Dad was a risk-taker—one of the features of his personality that made him interesting. But bald tires and a suicide knob on a dangerous mountain road? In a hearse? He had to be pushing his luck!
Chapter 10
Easy Pie
EARLY IN 1956, the Herbert hearse limped into Portland, Oregon, and we rented a tiny one-story house on the north side, not far from the St. Johns Bridge. Pepe Muñoz (known as Joe Muñoz now) stayed with us, and worked at a local cabinet shop as a carpenter. Money was tight. Dad and Mom set about trying to obtain “real” jobs. They were finding it too difficult to make ends meet as writers. Still, my father was on a course that would one day lead to success.
From an early stage of his writing, Frank Herbert was tuned-in to the problem of finite resources on this planet. At a time of increasing and wasteful consumer consumption in the United States, he saw, quite accurately, that it could not last forever. In The Dragon in the Sea he predicted the global oil shortage that would occur two decades later. One day in Dune he would make similar predictions about finite resources, particularly water.* In creating these novels, he asked himself the question, “What if?” Extrapolating from conditions that existed at the time, he envisioned worlds of startling, frightening clarity.
Submariners contacted my father over the years and told him that Dragon accurately depicted the psychological pressures of undersea crewmen—despite the fact that the author had never served on a submarine. This ability to imagine conditions he had never experienced would serve Frank Herbert well later in the creation of Dune.
But Portland in 1956 was nearly a decade before Dune, and fifteen years before book sales would begin to take off for Frank Herbert. We were poor, a not-uncommon experience for artists and writers who are ahead of their time.
All in all, Dragon was doing fairly well for a first novel, although it was not earning the kind of money needed to support a family. Reviews, those few that appeared, were favorable. Based upon the book, Dad was nominated, but did not win, in the category of “Most Promising New Author” at the 1956 World Science Fiction Convention.*
No one wanted to publish his new 40,000-word novel Storyship, a book in which he had placed a lot of hope. For a while, Amazing Stories considered running a magazine serial on it, if Dad could trim it to 30,000 words. They were offering what Lurton referred to derisively as “salvage money”—only $400. Lurton was opposed to accepting this, and recommended instead adding 10,000 words to the length, since 50,000 words would put it into a length preferred by pocket books. The pockets would pay more as well, he said, and there would be more prestige in publishing it as a novel than in a chopped-up serial form.
Dad was in a quandary. He went over the manuscript again and decided to go against Lurton’s advice. Amazing’s offer was a “bird in the hand,” Dad felt. Besides that, he said, the story didn’t seem “stretchable” to him. He told Lurton to contact Amazing, and a verbal agreement was reached. If the required number of words were cut they promised to look at the story again, and in all likelihood would publish it.
My father set to work on the rewrite, and within a few weeks had it in the mail. Amazing delayed, and ultimately decided against publishing the story at all. Dad was furious, and tossed the butchered manuscript in the back of a closet. For many years, he refused to look at it again. Ultimately, it became part of his 1968 novel, The Heaven Makers.
Most of Storyship was written in Mexico, and the project’s failure put a damper on future exotic trips. Thus far, neither tropical sojourn had worked out creatively, exposing the fallacy of such trips to him. He began to recognize them for the myths that they were.
Bits and pieces of the Mexican experience did find their way into Frank Herbert’s writing over the years. In the short story “You Take the High Road” (Astounding Science Fiction, May 1958), the towns on an alien planet had cobblestone central marketplaces. A decade later, he would publish a non-fiction newspaper piece about shopping in Mexico, but most of all, Mexican scenes and descriptions appeared in unpublished stories—stories he couldn’t sell for one reason or another.
In the 1950s, Dad didn’t fully commit himself to science fiction. He displayed flashes of brilliance in the genre, earning accolades, but then withdrew or changed direction, turning instead to mainstream stories he hoped would sell to Saturday Evening Post, The New Yorker, Life, or Reader’s Digest. Increasingly he tried to get away from science fiction, feeling it was dominated by the pulps and inane monster films. With his intellectual leanings, he didn’t want to be identified with nonsensical non-literature, didn’t want to have to keep explaining to people that he didn’t write the trashy material known as “sci-fi,” that he wrote instead a more sophisticated, thinking-man’s variety.
Still, deep in his heart, he loved the elbow room afforded by science fiction. It was a field where his imagination could stretch to the limits. And this was a man of remarkable imagination. In science fiction he could write allegories filled with symbolism.
In 1956 we owed money to the IRS that we were unable to pay. After receiving his advance on The Dragon in the Sea the year before, Dad didn’t think of setting aside funds for the payment of taxes on this income. Naively, he and Mom just took off for Mexico, thinking only of the adventures ahead of them. Any thoughts of income taxes were only vagrant, soon slipping away. There would be future story sales anyway, they reasoned, and everything would take care of itself.
Now with that myth shattered, old bill collectors and their attorneys were contacting us, demanding money. Again, Flora wanted past due child-support payments. Around the house my father kept saying we were “broke,” or, even worse, “flat broke.” On those rare occasions when we had people over for dinner, Dad used a code phrase with us. If there was not enough food for us to have second helpings, he would say, “FHB, NMIK”—which meant, “Family hold back, no more in kitchen.” On the other hand, if we could have seconds, he would utter the much more blissful letters, “MIK”—“More in kitchen.”
Mom found a job as a fashion advertising copywriter for a large department store in town, Olds & King. Since it was an election year, Dad accepted a speech writer position with Phil Hitchcock, who was running in the Republican primary for U.S. Senator from Oregon. Hitchcock was a professor at Lewis & Clark College in Oregon and a state senator since 1948. He had been a Republican candidate for U.S. Senator in 1954, before Guy Cordon beat him in the Republican primary. Now it was two years later, with another primary election coming up, and he was facing former Secretary of the Interior Douglas McKay for the Republican nomination. McKay had also been an Oregon state senator and governor of the state. He was a formidable opponent. Unfortunately, Hitchcock lost the May 18, 1956, primary election to McKay, so once more Frank Herbert was out of a job.
Joe Muñoz was rarely around because of his job and busy social calendar. He was dating blonde American girls, and life was good for him. He smoked little black cigarettes. Every month he sent money back to his family in Mexico.
It was a time of stress for our family, and I was not getting along with my father. A pattern of severe discipline from Dad set in—a resumption of our relationship before the last Mexico trip. Now it was worse than ever. If Dad was writing when I arrived home from school, I had to tiptoe around the house. It wasn’t a very big house, so I had to be especially careful.
Sometimes I came around the house and heard music playing from inside. Dad developed the habit of writing to music, played on a large reel-to-reel tape deck in his study. With this buffer of sound between him and me, I would open the front door quietly and creep into my room, or would lie on the floor in the living room with a book, listening to the music. It was powerful, vibrant material—Brahms, Vivaldi, Beethoven, Gershwin. Even “Peter and the Wolf,” which I especially enjoyed.
When The Dragon in the Sea was printed by Doubleday in hardcover, Dad entered my room and handed me a signed copy. A slender black volume with yellow lettering on the spine, it had a bright blue, yellow
and black dust jacket and bore a $2.95 retail price. He dedicated the story to the men of the United States Submarine Service.
In reflection of the gap between us, perhaps, Dad penned this inscription to me on the flyleaf at the beginning of the book:
To Number One Son—In hopes it will help him along the complicated path of understanding his father.
Frank Herbert
After he left my room, I glanced at the first page and noted something about an Ensign Ramsey who looked like “a grown-up Tom Sawyer,” but didn’t read further for many years. Still, I kept his book on a little bookshelf in my room, in plain view.
Frank Herbert demanded truth in government, consumer affairs, and environmental issues. He did not tolerate evasiveness, omissions or half-truths. His blue eyes did not avert when he spoke to you. In the coming decade, in Dune, he would write of “Truthsayers,” remarkable witches who could determine truth or falsehood from watching and listening to a person.
Dad was, by his own admission, a man obsessed with “turning over stones to see what would scurry out”—with unmasking lies. This was evident in his dealings with his children.
He had a World War II lie detector, a U.S. Navy unit. A small black box with a dial, it had ominous wires and a gray cuff that he wrapped tightly around my arm. The first time he used the machine on me, he accused me of secretly hitting my brother, and he was going to get the truth out of me. He said the lie detector always revealed falsehood, which was not, as I would learn later, exactly the case.
Admittedly I was lying about hitting my brother, and the machine indicated this, so I got a licking. After that he used the lie detector on me regularly, and on Bruce. If anything came up, such as an item missing from his desk or questions about where I had been after school, he would say, in a clipped voice, “I’m putting you on the lie detector. Let’s go in the other room.”
With that, he would grab my arm and lead me to the machine. On the way, I broke out in a sweat, rehearsing what I would say and how I would say it. Would he ask such and such? My mind was awhirl, full of terror.
The machine was kept in his study, and he only brought it out when I was in trouble. It was set up on a wooden table, with two straight-back chairs pulled up to it, one on each side.
He pointed to one of the chairs, and I slipped into it, shaking. Towering over me, he plugged the machine in and tapped it a couple of times for effect, ostensibly to free a sticky needle. A bare ceiling bulb threw his hulking shadow across the table.
“Roll up your left sleeve,” he said, gruffly.
Shaking, I complied, and he wrapped the sensor cuff around my arm. A stream of questions and accusatory statements ensued from him, and like a prisoner undergoing the tortures of Grand Inquisitor Torquemada, perspiration poured from my brow. Dad was too smart, and phrased every query in the precise way that put me in the worst possible light. After each question, he studied the machine intently and invariably pronounced me guilty of something. According to Howie Hansen, who disapproved of the use of the device on Bruce and me, Dad had a way of rigging the machine to indicate that we were lying, even when we were telling the truth.
One day my father would write of young Paul Atreides in Dune—ordered to place his hand into the blackness of a box in the ordeal of the gom jabbar. Paul was commanded not to withdraw the hand no matter how much pain he felt, on penalty of death from a poison needle held at his neck—the deadly gom jabbar. Terrified, the boy complied:
Pain throbbed up his arm. Sweat stood out on his forehead…Without turning his head, he tried to move his eyes to see that terrible needle poised beside his neck. He sensed that he was breathing in gasps, tried to slow his breaths and couldn’t…Pain! His world emptied of everything except that hand immersed in agony…His lips were so dry he had difficulty separating them.
In Heretics of Dune, one of the sequels to Dune, Frank Herbert would describe a “T-probe,” a torturous memory detection device that absorbed every bit of information about a person:
He could identify where it took over his muscles and senses. It was like another person sharing his flesh, pre-empting his own reactive patterns…It was a hellish device!…It could command his body as though he had no thinking part in his own behavior…The whole spectrum of his senses could be copied into this T-probe and identified…The machine could trace those out as though it made a duplicate of him.
It was my father’s gift and curse that he noticed infinitesimally small details. This enabled him to become a great writer. He had a tendency, however, to be somewhat of a nit-picker in the household. He was extremely demanding.
The Bene Gesserit of Dune understood nuances of meaning, subtle shiftings of voice and intonation, So it was with my father. He understood, or thought he understood, shades of meaning in every word his children uttered. He picked our sentences apart.
“What do you mean you’ll try to do it?” he would say to me, in a voice reaching crescendo. “Don’t ever use the word try on me! That word signifies failure, the likelihood of defeat. You’ll do it, god damn it, Brian, you won’t try to do it!” Another intolerable word to him was “can’t.” We didn’t dare use that word or “try,” because they triggered something in the man and he would fly into blind rages.
If one of the verboten words slipped from my mouth, I immediately wanted it back, a second chance. But there the word was, floating in the air, reaching his ears, causing his demeanor to change: a ferocious scowl on his face and loud commands from his ever-active mouth. I would cower and shake and watch for threatening movements from his beefy right hand, the hitting hand.
Of course there was an element of philosophical and moral truth in his concept, that the words “try” and “can’t” were weak, indicating a person was not strong of character and was incapable of taking responsibility for his own actions. It was an important lesson of life, one I think of often to this day.
When I got to know my father many years later, I found to my surprise he was quite the opposite of what I had supposed. He was in reality a loving, caring man. But one who experienced problems with children. He was impatient around them, intolerant of youthful energies and mischief. It is true as well that Bruce and I were expected to undergo similar routines to those that Dad had experienced in his childhood.
Frank Herbert, ever the psychoanalyst, might be surprised to realize that a major component of his own behavior was mimicry, of the subconscious variety. He imitated the stern disciplinary measures taken against him by his father, F. H., who had received them in turn from his own father, Otto. It is interesting to note a curious habit that Otto had while living in Burley in the 1930s, a habit my father saw firsthand. It seems that the old man enjoyed listening to the news on the radio, and when his programs were on, no one could disturb him and no one spoke—at the risk of incurring his ire. Family members had to tiptoe around the house.
My father first learned about lie detectors from his policeman father, F. H., who said to him in the 1930s, “There are methods of determining when a suspect is telling the truth and when he is lying. Subtle things to notice…his gaze, the way the mouth is held, nervous ticks and mannerisms, moisture on skin surfaces…” He told the boy about lie detection machines and threatened to connect him to one if he didn’t shape up. But he never actually brought a machine home.
The lie detector was a complete admission of failure on my father’s part as a parent. He couldn’t communicate with his sons, hadn’t taken the time to bond with us, to learn what made us tick. Instead he tried to crush our will and spirit. There could be no deviation from the rules he prescribed. The environment around him had to be absolute serenity to keep his mind in order, so that he might create his great work.
I never saw Dad lift a finger against Penny, who came to stay with us that summer. One time he did get into a battle of wills with the tall, blonde teenager: He insisted that she eat her dessert and then rubbed it into her hair when she refused to do so. For the most part, she didn’t receive the brunt of
his anger, which in its most severe form became physical. I think he felt boys could (and should) take more punishment, in order to make men out of us.
Despite our chronic poverty, Mom was exceedingly proper about etiquette, a carryover from her maternal grandmother, Ada Landis. One time Penny brought a loaf of bread in its wrapper to the dinner table, and my mother hurled the loaf across the kitchen. Mom taught us the proper technique of holding silverware, and of sitting up straight as we ate. We were not to slurp drinks or soup, and bowls were always to be tipped away when we spooned the last of the soup—never toward us. “A well-mannered person is never eager to eat,” she said.
Dad was around thirty-five or thirty-six at the time, and I remember a habit he had of bounding up and down the stairs of our front porch, skipping steps. From my perspective, he was an old duffer, and I couldn’t believe he had that much energy. He was impatient to get wherever the staircase led, not a man to dawdle with each step.
Frank Herbert had been clean-shaven since moving to Santa Rosa in 1949 for the job with the Press Democrat. Seven years later now, The Dragon in the Sea sold to a German publisher for a small amount of money, and the publisher wanted a book jacket photograph of him. Lurton said that readers in Europe expected writers to have beards, so Dad grew it back before having the photo taken. Mom said he looked nice in it, and he took a liking to it again. At first, Bruce, Penny and I thought he looked pretty strange, but gradually we grew accustomed to the change.
In the summer of 1956, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Congress, Phil Roth, offered Dad the position of public information officer, which he accepted. Roth was running against the Democratic incumbent, Edith Green. Roth, who had been in the Civil Air Patrol during World War II, piloted his own single-engine Cessna airplane on the campaign circuit, with “Roth for Congress” painted on the sides.
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