on my desk today, was called “Angry Moses,” and featured a statement of Bernard's political beliefs carved on the back of it. The men became instant friends, bonded by their interests in politics, religion, history and art.

Bernard Zakheim was one of the most famous painters and sculptors in California. A proletarian artist who identified with struggling workers, he had studied with Diego Rivera in Mexico and painted murals at Coit Memorial Tower and the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco. His creations were invariably political in nature, and he was falsely accused of being a Communist. Such a furor arose in 1934 over his work and the work of other artists at Coit Tower that authorities delayed the opening of the facility for several months. His murals at the medical center would eventually be removed, again in the midst of political controversy.

Upon looking at one of Zakheim's paintings, Dad was so moved that he wrote a poem. This is an excerpt from the unpublished piece:

Dad had an ornate antique bathtub stored in the garage of our house. Several 100-pound sacks of concrete (to be used as boat ballast) were stowed in the tub, and in boxes and piles nearby were brass boat parts, ship-to-shore radio equipment and oars. These were things my father had picked up here and there, intending to build a sailboat one day to take around the world with his family. It would be a forty-five-foot ketch, he said, and he planned to write stories aboard. He had taken celestial navigation classes recently with this in mind.

Sadly this dream, like many others of Frank Herbert, would never come to pass. We would move so many times in ensuing years, with no time or money to construct a boat, that the nautical items he had saved so carefully were discarded or sold.

One symbol of our frequent moves was a waxed cardboard stencil, “F. HERBERT,” with black paint smeared on it. Each time we moved, Dad used it to paint his name on our mailbox. As years went by and my father did more and more creative writing, this procedure with the stencil became increasingly important in order to make absolutely certain that the mailman did not miss our stop. Letters from agents and publishers as well as checks arrived in the mail. The mail became, to a large extent, the lifeline of our family.

My mother said we moved sometimes to elude the first wife, Flora, who chased us tirelessly for past-due child-support payments. Invariably, Flora found out where we were, and a letter from her attorney would arrive soon afterward.

One evening my mother and father went to a speech on Jungian psychology, at a Presbyterian church in Santa Rosa. The speaker, a clinical psychologist, was Irene Slattery—and as luck would have it, my parents sat in the audience next to her husband, Dr. Ralph Slattery. Ralph was the supervising clinical psychologist at Sonoma State Hospital, a sprawling sixteen-hundred-acre facility nearby. The Slatterys became our closest friends in Sonoma County.

With respect to Frank Herbert's writings, the relationship with Ralph and Irene was extremely important. Going back to his days in college only three or four years before, my father had come to realize that an understanding of human motivation was the essential component of characterization. Now, with psychologists as friends, he would gain new insights.

Dad had been interested in Carl Gustav Jung, the renowned psychologist and psychiatrist, for a number of years. Jung had known Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine, whose astounding experiments in the 1930s led Dad and a girlfriend at the time to dabble with ESP and the prediction of cards. Thinking there might be a link between ESP and what Jung referred to as “the collective unconscious” of mankind, my father subsequently studied this further in college.

Now more pieces were about to fall into place.

In the 1930s, Irene Slattery had been a personal student of Jung, at the Federal Polytechnical Institute in Zurich. She had her notes from those classes, along with papers provided by Jung, and Irene gave my father access to this information. Enthralled, he pored over everything written in English. Some of the notes and documents were in German, which Irene translated for him.

She had been in Berlin in the 1930s, where she'd seen Adolf Hitler speak before thousands of people. Hitler terrified her from the moment she first gazed upon him. He was a skillful demagogue, she said, an expert at couching twisted, angry thoughts in words that sounded convincing. He was a hero to the German people, and terribly dangerous in that position, she felt, because of the way his people followed him slavishly, without questioning him, without thinking for themselves. Irene very nearly expressed this dangerous thought to the wrong people.

Fortunately she left Germany before getting into trouble, and made her way to the United States. Years later she related her early concerns about Hitler to Frank Herbert. Her thoughts about the danger of heroes simmered in Dad's highly receptive brain, and ultimately they would form a cornerstone of the
Dune
series: Heroes are dangerous, especially when people follow them slavishly, treating them like gods.

Another cornerstone of the
Dune
series is the concept of genetically transferred memory, particularly in the Bene Gesserit sisterhood. This concept is based upon the teachings of Irene's professor, Jung, who believed in a collective unconscious produced by genetic memory.

The Slatterys were also interested in Zen Buddhism, a religious system emphasizing nonverbal interaction—understanding and saying things without words. This was my father's second exposure to Zen teachings, the first having occurred when he lived among Nisei as a child.
^*

Jung had been an early associate of Sigmund Freud, before breaking with Freud over, among other things, Freud's insistence upon attributing neuroses to sexual disturbances. Dad had studied Freud extensively, and believed in many of his hypotheses, particularly those that had to do with the subconscious motivations for human behavior.

Irene and Ralph, too, agreed with many of Freud's hypotheses. Rather than accepting the teachings of any one psychologist, however, they preferred to select from the teachings and beliefs of many, including Jung, Freud, Alfred Adler and others.

“Irene said something to me once,” my father told me many years later, “and I have thought of it often. ‘When you see what motivates people, you will begin to see them walking around with their intestines hanging out.'”

Now he was on a path that would lead to strong characterizations in his novels. In Santa Rosa, he began writing a novel,
Under Pressure
, about extreme psychological stress onboard a nuclear submarine during wartime. The protagonist, a crafty, world-wise Bureau of Psychology officer, had unique insights into the problems of underwater warfare. Dad's title for the book,
Under Pressure
, had double meaning: the obvious submarine reference and the underlying psychological inference, with respect to stresses exerted on the crew. (In 1955 the novel would be published in hardcover as
The Dragon in the Sea
.)

Other Frank Herbert novels were based at least in part upon the Santa Rosa experience, including
The Santaroga Barrier
(1968), about a town with a name that was a combination of two California towns—Santa Rosa and Saratoga. This novel described the mass psychology of people in the town and in the society at large, and had interesting philosophical themes, reflecting the influence of the Slatterys.

On June 26, 1951, Mom gave birth to her second child, Bruce Calvin Herbert. By prior agreement he would have a Scottish name. Mom named him after King Bruce (Robert the First).

I was a rather hyperactive child myself, and my father, when home, often lost patience with me. He was trying to write, or complete extensive research. He needed quiet, contemplative time to consider important matters. I remember him yelling at me constantly, and if I didn't do exactly as instructed, he was quick to administer corporal punishment.

At other times he enjoyed taking photographs of me, and one of the photos, of me standing at a mailbox trying to figure out how a chain beneath it could support it, was published in the
Press Democrat
. From my youthful perspective, however, there were more negative events than positive, and as years went by we would become increasingly estranged.

Unfortunately, he used Freudian methods when scolding his children. In addition to my own experiences I saw him doing this with Penny when she came to stay with us, and later with my brother as well. Virtually every mistake we made, in his opinion, was “intentional,” motivated by some underlying “subconscious element.” Nothing was accidental, in his view.

Frank Herbert was a man who was so observant about affairs of the world that in his writings he would accurately predict epic events—but he didn't recognize his lack of closeness to his children when they were children. In that respect, his all-seeing eye had a blind spot. This super human of awareness, this hero in so many respects who one day would become a hero to me, had an Achilles' heel. He could not handle children. Perhaps this was because he had never really been a child himself. Assuming important responsibilities from a young age, he had been more of a miniature adult, with a keenly searching mind.

His impatience with young people was perhaps his worst fault, the one that troubled me most. Children were noisy and boisterous, his
bête noire
. They clattered through the house and yard, driving him crazy when he tried to write, when he tried to think. They got into his desk and manuscript pages and smeared things around…much as Jules Verne's son, Michel, did to him.

Dad had an oval face, on the fleshy side, with a weak chin and long blond hair combed straight back—hair that was so light in color that it appeared thinner than it really was. His dark blue eyes had a way of flashing angrily at me when I was being scolded, and even when he smiled at me it was with a penetrating intensity that I found unnerving. Sometimes he wore eyeglasses for reading or driving: they had round lenses with mottled brown frames.

A burly, barrel-chested man, he had thick hair on his arms and chest. These features, combined with his loud and blustery ways, contributed to the “primal display” of the man from a child's perspective, making him a frightening, intimidating presence to me. Later when he grew a full beard, he would look even larger to me, and quite wild. A small mole marked the lower left side of his nose, and another mole, slightly larger, hung from the right eyebrow, a bit over the eye cavity. Near that, the dog bite scar from childhood remained over his right eye. His nose hooked down a little. A thick vein on the side of his neck and another on his temple bulged and throbbed when he was angry. During anger, his right eye looked murkier than the other, more dangerous.

Sometimes while writing in his study or working on a project in his shop, he would place a pencil in the notch over one ear, forgetting it was there afterward and walking all around the house like that. At other times he shoved his eyeglasses high on his head, into his hair, to get them out of the way while keeping them handy. He used his head to hold things. If there had been a ledge on his forehead, it might have been stocked with office supplies.

Mom often spoke of how strong he was, a natural strength, she said, from sturdy Herbert genes. He'd been a tough kid, and was even tougher now. No one pushed him around. He knew judo, a form of Japanese jujitsu that he had learned in the service. I know he had a powerful grip, because whenever he was displeased I found myself squirming in his cow-milker hands, unable to free myself. He could open any jar in an instant, and had what Mom called “asbestos skin,” enabling him to touch hot pans and casserole dishes without burning himself.

His presence was overpowering, with more than a hint of police-militarism, stemming from his highway-patrolman father. When Dad questioned me, it was
with intensity
, the way the police did it. I was overpowered, mentally and physically. His commands boomed forth, and were to be followed without question.

My father often wore aviator sunglasses and military surplus clothes (especially shirts and coats), and he had other military items, including a U.S. Navy lie detector (that he would use on me later), army chests, knives, a Navy periscope, a hand-operated field generator, and an old Army sword with a green handle. As further evidence of his authority, he had handguns, rifles and shotguns, which he used for hunting and target practice.