Dreamer of Dune (27 page)

Frank Herbert told his university students that we live in a “light-switch society,” in which we flip a toggle and the light goes on, without any awareness of the mechanics producing the end result. To demonstrate his point, he invited an entire Utopia/Dystopia class to hike and camp with him in the Olympic National Forest northwest of Seattle, a rain forest. It was March, with a high likelihood of precipitation. He told them only that they would camp for two days in a rain forest, and that they would need survival gear and supplies. He didn't specify exactly what they should bring, except a mention of warm clothing and sleeping bags, along with paper and pens for taking notes.

Incredibly, a young woman arrived in a fur coat, toting a leather suitcase! At the trailhead, Dad used his knot-tying expertise (from many years spent sailing in his youth) to rig up a rope sling so that she could carry the suitcase on her back. Most of the students had never been in the woods before, and brought along an odd assortment of heavy equipment. They had cast-iron skillets, china plates, cans of chili and bottles of soda pop.

At my father's brisk pace, they hiked several miles to an area called the Flats. Dad dug a drainage trench around his own pup tent to keep rain water away from it, but seeing blue sky and no rain, most of the students didn't bother. Within hours a deluge came down, and many of the students spent a miserable night. Early the next morning, as everyone gathered around a campfire, Frank Herbert told them, “We're the only survivors of a nuclear war and this is where we're going to live.”

They discussed which technologies might continue—how people would eat, clothe themselves, build shelters, and travel. What sorts of social groups would form? And he spoke of new utopias unimagined by his students, utopias known to Native Americans and other “primitive” peoples. He taught them methods of finding food in the woods, how red ants could be mashed and spread on crackers or bread for sweet topping, or eaten straight. He said they were even sweeter if the heads were cut off. With a pocket knife, he obtained grub worms from the undersides of logs, which he said, like leeches, could be mashed up for high protein stews. When one of the students asked how leeches were caught, Dad said, “There's a pond up ahead. I'll show you.” He rolled his trousers up and waded into the water. When he came out, leeches were clinging to his calves. He laughed and knocked them free.

In 1971 Dad began organizing files he had been building for several years on a third book in the
Dune
series, a novel he planned to name
Arrakis
. It would be the completion of a trilogy he had envisioned when
Dune
was written a decade earlier. In response to the desires of his fans and editors, this book would carry a stronger ecological theme than the previous book in the series,
Dune Messiah
.

For several months he had also been negotiating with Bantam Books to write a novel based upon the Oscar-winning documentary film
The Hellstrom Chronicles,
but didn't want to start it without a written agreement. When he finally had the contract, he only had a short time to complete the book before leaving for Europe on a scheduled trip.

He set
Arrakis
aside and in seven weeks completed an 85,000-word novel, which he entitled
Hellstrom's Hive
. Bantam was very pleased with it, and scheduled publication for 1973. Prior to publication in book form it was serialized as “Project 40” (
Galaxy,
November 1972 through March 1973). When the French edition was published by Editions Robert Laffont in 1978, it won the Prix Apollo award, considered the most coveted science fiction award in Europe.

In
Hellstrom's Hive
, Dad presented two conflicting world views (human versus insect) in such a way that half of his readers identified with human society and half with the social structure found among humans living secretly in a massive underground hive. In doing this he used the technique of “utopia/dystopia” that had been explored in the classes he taught at the University of Washington. It was also employed in his 1968 novel,
The Santaroga Barrier
, in which the world views of an insular California town and outside society were compared.

The mythology of the hero, so central to
Dune
and its sequels, is written from a different angle in this story. Dr. Hellstrom, the key individual in the hive, can be viewed as hero or villain, depending upon which world view the reader finds most compelling.

After returning from Europe in the summer of 1971, Dad tried to resume work on
Arrakis
, hoping to complete it by the following spring. After only a few days he experienced problems with plotting, and set the manuscript aside, intending to look at it again in a few weeks with fresh eyes.

But other projects soon filled his time, diverting him from this schedule. He signed a number of contracts for books, articles, and short stories, including contributions to anthologies. One of these projects was with G. P. Putnam's Sons for the novelization of a Frank Herbert short story that had been published in 1960, “The Priests of Psi.” Dad set to work on the novel, and it became
The God Makers
, published in hardcover in 1972.

In the summer of 1972, with funding from the Lincoln Foundation, Dad and his friend Roy Prosterman visited Pakistan, India, Bengal, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam to study land reform, overpopulation and ecology problems. My mother accompanied them, at considerable danger because of the ongoing war in Vietnam.

The
Dune
movie project had been stalled for a while, as Arthur P. Jacobs was too involved in producing sequels to
Planet of the Apes,
as well as a musical version of
Tom Sawyer.
There were rumors that he might not proceed with
Dune,
and his option was about to expire.

While my parents were in Pakistan, however, good news arrived from Dad's film agent in Hollywood, Ned Brown. Mr. Jacobs, through his production company Apjac International in Beverly Hills, was exercising his option, and was contracting with David Lean (of “Lawrence of Arabia”) to direct. Robert Bolt would write the screenplay. Filming would begin in 1974, with story boarding, set design and other preparatory work beginning right away.

Dad was elated, for he felt Jacobs and Lean, with science fiction and desert movie experience, respectively, would do a fine job of translating his novel into film. This was no small task, in view of the length of the book, the complexity of the characters, and the layers of ecology, philosophy, psychology, history, mythology, religion, and politics it contained.

My mother kept a journal on this trip, the first time she had done so in almost two decades. It was a simple account, with brief daily entries made on binder paper. In one entry she described a romantic side trip that she took with my father to Hong Kong, where they celebrated their twenty-sixth wedding anniversary.

In the early 1970s Frank Herbert sold a number of short stories: “Seed Stock” (
Analog,
April 1970), “Murder Will In” (
Five Fates
anthology, 1971), and “Death of a City,” (
Future City
anthology, 1973). Two collections of his short stories and articles were published at that time:
The Worlds of Frank Herbert
(Ace Books, 1971) and
The Book of Frank Herbert
(Daw Books, 1973). Three previously unpublished short stories appeared in
The Book of Frank Herbert
: “Gambling Device,” “Passage for Piano,” and “Encounter in a Lonely Place.” A complex non-fiction article, “Listening to the Left Hand,” appeared first in
The Book of Frank Herbert
and later in the December 1973 issue of
Harper's
magazine.

Just as
Soul Catcher
addressed a theme found in
Dune
, the clash between primitive and Western cultures, Dad found new avenues to explore other themes found in
Dune
and its sequels. In
Whipping Star
(G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1970), the dangers to human freedom caused by big government were described satirically, offsetting the seriousness of anti-government themes found in the
Dune
series, particularly in the sequels. In this setting he promoted one of his earlier short story characters, Jorj X. McKie of the Bureau of Sabotage, to the status of protagonist in a novel.

Religion, a subtheme of
Dune
and its sequels, was also the theme of his 1972 novel,
The God Makers
. In this story, a human god was created by the mentally induced “psi-forces” of worshipers. Dad liked to refer to
The God Makers
as a “semi-caricature” describing how religions and myths developed.

In the early 1970s, a Seattle film company, Gardner-Marlow-Maes, purchased the rights to
Soul Catcher
. The project failed, primarily because my father insisted upon maintaining his controversial ending, in which the Indian protagonist kills the innocent white child.

While the
Soul Catcher
film project was still alive, Gardner-Marlow-Maes produced a film about the Blue Angels precision flying team. In conjunction with that production (which was a film festival winner), Dad wrote
Threshold: The Blue Angels Experience
(Ballantine Books, 1973). This involved the writing of an introduction and script narrative, used in the film and book, to accompany photographs of the planes and the men who flew them. In the script narrative, comprising some seventy-eight pages, much of it was similar to caption writing he had done in the 1960s as picture editor for the San Francisco
Examiner.
Dad was fascinated with the hero mythology of the pilots, the symbiosis of man and machinery, and the way men, with all of their frailties, responded to high-pressure situations. All were themes found elsewhere in my father's writing.

He wrote
Threshold
in three days.

Around this time, while Dad was working on
Arrakis
, he and Bruce found it impossible to live together any longer, and, according to Bruce, Dad kicked him out of the house. My father didn't remember it that way, asserting instead that “Bruce needed to test his wings,” and made the move on his own. The relationship between father and “Number Two Son,” while tenuous, was not severed entirely. My brother remained close to his mother, and for her sake went to visit his parents regularly.

Unbeknownst to me or to my parents, Bruce was living in a “drug house” with people who injected themselves with amphetamines. The favored drugs were little pills called “criss-crosses” that looked like aspirins with crosses on them. Also known as “CCs” or “beans,” they were ground into powder on a spoon with the end of another spoon or a pocket knife. A little distilled water was mixed with the powder on the spoon, then cotton was laid on top and liquid was drawn through the cotton with a syringe. The mixture was, in turn, injected by the addict. My brother didn't take criss-crosses that way, because he hated needles and didn't want track marks on his arms. Instead he “dropped” the pills, swallowing up to thirty-five a day. Eventually Bruce moved out of the drug house and returned to the San Francisco Bay Area.

By now my younger brother wasn't dating girls anymore. In the new relationships he was forming, he was becoming a gay man, expressing feelings that had previously been latent or which had surfaced and been suppressed. Thus he was entering two worlds that were at once dangerous and socially unacceptable—those of hallucinogenic drugs and homosexuality. I had no idea these metamorphoses were occurring in him.

In part it was a reaction to our macho father, who spoke of homosexuality as if it were an immature, unseemly activity. I recall him saying to me that “repressed homosexual energy” could be employed for killing purposes by armies. In
God Emperor of Dune
and
Heretics of Dune
he described homosexual, lesbian and adolescent forces at work in armies. And, in an unpublished version of his epic poem, “Carthage,” Frank Herbert wrote:

All the while Mom, unaware of Bruce's sexual inclination, or turning her head away so as not to see the indications, was longing for a baby boy Herbert to carry on the family name. Thus far Jan and I had two daughters. Penny bore three sons, David, Byron and Robert Merritt, but through marriage had lost the Herbert name. My mother hoped Bruce would marry soon, to improve the odds.

I
N
DUNE
,
Frank Herbert wrote, “Polish comes from the cities; wisdom from the desert.” In his view, the rural and desert lifestyles bore certain similarities, and were superior to circumstances found in urban centers.

Shortly after Christmas 1972, Dad and Mom moved again—this time north, to the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State, near the northwest corner of the “lower-48” United States. They purchased a house and farm on six wooded acres on the outskirts of the mill town of Port Townsend, Washington, population five thousand. Employing bargaining skills learned when we lived in Mexican villages in the 1950s, Dad dickered the price down by several thousand dollars.

There was a symmetry to my father's life. In his childhood some of his fondest memories had been spent living on a small subsistence farm in Washington State. He never forgot the experience and always longed for a return to it, to his roots. This man of letters could be urbane and sophisticated, desiring the comforts of the good life. But he was not truly happy unless he was living in the country, with a rural base of operations. City life, with its crowds and noise and pollution, did not suit him.

On the National Historic Register, Port Townsend had many turn-of-the-century Victorian homes, giving it architectural similarities with San Francisco—an area my parents missed for its beauty. Like San Francisco this was also a port, but on a smaller scale and in a much different setting, situated as it was between the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Puget Sound. It had a small airport, Jefferson County International Airport—the subject of much amusement among locals for the name. It was dubbed “international” only because of regular small plane flights in and out of nearby Canada, necessitating a U.S. customs facility at the airport.

With six acres, Dad had room for the farming he wanted to do and for certain ecological demonstration projects he had in mind. Above all, he needed an isolated, quiet location where he could write without interruption. The phenomenal success of
Dune
had been bringing people out of the woodwork looking for Frank Herbert, and too many of them had his address and telephone number when he lived in Seattle.

Dad loved to ride his bicycle, and frequently ran errands on it around Port Townsend. The sight of a burly, bearded author leaning down over the handlebars of a Schwinn ten-speed became a familiar sight to locals. He and Mom fit in well and made many friends on all rungs of the social scale.

Their new house, comprising five thousand square feet, was a three-level cedar A-frame with two bedroom wings, located at the end of a rough, one-third-mile-long gravel road, just off a paved country road. In reality this was just inside the city limits, but it was a pastoral setting, with numerous farms and ranches nearby.

In the fall, each side of the gravel road and the nearby woods were full of edible mushrooms—primarily shaggy manes (
coprinus comatus
) and meadow mushrooms (
agaricus campestris
). Every time we visited during mushroom season my father organized family mushroom hunts, and we would go traipsing through the woods with him, filling plastic bags with delicacies. On such treks he quoted Latin names for the fungi he saw, edible and inedible, along with more commonly known references. He examined each plant closely to be certain it wasn't poisonous, often slicing it open with a pocket knife before throwing it away or tossing it in one of our bags. Back at the house, after we cleaned the mushrooms, Mom or Dad would slice them and sauté them in butter as a side dish, or would pour them over T-bone steaks or filet mignon.

It was always warm and cozy inside their home, a welcome shelter from cool Northwest weather. A heavy sliding glass door led from the front porch into the main level of the house, onto a Zen-like floor of black and white squares that extended into the kitchen. The kitchen was to the right of the entry, separated from the entry by a black countertop eating area with stools pulled up to it. Copper pans and utensils hung from beamed ceilings in the kitchen. Large white globes hung from the peak of the high-pitched ceiling—light fixtures that ran from the entry straight into an expansive, red-carpeted living room.

On the top level of the modified A-frame, beneath slanted ceilings, was a large loft for Dad's study. The study had a long desk (shop-built by my father) beneath gable windows that looked out on cedars and firs and a private driveway that led uphill to the gravel road at the top. To the right of the desk was an Olympia-65 electric typewriter on a typewriter stand. A large bookcase divided the room in two, with a sling chair reading area on the other side, by a camera tripod and stereo equipment. A weathered white and green Forest Service sign lay on the window sill:

This memento came from the trail to Kelly Butte, the Forest Service lookout where my parents had honeymooned in 1946. The sign had been retrieved by Dad on a recent hike when he found the path abandoned and overgrown.

On a large portion of the lower level of the house he had rows of bookcases built, for an extensive personal library that he intended to organize one day according to the Dewey decimal system used in public and university libraries. The house was only two years old when he purchased it, and some portions of it were not quite finished.

Mom's office was in one of the bedroom wings of the main level, with a view in the same direction as Dad's. She had a tall fir tree by the window nearest her desk, with a bird feeder that Dad had mounted for her on the trunk so that she could watch wrens, robins and other feathered visitors as they fed.

In the Port Townsend telephone directory my parents listed themselves under Mom's name, “B. A. Herbert,” with the address “Xanadu.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's unfinished poem, “Kubla Khan,” which he wrote about a wondrous place called “Xanadu” while experiencing a dream-vision, was my mother's favorite poem. She could quote every word of it and delivered it thespian-style, as if she were on a theater stage. Dad particularly enjoyed listening to her, and said it reminded him of acting performances she gave in 1946 when my parents attended the University of Washington.

Most often she quoted the first paragraph, closing her eyes as she did so, and raising her voice dramatically:

So like my parents' Xanadu were these words, for all around them were fertile grounds, gardens bright, ancient forests and sunny spots of greenery. And one day, if my father's construction dreams came to pass, there would even be a tower with a windmill on it, for his Ecological Demonstration Project.

The Port Townsend house was not a palace in the physical sense. It was unpretentious, comfortable and rather simple, without excess. It had little view, except of woods, an orchard and a duck pond. But under the influence of my father and mother it became a palace of intellect, of conversation and of love. We had many remarkable and memorable conversations at the dinner table and in the living room beside bookcases filled with books that Dad had written. Ten original
Dune
paintings by the Hugo award–winning artist John Schoenherr made a dramatic and colorful backdrop on the south wall of the living room.

Dad designed two large stained-glass windows to go high on the western gable wall over the living room, one a rooster and the other a writer's quill. I often thought, as I sat in the living room and looked up at these delicate, graceful windows, that they represented two key facets of my father's life—his love of working the land and his love of writing.

From the beginning, he had grand construction projects in mind to radically alter the character of the property. He wanted to build a large workshop with a windmill tower on top, a solar-heated swimming pool, and a poultry house heated by methane generated from bird droppings. This was with the intent of turning the property into his “Ecological Demonstration Project” (“EDP”), where he could establish a nearly self-sufficient farm and test the practicality of alternative energy sources, such as power from wind, sun, hydrogen and methane. The U.S. Department of Energy, he said, had never done a very good job of investigating alternative energy sources, and he especially wanted to reduce the dependency of society on petroleum products and nuclear energy.

Through his writings, Dad liked to explore different aspects of issues in separate works. Thus
The Dragon in the Sea, Dune, The Green Brain
and
Hellstrom's Hive
^*
dealt with various environmental issues, shedding new light on our world in ways that were not possible within the story limitations of one work. In like manner, his “EDP” was yet another environmental story, one in which he would learn and teach by doing, by rolling up his sleeves in the innovative American way he so admired.

Fans, editors and his literary agent were after Frank Herbert for the third book in the trilogy, but he had to do it at his own pace, in his own way. There were too many uncertainties in the unfolding story, too many potential directions that were not set firmly in his mind, so he kept putting off the writing of the work or only pecking away at it in the midst of a very busy schedule. He wasn't focused on
Arrakis
as he needed to be. It wasn't flowing, wasn't coming together, so in the spring of 1973 he set it aside again.

Dad felt the American Indian movement was just beginning, and that despite slow initial sales
Soul Catcher
would, like
Dune
, ultimately find a huge audience. Certainly
Soul Catcher
deserved such an audience, for it was a powerful, finely crafted novel, filled with poetic beauty and suspense. After the film project on this book failed he became involved in another Indian project, the writing of four closely linked stories based upon actual historical events in the Pacific Northwest. He entitled the work
Circle Times
, and it was most intriguing, about the cyclical Indian view of the universe. It was an involved work, making up a thick manuscript, but Dad was not able to obtain a publisher for it. He did sell it as a television screenplay to Wolper Pictures, Ltd., of California—but ultimately the project fell apart when the producers felt Dad was trying to remain too true to historical facts, at the expense of drama.

Yet another movie project began to unravel around this time.
Dune
had reached the storyboard phase, in which scenes were depicted by artists, according to instructions from the director and producer. But in the spring of 1973 producer Arthur P. Jacobs died unexpectedly, and since it had been his pet project, indications were that his company, Apjac International, intended to abandon it. Under terms of the contract, they had until 1974 to make their decision.

While this was up in the air, Dad devoted several months to completion of a half-hour documentary film based upon field work he had done with Roy Prosterman in Pakistan, Vietnam and other Third World countries. Entitled
The Tillers,
it was written, filmed and directed by Frank Herbert. Produced in cooperation with the Lincoln Foundation, the World Without War Council, and King Broadcasting Company, it appeared on King Television in Seattle and on the Public Broadcasting System.

By early 1974, my father was champing at the bit to get
Arrakis
underway, a novel he expected to be longer than
Dune Messiah
and perhaps as long as
Dune
. Finally he set other projects aside and made it his all-consuming priority.

He wanted ecology to be stronger in this climactic novel than it had been in the bridging work
Dune Messiah
, but he didn't want to overdo it, didn't want to curry favor with powerful environmental groups for the sake of sales. It was a balancing act. Throughout much of the 1950s he had been unable to sell many of his stories because they hadn't been written with particular markets in mind. They weren't the right subject matter for certain publishers, weren't the right length, didn't fit what was popular at the time. Maybe with a little of this and a little of that, editors told him, or if the market ever changed, they
might
sell….

In the 1950s his stories had been rejected by editor after editor. Now he was in demand, an unaccustomed circumstance for him. Readers and editors were clamoring for more
Dune
stories, and he realized he had to give them what they wanted, what they expected, to a certain extent. He had to write for a particular market, after all. But he had important messages he wanted to convey, and there had been so much misunderstanding over
Dune Messiah
.

Bernard Zakheim, my father's artist friend, invariably included anti-holocaust political messages and religious quotations with his paintings and sculptures. Similarly, Dad wanted his own important messages to be contained within every novel he wrote and included them in
The Dragon in the Sea, The Santaroga Barrier
and
Dune
—all books that had experienced good to excellent sales. The success, he came to understand, lay in keeping the adventure first, the excitement of the story—and fitting the lessons, the messages, underneath. He could not be pedantic, could not preach to his readers.

“While writing the third
Dune
book,” Dad recalled, “I first realized consciously that I had to be an entertainer above all, that I was in the entertainment business. Everything else had to be secondary, if I wanted readers to keep turning the pages.”