On the top level of the modified A-frame, beneath slanted ceilings, was a large loft for Dad’s study. The study had a long desk (shop-built by my father) beneath gable windows that looked out on cedars and firs and a private driveway that led uphill to the gravel road at the top. To the right of the desk was an Olympia-65 electric typewriter on a typewriter stand. A large bookcase divided the room in two, with a sling chair reading area on the other side, by a camera tripod and stereo equipment. A weathered white and green Forest Service sign lay on the window sill:
KELLY BUTTE TRAIL
LESTER GUARD STA.—5
KELLY BUTTE RD.—1
This memento came from the trail to Kelly Butte, the Forest Service lookout where my parents had honeymooned in 1946. The sign had been retrieved by Dad on a recent hike when he found the path abandoned and overgrown.
On a large portion of the lower level of the house he had rows of bookcases built, for an extensive personal library that he intended to organize one day according to the Dewey decimal system used in public and university libraries. The house was only two years old when he purchased it, and some portions of it were not quite finished.
Mom’s office was in one of the bedroom wings of the main level, with a view in the same direction as Dad’s. She had a tall fir tree by the window nearest her desk, with a bird feeder that Dad had mounted for her on the trunk so that she could watch wrens, robins and other feathered visitors as they fed.
In the Port Townsend telephone directory my parents listed themselves under Mom’s name, “B. A. Herbert,” with the address “Xanadu.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s unfinished poem, “Kubla Khan,” which he wrote about a wondrous place called “Xanadu” while experiencing a dream-vision, was my mother’s favorite poem. She could quote every word of it and delivered it thespian-style, as if she were on a theater stage. Dad particularly enjoyed listening to her, and said it reminded him of acting performances she gave in 1946 when my parents attended the University of Washington.
Most often she quoted the first paragraph, closing her eyes as she did so, and raising her voice dramatically:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree,
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
So like my parents’ Xanadu were these words, for all around them were fertile grounds, gardens bright, ancient forests and sunny spots of greenery. And one day, if my father’s construction dreams came to pass, there would even be a tower with a windmill on it, for his Ecological Demonstration Project.
The Port Townsend house was not a palace in the physical sense. It was unpretentious, comfortable and rather simple, without excess. It had little view, except of woods, an orchard and a duck pond. But under the influence of my father and mother it became a palace of intellect, of conversation and of love. We had many remarkable and memorable conversations at the dinner table and in the living room beside bookcases filled with books that Dad had written. Ten original Dune paintings by the Hugo award–winning artist John Schoenherr made a dramatic and colorful backdrop on the south wall of the living room.
Dad designed two large stained-glass windows to go high on the western gable wall over the living room, one a rooster and the other a writer’s quill. I often thought, as I sat in the living room and looked up at these delicate, graceful windows, that they represented two key facets of my father’s life—his love of working the land and his love of writing.
From the beginning, he had grand construction projects in mind to radically alter the character of the property. He wanted to build a large workshop with a windmill tower on top, a solar-heated swimming pool, and a poultry house heated by methane generated from bird droppings. This was with the intent of turning the property into his “Ecological Demonstration Project” (“EDP”), where he could establish a nearly self-sufficient farm and test the practicality of alternative energy sources, such as power from wind, sun, hydrogen and methane. The U.S. Department of Energy, he said, had never done a very good job of investigating alternative energy sources, and he especially wanted to reduce the dependency of society on petroleum products and nuclear energy.
Through his writings, Dad liked to explore different aspects of issues in separate works. Thus The Dragon in the Sea, Dune, The Green Brain and Hellstrom’s Hive* dealt with various environmental issues, shedding new light on our world in ways that were not possible within the story limitations of one work. In like manner, his “EDP” was yet another environmental story, one in which he would learn and teach by doing, by rolling up his sleeves in the innovative American way he so admired.
Fans, editors and his literary agent were after Frank Herbert for the third book in the trilogy, but he had to do it at his own pace, in his own way. There were too many uncertainties in the unfolding story, too many potential directions that were not set firmly in his mind, so he kept putting off the writing of the work or only pecking away at it in the midst of a very busy schedule. He wasn’t focused on Arrakis as he needed to be. It wasn’t flowing, wasn’t coming together, so in the spring of 1973 he set it aside again.
Dad felt the American Indian movement was just beginning, and that despite slow initial sales Soul Catcher would, like Dune, ultimately find a huge audience. Certainly Soul Catcher deserved such an audience, for it was a powerful, finely crafted novel, filled with poetic beauty and suspense. After the film project on this book failed he became involved in another Indian project, the writing of four closely linked stories based upon actual historical events in the Pacific Northwest. He entitled the work Circle Times, and it was most intriguing, about the cyclical Indian view of the universe. It was an involved work, making up a thick manuscript, but Dad was not able to obtain a publisher for it. He did sell it as a television screenplay to Wolper Pictures, Ltd., of California—but ultimately the project fell apart when the producers felt Dad was trying to remain too true to historical facts, at the expense of drama.
Yet another movie project began to unravel around this time. Dune had reached the storyboard phase, in which scenes were depicted by artists, according to instructions from the director and producer. But in the spring of 1973 producer Arthur P. Jacobs died unexpectedly, and since it had been his pet project, indications were that his company, Apjac International, intended to abandon it. Under terms of the contract, they had until 1974 to make their decision.
While this was up in the air, Dad devoted several months to completion of a half-hour documentary film based upon field work he had done with Roy Prosterman in Pakistan, Vietnam and other Third World countries. Entitled The Tillers, it was written, filmed and directed by Frank Herbert. Produced in cooperation with the Lincoln Foundation, the World Without War Council, and King Broadcasting Company, it appeared on King Television in Seattle and on the Public Broadcasting System.
By early 1974, my father was champing at the bit to get Arrakis underway, a novel he expected to be longer than Dune Messiah and perhaps as long as Dune. Finally he set other projects aside and made it his all-consuming priority.
He wanted ecology to be stronger in this climactic novel than it had been in the bridging work Dune Messiah, but he didn’t want to overdo it, didn’t want to curry favor with powerful environmental groups for the sake of sales. It was a balancing act. Throughout much of the 1950s he had been unable to sell many of his stories because they hadn’t been written with particular markets in mind. They weren’t the right subject matter for certain publishers, weren’t the right length, didn’t fit what was popular at the time. Maybe with a little of this and a little of that, editors
told him, or if the market ever changed, they might sell….
In the 1950s his stories had been rejected by editor after editor. Now he was in demand, an unaccustomed circumstance for him. Readers and editors were clamoring for more Dune stories, and he realized he had to give them what they wanted, what they expected, to a certain extent. He had to write for a particular market, after all. But he had important messages he wanted to convey, and there had been so much misunderstanding over Dune Messiah.
Bernard Zakheim, my father’s artist friend, invariably included anti-holocaust political messages and religious quotations with his paintings and sculptures. Similarly, Dad wanted his own important messages to be contained within every novel he wrote and included them in The Dragon in the Sea, The Santaroga Barrier and Dune—all books that had experienced good to excellent sales. The success, he came to understand, lay in keeping the adventure first, the excitement of the story—and fitting the lessons, the messages, underneath. He could not be pedantic, could not preach to his readers.
“While writing the third Dune book,” Dad recalled, “I first realized consciously that I had to be an entertainer above all, that I was in the entertainment business. Everything else had to be secondary, if I wanted readers to keep turning the pages.”
He began to find the proper balance.
When we went to visit Xanadu we were four—Jan, me and our daughters, Julie (age four) and baby Kim. We made regular trips to Port Townsend, going up on alternate weekends and staying with my parents for one or two nights. If Dad had a book signing in Seattle or other business there, we got together for dinner at restaurants or at our house.
My mother, uncomfortable with “Grandma” or “Grandmother” because of the antiquity such references implied, taught the children to call her “Nona” instead, as her maternal grandmother had been known to her. She said Dad should be referred to by his grandchildren as “Panona.” Neither nickname stuck, although the children did develop the habit of calling my mother “Nanna,” as I had earlier referred to my own maternal grandmother, Marguerite. Mom accepted this without complaint, as well as “Grandpa” for my father.
Mom had been taking Szechuan Chinese cooking lessons in a class sponsored by a restaurant in Bellevue, a Seattle suburb. One evening my parents held a dinner party there for friends and family. We sat at a long table with a huge salmon on a platter in the center, prepared Szechuan style. Dad sat at one end of the table, and regaled all present with his stories. In the middle of one convoluted yarn, he rose and went around to the salmon in the center of the table. Using his fingers, he dug an eyeball out of the fish, popped it in his mouth and swallowed it whole as we looked on, aghast. “A real delicacy,” he said, with a boyish smirk.
Now each time I saw Dad I enjoyed his fun-loving, playful side, a facet of his personality that had been revealed to me only intermittently when I had lived with him.
Since his father died in 1968, his mother, Babe, now seventy-one, had been living alone in a trailer home in Vader, Washington, one hundred miles south of Seattle. Dad and Mom visited her often and so did we. Sometimes I drove Grandma to and from family gatherings. But she was getting up in years, and Dad worried about her. So early in 1973 he brought her to live with him in Port Townsend, setting up an apartment for her downstairs with her own kitchen and bathroom. In doing this he displayed his generous, loving nature toward a mother who had been an alcoholic during much of her life, and often an inattentive parent.
Babe kept Mom company when Dad was writing and helped organize the household. But at times my grandmother could be domineering and troublesome when it came to matters of household cleanliness. Mom came home one day and found the old woman up on a ladder against the side of the house, cleaning the second floor windows!
“I just don’t know what I’m going to do with her,” Mom confided to Penny.
Dad had a talk with his mother, but came away shaking his head. “She’s so stubborn!” he exclaimed. All he could think to do was to chain and padlock the ladder, which he did.
George Carlson, formerly a Republican campaign manager who had hired my father to do publicity work in the 1950s, now had a local travel program on television, called Northwest Traveler. Carlson purchased 16mm footage from the trip and did a story highlighting Dad’s latest novels. Subsequently he became my father’s agent for speaking engagements.
When making connections with airliners, Dad and Mom regularly chartered a small plane and pilot from Jefferson County International Airport. They flew to Seattle, where Jan and I picked them up, or they took cabs. Carlson regularly expressed concern about the safety of little “puddle-jumper” airplanes that his friend and prized speaker flew so often, and tried to talk him out of using them. Dad listened, but didn’t change his habits. And, despite his scientific mind that extolled logic and discounted superstition, he often relied upon my mother’s astrological and other predictive methods concerning the safest times to travel.
Chapter 21
A New Struggle
I NOW worked for Insurance Company of North America as a commercial property underwriter. On a typical Friday evening after work I would pick up Jan and the kids and drive to the ferry dock in downtown Seattle. Following a brief wait, surrounded by a sea of cars and passengers waiting to board, we would catch the ferry to Bainbridge Island. From there it was about an hour’s drive north, over the famous Hood Canal floating bridge to Port Townsend.
At the bottom of a long gravel driveway stood my parents’ modified A-frame home, with a pair of bedroom wings jutting left and right. A two-car garage was beneath the right wing, which on the main level was the master bedroom. We pulled to the left onto a parking area, our tires slipping a little on loose gravel. Usually we could see Mom working in the kitchen, and as we were getting out of the car, my burly-chested, bearded father would bound down the stairs, smiling and calling out to us.
Behind him, a large wooden circle with a writer’s quill was mounted over the entry doors. A gargoyle statue with a terrifying, ancient face sat on the ground by the base of the stairs, in the midst of rhododendron and azalea shrubs. Dad claimed, with a twinkle, that it warded off evil spirits.
Invariably the house would be filled with mouth-watering cooking and coffee aromas, and sometimes Mom or Babe had apple, berry or pumpkin pies lined up in the kitchen on cooling racks. I’d give the women big hugs and kisses on the cheeks, feeling the softness of my mother’s skin and the creased toughness of my grandmother’s. Sometimes Mom would ask me to taste a sauce, as I had done for her as a child. And then Dad would take me outside and show me around the property, discussing all the things he and Mom had added since our last visit, along with the grand construction plans he had for the future.
Occasionally he’d have a copy of his latest book for me on the black Formica countertop between the kitchen and the dining room, and he would sign it with a personal message for me and my girls. But, since I still harbored feelings of rebelliousness and resentment toward him, I didn’t read his books. They accumulated on a bookcase at home.
It was early 1974 before I made any attempt to read Dune. After forty pages I gave up. I couldn’t get into the book. It seemed convoluted, opaque and full of strange language. Instead I opened my copy of The Dragon in the Sea, and paused at the flyleaf, where Dad had written a personal message to “Number One Son” nearly two decades before. In all that time, I had only glanced through the first few pages, but now I read the book straight through and enjoyed it.
The next time I saw Dad in Port Townsend, I complimented him on the story. He beamed in response, and brought forth a copy of Dune Messiah from the kitchen countertop. He opened to the title page, and with several bold strokes of a gold Cross pen wrote a brief message of love to me, Jan, and our girls, then crossed out his printed name and signed below it.
I asked him why he signed that way.
In an erudite voice he told me the practice was “as old as English letters,” that it dated back to when books were first
printed in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. He said authors of the time were used to seeing their books handwritten, in the ornate script of scribes. When they saw their names printed they thought it lacked a personal touch, without the closeness they wanted when they communicated with a reader. So they began crossing off their printed names and signing each copy. My father started doing this himself sometime in the 1960s, and it became his cachet.
Now I made another attempt to read Dune, using a library copy since I had loaned mine to a friend and it had been lost. On second reading, the opening pages became more clear, and I found myself hooked. I read it all the way through, finishing it early one morning, when I had to go to work in only a few hours. While lying in bed I couldn’t go to sleep. The story still churned in full color in my mind. I thought it was the greatest book I had ever read.
I was thrilled with the way my father had captured, on such a grand scale, the human spirit of defiance and rebellion against injustice and oppression. The very name the Fremen desert people called their planet, “Dune,” was unauthorized, in defiance of the military-political rulers, whose edicts proclaimed the world was called Arrakis. How well I understood this spirit of rebellion, because for a number of years I had been in revolt against the book’s author.
In my mother’s office one day I saw a file marked “Story Ideas.” I asked if they were for her stories, and she said, “No. Frank’s.” She went on to say she was more of a commercial ad writer, without my father’s talent for creativity.
Near her desk stood a bank of file cabinets. Several drawers were marked “Opus,” and she explained this was a filing system shared with them by science fiction author Robert Heinlein and his wife, Ginny. Under the system, each literary work of the author was assigned an “opus number,” in the order of creation date. Into an opus folder or folders went the manuscript, contracts, royalty statements, reviews and correspondence pertaining to a particular work. She found it easiest to use separate folders for each of these categories, all bearing the same opus number. Each story, even if its title was changed, kept the same opus number.
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