Dreamer of Dune (25 page)

Just before our baby's birth, when we knew delivery was imminent, I got my license back and was driving Jan from Marin County to the hospital in San Francisco. At the exact same time, Dad was in an ambulance on the way to a different hospital. A short while before, he and Mom had been at the SFO Heliport in Sausalito, disembarking from a helicopter after a trip to Santa Barbara for one of Mom's
Plan Ahead
projects. On a pathway at the heliport, a speeding baggage cart ran into my father, knocking him down and reinjuring his back. He was in excruciating pain, and had to be transported on a stretcher.

It was an insane time in the United States and in our family. Only four days before, Martin Luther King, Jr., had been assassinated, and now race riots were sweeping the country. Soon Robert Kennedy would be gunned down, too. As Mom and Dad flew over San Francisco on their return from Santa Barbara, she looked down. Not seeing flames she thought,
Thank God it's okay.

Dad began a new regimen of back therapy, with heavy doses of Valium for his pain. His back would never fully recover, and in bed each night he would have to arrange pillows in a special way, jamming them beneath the mattress to alleviate his pain.

Later in 1968, both of my grandfathers died—Frank Herbert, Sr., and Roscoe Stuart—and my mother broke her ankle. The year was incredibly bad, with two exceptions—the birth of our beautiful daughter and the increasing popularity of
Dune
. The book was growing by word of mouth, principally on college campuses, where it was being used as a textbook for many courses. Since
Dune
was an anti-establishment work, it was being referred to as an “underground” book.

Dad received word that
The Santaroga Barrier
was also being used as a textbook in a number of college-level classes—and that the sales of this book were increasing on the coattails of
Dune
.

The popularity of my father's work among bright college students pleased him. As a writer of science fiction, he wanted the leaders of tomorrow to receive his important messages, and his predictions. If they understood what he was talking about, he firmly believed the world would be a better place.

For a small amount of money, a German publisher purchased the right to publish
Dune
in that country, extending the international list to three—Great Britain, France and now Germany.

Favorable reviews began to trickle in on
Dune
. It was referred to as an environmental handbook in disguise, with intriguing characterizations and fantastic imagery.

Dad finished
Dune Messiah
in the summer of 1968, more than six months later than expected because of the injuries and deaths in our family. Despite the increasing international respect for
Dune
, John Campbell refused to serialize its sequel in
Analog
. His readers wanted stories about heroes accomplishing great feats, he said, not stories of protagonists spiraling into oblivion. He didn't like the strong anti-hero theme in the book, giving the protagonist “clay feet.”

After I graduated from Cal Berkeley that year I went to work as an underwriter for Fireman's Fund American Insurance Co. in San Francisco. At the time my father was not a role model for me, and I had no thoughts of following in his footsteps. My creativity, which I had shown at an early age in artwork and in the writing of childish stories, was virtually non-existent at this point in my life. I felt that if a person had to be like my father to be creative, I didn't want that life. Writing was a profession for crazy people with out-of-control tempers. It was for flakes and penniless bohemians, living on the fringes of society.

My feelings of antipathy toward my father, justified or not, sent me reeling into an anti-intellectual, alcoholic period in which I opposed most of the things he represented. I would spend my first years in insurance as a “functioning alcoholic,” reading little except insurance manuals and policies—a far cry from the intellectual world in which Frank Herbert lived. I held down steady jobs, showed up for work each day and performed what was expected of me—but on a regular basis I drank myself into comatose states. My marriage hung on, but only tenuously.

By the end of the 1960s, California was becoming too crowded for my father. Whenever he went fishing, he kept encountering rambunctious young people who were water skiing, throwing beer cans, and making love in the bushes. He began thinking about the Pacific Northwest again, and so did my mother, for she was a Northwesterner, too. Washington State was their Tara, glistening brightly in memory, and they realized they had to return.

Frank Herbert was a futurist who could see decades and millennia ahead, predicting the course of mankind and the planet Earth. Eventually, he would see many of his shorter-term predictions come to pass. But thus far, at the age of forty-eight, he had not done well in predicting the course of his own life. For years, he had been moving from city to city and state to state, making changes for the sake of change. Now he felt better than ever before about a move.

My parents listed their Fairfax and Cloverdale properties, which sold quickly, and sold other personal property as well. In order to give them time to wrap matters up in the Bay Area, they moved with my brother Bruce (who was seventeen) into a nice apartment on Post Street in downtown San Francisco.

While living there, Dad gave notice of his intent to leave the
Examiner
. The publisher, Ed Dooley, took him out for what Dad referred to as a “three-martini lunch” at a nice restaurant on Geary Boulevard in San Francisco. After ordering, Dooley said, “Frank, you shouldn't quit. I pulled your file this morning. Do you realize you'll lose all your retirement benefits—twenty-four thousand dollars?”

“I'm not even thinking about that.”

My father went on to tell him he needed to leave the Bay Area for the sake of his sanity. “
Dune
sales keep increasing,” he said. “The sequel is about to be published and I have the completion of the trilogy in the works. Ed, I think I can be writing full-time within a year. When I break free for good—and you need to understand
I will break free
—I want to live in the Northwest.”

Dad wasn't telling him the whole story, that he still wasn't earning much money from his writing. In the last royalty year, 1968, he received less writing income than in any year since 1964. His last attempt to leave the paper, a short-lived one, had been in 1964.

Ed Dooley stirred his drink, looked up and said, sadly, “You've done an incredible job at the paper, Frank, and we all think the world of you. In five years, you could be sitting in my chair.”

“Ed, I'm truly sorry. You've been wonderful to me, like a father. I'd like to stay, but honestly, I can't afford to.”

They parted as friends.

Frank Herbert accepted the position of education editor at the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
. This job, involving close contacts with the University of Washington, seemed perfect to my father. It was a stepping stone toward what he hoped to do soon—breaking away and writing full time. Mom would continue to write for
Plan Ahead
in the Pacific Northwest, and this income would help set up their new homestead.

When my parents and Bruce reached Seattle, they rented an apartment on Queen Anne Hill—in the same neighborhood in which my mother had spent much of her childhood.

My parents' large apartment was on the top floor of an elegant old mansion, a white structure with massive Greek columns. Perched on the edge of the hill, it provided a fabulous view of downtown Seattle, including the Space Needle and Elliott Bay. Referred to locally as “Cap Ballard's house,” it had once been owned by a famous local personality, Captain William R. Ballard. It had a widow's walk on top, an architectural feature said to have been designed so that a wife could look out to sea, watching for the return of her husband.

The house was absolutely perfect, with the nautical atmosphere my father loved, in an area where my mother had been happy as a child. Soon they bought a thirty-foot cabin cruiser (which they named “Arrakis” after the Imperial name for the planet Dune), and they were taking trips all over the Puget Sound.

They were home, back to my father's Tara.

Another of Frank Herbert's dreams was coming to pass as well, the dream of being a successful author. There had been so many years of research and writing, of rejection, of anger and frustration, of not taking vacations, of burrowing deep into the confines of his study. But through it all, when he really got rolling, his typewriter sang. He made music on it, made love to it, with his fingers floating over the keys, faster and faster and faster. He focused his entire essence on each work, this man who knew so well how to work and only intermittently how to love.

In
Dune
he had his literary prize, and a glittering prize it was. Immense fame awaited him just around the corner. Tens of millions of copies would be sold all over the world, in many languages. Decades after its first publication, the book would remain in print, standing as the greatest work of science fiction imagination of all time—a classic novel in which an entire universe was described in tremendous detail. Not bad for a farm kid from Washington State.

Dune
, a modern version of the ancient Pearl of Great Price myth, is a magnificent pearl of a novel with layers of luster running deep beneath its surface, all the way to its core. During the time that Dad took to create this pearl, a pearl that was nearly as complex as he was, he guarded his writing lair against interruptions, preventing harm to his treasure, his great book. He was like Shai-Hulud guarding the melange of the planet Dune.

In taking this course he lost the affection of his sons. We didn't bond with him. He wasn't our role model. I nearly killed myself with alcohol. My younger brother, believing his father disliked him, was experimenting with drugs and homosexuality. Of his children, only Penny did not have strong feelings of antipathy toward him.

But in a good novel, the kind my father wrote, the best and most interesting characters change. They evolve over the course of the story. Frank Herbert, a complex and unpredictable man, would change one day…forever to his credit.

M
Y FATHER
was one of the most interesting men in the world. His writing was only part of that, a dimension of the man. He had other aspects, fascinating ones. Of all the complex characterizations he drew in his stories, including that of Paul-Muad'Dib, Frank Herbert was a more complicated person. He was not a man to be understood readily, not a man easily read.

By long-distance telephone from my apartment in San Francisco to Dad's in Seattle, he and I made something of a truce, without either of us apologizing. We didn't speak of our last confrontation, an argument over my drinking, and went on from there rather uneasily, talking instead about various family matters. How my brother Bruce was doing, and my sister Penny and her husband, Ron, who now had three sons, David, Byron and Robert. Dad said it was beautiful in Seattle, that he was glad to be home.

Then my father surprised me by asking if I might consider moving north.

“Maybe,” I said.

The month Frank Herbert arrived in Seattle, astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the moon. In a subsequent conversation I had with Dad, he told me of his tremendous excitement about that. And he added a bit of practicality: “We have to get off this planet. We can't have all our eggs in one basket.”

In his position as education editor for the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer,
Dad met interesting people on the University of Washington beat, including the world's leading expert on land law and land reform, law professor Roy Prosterman. Prosterman invited his new friend to accompany him to South Vietnam to study land ownership, farming methods and problems of overpopulation—all areas of keen interest to my father.

Only six weeks after arriving in Seattle, Frank Herbert–the-adventurer had been inoculated against Third World diseases and was on his way to South Vietnam as a war correspondent for Hearst Headline Service—on the payroll of the
Post-Intelligencer
.

Shortly after his departure I called to see how Mom was doing. She sounded despondent, lonely. “I feel strange when your father's away,” she said. “As if a light around me has dimmed.” She said she missed his energy around her, his constant ebullience. When she arose in the morning she no longer heard his typewriter clacking rapidly from another room, a sound which for its comfort and familiarity had become music to her ears. She no longer felt his embrace or, when she was tired, the loving way he massaged her shoulders.

It was a time of heavy U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and more than thirty thousand Americans had already been killed in action. Many Americans were vocally opposed to U.S. participation in the conflict, and thousands had been taking to the streets in protest. Dad stayed at the USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development) VIP House in Saigon, where visiting U.S. senators and congressmen were housed. He was assigned a car and driver, and his Hearst press credentials permitted him access to the most important people in the country. He also received the assistance of American military pilots, who provided air taxi service, taking him almost anywhere he wanted to go.

Now for Hearst Headline Service he wrote of a bungled U.S. war effort in the region, asserting that our policy was poorly thought out and based upon faulty data and incorrect assumptions. As a result, he said, thousands of Americans were dying. His stories ran daily in the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
for the two weeks he was on assignment. Each morning Mom read them and clipped them out.

Frank Herbert was, at various times, both a war protester and, almost paradoxically, a member of the National Rifle Association. It is important to understand that he was not opposed to all wars, although he could certainly see the folly of most of them. Wars had a tendency to destroy the habitat of mankind, he thought, the Earth-nest. One of his unpublished poems speaks to this point of view, and of the resilience of nature:

Just prior to the publication of
Dune Messiah
in hardcover by Putnam, it ran in five installments in the science fiction magazine
Galaxy,
from July through November, 1969. “The Mind Bomb,” a Frank Herbert short story, also ran that year in the October issue of
If
magazine.

The serialized
Dune Messiah
was named “disappointment of the year” for 1969 by National Lampoon, Harvard University's satirical magazine.
Messiah
had earlier been rejected by legendary
Analog
editor John W. Campbell, who, like the Lampooners, loved the heroic aspects of
Dune
and hated the anti-heroic elements of the sequel. They did not understand that
Messiah
was a bridging work, connecting
Dune
with an as-yet-uncompleted third book in the trilogy.
Messiah
flipped
Dune
over, revealing the dark side of a messiah phenomenon that had appeared to be so glorious in
Dune
. Many readers didn't want this dose of reality; they couldn't stand the destruction of their beloved, charismatic hero, Paul Muad'Dib.

Dad was not entirely deaf to his readership. In
Dune
he had killed off the popular Swordmaster of the Ginaz, Duncan Idaho. This upset fans so much that he resurrected Idaho in
Dune Messiah
in an altered form—a “ghola” that was cloned from cells of the dead man, resulting in a creature that did not have the memories of the original.
^*

In
Messiah
my father wrote of the dangers of following any leader blindly. And during impassioned speeches on university campuses all across the country, he warned young people not to trust government, telling them that the American founding fathers understood this and attempted to establish safeguards in the constitution.

“Governments lie,” my father said.

In the transition from
Dune
to
Dune Messiah
, Dad accomplished something of a sleight of hand. In the sequel, while emphasizing the actions of the heroic leader, Paul Muad'Dib, as he had done in
Dune
, the author was also orchestrating monumental background changes and dangers, involving machinations of the people surrounding that leader. These people would vie for position to become closest to Paul; they would secure for themselves as much power as possible, and would misuse that power.

Many critics didn't understand this subtle message and lambasted the book.

Through it all,
Dune
continued to increase its readership. Readers passed dog-eared copies back and forth, and word got around. They loved the novel so much that they read it over and over, discovering something new on each pass through. One fan claimed to have read the book forty-three times!

Four years after publication in novel form,
Dune
received what Dad considered to be its first “really perceptive” review, from Reyner Banham of New Society London. Banham loved the novel, and tabbed it as the next great cult book after Tolkien's
Lord of The Rings
. The first
Whole Earth Catalog
in 1969 included a big spread on
Dune
, presenting it as a revolutionary ecological handbook couched in a “rich and re-readable fantasy.” The catalog sold paperback copies of
Dune
at ninety-five cents apiece, giving sales of the novel a sharp kick upward.

In January 1970, my insurance company transferred me to Seattle. This was at my request, for I had been born in Seattle. The move felt comfortable to me. Beyond that, I had been missing my parents, even Dad. The abuses of neglect and overzealous discipline that he had visited upon me in my childhood were fading in memory, and I was trying to be positive about him.

When we visited their home on a frosty, clear day, Dad was wearing a rust-red sweater that Mom had made for him. His full, slightly wavy beard was freshly trimmed, giving him a professorial appearance. His alert, youthful blue eyes had Santa Claus crinkles around them. His movements were energetic, belying his forty-nine years.

My mother's dark brown hair was cut stylishly short. Her eyes were a darker shade of blue than his, and with her nearly round, gentle face and quiet ways, she was the perfect complement to his dynamism. Each of them wore a simple gold wedding band. I always felt a sense of permanence about their relationship when I looked at those rings exchanged at their marriage in 1946—that no matter the vicissitudes of life, their rings would never change, would never be removed.

During dinner Dad told some of his favorite jokes and anecdotes. In the telling of a story, he often switched between characters, and if they were ethnic he mimicked their accents, usually quite well. His accents could range among various ethnicities, and this evening he told a rollicking tale of three retired British officers. At the conclusion of the story we all laughed heartily. When Dad laughed he invariably took a couple of extra gulps at the end, like an earthquake with ensuing tremors.

I sipped my red wine and gazed out upon Seattle, at the sparkling lights of the city. Beyond the Space Needle a harbor tour boat, brightly illuminated and filled with revelers, plied the waters of Elliott Bay, heading out toward Bainbridge Island. From an early age, I used to listen to my father's wondrous array of amusing and interesting stories as he regaled friends. He never told them directly to me or to my siblings, so whenever I heard them I felt like an eavesdropper, hanging around on the fringes. Now, for the first time, he was telling the stories to me. I was no longer a child, but was an adult with a wife and a child and all of the rights attached thereto.

As time passed I established a new relationship with my father. Both he and my mother became more than parents. They became friends to Jan and to me. But Dad was so busy, with public appearances and writing deadlines, that we had to make appointments to see him, fitting ourselves into available niches in his calendar. It wasn't a relationship where we could just pop over to their place unannounced.

As Dad's schedule permitted, we made occasional trips with them to the beach, to the woods, and out on boats. Above all, there were wonderful dinners, many of them prepared by my mother and father. Both had become, in recent years, gourmet chefs. At every sitting, Dad told marvelous stories in his rich, full-bodied voice, peppered frequently with his deep, contagious laughter. The voice that had once seemed so objectionable to me from the stern discipline it imparted was now quite the opposite, a source of delight.

At times, even when my father was being kind to me, I had difficulty shaking childhood memories of him towering over me with his hand upraised and voice thundering. I tried not to think of such things, but I needed to talk with him about them, to clear the air. But with someone as dominant as this man, that was not an easy task. Reluctantly, I set it aside.

On an adult level I began to see sides of my father I had not previously noticed. He dominated every conversation, even when a room was full of people, and sometimes I found his ego hard to bear. But that was his way, and he was, after all, the most interesting person any of us knew.

Whenever Jan or I had important announcements to make to my parents—something to do with our personal lives—such news would receive a few moments of polite, often excited reception from them. Then Jan and I would listen with rapt interest for hours to the thrilling events of their lives. At times this made us feel comparatively insignificant, but such thoughts were fleeting and of little concern to us.

Dad's criticisms of me were gentler than in earlier years, more considerate and better thought out. I came to realize that it had more than a little to do with my age, and that this man could relate better to adults than to children. He had little patience for the activities of the young, for their hyperactivity, for their loud and importunate behavior.

Also I was no longer living with him, which must have helped immensely. The plethora of personal habits that can irritate a housemate weren't occurring. With breathing room our relationship was beginning to look as if it might stand a chance.

Conversely, there were large sparks flying between Dad and Bruce, almost every time I saw them together. Bruce was eighteen, of an age when he instinctively wanted to break away. Around 5'10" and slender, with long brown hair, he was speaking his mind more freely to Dad, venting previously pent-up hostilities. Bruce had also developed an intelligent procedure of minimizing confrontations with Dad by coming in the back door and heading straight for his room.

My brother's feelings of attraction toward other males were mixed with feelings that he should be attracted to women, that he should behave in socially accepted ways. He took girls to high school proms and other dates and had one particular girlfriend for a time, an intelligent young woman with round eyeglasses.

But Bruce was experimenting with amphetamines, getting “high” on a regular basis. He told me of a dinner one evening with my parents when he was so high that he laughed at everything they said. They didn't comment on his behavior, perhaps thinking it was only the wine that was served with the meal. Or perhaps, as Bruce suspected, our mother “turned her head” on this occasion and others, not wanting to see, not wanting to face the possibility that her second son was on a destructive path.

When University of Washington students gathered in opposition to the Cambodian War, my father the
Post-Intelligencer
education editor was in their midst, as supporter and reporter. The protesters commandeered the I-5 freeway through Seattle, preventing cars from using it while they marched on the federal courthouse, an army without arms.

Some months earlier, a Los Angeles community group concerned about air pollution had paid for Dad's services as an expert consultant. At one of their meetings, the conversation kept returning to the internal combustion engine as the primary cause of dirty air.