After a few days of working on “They Stopped the Moving Sands,” Dad realized he had something bigger in front of him than a magazine article. He sat back at his desk and remembered flying over the Oregon dunes in a Cessna. Sand. A desert world. He envisioned the earth without technology to stop encroaching sand dunes, and extrapolated that idea until an entire planet had become a desert.
What sorts of characters might populate such a world, and what was their history? What religion would they follow? This last was an important question, perhaps one of the key questions he would have to answer.
Three of the world’s major religions…Judaism, Christianity and Islam…came into existence and grew in desert regions. In sand, in desolation. This was the canvas he needed for the complex story he wanted to write about a hero. He selected the most fanatical of the three faiths, Islam. The story would include an Arab-like world view, and the hero would be a messiah. He envisioned a desert messiah like the Mahdi or Mohammed on horseback, with a ragtag army on horse and camelback with him, thundering across the desert. This leader would be charismatic, capable of inspiring intense loyalty among his people. A power structure would develop around him.
My father wanted a novel that would incorporate real elements from history, mixing them and casting them in a new light—always keeping in mind the saying of one of his favorite literary figures, Ezra Pound: “Make it new.”
Frank Herbert knew comparatively little about the complex ecosystems of deserts but set about a thorough course of personal study. He wanted to do something futuristic in his setting, involving desert technology and advanced methods of desert warfare. Despite his mainstream leanings, he found himself changing course again and realized this had to be a science fiction novel. He needed the elbow room afforded by the genre.
This story would have a big canvas.
Dad scoured every library and book store for books about deserts, desert peoples and languages and desert religions. He learned about the behavior of sand, desert storms, water control, and dry land life forms. And he learned how people survived in the hostile, desolate environments. He read T. E. Lawrence’s 1926 masterpiece about war in the desert, Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
His Library of Congress research skills served him well in this endeavor, for he was able to skim books and articles for the information he needed, avoiding long, time-consuming passages.
But sometimes his innate, boyish curiosity got in the way and slowed him down. While looking for one thing he would become interested in another, and would spend hours learning about a topic that had little or nothing to do with the story he wanted to write.
His notes began filling file folders. The unfinished magazine article went into one of those folders: background information about the ecology of the desert planet.
The story would not occur on Earth, but the characters would be human. Readers would identify best with humans, he believed. And borrowing from the American Indian’s opinion of white culture, he would describe how man inflicts himself upon his environment, usurping it and failing to live in harmony with it.
He had the science fiction bug once more, but for a respite from the rigors of novel research, he began writing short stories in that genre again and mailing them off to Lurton in New York City. This was not a total commitment to science fiction, as from time to time he would continue to make attempts at mainstream stories….
Sometimes Dad kidded Mom about having a black spot on her lower back, a mark that came and went. He said it was a “Mongolian spot,” indicating that she was either part Indian or part Asian. This conflicted with what Mom had been told by her family, who claimed that they had only pure “East Coast” blood in their veins.*
My parents were totally faithful to one another, and rarely argued about anything, at least not in front of the children. They were remarkably compatible. There were a few exceptions. From the first days of their marriage, Dad depended upon Mom to find things for him. She was the “white witch” of our family, he said, with mysterious methods even she could not fathom. As a natural consequence, Dad had a tendency toward carelessness about where he left personal articles—his keys, wallet, eyeglasses, books, and the like.
Sometimes his habits irritated her, because he would interrupt her in the midst of her work, or some other activity, demanding that she find something for him. If she didn’t leap to his aid, he became quite upset.
“I’m married to a large child,” she sometimes said, in a tone of bemused resignation.
Once, to apologize for behaving poorly, Dad typed her this note:
Forgive me, darling, if I’m rash,
If prudence doesn’t prevail—
For I needs must be a man at times;
I needs must be a male.
To this she typed a reply, on the same sheet of paper:
You say you needs must be a man,
You needs must be a male…
Our romance, if you weren’t a man,
Might go a little stale.
In some respects, such as Dad’s dependence upon Mom to find things, it was a symbiotic relationship, with unlike organisms living together. Another aspect of symbiosis lay in her dependence upon him to drive her everywhere she wanted to go. In 1956 she did obtain an Oregon State driver’s license, passing all the tests. Then she didn’t use it, and let it lapse. I hesitate to classify their relationship entirely as symbiotic, or entirely anything else, because no aspect of my parents fits neatly into descriptive niches.
They were each dependent upon the other. Where one had a shortcoming, such as an inability to find things or to drive, the other filled in, and they became a complete organism. Where one needed time to write, the other worked to support the family. Frank and Beverly Herbert were inseparable.
On Thanksgiving Day, 1957, Dad and a photographer friend, Johnny Bickel, went to a wild animal sanctuary near the Green River in Washington State, called Hidden Valley Ranch. The place was run by Georges H. Westbeau and his wife, Margaret. Dad wanted to write a story on the Westbeaus for one of the slick national magazines, and he and Johnny were taking photos. The Westbeaus had a huge lioness called Little Tyke, who was internationally famous since it was a vegetarian and had never eaten meat. It had been featured in a film documentary and bestselling book, Little Tyke. The grounds of the compound were lovely, with a pond, rich foliage and exotic birds, including peacocks and swans.
At dinner, Georges Westbeau spoke of his famous lioness, who had died a short time before. He told of advertising for a caretaker one time, and a young couple called. Westbeau forgot to tell them about the lioness. As the couple came up the walkway, the man carrying a baby, Little Tyke appeared suddenly and bounded toward them. The woman ran away, screaming. The man followed close behind, but not before dropping the baby on the ground in the path of the lioness. Little Tyke only licked the child’s face, but the couple did not get the job.
I visited Hidden Valley Ranch once with my parents, and heard another story. One of Georges Westbeau’s favorite tricks was to have an uninformed visitor sit on Little Tyke’s couch in the sun room of the house, a room that looked out upon the pond. At first the animal took the balance of the couch, right next to the visitor. But gradually she nudged the person more and more, until she had the whole couch and the visitor was on the floor.
Dad’s feature about Hidden Valley Ranch didn’t sell, but late in 1957 and early in 1958, his science fiction short stories began taking hold again. Three would be published in 1958: “Old Rambling House” (Galaxy, April), “You Take the High Road” (Astounding Science Fiction, May), and “A Matter of Traces” (Fantastic Universe, November).
“Old Rambling House” reflected our itinerant lifestyle and Dad’s hatred of the IRS. A young couple, not unlike my mother and father, had grown tired of constantly moving. They decided to purchase a large house. Unfortunately, the house was not what they expected it to be. It transported them to another planet, where they were told that the people who sold them the house were tax
collectors. The new owners were expected to fill the vacated positions.
Whenever Grandma and Grandpa Herbert came to visit and stay with us, Babe insisted on cleaning our house. She caught up on all the chores my mother didn’t get around to with her busy schedule. The beds were made with fresh sheets and clean, sweet-smelling blankets. Babe even ironed the sheets.
If Grandma was a neatnik, my father was a beatnik, before the term came into vogue. He was a person leading an alternate lifestyle, without steady employment. Whenever Grandma was around, she always exuded a slight air of disapproval about her son’s lack of gainful enterprise and the way he didn’t live in one place for very long. She and other McCarthys, who classified people in black and white terms, saw him as something of a black sheep who didn’t provide adequately for his family.
One morning Dad was surf casting on the beach near our house at Brown’s Point. He heard a bang, and looked around. A strange man was lurching along the beach, coming toward him. The man had a fedora pulled down over his eyebrows, and wore a ragged tweed trench coat with the collar up so that it covered the lower part of his face, revealing only his eyes. He walked with “a terrible crazy slouch,” in my father’s words, and gripped a .38 caliber pistol in his right hand.
Bang! A bullet hit the sand at water’s edge, well away from Dad. Then another shot rang out, and the man was getting closer.
Calmly, Frank Herbert turned away and cast his line into the surf.
Bang! Bang! Each shot rang out louder than the one before.
When the demented creature was only three feet away, Dad said, without turning, “Hi, Howie. How you been?”
They exchanged profane insults and then had a good laugh.
Dad hadn’t seen Howie in a while, but he explained it this way, “I don’t know why, but the first glance was enough. I knew it was Howie. I knew it was Howie.”
Howie put it this way: “I was trying to give him no place to go but Puget Sound. I wanted him to make a motion for the ocean.”
The men then “yammered and stammered,” as Howie described their playful bantering, and went back in the house.
A little shorter than my father, Howie often wore a dark blue nautical cap. He had a ruddy, square face and intelligent eyes. Of my father’s many male friends, none touched his heart like this one. No matter where we moved or how far away Howie was on a maritime assignment, the men always kept in touch. One time after a separation of a few months Dad sent Howie a telegram that said, “Write, damn it, write, or we’re through, by God, through!”
From a week before the Fourth of July to a week afterward, a man who lived next door to us set off firecrackers and rockets until 10:00 or 11:00 each night. Dad and Howie decided to get even. At 2:00 one morning, they set off thunderous cherry bombs in his front yard, by his bedroom window. Lights went on in the house, and the man ran outside in his underwear. He couldn’t see who was creating the disturbance.
When Dad and Howie saw him outside, they split up. Dad hid behind bushes in the front yard, while Howie went in the backyard and did the same thing. Then Howie shouted, “I got him! Here he is!”
The man ran to the back, whereupon Dad set off cherry bombs in the front yard! Variations on this followed, and they kept the fellow running back and forth in confusion.
By this time I was outside in my pajamas. Seeing Howie sneaking back into our yard, I said, “Hey, that’s you and Dad shooting off firecrackers, huh?”
Howie laughed.
In describing his friend, Howie said, “Frank had an infectious sense of fun.” Unfortunately, my father rarely showed this side to us, his children. If we saw it at all it was as observers, not as participants.
In 1957, Avon paid $1,500 for the paperback rights to The Dragon in the Sea. They would publish it under yet another title, which Dad hated: 21st Century Sub. So, in a short period of time, the same story was serialized as Under Pressure, printed in hardcover as The Dragon in the Sea and in paperback as 21st Century Sub.
When the check for 21st Century Sub arrived, Dad was so pleased that he wanted to take Mom out for a gourmet meal. We didn’t own a vehicle that ran, so Howie loaned Dad his big gray 1949 Chrysler Windsor, a nice two-door car with white sidewalls. Dad and Howie washed and polished the car. At the restaurant, the finest in Tacoma, the valet congratulated my father on owning such a fine automobile. Dad just smiled and handed him a generous tip for the time, five dollars.
Howie and Dad spent a lot of time discussing religion, particularly the mysticism of many faiths and peoples. They drew parallels between Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, the Kabbala of Judaism, the Sufis of Islam, and American Indian beliefs. Howie, half Quileute Indian himself, was at once an intellectual giant and a spiritual man. He spoke for his ancestors and for uncounted future generations, and my father was startled by the message of the people speaking through Howie: “The Earth is dying, it is being misused by non-Indian civilizations that take and do not give.”
In 1958, after being in the U.S. Merchant Marine for years, Howie returned to his Indian reservation at Lapush, Washington, in order to gather legends and songs from the remaining old folks. He had last been there in 1939, and was shocked now to see the damage to the environment. Previously the area had been a verdant primeval forest, thousands of years old, with young and middle-aged trees and old grandfather trees shading the younger ones. There had been so many trees on the reservation that to the young man they had seemed to form a tunnel, with light coming in at the ends. Now, after indiscriminate logging by big timber companies, the area was much different. Howie was saddened, and incensed.
When he visited us at Brown’s Point, he had with him a book entitled Ecology, which had been loaned to him by an Indian friend. The book spoke of the ecological decimation of the planet Earth, and Howie combined this knowledge with what he had seen at Lapush. In a conversation with Dad, Howie told me he said angrily, “They’re gonna turn this whole planet into a wasteland, just like North Africa.”
“Yeah,” Frank Herbert responded. “Like a big dune.”
By the time Dad said this, the elements of his story were coming together. He had in mind a messianic leader in a world covered entirely with sand. Ecology would be a central theme of the story, emphasizing the delicate balances of nature.
Dad was a daily witness to conditions in Tacoma, which in the 1950s was known as one of the nation’s most polluted cities, largely due to a huge smelter whose stack was visible from all over the city, a stack that belched filth into the sky. The air was “so thick you could chew it,” my father liked to quip. The increasing pollution he saw all around him, in the city of his birth, contributed to his resolve that something had to be done to save the Earth. This became, perhaps, the most important message of Dune.
My father would write two great books tracing themselves in varying degrees to conversations with his closest friend, Howie Hansen: Dune (1965) and the poetically written story of Indian rage, Soul Catcher (1972), my father’s only non–science fiction novel.
Chapter 12
A Writer in Search of His Voice
IN THE fall of 1958 Dad’s writing career was not going well. We moved to Longbranch, a small town on a bay just north of Tacoma. This had been one of Dad’s ports of call as a child when he rowed and sailed around Puget Sound.
He resumed searching for a job, and as fate would have it, this was an election year. He stopped by Republican campaign headquarters in Tacoma. William “Big Bill” Bantz, a Spokane, Washington, attorney, was running for the U.S. Senate at the time against the popular Henry “Scoop” Jackson. Bantz had a publicity director who wasn’t working out, so his campaign manager, George Carlson, fired him. That day, Carlson received a call from Republican campaign headquarters saying a man had been in looking for a job, Frank Herbert. Carlson had never heard the name before, but met my father the following day, was impressed with him and hired him.
Dad was the best publicity man Carlson ever saw. Frank Herbert would put together six sugges
ted publicity letters at a time and lay them in front of Carlson for review and approval. Carlson remembered approving, perhaps, four, rejecting one and specifying revisions on another. It was difficult to find people for jobs like that. The assignments were short-term and demanding, involving highly intensive work.
While Dad worked on the political campaign, his fourth, he dovetailed his schedule with Mom’s, doing his publicity work in Tacoma while she was writing ads at the department store.
Unfortunately, William Bantz, like every other candidate my father worked for, lost! Scoop Jackson, an unbeatable foe in Washington State politics who ultimately went on to national prominence, garnered almost 70 percent of the vote.
Whenever my parents had friends over to the house, I sometimes tried to participate in adult conversations. Typically it was after dinner, with everyone sitting in the living room by a cozy fireplace. Too often my inadequate contributions irritated Dad, and he would send me out of the room. My status in the household, Howie told me later, was not dissimilar to that of a dog or a human subspecies. If I didn’t please the master, I was dispatched from sight. After seeing my father do this to me more than once, Howie finally told him it was a big mistake, that he should let me participate, and Bruce as well. If he didn’t, Howie cautioned, the boys would never bond with their father.
Dad listened attentively to his friend, but said he would raise the boys as he saw fit. We would grow up on our own, if need be, as he had. It would be good for us. He refused to change. And how ironic it was that this man, who one day would communicate effectively with millions of people through his writing, could not communicate with his own children.
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