Authors: Brian Herbert
Dreamer of Dune
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With love and appreciation, this book is for my darling, Jan, who has given so much to me; for my mother, Beverly Stuart-Herbert, for her devotion and her sacrifices; and for my father, Frank Herbert, who did so much for my mother in her time of need. This book is also for my sister, Penny, her husband, Ron, and my brother, Bruceâand for Julie, Kim, Margaux, David, Byron, and Robert, the grandchildren of Frank and Beverly Herbert.
“How do we approach the study of Muad'Dib's father?”
âFrank Herbert, in
Dune
J
OSEPH
C
AMPBELL
said the search for one's father is a major hero quest, equivalent to Telemachus seeking Odysseus. Frank Herbert was not always a heroic figure to me, for I did not get along well with him in my childhood, and only grew close to him when we were both adults. My attempt to understand him became an odyssey that went on not only during his lifetime but afterward. It continues to this day, as I learn new things about him each time I read one of his stories, and each time I speak with someone who knew him and saw a different aspect of him than I did.
He was a man of many facets, of countless passageways that ran through an intricate mind. His life was not linear. It proceeded in fifty directions at once. He was a man of surprises. My father once said to me, with a twinkle in his eye, that he had trouble using dictionaries and encyclopedias, since he so often became distracted by information on the opposite page, and this slowed him down. He had a boyish curiosity about everything, and a remarkable memory for detail.
Dune
is a reflection of this, a
magnum opus
that stands as one of the most complex, multi-layered novels ever written.
So many questions come in from fans about my father. They want to know what he was working on late in his life, what his influence was on my writing, and more about his relationship with my mother. There are even current letters addressed to him, since they see wide arrays of his books in stores and think he's alive. In a very real sense he is still with us, of courseâin the magnificent literary legacy he left for his readers.
He had a fascinating, phenomenal career, and this stands out above all else: He could not have done it without my mother, who sacrificed her own career as a creative writer in order to work and support our family during difficult times. I know there can be no greater love story than that of my remarkable parents. They trapped time and kept it for themselves in brilliant little time-gems, cosmic and eternal. Frank and Beverly Herbert were significant and interesting people, rare in their abilities to leave lasting memories upon everyone coming in contact with them.
I was one of those people.
Brian Herbert
Seattle, Washington
Pearl of Great PriceAdventures in Darkest AfricaF
RANK
H
ERBERT'S
paternal grandfather, Otto, was born in 1864 on a boat while coming to America from Bavaria with other immigrants. As a young man, Otto met Mary Ellen Stanley, an illiterate Kentucky hill-woman. By the turn of the century the couple was living in Cairo, Illinois, with five sons.
*
Otto worked as a solicitor for a steam laundry there, and subsequently on the line in a bottling works. A restless, energetic man, he began attending meetings sponsored by the Social Democracy of America. This was a socialist group, founded and led by Eugene V. Debs. The SDA had a plan to colonize certain Western states, including the state of Washington, in order to dominate the politics of those regions. Eventually they hoped to alter the moral and economic order of the entire country. But the colonization idea was steeped in controversy, and socialist leaders, including Debs himself, came to feel that it was not the most efficient utilization of people and assets on behalf of the socialist cause. Political action in the cities and mill towns would produce better results, they thought.
Still, Burley Colony in Washington State was founded in 1898 by “the Co-operative Brotherhood,” an SDA splinter group that pushed forward with the colonization plan. Burley Colony was on Burley Lagoon at the head of Henderson Bay, just north of Tacoma. This was a shallow lagoon where whales were sometimes trapped when the tide went out.
The colonists were idealistic, advocating universal brotherhood, equal pay for all jobs and equal rights for women. They had mottoes like “Make way for brotherhood, make way for man” and “Do your best and be kind.” They liked to say “ours” instead of “mine,” and “we” instead of “I.” Each colonist received broad medical insurance.
At its zenith, Burley was headquarters for an organization having 1,200 members all over the worldâonly a minority of whom actually lived in the commune. There were affiliated “Temples of the Knights of Brotherhood” all over the United States, including facilities in Seattle, Tacoma, Fairhaven (Washington), Portland (Oregon), San Francisco, Reno and Chicago. Contributions came in from powerful social organizations in Chicago, New York City and Rochester.
It was a short-lived colony, an experiment in socialist utopia that would last only a decade and a half. But at its height, the colony had a large church, community hall, library, schoolhouse, post office, sawmill, shingle mill, hotel and dining hall, general store, blacksmith's shop, dairy, laundry, and many other mercantile businesses. They printed a socialist newspaper and colony currency, in the form of coupons good for purchases at commune businesses. They had factories for the preserving of catsup and pickles, and a cigar factoryâthe largest in Washington State. The cigar factory produced Marine Cigars, selling for three to six cents apiece. They were excellent and popular, made of fine Kentucky burley tobacco, imported to the colony. Hence the colony's name: Burley. Cigar boxes and labels were produced locally as well.
Today the town of Burley, with only a few houses, a general store, a community hall and a post office, is but a shadow of its former self. Most of the buildings, including the mills, the hotel, and the cigar factory, are long gone. Many houses, built without concrete foundations, have decayed into the ground.
In 1905, Otto and Mary, now with six sons, and Otto's younger brother, Frank, took a train from Illinois across the Great Northern route to Washington State and thence through recently opened Stampede Pass to Tacoma. From Tacoma it was a short steamboat ride across the narrows to Gig Harbor, followed by a six-mile trip by horse-drawn stage to the colony through thick virgin forests. Otto and his brother each took a small government land grant just outside of Burley and set about making themselves part of the community. With his brother's assistance, Otto built a two-story log house, and ultimately the Herberts bought property inside Burley itselfâland that curved around the lagoon.
Burley, called “Circle City” by locals because of the arrangement of buildings in a half-circle around an artesian well, had undergone a dramatic economic change shortly before the arrival of the Herberts. Through an amendment to the articles of incorporation of the colony, private ownership of land and industry was permitted. The Brotherhood remained in control, with profits going in equal shares to members. But this was no longer the socialist utopia originally envisioned by its founders. It was a curious amalgam of socialism and capitalism, and would last only eight more years before falling apart entirely.
But even with the departure of the Brotherhood in 1913, a community remained, with many former co-op members staying in the area. The land of this valley was dark and fertile, excellent for farming. Other former co-op members logged, operated dairies and raised poultry. For many years Burley remained the center of intellectual and social activity for the county.
There were three Frank Herberts in my family. The first, Otto's brother, eventually gave up his land near Burley and went on the circus and vaudeville circuit as “Professor Herbert,” becoming a well-known performer of strongman feats, gymnastics and daredevil acts. The next Frank Herbert, known as “F. H.” in ensuing years, was Otto's third son, born in December, 1893, in Ballard County, Kentucky. F. H. in turn had a son, Frank Jr., who would become my father and one of the world's best-known authors.
In Burley, Otto, Mary and their children prospered and increased family real estate holdings. For many years Otto operated a general store, “Herbert's Store.” The establishment carried, in the words of an old-timer, “everything from tires to toothpicks.” It had hay, grain, cow-feed, chickenfeed, clothing, medicines, dishes, hardware and most everything else imaginable, piled high to the ceiling. It was not a “green grocery,” as it sold no fresh produce. The locals grew their own vegetables and fruit, and canned them. Credit slips hung on the wall behind the cash register.
Otto's sons worked with him in the store, and when they grew up they formed “Herbert Brothers,” which operated the family store, a gas station, an auto and electrical repair shop, a stage line, and a logging business.
A stern, stocky little man, Otto was the undisputed ruler of his household. He named all six of his sons, and it is said that he did so without input from Mary. The boys were raised with stern “German discipline,” as my father called it later, the same sort of attention he would in turn receive from his father.
At 7:30 in the morning on October 8, 1920, Frank Herbert, Jr., was born at St. Joseph Hospital in Tacoma. It was his mother's nineteenth birthday, and he would often joke in later years that he never forgot her birthday.
F. H. and his wife, Eileen, were living in Tacoma at the time of their son's birth, but at every opportunity they visited Burley and the extended family there. Fond memories were formed in this little town on a lagoon, and these halcyon times would have a lasting impact upon young Frank Herbert. At the time of Frank's birth, his father was operating an auto-bus line between Tacoma and Aberdeen to the southâan offshoot of the family's successful stage line that ran between Burley and Gig Harbor.
The business became unprofitable, however, and by 1923 F. H. was working in Tacoma as an electrical equipment salesman. A stint as an automobile salesman followed. Then he became a motorcycle patrolman for the recently created Washington State Patrol. He had the “Mount Rainier beat,” from East Pierce County to the base of the mountain. He was paid $30 a week.
By 1925, family trips to Burley became easier. A modern car ferry transported them from Tacoma to Gig Harbor, and from there they drove to Burley on a fine new highway for motor vehicles.
Frank's mother, Eileen Marie (Babe) Herbert, was a McCarthy. She was one of thirteen children, most of whom were girls. “They were beautiful red-haired Irish colleens,” my father would tell me many years later. Babe's grandfather, the eldest son of an eldest son, was in a direct Irish royal line of succession that could have given him Blarney Castle in County Cork, which they called “Castle McCarthy.”
But under British rule, such a lineage became meaningless to Babe's great-grandfather. He was an Irish Catholic rebel, operating in County Cork and elsewhere in the mid-nineteenth century. The rebels made an attempt to overthrow British rule, but police action crushed the insurrection. The McCarthys fled their homes in Ireland, just ahead of pursuing British authorities. The family went to Canada, and then to Wisconsin in the United States, where Babe was born. Her father, John A. McCarthy, was a mining engineer.
In
The White Plague
, a novel published by my father many years later, he wrote about one of the stories his maternal grandfather, John A. McCarthy, used to tell at the dinner table. Here is the passage from the book, with actual names substituted for fictional ones:
“All of this for seven hundred rifles!”
That had been the McCarthy family plaint during the poor times. (Frank) had never lost the memory of Grampa (John's) voice regretting the flight from Ireland. It was a story told and retold until it could be called up in total recallâ¦The McCarthy silver, buried to keep it from piratical English tax collectors, had been dug up to finance the purchase of seven hundred rifles for a Rising. In the aftermath of defeat, Grampa (John's) father, a price on his head, had spirited the family to (Canada) under an assumed name. They had not resumed the McCarthy name until they were safely into the United States, well away from the thieving British.
Frank Herbert's earliest memory went back to 1921, when he was around a year old. He was at his Grandmother Mary's house in Burley, and he recalled walking straight under a wooden dining room table covered with a white tablecloth.
In May 1923, at the age of two and a half, he was attacked by a vicious malamute dog, an assault that nearly blinded him and left him with a lifetime scar over his right eye, just above the lid and extending into the eyebrow. His life was saved only because the dog knocked him beyond the reach of its chain. The terrifying image of the malamute's ferocious mouth, filled with sharp teeth, remained with my father for the rest of his life, and he had difficulty overcoming an acute fear of aggressive dogs.
When Frank was five, his Uncle Ade (Adrian) McCarthy, who was a hunter, gave him a beagle puppy, which Dad took an instant liking to and named “Bub.” It was not a large dog, certainly not ferocious, and his uncle told him it would help in the hunting of rabbits one day when the boy was big enough to handle a rifle.
On a Tacoma beach one day, Dad and his father were digging clams.
*
Bub put his face down by a hole, and a clam spat stinging saltwater in his eye. The dog yelped, and in a frenzy dug the offender out of the sand. Thereafter Bub always growled at spitting clams and dug them up for the boy. Young Frank thought it uproariously funny. For years he referred to Bub as “the dog who hated clams,” and eventually wrote about him in
Chapterhouse: Dune
.
My father had an early fascination with books, and could read much of the newspaper before he was five. He learned everything around him quickly, had an excellent memory and a long attention span. His number skills came to him early, and he loved puzzles.
Everything interested him. At the age of ten, he saved enough money to buy a Kodak box camera with a flash attachment. He began taking pictures of family events that often involved hiking, sailing, or fishing. In his early teens he purchased one of the “newfangled” folding cameras, and shortly after color film was introduced in the mid-1930s he purchased a miniature camera and began developing his own film. He set up a darkroom in the basement of his parents' home. Photography would remain a lifelong love for him.
He was without question a gifted child. When a school tested his IQ, he claimed it was one hundred and ninety, well into the genius range. He would often say in later years, however, that IQ tests were not accurate in measuring intelligence. They were, in his opinion, heavily weighted toward language skills.
Frank Herbert often spoke with fondness of the extended family in which he lived as a child, of time spent at the homes of aunts, uncles and grandparents in Tacoma and Burley. His father had four brothers living in the area, and his mother had eight sisters and two brothers nearby. So young Frank had many cousins with whom he could play, and if he happened to be over at a relative's house at dinner time the aunt or uncle would phone home and say young Frank was staying for the meal, and often that he was going to spend the night.
His Irish Catholic maternal aunts, who attempted to force religion on him, became the models for the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood of
Dune
. It is no accident that the pronunciations of “Gesserit” and “Jesuit” are similar, as he envisioned his maternal aunts and the Bene Gesserit of
Dune
as female Jesuits. The attempted brainwashing by his aunts, as he later termed it, was performed over the protestations of F. H., who was an agnostic. Before giving up the fight, F. H. had many arguments with Babe over this. In the end, the boy's religious beliefs became more like those of his father's than those of any other adult he knew.