Dreamer of Dune (28 page)

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.

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.

Since Dad wanted to forget his pulp Western that was published in 1937, Opus Number 1 for Frank Herbert went to “Survival of the Cunning,” published in 1945.
The Dragon in the Sea
(1956) was number eleven, and
Dune
(1965) was number twenty-five. There were some errors in the numbering, because the system was set up late and Dad had many unpublished stories that pre-dated the system.

As part of the system she maintained a loose-leaf binder, with separate sheets on each work arranged by opus number. On those sheets she wrote the title or titles, copyright dates, advances, royalties, foreign translations and other important information. She said that this binder served as a “tickler file,” reminding her of money that was due from each publisher, when to renew copyrights and the publishing history of the work. With the help of an alphabetical master list that she constantly updated, she could locate important files quickly and keep documents in order.

Based upon another Heinlein system she also set up an annual correspondence section, in which all non-opus letters for a particular year were filed in sections from A to Z, according to the last name or company name of the other party. A 1972 letter from Jack Vance, for example, went into the “V” section for 1972. There were many other files maintained.

Dad depended upon Mom entirely to keep his business affairs organized. In addition to editing his stories and handling all of his paperwork (including the answering of fan letters), she coordinated his speaking and other travel arrangements, wrote publicity for him, and kept careful accounting ledgers. When interviewed my father frequently could not remember when a particular story was published, or some other detail requested by the interviewer. “I'll check with Bev,” he would say. “She's always right about details like that.”

Business and monetary affairs hardly entered Dad's mind at all, and soon slipped away entirely, to be fielded by Mom. This despite the fact that his study was a model of efficiency and organization, as were the stories he wrote in there. He was also highly organized when it came to affairs of the kitchen, since he so loved to cook. He kept kitchen pans and utensils clean, and, of utmost importance to him, kept them in exacting locations in cupboards and drawers, near where they would be used. Baking dishes were by the oven, pans by the range, and so on. He called it “point-of-use” storage.

Because of his inattention to financial details he had a tendency to overspend, and to buy impulsively. Mom was constantly reining him in, reminding him of stark economic realities.

Frank and Beverly Herbert were more content in Port Townsend than anyplace they'd ever lived before, and in large measure their happiness came from the beauty of the land itself, and from their attention to improving it. With my grandmother's help they planted roses, rhododendrons, hydrangeas, bougainvillea, poinsettia, and geraniums along the driveway and around the front of the house. Mom poured coffee grounds around roses and other plants, saying that something in the chemistry was good for the plants. The results bore this out.

By mail order they obtained seeds for trees and seedlings, and they planted giant sequoias, redwoods, firs, sugar maples and dogwoods. Based upon research my father did, they kept the giant sequoia seedlings in a refrigerator for two months before planting them, simulating winter temperatures at a young age in order to improve the odds of their surviving through the first real winter.

Above the duck pond stood an old apple, pear and plum orchard, where they added young apricot, crabapple and filbert trees. They researched wine grapes carefully, hoping to find varieties that would do well in the cool northern latitudes. It was a risky proposition, but near the orchard they planted a small experimental vineyard of Merlot, Sauvignon Blanc, and Cabernet Sauvignon. At the top of a hill overlooking the orchard, vineyard and duck pond they constructed three large stone-walled vegetable (and low-growing fruit) garden areas, with drainage holes in the walls to keep excess moisture from damaging the plants.

In Frank Herbert's studies of Native American planting methods, he discovered that they often planted corn in circles. Supposedly this was for religious reasons, since the circle had spiritual significance to them, but after several seasons Dad discovered a practical reason as well: higher yields were produced. Subsequently he employed a variation on circles—spirals—and obtained even higher yields.

Dad had a poultry house built, connected to a wire-screened enclosure, and filled it with nearly a hundred Rhode Island Reds (prolific brown egg–layers) and other breeds of chickens, and thirty ducks. Turkeys became occasional, if short-term visitors before they were relocated onto a dinner table or into one of the freezers in the main house. And there were a pair of geese living in the yard, a working couple who earned their keep by weeding the garden.

Some of the ducks were Rouens from France, examples of genetic engineering that looked like dark-feathered mallards but grew much faster and didn't fly well. A meat breed, they laid green, blue or tinted white eggs. They were allowed to forage around the pond, an unfenced area, and in this way were able to come up with most of their own food—supplemented by small amounts of grain left around the shores of the pond by Dad. He also stocked the pond with tubers and salamanders (for the ducks), fresh water clams, pond snails, and bass. Always thinking of the interrelationships of an ecosystem, my father said that duck droppings sealed the bottom of the pond better than concrete.

In his travels to Third World countries, Frank Herbert learned about high-yield hybrid rice, which he wanted to plant on the shores of the pond. He set up bird feeders on trees all around the main house, including on a fir outside Mom's office, so that she could watch activity at the feeder from her desk. Dad referred to birds as “feathered insect killers,” and said they kept insect levels down on his patio and decks during summer months when insect populations were highest.

My parents were amateur bird watchers and frequently went for long walks in the woods together, taking binoculars and Audubon bird callers.

Doing most of the construction work by himself, Dad put together a fancy Lord and Burnham greenhouse adjacent to the house. When the structure was complete they used it in the winter to “get an edge on the growing season,” keeping plants inside during the cold months and then planting them at the first opportunity in the springtime. They kept warm-weather fruit trees in the greenhouse year 'round, providing their table with fresh lemons, limes, oranges and figs. They also grew strawberries in there.

Dad arose early each day to write, before Mom or Babe were up. After a small breakfast of unbuttered whole wheat toast with jam or honey and freshly squeezed orange juice, he was at work on
Arrakis
by 5:30 or 6:00. He continued without interruption until noon or early afternoon, depending upon where he was in the story. Friends and family were instructed never to call him before noon.

After lunch, Dad did farm work, often involving heavy manual labor. To compensate for the sedentary life of a writer, he liked getting his hands dirty and exercising in fresh air. He and Mom often said the earth calmed them as they gardened, when they immersed their hands in the soil. One day when my daughter Julie was upset they suggested that she go outside and do this. It worked for her, and the farm benefitted as well from the weeds that they suggested she pull.

My father designed and built a number of farm gadgets, including an enclosure for the garbage cans (with a lid that propped itself open), a brush (nailed bristles-up to the deck by the front door) for cleaning mud from shoes, and a funnel arrangement (nailed to a tree by the chicken house), for draining fowl he had slaughtered. It was an efficient farm, producing the fresh makings of fabulous gourmet meals, which we shared with them often. Each morning, awakening with our stomachs pleasantly full from the evening before, we heard the crowing of roosters.

Frank Herbert was the most famous person in town and liked by every level of the social strata, from contractors to professors. They helped him guard his privacy. Whenever an outsider came to town looking for Frank Herbert, no one seemed to know where he lived.

When Howie Hansen's best friend became famous, for a time Howie didn't know how to relate. It wasn't the same to him, no matter how he tried to achieve the closeness they had known in the past. Finally Howie initiated a heart-to-heart conversation. Dad told him he was very skittish of people who wanted to know him only after they found out he wrote a book. “You're different, Howie,” he said. “You know me as a guy who runs a typewriter, and I know you as a guy who runs a fishing boat. There isn't a lot of difference from one person to another when you look at it that way.”