Dreamer of Dune (17 page)

By this time I was outside in my pajamas. Seeing Howie sneaking back into our yard, I said, “Hey, that's you and Dad shooting off firecrackers, huh?”

Howie laughed.

In describing his friend, Howie said, “Frank had an infectious sense of fun.” Unfortunately, my father rarely showed this side to us, his children. If we saw it at all it was as observers, not as participants.

In 1957, Avon paid $1,500 for the paperback rights to
The Dragon in the Sea
. They would publish it under yet another title, which Dad hated:
21st Century Sub
. So, in a short period of time, the same story was serialized as
Under Pressure
, printed in hardcover as
The Dragon in the Sea
and in paperback as
21st Century Sub
.

When the check for
21st Century Sub
arrived, Dad was so pleased that he wanted to take Mom out for a gourmet meal. We didn't own a vehicle that ran, so Howie loaned Dad his big gray 1949 Chrysler Windsor, a nice two-door car with white sidewalls. Dad and Howie washed and polished the car. At the restaurant, the finest in Tacoma, the valet congratulated my father on owning such a fine automobile. Dad just smiled and handed him a generous tip for the time, five dollars.

Howie and Dad spent a lot of time discussing religion, particularly the mysticism of many faiths and peoples. They drew parallels between Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, the Kabbala of Judaism, the Sufis of Islam, and American Indian beliefs. Howie, half Quileute Indian himself, was at once an intellectual giant and a spiritual man. He spoke for his ancestors and for uncounted future generations, and my father was startled by the message of the people speaking through Howie: “The Earth is dying, it is being misused by non-Indian civilizations that take and do not give.”

In 1958, after being in the U.S. Merchant Marine for years, Howie returned to his Indian reservation at Lapush, Washington, in order to gather legends and songs from the remaining old folks. He had last been there in 1939, and was shocked now to see the damage to the environment. Previously the area had been a verdant primeval forest, thousands of years old, with young and middle-aged trees and old grandfather trees shading the younger ones. There had been so many trees on the reservation that to the young man they had seemed to form a tunnel, with light coming in at the ends. Now, after indiscriminate logging by big timber companies, the area was much different. Howie was saddened, and incensed.

When he visited us at Brown's Point, he had with him a book entitled
Ecology,
which had been loaned to him by an Indian friend. The book spoke of the ecological decimation of the planet Earth, and Howie combined this knowledge with what he had seen at Lapush. In a conversation with Dad, Howie told me he said angrily, “They're gonna turn this whole planet into a wasteland, just like North Africa.”

“Yeah,” Frank Herbert responded. “Like a big dune.”

By the time Dad said this, the elements of his story were coming together. He had in mind a messianic leader in a world covered entirely with sand. Ecology would be a central theme of the story, emphasizing the delicate balances of nature.

Dad was a daily witness to conditions in Tacoma, which in the 1950s was known as one of the nation's most polluted cities, largely due to a huge smelter whose stack was visible from all over the city, a stack that belched filth into the sky. The air was “so thick you could chew it,” my father liked to quip. The increasing pollution he saw all around him, in the city of his birth, contributed to his resolve that something had to be done to save the Earth. This became, perhaps, the most important message of
Dune
.

My father would write two great books tracing themselves in varying degrees to conversations with his closest friend, Howie Hansen:
Dune
(1965) and the poetically written story of Indian rage,
Soul Catcher
(1972), my father's only non–science fiction novel.

I
N THE
fall of 1958 Dad's writing career was not going well. We moved to Longbranch, a small town on a bay just north of Tacoma. This had been one of Dad's ports of call as a child when he rowed and sailed around Puget Sound.

He resumed searching for a job, and as fate would have it, this was an election year. He stopped by Republican campaign headquarters in Tacoma. William “Big Bill” Bantz, a Spokane, Washington, attorney, was running for the U.S. Senate at the time against the popular Henry “Scoop” Jackson. Bantz had a publicity director who wasn't working out, so his campaign manager, George Carlson, fired him. That day, Carlson received a call from Republican campaign headquarters saying a man had been in looking for a job, Frank Herbert. Carlson had never heard the name before, but met my father the following day, was impressed with him and hired him.

Dad was the best publicity man Carlson ever saw. Frank Herbert would put together six suggested publicity letters at a time and lay them in front of Carlson for review and approval. Carlson remembered approving, perhaps, four, rejecting one and specifying revisions on another. It was difficult to find people for jobs like that. The assignments were short-term and demanding, involving highly intensive work.

While Dad worked on the political campaign, his fourth, he dovetailed his schedule with Mom's, doing his publicity work in Tacoma while she was writing ads at the department store.

Unfortunately, William Bantz, like every other candidate my father worked for, lost! Scoop Jackson, an unbeatable foe in Washington State politics who ultimately went on to national prominence, garnered almost 70 percent of the vote.

Whenever my parents had friends over to the house, I sometimes tried to participate in adult conversations. Typically it was after dinner, with everyone sitting in the living room by a cozy fireplace. Too often my inadequate contributions irritated Dad, and he would send me out of the room. My status in the household, Howie told me later, was not dissimilar to that of a dog or a human subspecies. If I didn't please the master, I was dispatched from sight. After seeing my father do this to me more than once, Howie finally told him it was a big mistake, that he should let me participate, and Bruce as well. If he didn't, Howie cautioned, the boys would never bond with their father.

Dad listened attentively to his friend, but said he would raise the boys as he saw fit. We would grow up on our own, if need be, as he had. It would be good for us. He refused to change. And how ironic it was that this man, who one day would communicate effectively with millions of people through his writing, could not communicate with his own children.

One day I was beach-combing with Howie, and he said to me, “Your father cares about you more than you realize. If necessary, he would give up his life for you.”

I was astounded to hear this, and didn't know what to believe.

My parents played cards frequently, the two-hand version of Hearts they had invented on their honeymoon. It was their private game. My mother, being what my father called a “white witch,” enjoyed a certain advantage over him in these sessions.

When Mom was seated, Dad often went to her and leaned down to whisper in her ear, “I love you.” She would smile and whisper the same back to him. There were many small acts between my parents that told us how deeply they felt for one another. The way they looked into each others' eyes and squeezed hands, their secret smiles, whispered words and lingering kisses. The help they gave one another.

Often when she came into the room he would exclaim, “Hi, beautiful!” and she would reply, “Oh, you're just saying that because you mean it.”

They exchanged little gifts for no special occasion. He gave her red roses or her favorite perfume, Chanel No. 5, and she made him shirts and sweaters.

To a large extent we lived off the land. Dad maintained a pen of chickens, providing eggs and meat. We had a large, neat vegetable garden across the gravel driveway from the garage, and it provided us with the sweetest carrots I've ever tasted. Mom worked with an artist named Nancy Modahl, whose parents owned a waterfront cabin near us. I knew a spot in the woods near their place where huckleberries grew in abundance, so in the summer and fall I rode my bike over there and harvested them, for Mom's incredible pies. I also brought in blackberries by the bushelful from a field by our house.

To clean the berries, Mom dumped them in buckets of water. Most of the bugs, tiny worms and debris floated to the top, enabling her to remove them with a spoon or strainer.

In distributing her prize desserts to us, Dad employed a variation on Solomon's wisdom, thus preventing Bruce and me from arguing over who was going to get the largest piece. He ordered one of us to cut, and the other to select first.

At Thanksgiving that year, as always, Dad prepared what he called Stuffing Herbert, a concoction with chestnuts, celery and wild rice. Grandma and Grandpa Herbert joined us, and we gathered around our little table in the kitchen.

My mother always kept abreast of what Dad was writing, and she watched for newspaper or magazine articles or books that might be of interest to him. Frequently she guided him into areas he hadn't considered. Both of them read voraciously on every conceivable subject, and she constantly threw ideas at him that he subsequently incorporated into his stories.

Early in 1959 Mom was offered an important job as advertising manager for a new department store in Stockton, California, Smith & Lang. It was time for another move. Dad said we had to fit all of our things in a U-Haul trailer and on the top rack of our car. Much had to be sold or put in storage with friends.

Thinking our Studebaker wouldn't survive the trip, he sold it for only fifty dollars. It was leaking water and oil from the engine, and he thought it might have a blown head gasket. He told the buyer everything he knew that was wrong with the vehicle, and cautioned him, “Just run it until it stops. Whatever you do, don't take the engine apart!”

But the purchaser of the car, despite my father's honesty, didn't listen, and proceeded instead to take the engine apart piece by piece. Just before we left, he phoned to shout at Dad and call him names. Dad reminded him of what he had told him, and the man, unable to counter my father's debating skills, slammed the receiver down.

Almost a decade later, in his novel
The Santaroga Barrier
(1968), Dad wrote of a utopian town in which anyone advertising to sell a used car had to reveal all defects in advertisements. An ad for a $100 Buick described it as an oil-burner, while a $500 Rover had a cracked block. The town, Santaroga, refused all pork barrel government projects. The people were straightforward, honest, and didn't ask for special favors. They didn't smoke or watch television.

In one of the most memorable passages of
Dune
(1965), the Princess Irulan said her father once told her that “respect for the truth comes close to being the basis of all morality.” This was Frank Herbert speaking through his characters.

By the end of February we were on the road south in a big black 1951 Nash, a car with a six-cylinder engine that only ran on four. The ugliest thing I had ever seen, it looked like a giant bloated potato bug. A U-Haul trailer with a tarp flapping in the wind rolled along behind us, and there were suitcases on the top rack of the car.

We had, as my father liked to say, packed with a shoehorn. In this process, known well to us, items were packed within items. Everything possible was nested, even if it meant mixing items from different parts of the house. This made for interesting adventures trying to locate things later, but was the most compact possible method of transport. We didn't have a wasted centimeter, or bring along a single unnecessary item.

So much for Tara, for the Washington State homeland where Dad could write. While he sold two short stories that were published early in 1959—“Missing Link” (
Astounding Science Fiction
, February) and “Operation Haystack” (
Astounding Science Fiction
, May)—they took him only a few weeks to write. He wasn't putting out very many words, though he continued to perform research for his desert book. Avenues of research were shooting out in all directions. Maybe with the economic stability of Mom's new job, he reasoned, he would have the time and resources to increase his output.

In Stockton we rented a modern ranch-style home, with an option to buy. It was a sturdily built one-story rambler with a painted concrete patio in the back yard and a big weedy field beyond that. Mom planted a small vegetable garden next to the garage, and I particularly recall how delicious the asparagus was.

Shortly after moving in, Dad pursued a wild scheme. He had heard about high altitude Air Force weather service (“Ptarmigan”) flights over remote regions of Alaska, the Bering Sea and the North Pole. Ever curious, he wanted to go along on one of them in order to obtain material for a magazine article. So he contacted one of his old political buddies for help, Congressman Jack Westland, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Washington State.

Westland tried, but the Air Force rejected the request, citing extremely dangerous conditions encountered during the flights, and the unwillingness of authorities to expose civilians to such peril. In more recent times, with different technology, my father would have been trying to get a seat on the Space Shuttle…probably with similar results. He did not do well when it came to getting his ideas through bureaucratic channels. I don't think he ever figured out how to work through the decision-making processes of governmental and large private bureaucracies. Such endeavors apparently required more patience than he possessed.

Within two weeks of our arrival in Stockton, Dad was receiving child-support demands from Flora's attorney. Since we couldn't make the payments and Dad needed to balance the ledger, Penny came to live with us. The house was big enough for all of us to have our own bedrooms. Dad set his study up in the master bedroom, which was large.

Lurton Blassingame kept pressing my father for more material, and the agent made a number of inadvertent comments about the low output of stories, remarks that irritated Dad. Frank Herbert was finding it more and more difficult to send stories to New York, for reasons he couldn't quite define. The relationship with Lurton and science fiction publishers was becoming a rut, with increasingly negative connotations.

Frank Herbert wanted to write for magazines that paid well, not for science fiction pulps at four and five cents a word. “I was floundering,” he confided to me years later, “not making a living. Bev was patient, but wanted to buy a house, ending our itinerant lifestyle. She didn't complain but I knew she wanted to settle down. I was nearly forty years old, with little to show for myself.”

His book about the desert was almost becoming too massive to envision finishing. To do it right he wanted to create a universe and several cultures, a formidable, disheartening task that was bogging him down in the tedium of research.

Thus far he had committed very little to paper. Only disjointed plot ideas, descriptive passages and characterizations. His personal library was burgeoning. He had cardboard boxes full of notes.

To earn money more quickly he thought about writing television scripts, and purchased several books about the craft. He came up with a television show idea about a man-fish, a web-footed merman, and spent time writing a synopsis. MCA in Beverly Hills expressed an interest in the project, and he sent it off to them through his film agent, Ned Brown. It didn't sell.
^*

In ensuing years Dad would write other television treatments, all without success. Part of his problem, as paradoxical as it sounds, might have been that he rarely watched television. Our Hall Avenue house was the first home in which we had a set, and that one, an old Zenith portable, was given to us by a friend.
^**

Around this time, Dad became acquainted with the Zen writings of Alan W. Watts, particularly
The Wisdom of Insecurity
, which postulated the abandonment of safe courses of action in favor of uncertainty and insecurity. Watts spoke of a paradox in which the abandonment of safe courses of action opened a person to ineffable spiritual truths that could not otherwise be attained.

Frank Herbert held a similar belief, that the natural state of equilibrium in the universe was not a stable, fixed point or condition of being. It was instead a changing thing, always presenting new faces and new experiences. For an individual to be in harmony with the universe, my father believed, he needed to place himself in synchronization with the changing state of nature and human society. He needed to take risks. Thus in many of his stories he stressed the importance of adaptability, and his characters often had to adjust in order to survive.

So it was in our family, with the constant moving from place to place. I was always the new kid on the block, the new kid in school, having to fit into unfamiliar social and educational structures.

He told me that without change, without constant challenge, something in the human mind goes to sleep. “That's why I keep moving,” he said, “why I keep looking for new experiences.”

My mother wrote a series of advertisements for Smith & Lang that won national awards and became famous around the country. The first ad went something like this: “We're glad to be opening Smith & Lang again because our roots go deep here in the Valley of the San Joaquin.” This was a brand-new store, replacing one that had burned down.

Subsequently, a number of stores on the East Coast picked up the advertising theme and began saying things like, “Our roots go deep in the Valley of Virginia,” or “Our roots go deep in the hills of the Catskills.”

Around New Year's, 1960, after less than a year in Stockton, Dad reached the emotional low point of his career. His writing income in 1959 had been only a few hundred dollars, from a pair of science fiction short stories and the trickle of earnings on
Dragon
. With the money he owed to bill collectors, including the Internal Revenue Service (who had levied a federal tax lien against him), his net worth was below zero. He even owed me back allowance.