Dreamer of Dune

by Brian Herbert

  Chapter 13

  Zen and the Working Class

  THE SAN Francisco Bay Area would ensnare my father with its charms for almost the entire decade of the 1960s. But as we navigated the highway west out of Stockton, I didn’t know that, and was considering the benefits of keeping most of my things packed in cardboard boxes in my new room. That way I wouldn’t have to continually pack and unpack. How many houses had I lived in now? I had lost count.

  Our potato bug–shaped Nash pulled yet another U-Haul trailer. We didn’t have everything we owned with us, since a lot of our stuff had been left in storage with Howie in Seattle a couple of years before, and other items had been stored with Ralph and Irene Slattery even longer.

  On San Francisco’s Potrero Hill, a working-class neighborhood of weathered Victorian row houses, we rented a flat, an entire level on the third floor of one of the houses. Within months we moved into a house that became available next door. Dad quipped that we moved “because we didn’t like the neighborhood.” It was a one-story white stucco house, built around 1930, with hardwood maple floors throughout and a red tile roof.

  It was not a large house, so Dad set up his roll-top desk in the dining room. The old portable typewriters were getting “long in the tooth” (as he put it when something was past its prime), so he purchased a big Olympia electric typewriter, which was faster than the manual and made a smoother sound as he typed on it.

  We had a black wicker couch in the living room, with a round, red-lacquered Chinese coffee table that featured a black dragon design in the center. The table had carved legs that curved outward. When Dad read his manuscripts to Mom in this room he sat on the couch, leaning over pages spread across the Chinese table, while she knitted or crocheted. Every few moments, she took a long drag on a cigarette, causing the tip to flare red-hot. When deep in conversation, she often didn’t put the cigarette down, and kept working at it, tapping ashes meticulously into her ashtray.

  Within a short time my parents made many intellectual friends in the Bay Area…artists, poets, psychologists, newspapermen, science fiction writers. They came for small dinner parties and retired afterward to the living room, where they talked and drank wine with Mom and Dad far into the night. Above all, my parents resumed their relationship with Jack and Norma Vance, who now lived just across the bay in the Oakland hills. Through the Vances, Dad met the well-known science fiction writer Poul Anderson and his wife, Karen, who lived nearby. The three couples became fast friends, and shared many fine dinners and outings together.

  The Chinese coffee table in our living room was a reflection of my father’s increasing interest in Eastern culture and thought. In his study and scattered all over the house were books reflecting the wide-ranging diversity of his mind, including philosophy, history, politics, mythology, mathematics, religion, foreign languages, deserts, ecology, mythology, science and technology.

  In San Francisco, Mom learned how to make charts and predictions from the Book of I’Ching…Chinese astrology. Using this and her other means of prediction, she said to me one day, “Brian, you will marry a blonde” (which turned out to be correct). And after she showed me how the I’Ching worked, I had trouble putting the book down.

  She also predicted that she would die one day in a distant land (which also turned out to be right). Afterward she was in the living room with knitting on her lap, lamenting to Dad about this, since she wanted to see so much of the world. It almost seemed amusing to her, but he perceived her fear, because of accurate predictions she had made in the past. During her entire life my mother tap danced with the paranormal. It frightened her, but few other subjects intrigued her as much. So every once in a while, like an addict, she ventured into the dangerous realm of prediction.

  Dad kissed her and told her not to worry. “After all, darling,” he said, “Your predictions don’t always come true!”

  She returned to her knitting, but pensively. For my mother, predictions were always considered carefully, never disregarded.

  “I don’t know where I’ll die,” Dad said in a cheerful tone, “but I know what I’ll be doing. I’ll be at a keyboard, pounding out a story.”

  Around this time my father was teaching himself Kanji, the linguistic characters of China and Japan. He mixed his own black ink in a stone inkwell and with a fat brush made characters on large sheets of rice paper, true to the artistic technique of those cultures. The paper was thin, and shrank and wrinkled around the lettering.

  Shortly after arriving in San Francisco, Dad got rid of the Nash. He negotiated a flat monthly taxi rate to transport Mom to and from the White House department store, where she wrote fashion advertisements. Thereafter at a set time every weekday morning, a green and red Veterans Cab Company car showed up outside. It was a twenty-five minute ride each way to her job at The White House department store. Now, at long last, Dad was free of having to drive her.

  I played trumpet in the Everett Junior High School band. Mom liked my horn playing, but Dad had me under orders to practice only when he wasn’t writing. Still he must have held some affection for my music (though he never told me so), since he wrote a humorous haiku poem about it. A seventeen-syllable Japanese form of poetry, it went like this:

  Number-one son play

  His horn better every day. Still—

  Neighbors move away….

  One day at school I got into a confrontation with a future Hall of Fame football player, the notorious O. J. Simpson. At the age of thirteen, I was in the habit of carrying cheap ball-point pens in my shirt pocket. Sort of a 1960s nerd look, but without a plastic pocket liner or slide rule. I was in the courtyard of the school, and a wiry black kid of around my height pulled the pens out of my pocket and threw them on the ground. I outweighed him, and to me he didn’t look very tough. He had two friends with him.

  “Pick ’em up,” I said.

  “Make me,” the kid said, glaring.

  I shoved him, and he shoved back.

  “Get him, O. J.,” one of his companions said. “Get that white boy.”

  The ensuing fight, which had no clear victor, was soon broken up by a gym teacher. O. J. and I never had another confrontation, and eventually became friendly. We often ran into one another on the 22 Fillmore bus, where we had a number of pleasant conversations.

  In the summer of 1960, Dad accepted a position, once more, in the newspaper industry. He became night picture editor with the San Francisco Examiner, working the 4:00 P.M. to midnight shift. The steady old reliable news profession, a fall-back position, offered relative security. With Frank Herbert’s tremendous qualifications and abilities in this field, jobs were almost always available to him for the asking—though he often went to great lengths to avoid asking.

  The Examiner, which Dad and other employees referred to as “The Ex,” was owned by the Hearst Corporation, and was the flagship of the chain, the very first newspaper owned and operated by William Randolph Hearst, Sr. The Examiner building was old, solid and colorful, and still a bustle of activity. In newspaper circles, it was considered hallowed ground.

  Each weekday, Dad wrote or researched in the mornings and early afternoons. At shortly after 3:00 P.M., he would walk down to Third Street near Bethlehem Steel, where he caught a city bus. It took him downtown to the Examiner building at Third and Market.

  “By writing in the mornings, I gave my best energies to myself,” Dad recalled. “The Ex got what was left.”

  After he had been on the job a while, he went to the paper’s book review editor and made an interesting proposition. In exchange for free books, Dad offered to write book review outlines in his spare time, which could then be fleshed out by the editor.

  “I’m a fast reader,” Frank Herbert said, “and when I’m at the typewriter it goes like a machine gun.”

  The offer was accepted, and Dad received his pick from carloads of books received by the book review staff. He outlined a wide range of fiction and non-fiction, but the books he wanted to keep were almost e
ntirely non-fiction—works of history (especially Arab history), religion, psychology, ESP, dry land ecology, geology, linguistics, anthropology, botany, navigation…

  William Randolph Hearst, Sr., a legendary figure, had worked in the Examiner building himself in years past. Traditionally, old newspaper files were kept in what was called the “Morgue.” It wasn’t called that on any Hearst paper, however, since “The Old Man” had an abhorrence for anything involving death. On his papers, it was called the “Library.”

  After working there six months, Dad was in the Examiner library one evening and saw several big photo album–size volumes stacked on a table. Ever-curious, he opened one of the books and was astounded to find original communications from Hearst, who had died in 1951.

  Frank Herbert took a deep breath, and looked around. He didn’t know where these albums were normally kept, but realized they should not have been left out. He was alone in the library.

  If Hearst sent a note, a telegram or a cablegram, they were kept in the albums. These were his Orders, filed chronologically. Some were, in my father’s words, “absolutely astounding.” One telegram sent from the Hearst Castle at San Simeon said something like, “Who wrote the headline top of column three, page eight, First Edition Sunday? Fire that man.”

  Some telegrams from San Simeon told the city editor to assign a photographer and a reporter. The photographer was needed because he had a car. They were to assemble something like fifty-one halves of roast chicken, twenty-eight orders of coleslaw and sixteen cakes, and put them on the 3:00 P.M. train to San Simeon. Hearst was having a party.

  Dad closed the albums and chuckled softly to himself.

  A well-known Sausalito artist named Vargas was a sailing buddy of my father’s. Vargas also knew Zen-master Alan Watts, as they were neighbors in Sausalito, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. When Dad expressed an interest in interviewing Watts for an Examiner story, Vargas arranged a meeting. This was no ordinary story for my father. He wanted to learn more about the most elusive of all religious philosophies he had encountered, Zen Buddhism. He had read every word Watts had ever written, and had made extensive notes from these and other Zen writings for his desert novel—a novel that still had not reached much beyond the file-building stage. Now Frank Herbert wanted to synthesize the information he had been reading, to hear what a master had to say personally.

  Watts lived on the old ferryboat Sausalito, which had been retired and was moored in the picturesque town of that name. A passageway in which one had to bend over led from Watts’ quarters to the quarters of another occupant of the ferry, Vargas. My father and Alan Watts were charmed by one another’s company, and became friends. Watts used to invite Dad over for dinner and conversation, serving him Oriental food on black and white china in a black and white room.

  “It was very Zen,” my father recalled, “but our conversations were catholic, in the universal sense.”

  Watts was particularly taken by one of Dad’s observations, that a person’s personality could be compared with the impurities of a diamond. “A diamond’s value is determined by its impurities,” Dad told him.*

  This was the height of Frank Herbert’s oriental period. Aside from the meetings with Watts, the extensive research, the Oriental furniture in our house, the writing of Kanji characters, and fortune telling from the I’Ching, Dad called me “Number One Son,” and Bruce “Number Two Son.” We ate Chinese or Japanese food several times a week. Bruce and I received gifts of Chinese thinking caps and sets of origami paper. Dad hung a calendar from Chinatown on the wall of his study. And he gave Mom a beautiful red and black kimono, which she wore on special occasions.

  My father was happy at the Examiner, and with the respectable combined income he and Mom were bringing in we were able to live a little better. We owed money to a lot of people, including Dad’s Aunt Peg, Mom’s Aunt Ruth, Jack Vance, Dad’s former wife, Flora, businesses in the various towns in which we had lived, and last, but certainly not least, the IRS. Mom established a careful budget, and made regular monthly payments to repay our debts.

  In 1961, Dad went on a health food binge, stocking the shelves and refrigerator with an array of foods that Bruce and I loathed, including oriental herbs, tofu and beef tongue. Convinced that beef tongue provided more nutrients and proteins than any other form of meat, he forced us to eat the foul substance in a variety of forms, including tongue sandwiches with mayonnaise on the bread and a tongue stew—both of which made me gag worse than green clam guts. I hated any form of tongue, especially the texture of the meat, which had sickening little bumps on it.

  Our father also began consuming large quantities of vitamin pills (particularly vitamin C), and loaded up on brewer’s yeast, which he sprinkled on many of the meals we ate. The latter had a rather strong flavor, but I got used to it and even grew to favor it. Dad said it gave us more energy. He extolled the virtues of honey as a natural source of energy, and kept several varieties of it in the kitchen. Bruce and I protested (to no avail) having to drink a nasty mixture of vinegar and honey, which Dad served to us at breakfast.

  Every once in a while, Bruce or I didn’t heed one of the oft-repeated rules of our father’s house, and crumbs got into one of the honey jars.

  “Who got crumbs in the honey?” Dad would shout, at the top of his lungs.

  Uh oh, the guilty party would think.

  The standard punishment for crumbs in the honey was a long lecture and yet another demonstration of the proper method. “Do it like this,” Dad would say, in an irritated tone, dipping a clean butter knife in the jar. Withdrawing the knife, he then spun it slowly, using the motion to keep a gob of honey from dripping. He held the honey over a piece of whole wheat toast and let the golden syrup drip down.

  “See? The blade never touches the toast. Now you can dip the knife back in and keep the honey clean.”

  “Okay, Dad,” Bruce or I would say. And we would promise to do it right the next time. Anyway, our intentions were good….

  Before each lecture he would utter the familiar words, “I want your undivided attention.” He was always repeating himself, which explains in part why Bruce and I frequently tuned him out. We knew it was risky to do so, but we just couldn’t stand listening to him anymore. He saw too many details, expected perfection from us. Like many characters in his stories, he was hyper-aware. Our every action was viewed through a high-powered microscope. His attention to detail came from a perceived need to run our household with military precision, so that all would be orderly around him—an enforced environment that allowed him the serenity to create.

  My parents thrived in San Francisco. Immersing themselves in the culture of one of the world’s great regions, they were putting down roots. Mom even crocheted a large San Francisco map rug, with marks showing the location of our house, the San Francisco Examiner, and The White House department store. In our backyard, her roses were blooming, and Mom regularly placed vases of cut flowers on our dining room table.

  Above all else in his life, my father was consumed with research for his big novel, set in the desert. In this effort he would eventually read more than two hundred books. He studied Oriental and Arabic languages and literature so extensively that he could think and write in those languages. He discovered the Japanese haiku and tonka poetry forms, and was fascinated by their pristine simplicity and beauty. They had a strange and alien power, he thought, in which they captured the essence of all life.

  Dad sold six science fiction short stories in the three-year period of 1960–62: “The Priests of Psi” (Fantastic, February 1960), “Egg And Ashes” (If, November 1960), “A-W-F Unlimited” (Galaxy, June 1961), “Mating Call” (Galaxy, October 1961), “Try To Remember!” (Amazing, October 1961) and “Mindfield” (Amazing, March 1962).

  His writing income during that period averaged only a few hundred dollars annually. Still, he remained in contact with the science fiction community, attending local science fiction conventions and other functions.
He met science fiction writer Frederik Pohl at a party at Poul Anderson’s house. Science fiction writers Reginald Bretnor and Anthony Boucher lived in the area as well, and there were many get-togethers with them.

  At a poker party, one of the writers, an elderly gentleman, tipped a beer over on his lap, drenching the crotch of his trousers. Upon seeing that, Reginald Bretnor quipped, neatly altering a line from Shakespeare: “Who would have thought the old man had so much beer in him?”

  A number of famous and soon-to-be famous science fiction writers visited our homes in San Francisco, including Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Jack Vance, and Isaac Asimov. Bruce, despite his youth, was developing an interest in science fiction and was eager to participate in conversations with these men. Unfortunately, whenever they arrived, Dad quickly dispatched my brother to his room.

  Frank Herbert usually had many stories floating around looking for publishers, and, being an eternal optimist, he always expected good news to arrive in the mail. It rarely did, but there were occasional checks and letters of encouragement. Bruce and I were under strict orders not to touch the mail. Under no circumstances were we to collect it from the mailbox and bring it inside, because an important letter might fall from our hands and be lost.

  With my father’s lack of commercial success came a steady stream of suggestions from Lurton Blassingame as to how he might do better. The agent kept reminding Dad that he had tremendous talent, citing as an example The Dragon in the Sea. In every way possible, Lurton tried to steer his stubborn writer along a path that would produce more fine science fiction novels, since that was where his talent seemed to be.

  Dad wanted to write a science fiction novel, the desert story he had been researching for too long. But he didn’t think it would be anything like what Lurton wanted. This would be a big book—hundreds of thousands of words, perhaps. It would involve a new and dense style of writing, in which he would attempt to layer important messages beneath the text of an adventure, almost subconsciously. He didn’t want to think about length or style or any other distraction from his work. He didn’t want to worry about such things.