Dreamer of Dune (18 page)

While in Stockton, Dad wrote a mainstream story entitled “The Iron Maiden,” an amusing yarn with strong sexual content. Approximately 4,500 words long, it was turned down by a number of publishers. Later, Dad would rewrite it under a pseudonym with an anagram surname, Ephraim Therber, but it would fare no better. Editors liked it, but for a variety of reasons, including length and a flat ending, it did not quite fit their needs.

Around this time, Dad also wrote a 12,000-word mainstream story entitled “The Little Window,” about a Greek shoemaker and his young nephew, both of whom worked in a shop below street level. The store had a tiny window in the front, providing a view of the shoes and lower legs of passersby on the sidewalk outside. The shop workers saw everyone in terms of the shoes they wore, and in this story Frank Herbert made a number of interesting psychological comments about different types of people.

The action of the tale concerned a gang of thugs who commandeered the shop with the intention of using it as a base of operations to rob an armored car on its regular rounds in the neighborhood. Here my father was putting on paper a story about an armored car heist that his father had told him.

The protagonist of “The Little Window” was the shoemaker's young nephew, who bore the interesting name Paul—a name that would reappear one day as the protagonist of
Dune
. Earlier, he had also used the name in “Paul's Friend,” the unpublished story of heroics in a South Pacific hurricane.

“The Little Window” was cleverly told, but had length problems. Lurton showed it to a number of magazines, including
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
and
Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine
, since they were purchasing crime, detective and suspense stories. He tried mainstream publications as well, such as
Cosmopolitan
, but no one wanted the story.

I was struck by several scenes near the end of the story. In one, Paul overpowered a young hoodlum and took his rifle, which he then used to shoot the gang leader, who was running across the street. As he aimed at the gang leader, holding the rifle against his shoulder with the elbow out, Paul recalled the words of his army sergeant:
“Lead him a little! Lead him!”
This was from Dad's experiences as a young hunter, when his father and uncles taught him how to shoot running deer and fowl in flight.

After killing the gangster, an act of heroism that protected the lives of innocent people, Paul felt terrible remorse for having taken a life. This was Frank Herbert, speaking from his own heart. During the Depression when he had to hunt to put food on the table, he felt remorse each time he shot game.

It was a philosophy of non-violence that would ultimately lead to his involvement in the movement to stop the war in Vietnam. His anti-war beliefs were directly linked to his ecological writings, including the yet-to-be-written works
Dune
(1965),
The Green Brain
(1966) and
New World or No World
(1970). Wars were devastating not only to people, but in the harm they inflicted upon the environment.

The old shoemaker in “The Little Window,” upon passing by his shop from the outside, looked through the window and saw for the first time how small and dirty the place was. He lamented having spent thirty-one years there with very little to show for it: just a squalid little shop with a little window.

This was a remarkable and poignant metaphor for the life of Frank Herbert up to that point. He was thirty-nine at the time he wrote the story…
thirty-one
years after declaring on his eighth birthday that he wanted to be “a author.” The shoemaker's craft was a metaphor for the writing craft, and the shop window like the window my father had on the world, which he realized was very limited, indeed. The more he researched and studied, the more he realized how much he did not know, and it frustrated him.

He was a man in terrible fear that life was passing him by.

At his best, my father was a stream-of-consciousness writer, putting words on paper that emanated from emotions deep within his being…words that came almost automatically. I don't think he was fully aware of the metaphorical, semi-autobiographical aspects of “The Little Window.” This man made efforts to psychoanalyze other people, but very often failed to perceive his own motivations.

Dad had another short story in search of a publisher around this time. Entitled “A Thorn in the Bush,” it bore surface similarities with
A Game of Authors
. Like
Authors
, it was set in a small Mexican village and involved a mysterious foreigner hiding from the past. This time it was an aging and infamous whorehouse madam from Alaska. The protagonist in “Thorn” was a young painter who fell in love with a beautiful but crippled Mexican girl, under the watchful, protective eye of the ex-madam. The story was seen by a number of publishers, most of whom considered it well-written. Unfortunately the length, at eighteen thousand words, was again cited as a problem. It didn't fit into available spaces.

With the failure to find publishers, my father was coming to believe that Lurton had lost faith in his ability to produce good, marketable manuscripts. Concerning the “Little Window” manuscript, Lurton saw immediately that it was a length that would be difficult to sell, but he wrote that he would “try” to market it nonetheless.

The use of this word, “try” sent my father through the roof. He said anyone using that word was presupposing failure, and in a letter he blasted Lurton. I had heard variations of this diatribe myself, in which Dad picked apart every word I used.

Lurton didn't take it lying down, and told my father he had no one to blame but himself for not adequately analyzing magazine and book markets.

Dad apologized. In his heart of hearts he knew the problem was of his own making, and could not be blamed on anyone else. He was a man in an artistic wilderness struggling to find his voice, struggling to find himself. He couldn't decide about subject matter, length or genre. He waffled between short stories, too-long short stories, too-short novelettes and novels, and between mainstream, crime stories, adventures, mysteries, and science fiction. Intermittently he came up with ideas for television programs. Most of his ideas went nowhere.

Frank Herbert wasn't focused, with one exception. In stops and starts he continued the monumental research for his big novel, the pie-inthe-sky book that might never be pulled together. He refused to copy other styles or formulas, even though they had proven successful to other writers. He wanted to write something entirely different, of uncommon intellectual complexity, in a new form.

In the spring of 1960, Mom used her contacts in the retail advertising field to find an even better job, in a glittering jewel of a city almost due west: San Francisco.

Bruce and I would have to leave school in the middle of the semester, but we were old troopers, having done this before. Penny married a truck driver named Ron Merritt, and they settled in Stockton to raise a family.

The move to the City by the Bay would prove to be very important for my father. It would place him in an oasis of intellectualism and culture, offering far more rewards for his investigative mind than Stockton.

T
HE
S
AN
Francisco Bay Area would ensnare my father with its charms for almost the entire decade of the 1960s. But as we navigated the highway west out of Stockton, I didn't know that, and was considering the benefits of keeping most of my things packed in cardboard boxes in my new room. That way I wouldn't have to continually pack and unpack. How many houses had I lived in now? I had lost count.

Our potato bug–shaped Nash pulled yet another U-Haul trailer. We didn't have everything we owned with us, since a lot of our stuff had been left in storage with Howie in Seattle a couple of years before, and other items had been stored with Ralph and Irene Slattery even longer.

On San Francisco's Potrero Hill, a working-class neighborhood of weathered Victorian row houses, we rented a flat, an entire level on the third floor of one of the houses. Within months we moved into a house that became available next door. Dad quipped that we moved “because we didn't like the neighborhood.” It was a one-story white stucco house, built around 1930, with hardwood maple floors throughout and a red tile roof.

It was not a large house, so Dad set up his roll-top desk in the dining room. The old portable typewriters were getting “long in the tooth” (as he put it when something was past its prime), so he purchased a big Olympia electric typewriter, which was faster than the manual and made a smoother sound as he typed on it.

We had a black wicker couch in the living room, with a round, red-lacquered Chinese coffee table that featured a black dragon design in the center. The table had carved legs that curved outward. When Dad read his manuscripts to Mom in this room he sat on the couch, leaning over pages spread across the Chinese table, while she knitted or crocheted. Every few moments, she took a long drag on a cigarette, causing the tip to flare red-hot. When deep in conversation, she often didn't put the cigarette down, and kept working at it, tapping ashes meticulously into her ashtray.

Within a short time my parents made many intellectual friends in the Bay Area…artists, poets, psychologists, newspapermen, science fiction writers. They came for small dinner parties and retired afterward to the living room, where they talked and drank wine with Mom and Dad far into the night. Above all, my parents resumed their relationship with Jack and Norma Vance, who now lived just across the bay in the Oakland hills. Through the Vances, Dad met the well-known science fiction writer Poul Anderson and his wife, Karen, who lived nearby. The three couples became fast friends, and shared many fine dinners and outings together.

The Chinese coffee table in our living room was a reflection of my father's increasing interest in Eastern culture and thought. In his study and scattered all over the house were books reflecting the wide-ranging diversity of his mind, including philosophy, history, politics, mythology, mathematics, religion, foreign languages, deserts, ecology, mythology, science and technology.

In San Francisco, Mom learned how to make charts and predictions from the
Book of I'Ching
…Chinese astrology. Using this and her other means of prediction, she said to me one day, “Brian, you will marry a blonde” (which turned out to be correct). And after she showed me how the I'Ching worked, I had trouble putting the book down.

She also predicted that she would die one day in a distant land (which also turned out to be right). Afterward she was in the living room with knitting on her lap, lamenting to Dad about this, since she wanted to see so much of the world. It almost seemed amusing to her, but he perceived her fear, because of accurate predictions she had made in the past. During her entire life my mother tap danced with the paranormal. It frightened her, but few other subjects intrigued her as much. So every once in a while, like an addict, she ventured into the dangerous realm of prediction.

Dad kissed her and told her not to worry. “After all, darling,” he said, “Your predictions don't
always
come true!”

She returned to her knitting, but pensively. For my mother, predictions were always considered carefully, never disregarded.

“I don't know
where
I'll die,” Dad said in a cheerful tone, “but I know what I'll be doing. I'll be at a keyboard, pounding out a story.”

Around this time my father was teaching himself Kanji, the linguistic characters of China and Japan. He mixed his own black ink in a stone inkwell and with a fat brush made characters on large sheets of rice paper, true to the artistic technique of those cultures. The paper was thin, and shrank and wrinkled around the lettering.

Shortly after arriving in San Francisco, Dad got rid of the Nash. He negotiated a flat monthly taxi rate to transport Mom to and from the White House department store, where she wrote fashion advertisements. Thereafter at a set time every weekday morning, a green and red Veterans Cab Company car showed up outside. It was a twenty-five minute ride each way to her job at The White House department store. Now, at long last, Dad was free of having to drive her.

I played trumpet in the Everett Junior High School band. Mom liked my horn playing, but Dad had me under orders to practice only when he wasn't writing. Still he must have held some affection for my music (though he never told me so), since he wrote a humorous haiku poem about it. A seventeen-syllable Japanese form of poetry, it went like this:

One day at school I got into a confrontation with a future Hall of Fame football player, the notorious O. J. Simpson. At the age of thirteen, I was in the habit of carrying cheap ball-point pens in my shirt pocket. Sort of a 1960s nerd look, but without a plastic pocket liner or slide rule. I was in the courtyard of the school, and a wiry black kid of around my height pulled the pens out of my pocket and threw them on the ground. I outweighed him, and to me he didn't look very tough. He had two friends with him.

“Pick 'em up,” I said.

“Make me,” the kid said, glaring.

I shoved him, and he shoved back.

“Get him, O. J.,” one of his companions said. “Get that white boy.”

The ensuing fight, which had no clear victor, was soon broken up by a gym teacher. O. J. and I never had another confrontation, and eventually became friendly. We often ran into one another on the 22 Fillmore bus, where we had a number of pleasant conversations.

In the summer of 1960, Dad accepted a position, once more, in the newspaper industry. He became night picture editor with the
San Francisco Examiner
, working the 4:00
P.M
. to midnight shift. The steady old reliable news profession, a fall-back position, offered relative security. With Frank Herbert's tremendous qualifications and abilities in this field, jobs were almost always available to him for the asking—though he often went to great lengths to avoid asking.

The
Examiner
, which Dad and other employees referred to as “The Ex,” was owned by the Hearst Corporation, and was the flagship of the chain, the very first newspaper owned and operated by William Randolph Hearst, Sr. The
Examiner
building was old, solid and colorful, and still a bustle of activity. In newspaper circles, it was considered hallowed ground.

Each weekday, Dad wrote or researched in the mornings and early afternoons. At shortly after 3:00
P.M
., he would walk down to Third Street near Bethlehem Steel, where he caught a city bus. It took him downtown to the
Examiner
building at Third and Market.

“By writing in the mornings, I gave my best energies to myself,” Dad recalled. “The Ex got what was left.”

After he had been on the job a while, he went to the paper's book review editor and made an interesting proposition. In exchange for free books, Dad offered to write book review outlines in his spare time, which could then be fleshed out by the editor.

“I'm a fast reader,” Frank Herbert said, “and when I'm at the typewriter it goes like a machine gun.”

The offer was accepted, and Dad received his pick from carloads of books received by the book review staff. He outlined a wide range of fiction and non-fiction, but the books he wanted to keep were almost entirely non-fiction—works of history (especially Arab history), religion, psychology, ESP, dry land ecology, geology, linguistics, anthropology, botany, navigation…

William Randolph Hearst, Sr., a legendary figure, had worked in the
Examiner
building himself in years past. Traditionally, old newspaper files were kept in what was called the “Morgue.” It wasn't called that on any Hearst paper, however, since “The Old Man” had an abhorrence for anything involving death. On his papers, it was called the “Library.”

After working there six months, Dad was in the
Examiner
library one evening and saw several big photo album–size volumes stacked on a table. Ever-curious, he opened one of the books and was astounded to find original communications from Hearst, who had died in 1951.

Frank Herbert took a deep breath, and looked around. He didn't know where these albums were normally kept, but realized they should not have been left out. He was alone in the library.

If Hearst sent a note, a telegram or a cablegram, they were kept in the albums. These were his Orders, filed chronologically. Some were, in my father's words, “absolutely astounding.” One telegram sent from the Hearst Castle at San Simeon said something like, “Who wrote the headline top of column three, page eight, First Edition Sunday? Fire that man.”

Some telegrams from San Simeon told the city editor to assign a photographer and a reporter. The photographer was needed because he had a car. They were to assemble something like fifty-one halves of roast chicken, twenty-eight orders of coleslaw and sixteen cakes, and put them on the 3:00
P.M
. train to San Simeon. Hearst was having a party.

Dad closed the albums and chuckled softly to himself.

A well-known Sausalito artist named Vargas was a sailing buddy of my father's. Vargas also knew Zen-master Alan Watts, as they were neighbors in Sausalito, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. When Dad expressed an interest in interviewing Watts for an
Examiner
story, Vargas arranged a meeting. This was no ordinary story for my father. He wanted to learn more about the most elusive of all religious philosophies he had encountered, Zen Buddhism. He had read every word Watts had ever written, and had made extensive notes from these and other Zen writings for his desert novel—a novel that still had not reached much beyond the file-building stage. Now Frank Herbert wanted to synthesize the information he had been reading, to hear what a master had to say personally.

Watts lived on the old ferryboat Sausalito, which had been retired and was moored in the picturesque town of that name. A passageway in which one had to bend over led from Watts' quarters to the quarters of another occupant of the ferry, Vargas. My father and Alan Watts were charmed by one another's company, and became friends. Watts used to invite Dad over for dinner and conversation, serving him Oriental food on black and white china in a black and white room.

“It was very Zen,” my father recalled, “but our conversations were catholic, in the universal sense.”

Watts was particularly taken by one of Dad's observations, that a person's personality could be compared with the impurities of a diamond. “A diamond's value is determined by its impurities,” Dad told him.
^*

This was the height of Frank Herbert's oriental period. Aside from the meetings with Watts, the extensive research, the Oriental furniture in our house, the writing of Kanji characters, and fortune telling from the I'Ching, Dad called me “Number One Son,” and Bruce “Number Two Son.” We ate Chinese or Japanese food several times a week. Bruce and I received gifts of Chinese thinking caps and sets of origami paper. Dad hung a calendar from Chinatown on the wall of his study. And he gave Mom a beautiful red and black kimono, which she wore on special occasions.

My father was happy at the
Examiner
, and with the respectable combined income he and Mom were bringing in we were able to live a little better. We owed money to a lot of people, including Dad's Aunt Peg, Mom's Aunt Ruth, Jack Vance, Dad's former wife, Flora, businesses in the various towns in which we had lived, and last, but certainly not least, the IRS. Mom established a careful budget, and made regular monthly payments to repay our debts.

In 1961, Dad went on a health food binge, stocking the shelves and refrigerator with an array of foods that Bruce and I loathed, including oriental herbs, tofu and beef tongue. Convinced that beef tongue provided more nutrients and proteins than any other form of meat, he forced us to eat the foul substance in a variety of forms, including tongue sandwiches with mayonnaise on the bread and a tongue stew—both of which made me gag worse than green clam guts. I hated any form of tongue, especially the texture of the meat, which had sickening little bumps on it.

Our father also began consuming large quantities of vitamin pills (particularly vitamin C), and loaded up on brewer's yeast, which he sprinkled on many of the meals we ate. The latter had a rather strong flavor, but I got used to it and even grew to favor it. Dad said it gave us more energy. He extolled the virtues of honey as a natural source of energy, and kept several varieties of it in the kitchen. Bruce and I protested (to no avail) having to drink a nasty mixture of vinegar and honey, which Dad served to us at breakfast.

Every once in a while, Bruce or I didn't heed one of the oft-repeated rules of our father's house, and crumbs got into one of the honey jars.

“Who got crumbs in the honey?” Dad would shout, at the top of his lungs.

Uh oh
, the guilty party would think.