One day I was beach-combing with Howie, and he said to me, “Your father cares about you more than you realize. If necessary, he would give up his life for you.”
I was astounded to hear this, and didn’t know what to believe.
My parents played cards frequently, the two-hand version of Hearts they had invented on their honeymoon. It was their private game. My mother, being what my father called a “white witch,” enjoyed a certain advantage over him in these sessions.
When Mom was seated, Dad often went to her and leaned down to whisper in her ear, “I love you.” She would smile and whisper the same back to him. There were many small acts between my parents that told us how deeply they felt for one another. The way they looked into each others’ eyes and squeezed hands, their secret smiles, whispered words and lingering kisses. The help they gave one another.
Often when she came into the room he would exclaim, “Hi, beautiful!” and she would reply, “Oh, you’re just saying that because you mean it.”
They exchanged little gifts for no special occasion. He gave her red roses or her favorite perfume, Chanel No. 5, and she made him shirts and sweaters.
To a large extent we lived off the land. Dad maintained a pen of chickens, providing eggs and meat. We had a large, neat vegetable garden across the gravel driveway from the garage, and it provided us with the sweetest carrots I’ve ever tasted. Mom worked with an artist named Nancy Modahl, whose parents owned a waterfront cabin near us. I knew a spot in the woods near their place where huckleberries grew in abundance, so in the summer and fall I rode my bike over there and harvested them, for Mom’s incredible pies. I also brought in blackberries by the bushelful from a field by our house.
To clean the berries, Mom dumped them in buckets of water. Most of the bugs, tiny worms and debris floated to the top, enabling her to remove them with a spoon or strainer.
In distributing her prize desserts to us, Dad employed a variation on Solomon’s wisdom, thus preventing Bruce and me from arguing over who was going to get the largest piece. He ordered one of us to cut, and the other to select first.
At Thanksgiving that year, as always, Dad prepared what he called Stuffing Herbert, a concoction with chestnuts, celery and wild rice. Grandma and Grandpa Herbert joined us, and we gathered around our little table in the kitchen.
My mother always kept abreast of what Dad was writing, and she watched for newspaper or magazine articles or books that might be of interest to him. Frequently she guided him into areas he hadn’t considered. Both of them read voraciously on every conceivable subject, and she constantly threw ideas at him that he subsequently incorporated into his stories.
Early in 1959 Mom was offered an important job as advertising manager for a new department store in Stockton, California, Smith & Lang. It was time for another move. Dad said we had to fit all of our things in a U-Haul trailer and on the top rack of our car. Much had to be sold or put in storage with friends.
Thinking our Studebaker wouldn’t survive the trip, he sold it for only fifty dollars. It was leaking water and oil from the engine, and he thought it might have a blown head gasket. He told the buyer everything he knew that was wrong with the vehicle, and cautioned him, “Just run it until it stops. Whatever you do, don’t take the engine apart!”
But the purchaser of the car, despite my father’s honesty, didn’t listen, and proceeded instead to take the engine apart piece by piece. Just before we left, he phoned to shout at Dad and call him names. Dad reminded him of what he had told him, and the man, unable to counter my father’s debating skills, slammed the receiver down.
Almost a decade later, in his novel The Santaroga Barrier (1968), Dad wrote of a utopian town in which anyone advertising to sell a used car had to reveal all defects in advertisements. An ad for a $100 Buick described it as an oil-burner, while a $500 Rover had a cracked block. The town, Santaroga, refused all pork barrel government projects. The people were straightforward, honest, and didn’t ask for special favors. They didn’t smoke or watch television.
In one of the most memorable passages of Dune (1965), the Princess Irulan said her father once told her that “respect for the truth comes close to being the basis of all morality.” This was Frank Herbert speaking through his characters.
By the end of February we were on the road south in a big black 1951 Nash, a car with a six-cylinder engine that only ran on four. The ugliest thing I had ever seen, it looked like a giant bloated potato bug. A U-Haul trailer with a tarp flapping in the wind rolled along behind us, and there were suitcases on the top rack of the car.
We had, as my father liked to say, packed with a shoehorn. In this process, known well to us, items were packed within items. Everything possible was nested, even if it meant mixing items from different parts of the house. This made for interesting adventures trying to locate things later, but was the most compact possible method of transport. We didn’t have a wasted centimeter, or bring along a single unnecessary item.
So much for Tara, for the Washington State homeland where Dad could write. While he sold two short stories that were published early in 1959—“Missing Link” (Astounding Science Fiction, February) and “Operation Haystack” (Astounding Science Fiction, May)—they took him only a few weeks to write. He wasn’t putting out very many words, though he continued to perform research for his desert book. Avenues of research were shooting out in all directions. Maybe with the economic stability of Mom’s new job, he reasoned, he would have the time and resources to increase his output.
In Stockton we rented a modern ranch-style home, with an option to buy. It was a sturdily built one-story rambler with a painted concrete patio in the back yard and a big weedy field beyond that. Mom planted a small vegetable garden next to the garage, and I particularly recall how delicious the asparagus was.
Shortly after moving in, Dad pursued a wild scheme. He had heard about high altitude Air Force weather service (“Ptarmigan”) flights over remote regions of Alaska, the Bering Sea and the North Pole. Ever curious, he wanted to go along on one of them in order to obtain material for a magazine article. So he contacted one of his old political buddies for help, Congressman Jack Westland, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Washington State.
Westland tried, but the Air Force rejected the request, citing extremely dangerous conditions encountered during the flights, and the unwillingness of authorities to expose civilians to such peril. In more recent times, with different technology, my father would have been trying to get a seat on the Space Shuttle…probably with similar results. He did not do well when it came to getting his ideas through bureaucratic channels. I don’t think he ever figured out how to work through the decision-making processes of governmental and large private bureaucracies. Such endeavors apparently required more patience than he possessed.
Within two weeks of our arrival in Stockton, Dad was receiving child-support demands from Flora’s attorney. Since we couldn’t make the payments and Dad needed to balance the ledger, Penny came to live with us. The house was big enough for all of us to have our own bedrooms. Dad set his study up in the master bedroom, which was large.
Lurton Blassingame kept pressing my father for more material, and the agent made a number of inadvertent comments about the low output of stories, remarks that irritated Dad. Frank Herbert was finding it more and more difficult to send stories to New York, for reasons he couldn’t quite define. The relationship with Lurton and science fiction publishers was becoming a rut, with increasingly negative connotations.
Frank Herbert wanted to write for magazines that paid well, not for science fiction pulps at four and five cents a word. “I was floundering,” he confided to me years later, “not making a living. Bev was patient, but wanted to buy a house, ending our itinerant lifestyle. She didn’t complain but I knew she wanted to settle down. I was nearly forty years old, with little to show for myself.”
His book about the desert was almost becoming too massive to envision finishing. To do
it right he wanted to create a universe and several cultures, a formidable, disheartening task that was bogging him down in the tedium of research.
Thus far he had committed very little to paper. Only disjointed plot ideas, descriptive passages and characterizations. His personal library was burgeoning. He had cardboard boxes full of notes.
To earn money more quickly he thought about writing television scripts, and purchased several books about the craft. He came up with a television show idea about a man-fish, a web-footed merman, and spent time writing a synopsis. MCA in Beverly Hills expressed an interest in the project, and he sent it off to them through his film agent, Ned Brown. It didn’t sell.*
In ensuing years Dad would write other television treatments, all without success. Part of his problem, as paradoxical as it sounds, might have been that he rarely watched television. Our Hall Avenue house was the first home in which we had a set, and that one, an old Zenith portable, was given to us by a friend.**
Around this time, Dad became acquainted with the Zen writings of Alan W. Watts, particularly The Wisdom of Insecurity, which postulated the abandonment of safe courses of action in favor of uncertainty and insecurity. Watts spoke of a paradox in which the abandonment of safe courses of action opened a person to ineffable spiritual truths that could not otherwise be attained.
Frank Herbert held a similar belief, that the natural state of equilibrium in the universe was not a stable, fixed point or condition of being. It was instead a changing thing, always presenting new faces and new experiences. For an individual to be in harmony with the universe, my father believed, he needed to place himself in synchronization with the changing state of nature and human society. He needed to take risks. Thus in many of his stories he stressed the importance of adaptability, and his characters often had to adjust in order to survive.
So it was in our family, with the constant moving from place to place. I was always the new kid on the block, the new kid in school, having to fit into unfamiliar social and educational structures.
He told me that without change, without constant challenge, something in the human mind goes to sleep. “That’s why I keep moving,” he said, “why I keep looking for new experiences.”
My mother wrote a series of advertisements for Smith & Lang that won national awards and became famous around the country. The first ad went something like this: “We’re glad to be opening Smith & Lang again because our roots go deep here in the Valley of the San Joaquin.” This was a brand-new store, replacing one that had burned down.
Subsequently, a number of stores on the East Coast picked up the advertising theme and began saying things like, “Our roots go deep in the Valley of Virginia,” or “Our roots go deep in the hills of the Catskills.”
Around New Year’s, 1960, after less than a year in Stockton, Dad reached the emotional low point of his career. His writing income in 1959 had been only a few hundred dollars, from a pair of science fiction short stories and the trickle of earnings on Dragon. With the money he owed to bill collectors, including the Internal Revenue Service (who had levied a federal tax lien against him), his net worth was below zero. He even owed me back allowance.
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 Lur
ton 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.
Dreamer of Dune Page 16