Dreamer of Dune (12 page)

So, with our funds dwindling once again, Dad set to work on the submarine novel.

A few days before Christmas 1954, we rented a little A-frame beach cabin in Healy Palisades, Washington. This was a tiny community between Seattle and Tacoma, in an area now known as Federal Way. The rent was low, and well it should have been. The cabin, all six hundred square feet of it, was at the bottom of a steep hill, reached by a long narrow trail. We moved in by boat, using a large open dory powered by an inboard diesel engine. This was supposed to be an interim house, a cheap place to live until Dad finished his submarine novel,
Under Pressure
. Dad set to work on the book, rising early each day and working far into the night.

My mother began to do freelance copy-editing for local stores, writing retail advertisements to bring in what money she could. Mom's work was only part-time, paying very little. To reduce family expenditures she removed frayed collars from our shirts and sewed the collars back on inside out, giving new life to old fabric. She also cut long sleeves down to short when the elbows became worn, and patched our socks and the knees of trousers.

To save money, my father regularly gave his sons what he called “butch” haircuts, using electric clippers. These were crewcuts, with our hair cut the same length all over. His haircuts turned out okay at first, but always looked funny in a few weeks when the hair grew out. I had cowlicks, and as time passed without a new trim, my head took on the shape of a large, strange flower.

The proverbial church mouse had more money than we did in those days. When we didn't have enough on hand to pay bills, Mom developed a random method of deciding which would receive priority. She threw all of them on the floor, and the ones that landed right side up were paid first. On other occasions she drew bills out of Dad's Homburg felt hat to determine which ones to pay.

For my principal chore, I was assigned to collect driftwood from the beach to heat the house. I found quite a bit, which I stacked on the porch by the front door. Dad did his own foraging for firewood, and he supplemented that by getting on as many mailing lists as he could, under a phony name. In a few weeks, junk mail was pouring in from all over the country, which Dad and Mom tossed in the wood stove in the kitchen along with the driftwood, or in a river rock fireplace in the main living area.
^*

Our beach cabin had one bedroom and one bath. I slept on a mattress on the floor of a tiny mezzanine overlooking the living room. Bruce's crib was set up nearby. He was three, and I was seven. Due to the absence of a wall, activities downstairs often kept me awake. Especially Dad's loud voice as he told long, convoluted “shaggy dog” stories, and his booming laughter after the punch lines. I often crawled out of bed, and in my pajamas peered through a railing at adults below. Bruce slept through anything.

A man of extremes, my father could become very angry—a side of him I saw too often. At the other end of the spectrum, he could behave like the happiest man alive. At such times his laughter was remarkable. It rolled from him in great peals. He savored each cachination, taking a couple of extra gulps of mirth at the end. When entertaining guests, my parents often had the lights down low while the fireplace blazed cheerily, giving the cabin a warm glow. A remarkable raconteur, Dad enjoyed talking far into the night.

For his desk Frank Herbert salvaged a broad slab of driftwood from the beach and mounted it on a frame constructed of plywood and two-by-fours. It was set up in the living room by a large window, so that he looked out upon the water.

One day he received an unsolicited package of peyote in the mail from a friend, along with instructions on how to take it. A note with the package said the stuff was guaranteed to cure writer's block. Mom told him not to do it, to throw the stuff away. But Dad was curious. He'd never had peyote before, and proceeded to cut up an entire blossom. With this and hot water, he made a cup of tea. The instructions said to quaff it, and Dad did so. Instantly the stuff came back up, with most of the other contents of his stomach. After cleaning up, Dad didn't feel any ill effect, and went back to writing his submarine novel at the driftwood desk.

Soon he seemed to be upon the waters of Puget Sound, with sunlight glinting off wave tops in a rhythmic pattern. He experienced sound with each beat of light—an eerie, beautiful pealing. The water was choppy, almost forming whitecaps, and sunlight glinted upon it. Suddenly he realized he was
hearing
each glint of light—the most dulcet, soothing chimes he had ever experienced in his life.

Thus when he wrote in the
Dune
series of a “vision echo,” he was writing from firsthand experience, from an experience of sensory mixing.

My father discarded the rest of the peyote, and never did anything like that again. He said the regurgitation was caused by strychnine, a white fluffy material that should have been separated from the blossom's bud with a knife and thrown away.

Before we moved again in early 1955, Dad returned the driftwood desktop slab to the beach. He told my mother he had been the custodian of the wood for a short time. Years later he would say something similar to me, that none of us ever “own” land. We are merely caretakers of it, passing it along one day to other caretakers.

It is this way with the Earth, he said. We are stewards of it, not owners, and one day future generations will assume the responsibility.

T
HAT SPRING
Dad received a job offer to do promotional work for the Douglas Fir Plywood Association (DFPA) in Tacoma. The position didn't pay much, but with these earnings we could afford a nicer place to live—not much of a step upward. We moved into an old ramshackle house on the tide flats of Marine View Drive, across the bay from Tacoma. The weather-beaten house, with a porch that ran around most of it, stood on a narrow stretch of land some twenty feet below road level, reached by going down two sets of steps. Part of the structure was on pilings, and below the house was an old dock.

For his study, Dad set up a desk in what had once been the living room. This afforded him a view of an industrial waterway, filled with tugboats and log booms. Each evening after work at the DFPA and every weekend I heard his portable typewriter going constantly—a rapid, machine-gun rhythm of keys.

Tacoma had long suffered a reputation for its poor air quality, known as the “Tacoma aroma.” A number of pulp mills were in and around the city and the tall stack of a giant smelter across the bay was visible from our house. From the dumping of arsenic, heavy metals and other industrial wastes in the bay, the tide flats by us had a distinctive, unpleasant odor, especially when the tide was out. For the six months that we lived in that house, Bruce and I slept on thin mattresses, on a pair of toboggans set up on an unheated, enclosed porch.

Two of Frank Herbert's science fiction short stories were published that year, “Rat Race” (
Astounding Science Fiction
, July 1955) and “Occupation Force” (
Fantastic
, August 1955). Earnings from them were minimal.

These stories had been written before we moved to Marine View Drive. Now here, with every moment of spare time, he labored on his submarine novel,
Under Pressure
. He finished the 75,000-word book in April 1955, and mailed it to Lurton. It was organized into several story breaks, making it easily adaptable to serialization. When he wrote the book, he had in mind the legendary editor at
Astounding Science Fiction
, John W. Campbell. Among his other accomplishments, Campbell was a science fiction writer himself.
^*

Even with my father's job, we didn't have much money to spend. Flora knew where we were, and wanted her child-support money. The IRS demanded payment for back taxes, but in lieu of checks Dad sent excuses. Other bill collectors were in pursuit as well.

Dad did much of the cooking in our household, and liked to stir-fry several pounds of rice in a big wok, with a few vegetables and a minimal amount of meat. I'm sure it was good for us, with all the complex carbohydrates my father promised. But for years after I moved out I refused to eat rice. Only recently have I been able to stomach it again.

In the mid-1950s, a large new medical facility was opening in Tacoma, the Mary Bridge Children's Hospital. When Mom's freelance copywriting assignments ebbed, she took a part-time job with the facility, writing promotional literature for hospital fund-raising.

At the dinner table, my father sometimes spoke of writing and his attempts to sell stories, complaining about particular editors. Sometimes as he ate, he read passages to my mother from manuscript pages stacked by his plate and asked for her opinion. She always provided honestly, and he would make pencil notations on the pages. At other times, Dad and Mom sat in the little living room, overlooking the tide flats, and he read short stories and chapters to her.

Only nine years before, in college, Beverly Herbert had dreamed of becoming a professional writer herself. With the demands of married life, this dream was fading. Reality told her there couldn't be two creative writers in one family. How could they possibly support a household?

In the midst of our pressing need for income, she told Dad not to worry, that if necessary he could leave DFPA and she would work for department stores (or wherever necessary) until his writing became successful. In this and countless other ways Beverly Herbert was totally selfless, and made an incredible sacrifice—giving my father a true gift of love. She believed in his writing ability, and always said he had more talent than she did, that she only had a flair for writing.

“Do what's in your heart, darling,” she told him. “I'll be here for you.”

In my mother's heart, she was sure he would become tremendously successful one day. He had such a powerful
need
to write, such a drive for it, that she knew she could never stand in his way, could never exert pressure on him to earn more money at the expense of his creative potential. He wasn't happy unless he was writing.

Aside from sacrificing a creative writing career, she was giving up a traditional home life. Mom enjoyed tinkering around the house, making a snug nest out of it, but with her career requirements there was less time for this. Still she sewed, knitted, wove, crocheted and baked pies. She made clothes for all of us and darned our socks. Essentially a homebody, she might have done well as a writer working out of the house if she'd been married to anyone else—to someone who would permit her the luxury of staying home near the typewriter. Instead she was forced out of her element into the workplace, at a time when the vast majority of women did not work away from the home.

Her faith was rewarded. Within two weeks of sending
Under Pressure
to New York, John W. Campbell made an offer to serialize it in
Astounding Science Fiction
. This was a remarkable response time for an editor. Campbell's offer was four cents a word, meaning the author would receive around $2,700 net after the deduction of Lurton's 10 percent commission. Dad accepted right away.

Campbell asked for two synopses. He planned to run the story in three installments of around twenty-five thousand words apiece, and synopses were needed to precede the second and third segments, filling the readers in on prior action. The serialization was scheduled to run from November 1955 through January 1956.

Lurton turned immediately toward selling the novel in book form. Walter I. Bradbury, managing editor of Doubleday, liked the book, and snapped it up in June 1955. This resulted in an additional $3,600 net to the author, so the book was starting to earn pretty good money for the mid-1950s. It allowed Dad to pay old debts, including some of the money owed to his ex-wife, Flora.

Doubleday was so impressed with the novel that they copy-edited it right away and scheduled it for publication in February of the following year. This was one short month following the serialization in
Astounding Science Fiction
, the earliest possible date Doubleday could publish it. The Science Fiction Book Club also picked the title up, but only paid a small amount for the rights.

Inspired by Dad's success, Mom spent every available moment writing a 64,000-word mystery novel,
Frighten the Mother
. It was dispatched to Lurton in the summer of 1955. While he liked portions of it, he felt the manuscript needed more work, and told her it was not ready for submission to publishers. Dejected, Mom set it aside. She didn't have Dad's perseverance.

In late August, Dad decided it was time to get rid of our rickety old car, a Dodge, in favor of more reliable transportation. He became aware of a most unusual set of wheels that was being advertised for sale by a funeral home in Tacoma. Terms were agreed to, and my parents purchased a used hearse for three hundred dollars. A 1940 Cadillac LaSalle, it only had nineteen thousand miles on it.

Dad wrote an unpublished 1,000-word piece about the vehicle, which he entitled, “The Invisible Car.” In explanation of the title, he wrote:

There's no glimmer of recognition.

Our “car” was unlike anything I had ever seen before. I hadn't even been familiar with the word “hearse,” but soon learned the meaning. I don't recall being that surprised. After all, I slept on a toboggan, while other kids had beds. How was this so unusual?

Describing the hearse years later, Dad said, “It had a pre-Kettering engine, you know, before Kettering
^*
screwed it up.” He claimed the big heavy vehicle got twenty-seven miles per gallon on some stretches of road. My father was known to exaggerate on occasion, but he held firm on this. He said the Cadillac had separate hand and foot throttles, so that the hand throttle could be used as a cruise control to improve fuel efficiency.

The front compartment smelled of dust and old leather. A little electric fan sat on the dashboard, and a cracked leather seat stretched across the front—a seat that was, as Dad wrote, “as darkly blue-black as a pallbearer's suit.” A pair of small glass sliding windows separated this compartment from the rear, so that anyone groaning inside a coffin could probably not be heard.

A week after acquiring the vehicle, Mom announced, “You aren't going to school here in September, Brian. Your father and I will tutor you in Mexico.”

We were going to Mexico in the hearse.

Dad's American Samoa assignment hadn't materialized, so he and Mom were putting together an alternate trip to the tropics, to more familiar climes. It would be a working trip for the benefit of their writing, as on their Kelly Butte adventure and on our earlier trip to Mexico. Dad had been tinkering with a novel based upon a famous Santa Rosa murder case,
^*
which he entitled
Storyship
. He wanted to complete it in Mexico, along with ten or fifteen short stories. Mom planned to rewrite her rejected murder mystery,
Frighten the Mother
.

The hearse, which became like a van or panel truck to our family, was black, with big rounded front fenders. It had chapel-shaped doors and pewter scrolls and candelabra on the sides of the rear compartment. Dad painted the top silver, concurring with Mom's opinion that it would reflect tropical heat better than the original black. He and Mom also painted the chapel doors bright yellow, just for fun. This would distinguish the vehicle (they thought) from a normal working hearse.

Bruce and I received a battery of shots to ward off tropical diseases. Penny, who had been staying with us recently on Marine View Drive, would not go with us.

While making preparations for the trip, Dad enjoyed driving around Tacoma in a dark suit, impersonating an undertaker. At the Cadillac dealership, where he had the car checked and tuned up, he forced the service manager to shake his hand. To his glee, he noticed the fellow then wiped his hand on his coveralls, assuming the hearse driver had been handling bodies. So Dad fiendishly maneuvered another handshake with the poor fellow, and soon afterward saw him make a bee-line for the washroom.

Frank Herbert was not a patient man. In restaurants while waiting for food, he often turned into a grouchy bear. To his delight he discovered that restaurant operators were uncomfortable with a hearse parked outside, and set everything else aside to get food for the driver.

“Wouldn't you prefer take-out, sir?” one manager asked, after Dad went in and requested a table. The manager glanced nervously outside at the long vehicle, parked by the front door.

“No, thank you,” Dad replied, in a halting voice. “My doctor says I need to slow down. I wouldn't want to end up…” He cast a sidelong glance at the hearse. “Well, you know!”

Even fast-food drive-in restaurants accelerated when he drove up. He and Mom liked fried chicken from one take-out place in Tacoma, and over a couple of weeks he pulled up to the window several times to order either two or four complete chicken dinners. It reached the point where he noticed employees running around inside before he even reached the window. Someone would see him pulling in, and the order would go out for chicken.

Around this time, Dad was waiting at a stoplight in the right-hand lane of a four-lane road, an event he described in “The Invisible Car”:

Just before heading for Mexico, Dad bolted a heavy steel ball on the steering wheel of the hearse. The ball, which had been on a number of Herbert-owned cars, resembled a trailer hitch, and was a handy thing to hold onto. But if a driver happened to be wearing long sleeves, the knob could become caught in the sleeve, in the opening by the button. Thus it became commonly known as a “suicide knob.” Despite my father's vast reservoir of knowledge, this important statistical fact eluded him for many years.

As a result, we rode to Mexico in a hearse, and the guy driving it had a suicide knob in his grip.

Into the big heavy vehicle we loaded double-wall cardboard boxes and trunks of our personal property, stacking them up to the bottom of the little sliding glass windows that separated the front and rear compartments. We took an old green Elna sewing machine, a pair of Olympia typewriters, several boxes of typing paper, two footlockers that had been up Kelly Butte by mule, a reel-to-reel tape recorder, tools and spare parts for the car, tape recordings of my parents' favorite music, fishing gear, camera equipment, toys, clothes…and maybe even a kitchen sink somewhere in the midst. Dad brought along a complete medical kit with antibiotics, hypodermics, tourniquets, and snake-bite paraphernalia, as well as several brand-new medical books, including
Cecil's Textbook of Medicine
and the
Merck Manual
.

On top of our belongings, Dad placed a layer of DFPA plywood, and above that several soft blankets. Bruce and I rode back there, with lots of room. I had my cocker spaniel Dusty with me, my best buddy, and he scrambled around happily, licking our faces. In “The Invisible Car,” Dad referred to our hearse as “a traveling arena, a wrestling mat with wheels.”