My mother could only hold on to his coattails. Even when he appeared to be settled, he really wasn’t. Things were constantly jumping around in his mind. He plotted out his life as if it were one of his stories, experimenting with this avenue, that one and yet another. At least now, at my mother’s wise insistence, he was investing in real estate, with the prospect of appreciation in value, instead of collecting rent receipts.
Frank Herbert intended to remodel the farmhouse himself on weekends, with the help of volunteers such as Jack Vance and myself. The three of us tore the roof off the house and began framing a full second floor, where previously there had only been an attic. Dad scrounged around for doors, pieces of marble slab, frosted glass and brass ship’s portholes, which he intended to install in the home. For safekeeping, he stored them with Ralph and Irene Slattery a few miles south in Sonoma County.
Sometimes I brought along my girlfriend, Jan Blanquie, and her younger brothers, Dan and Gary, who helped with cleanup. One day a big mongrel dog came onto the land and bit Dad’s leg. Chronically at odds with unruly canines, my father chased it off, hurling 2 © 4 scraps at it.
The Cloverdale property was a lovely spot, overlooking an oak and maple dell where a brook ran. Dad thought this would be an ideal place to write, farm, and conduct his Ecological Demonstration Project experiments. Unfortunately, he was about to face another detour.
Chapter 17
Tara
IN 1966, Dad was working on a new novel, The Santaroga Barrier—about an unusual, insular northern California town. The book had a framework based upon the thinking of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. In his classic 1927 work, Sein und Zeit, Heidegger presented a theory of man’s existence in the world, which he called “dasein.” The protagonist of The Santaroga Barrier was Gilbert Dasein. His girlfriend was Jenny Sorge, and in the Heideggerian view, “sorge” represented “care”—things that were within the care of mankind or dasein. Heidegger believed that man became disoriented and drowned himself in the vastness of the world and in the minutiae of following society’s rules. Each man’s experiences were too small, too parochial, for him to develop a proper philosophy of existence.
While working on The Santaroga Barrier, Dad contracted pneumonia, which laid him on his back for several weeks. He also suffered two back injuries in this period—one while lifting heavy building materials for the Cloverdale house and the other in a fall down the icy outside stairs between the Fairfax house and garage. His spinal injuries were so serious and so painful that at first his doctor thought he might have to undergo an operation to give him a stiff “ramrod spine.” Before undergoing this irreversible procedure, my father asked for a second opinion. The second doctor thought swimming might benefit him, so Dad went regularly to a nearby public pool to exercise. This helped, but recuperation was slow. For several months his back hurt so much that he couldn’t sit at his typewriter for more than two hours a day.
I think he had a black cloud over him. While at the laundromat one day, bleach that had been left on one of the washing machines got on his new clothes, ruining a new pair of slacks and a dress shirt.
It was no surprise, then, that the protagonist in The Santaroga Barrier suffered a succession of “accidents.” In a series of near-misses he is almost drowned, poisoned, shot with an arrow, crushed by a car, and firebombed! Lurton thought the story had too many accidents, but from my father’s point of view they were in there for a reason…based on his own personal experience. Similar to Alan Watts, Heidegger said man could only come to a full understanding of life and the mysteries of existence by placing himself in challenging, even dangerous situations. My father concurred with this philosophy.
In his life and writing, Dad constantly placed himself and his characters in demanding situations where they had to adapt in order to survive. In an essay for “Saving Worlds” (1973), he said that we are “surfboard riders on an infinite sea,” and when the waves change we must adjust our balance. The single most important survival strength of mankind was adaptability, he said. It would prevent us from becoming extinct.
The influence of several great German thinkers could be seen in The Santaroga Barrier, harking back to studies my father made with the clinical psychologists Ralph and Irene Slattery in the early 1950s. The book was replete with concepts from Carl Gustav Jung, Sigmund Freud, Karl Jaspers, and others. In the town of Santaroga, the key industry was the Jaspers Cheese Cooperative, which produced a drug-laden cheese that bonded the members of the community within an alternate dimension. This, of course, bore more than a passing resemblance to the effects of the melange of Dune.
Santaroga bore another similarity with my father’s most famous work. In the town of Santaroga, people attended the “Church of All Faiths”—a concept that bore a strong resemblance to the Commission of Ecumenical Translators of Dune, which attempted to eliminate a bone of contention between competing religions—“the claim to possession of the one and only revelation.”
The Santaroga cheese cooperative concept was based upon a famous cheese business in California, the Marin French Cheese Company in Petaluma, near Santa Rosa. My parents went there often. It was out in the country in a valley, and Dad imagined a town built up around it. In the mid-1960s, bohemian cooperatives were springing up everywhere. Dad used to go to one in Berkeley that was a non-profit enterprise run out of a big warehouse, selling groceries and consumer goods to members. It is interesting as well to recall my father’s childhood experiences in which he grew up in the town of Burley, Washington, once a socialist cooperative.
When Frank Herbert was a star debater for Lincoln High School in Tacoma, he learned how to take either side of an issue. This was necessary in order to prepare for a debate, thus anticipating the attacks an opponent might make. A similar line of reasoning was required of him when he wrote political speeches for Republican congressional and senatorial candidates.
Remembering such experiences, Frank Herbert presented arguments in The Santaroga Barrier of equal strength to support and condemn the Santarogan lifestyle—a lifestyle of strict conformity quite different from that of the outside world. The book was a utopian novel, but presented in such a manner that the reader went away wondering how the author really felt about Santaroga. Dad called this concept utopia/dystopia: “One man’s utopia is another man’s dystopia.”
Around this time, the Examiner offered Frank Herbert the position of wine editor, in addition to his duties at California Living. Dad accepted the assignment, but told management he didn’t feel entirely qualified for the position. Actually he knew quite a bit about wine, having spent some time in the Napa Valley studying vineyards and wine-making methods. Now, since he didn’t want to appear inept, he took several days and stayed with a friend who owned a winery, receiving a crash course from him. To further Dad’s education, the Examiner also agreed to purchase a number of expensive wine books for his personal library—one of the perks of the new job.
Before undertaking any writing task, Frank Herbert did his homework—a necessity, he joked, in order to avoid letters from readers that began, “Dear Jerk.” He also began making his own wine, using the bar area of his Fairfax study, which was a converted family room. He favored the Cabernet Sauvignon variety, referring to it as “queen of the clarets.” I recall seeing plastic wine vats and glass jugs on the floor of the study, with plastic tubes running between them in arrangements I didn’t understand. On the counter nearby were black and gold stacks of his private wine labels bearing the face of Bacchus, the Greek wine god—an image from thousands of years before. He had five different labels: Cabernet Sauvignon, Rosé, Chenin Blanc, Semillon and a generic label, without a variety. Each said “Made by Frank Herbert.” Next to the labels were piles of corks and packages of wine yeast, along with jars of enzyme tablets and sodium bisulfate. He had a brew tester, a hydrometer and a number of other gadgets, too. He also had beer-making equipment.
In 1967, John Campbell of Analog turned down The Santaroga Barrier for
serialization, saying it wasn’t truly science fiction. He also felt there were too many loose ends in the novel. Frederik Pohl of Galaxy rejected it, too, feeling the plot was thin, without enough narrative hooks for serialization. Amazing liked it very much and offered a contract. They published it in their October 1967 through February 1968 issues. Tom Dardis of Berkley Books liked it as well, and published it in paperback in 1968.
The loose ends cited by Campbell were placed in the story intentionally by Dad to reflect the realities and uncertainties of life. After turning the last page, the reader was left feeling disturbed and uneasy, with his mind going a mile a minute—like an engine that “diesels,” refusing to shut off. This was done in Dune, too, as Dad intentionally sent his readers spinning out of the end of the book with fragments of it still clinging to them—fragments that would keep them thinking about the story. In large part this psychological element was why so many fans read my father’s books over and over.
It was a storytelling technique he learned early in life, from reading such classics as Tom Sawyer and Treasure Island. After reading the books, he and playmates made up games and events based upon the stories. The stories had not ended with the conclusion of the printed texts.
Dad published a short story in 1967—“The Featherbedders” (Analog, August). He also sold a novel he had been working on for fifteen years, The Heaven Makers, serialized in Amazing in 1967 and then published in paperback the following year by Avon Books.*
In 1967, Dad’s royalty income dropped slightly from the prior year, and would fall again in 1968. Dune still had not “cracked the nut” with either Chilton or Ace—that point where an author’s royalties exceeded his advances, so that he received additional money.
The parents of my girlfriend, Jan Blanquie, did not approve of me because of my drinking habits, so that summer she and I eloped to Reno and were married. When we returned to Marin County, Mom and Dad let us live with them for a couple of weeks until we could find a place of our own, a cottage in nearby San Anselmo. At dinner the first night back, Mom took Jan aside and told her, “You’ll never be bored married to a Herbert man.”
Mom consulted astrology and found the intersection of my path with Jan’s—where we met. She predicted we would remain together for the rest of our lives. Years before, she had predicted that I would marry a blonde, and this beautiful young woman was very blonde, with French-Scandinavian features.
The year 1968 started off with an announcement from Terry Carr, the Dune editor at Ace, that they were going back to press for an additional twenty-five thousand copies. Three months after this printing, Chilton printed more hardcovers. Still, Dad wasn’t seeing more than a trickle of earnings from writing sales. He was at work on a sequel to Dune, with the working title of Fool Saint at first and then Messiah, before settling on Dune Messiah. He also considered and discarded the cryptic title C Oracle, representing a coracle floating on a sea of time.
He also conducted occasional writing seminars at local schools, including San Francisco State University, whose president was the noted semanticist and future U.S. senator, S. I. Hayakawa. The works of Hayakawa had been influential upon my father in researching Dune, and when the men met they liked one another instantly.
Around this time, Mom came up with a promotional idea: a “Dune Tarot” deck, based upon descriptions in Dune. She thought it would go hand-in-hand with the book and its sequels, garnering additional attention and readership. Through her advertising contacts, she lined up a well-known San Francisco artist, who made several full-color prototype cards. Dad photographed the cards and tried to interest publishers and game manufacturers, without success.
Early in 1968, Dad again wanted to leave the Examiner and write full-time. He had in mind a book about American Indians on the Northwest Coast, a mainstream story he said had been boiling inside him since his childhood—about a modern-day clash between American Indian and white cultures. He had been told by government sources that he might obtain a federal grant from the National Foundation of the Arts to research and write such a book, because of the historical value of it.
Setting aside unpleasant memories of past attempts to penetrate the befuddling walls of bureaucracy, Dad contacted the agency. He requested a grant of fifteen thousand dollars for a project he estimated would take a year and a half to complete—nine months of research, and another nine months of writing. He wanted to hire his friend Howie Hansen as a research assistant, and planned to film and tape Indian rituals, along with many previously unrecorded legends and songs. After getting the run-around from a variety of departments in the agency, Dad was told he had contacted the wrong offices, that he should instead have gone through the National Endowment for the Humanities!
He was like a man who had waited in a long line, only to be told he had to go to the rear of another line and start all over again. Frank Herbert threw his hands in the air and gave up the effort, vowing to himself, “Never again!”
Jan was pregnant, and needed to learn how to drive a car to get back and forth to her doctor’s appointments. My license had been suspended for a plethora of tickets and alcohol-related accidents, and I was hitchhiking to my busboy job at a restaurant in San Rafael and to school in Berkeley. While I was at school one day, Dad and Mom stopped by our cottage to visit Jan. When Dad learned she needed a driver’s license, he volunteered to give her driving lessons. She accepted before I could warn her that he might not be the most patient instructor.
In ensuing weeks, Dad took time off from his busy schedule to give Jan lessons in our little red 1955 Volkswagen. To my surprise, she reported to me that he was exquisitely patient with her, almost to a fault. With my wife’s stomach nearly touching the steering wheel, they drove around Marin County, from Fairfax to Novato. When Dad told her how to slow the car down, he said, “Now apply the brakes gently, as if you had a little old grandma in the backseat with eggs on her lap.”
Mom was as surprised at his patience as I was.
I don’t recall thinking much in those days about the nice things my father did. I filtered that information out and from long experience living under his thumb, focused more on his bad side. What I was feeling about him was entrenched in my mind—little soldiers of hatred had bunkered in there, and would not surrender easily.
In April 1968, Jan had a nine-pound baby girl. We named her Julie, after Jan’s paternal great-grandmother—and gave her the middle name Ann, the same as my mother’s.
Just before our baby’s birth, when we knew delivery was imminent, I got my license back and was driving Jan from Marin County to the hospital in San Francisco. At the exact same time, Dad was in an ambulance on the way to a different hospital. A short while before, he and Mom had been at the SFO Heliport in Sausalito, disembarking from a helicopter after a trip to Santa Barbara for one of Mom’s Plan Ahead projects. On a pathway at the heliport, a speeding baggage cart ran into my father, knocking him down and reinjuring his back. He was in excruciating pain, and had to be transported on a stretcher.
It was an insane time in the United States and in our family. Only four days before, Martin Luther King, Jr., had been assassinated, and now race riots were sweeping the country. Soon Robert Kennedy would be gunned down, too. As Mom and Dad flew over San Francisco on their return from Santa Barbara, she looked down. Not seeing flames she thought, Thank God it’s okay.
Dad began a new regimen of back therapy, with heavy doses of Valium for his pain. His back would never fully recover, and in bed each night he would have to arrange pillows in a special way, jamming them beneath the mattress to alleviate his pain.
Later in 1968, both of my grandfathers died—Frank Herbert, Sr., and Roscoe Stuart—and my mother broke her ankle. The year was incredibly bad, with two exceptions—the birth of our beautiful daughter and the increasing popularity of Dune. The book was growing by word of mouth, principally on college campuses, where it was being used as a textbook for many courses. Since Dune was an anti-establishment work, it was being referred t
o as an “underground” book.
Dad received word that The Santaroga Barrier was also being used as a textbook in a number of college-level classes—and that the sales of this book were increasing on the coattails of Dune.
The popularity of my father’s work among bright college students pleased him. As a writer of science fiction, he wanted the leaders of tomorrow to receive his important messages, and his predictions. If they understood what he was talking about, he firmly believed the world would be a better place.
For a small amount of money, a German publisher purchased the right to publish Dune in that country, extending the international list to three—Great Britain, France and now Germany.
Favorable reviews began to trickle in on Dune. It was referred to as an environmental handbook in disguise, with intriguing characterizations and fantastic imagery.
Dad finished Dune Messiah in the summer of 1968, more than six months later than expected because of the injuries and deaths in our family. Despite the increasing international respect for Dune, John Campbell refused to serialize its sequel in Analog. His readers wanted stories about heroes accomplishing great feats, he said, not stories of protagonists spiraling into oblivion. He didn’t like the strong anti-hero theme in the book, giving the protagonist “clay feet.”
After I graduated from Cal Berkeley that year I went to work as an underwriter for Fireman’s Fund American Insurance Co. in San Francisco. At the time my father was not a role model for me, and I had no thoughts of following in his footsteps. My creativity, which I had shown at an early age in artwork and in the writing of childish stories, was virtually non-existent at this point in my life. I felt that if a person had to be like my father to be creative, I didn’t want that life. Writing was a profession for crazy people with out-of-control tempers. It was for flakes and penniless bohemians, living on the fringes of society.
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