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:
…Nobody looks at a hearse unless he absolutely has to. They see you, but they don’t look. The eyes refuse to change focus.
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 t
his 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”:
Up from behind came a hot rod packed with eight teenagers. They turned the corner behind me on two wheels, thundered to a stop in the lane at my left. I looked down, met eight pairs of staring eyes.
“Drive carefully,” I said, voice sepulcher.
The light turned green.
Gently, with the most delicate and sedate application of throttle, they eased across the intersection.
I chose that moment to prove the Invisible Car would go from stop to sixty-five in nine seconds.
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.”
He installed a top rack on the hearse, where we carried a spare tire. Two gray canvas water bags were tied to the grill, draped across the front.
Since we were moving out of the rental house, arrangements had to be made for every article of personal property we owned. Items were sold or donated to charity, books were left in storage with friends, and clothing and other articles were shipped to Penny in Florence, Oregon, along with a child-support check for her mother.
On the September morning that we set out, Dad was in an incredibly good mood, singing and making witty quips about road signs. Whenever he saw a sign that read “Stop Ahead,” he exclaimed, “Stop! A head in the road!”
Dad did all the driving, since Mom was afraid to drive and didn’t have a license. As the days wore on, he grew tired and increasingly testy, largely because Dusty was not waiting for rest stops to do his doggy duty. Instead he picked a corner in the back, and by the second day a distinct, unpleasant aroma wafted from that vicinity. His feces and urine had soaked through the blankets, and some got around the plywood onto our things below. By the time we reached Ralph and Irene Slattery’s place in Sonoma, California, Mom and Dad had endured enough of Dusty. They arranged to leave him with the Slatterys.
The hearse had a tendency to slip out of low gear, from having been driven in first gear during so many funeral processions. Dad had to hold the gear shift down at times to keep it from popping out of place. Sometimes when he wanted to keep the hearse in low gear he had Bruce or me hold the gear shift down, pressing on it so that it wouldn’t slip. It was a “three on a tree” shift on the right side of the steering column.
I remember warm California and Southwest nights on the highway, with my parents’ heads silhouetted against low evening light, from headlights on the road. There were flea-bitten motel rooms with no air conditioning and the windows left open. Crickets sang outside, and I smelled dry grass, cattle, fertilizers, and warm, sweltering earth.
At the border, the Mexican officers performed a cursory inspection of our belongings. Luckily they didn’t remove the door panels, or they would have discovered Dad’s concealed automatic pistol, which he carried for protection.
As our hearse rolled through Mexico on its journey south, peasants fell to their knees or held straw hats over their hearts. Devout Catholics, they undoubtedly thought we were carrying a poor departed soul on its final earthly journey. As soon as we left the first village in which this occurred and were on the open highway, Dad and Mom broke out laughing. They laughed so hard that tears streamed down their faces, and Dad had to pull the car over.
We didn’t have much money with us, only around $3,000 in U.S. currency and traveler’s checks. But prices were so low that we could live quite well, much better than in the United States. Some of the Mexican hotels in which we stayed were almost palatial, with floral-decked central patios and fine furnishings.
Dad was sure he would be able to write in Mexico to boost our monetary reserve, though years later he would refer to this belief as founded in myth. One day he would become a student of modern mythology and its correlation with individual and mass psychology. Myths were all around us, he said. The myth of owning a sailboat or a ranch, for example, or of being a great writer without having to work hard at the craft.
Or the idyllic myth he found himself seeking now, after the brief Mexican jaunt of 1953 and the failed American Samoa attempt. Frank Herbert now envisioned himself in a remote tropical village, pounding out a literary masterpiece on a manual typewriter.
He’d sold several short stories in 1954. There were fewer short story sales in 1955, but that year he made the important novel sale, Under Pressure. And before leaving for Mexico, he received word from his agent that a movie producer was interested in the book.
We passed through the bustling shopping town of Toluca, just west of Mexico City, then followed a highway northwest. Our destination was the mountain village of Tlalpujahua in the state of Michoacán. This had been recommended by Mike Cunningham, an American friend with whom we had rendezvoused in the last few days. He drove ahead of us in his old wood-paneled station wagon, kicking up clouds of dust on a long dirt road leading to the village.
Near Tlalpujahua the road narrowed and jungle closed in around us. A number of houses dotted the overgrowth, in tiny carved-out clearings. Some were tin-roofed shacks while others were constructed of more sturdy adobe, with tile roofs. Many had outdoor kitchens in the form of lean-to arrangements against the houses. I smelled the acrid odor of cookfires from the burning of dry brush, grass and burro dung. Daylight faded and after dark we arrived in Tlalpujahua, where we stayed with a friend of Mike’s.
Soon we rented a one-story adobe and white stucco house with a wrought-iron gate and a heavy, carved wooden door. It was set up in a U-shaped arrangement of rooms around a central outdoor courtyard. The fourteen-room home belonged to Señorita Francìsca Aguìlar, a large woman known as “Señorita Panchita.” Since costs were so low, we could afford to hire a maid, a live-in cook and a gardener.
Almost every day, Dad wrote from early in the morning until early afternoon, on Storyship (alternate title As Heaven Made Him), his novel about the Santa Rosa murder case. Dealing with the legal definition of sanity and the responsibility of a criminal for his acts, the novel had both moral and political content, making it potentially pedantic.
Each day, Mom set up her own portable typewriter on the dining room table and worked on revisions to her mystery novel, Frighten the Mother. She didn’t put in as many hours as Dad, since she spent more time than he in managing household affairs, including the household help and the children. Unfortunately, she was having trouble with the story.
When my parents’
work was finished for the day they enjoyed taking walks through town together. I remember playing marbles and looking up to see them across the street holding hands and talking. They waved to me and smiled, and went on their way. They had a spot they liked to visit at sunset, where they could look across the burnt orange tile roofs of the town at a magnificent sky filled with color.
As in every other place we lived, the mail was critically important to my father. Here it was more essential than ever, since we had no telephone. Contract offers, documents and checks were expected to arrive in the mail, he told us, and for that reason all mail was to be treated with extreme care. We got to know our mailman, Jesus Chako, very well. A slender, affable man, he was always punctual. When he delivered a check one day in payment for an article Dad had written ($125 U.S.) my father said to my mother, “Jesus brings manna from Heaven!”
Unfortunately, Doubleday mailed the galley proof of Under Pressure to our previous address in Tacoma, and it wasn’t forwarded to us in Mexico. Consequently, a duplicate galley had to be mailed to Dad. This became a matter of extreme urgency due to the publisher’s schedule, so the moment Dad had the galley, he worked without sleep until it was corrected and in the mail back to New York.
Doubleday did not like the title Under Pressure, and asked the author for an alternate. He preferred the original title, but suggested The Dragon in the Sea nonetheless, which was used for the hardcover Doubleday edition. In many respects the new title was superior, for the mythology it suggested. There is an ancient Chinese legend concerning a ferocious, terrifying “dragon that lives in the sea.” The Bible (Isaiah 27:1) contains a similar description: “…and (the Lord) shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.” These passages, particularly the latter for Western readers, added subconscious depth and meaning to the title. In my father’s tale, the “dragon” was a nuclear-powered subtug that transported precious oil through wartime waters, a craft that guarded the cargo against anyone who would harm it. This craft was reminiscent of mythological beasts of legend guarding a great treasure.
Dreamer of Dune Page 11