Dreamer of Dune (4 page)

A renowned quilt maker, Grandma Herbert won so many awards at the big county fair in Burley that the fair committee finally banned her from competing. Nonetheless she continued to make quilts, and they were displayed prominently each year at the fair. Every quilt had an interesting story, something to do with the history of the Herbert family, which she related to young Frank. One year she sent a beautiful “Blue Eagle Quilt” to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor, commemorating their wedding anniversary.

Beginning when Dad was around ten years old, he used to go over to Mary's house and read old family letters to her, which she kept in a trunk. Some of the letters were valuable, as they had eighteenth-century New England postmarks on them, even several rare Boston Post markings, so the boy handled them carefully. During moments of excitement, Grandma Herbert would lapse into Old English, a dialect spoken in her family for centuries. Sometime in the 1600s, her ancestors had immigrated to the hills of Kentucky and Tennessee, and in certain enclaves the old dialects were preserved and spoken. Upon hearing these strange words, the young Frank Herbert was fascinated. Ultimately he conducted extensive research into languages and dialects, information he used to great effect in
Dune
and other works.

My father remembered how Mary used to take out posters of his great-uncle Frank Herbert (Otto's younger brother), who had been the circus and vaudeville star Professor Herbert. She would fold open each poster carefully, saying, “This is your great-uncle Frank. You and your father were named for him.”

Mary Herbert also had a red leather-bound genealogy book showing that our family was directly descended from Henry VIII, King of England, but “on the wrong side of the sheets.” Henry used to frequent a public house run by a woman named Moll Golden, a place where he drank and sang. Moll had six illegitimate children, all presumably fathered by Henry. She was an exceptional singer, and it was said that she took on the name “Golden” because of her voice. Henry had his own musical talents, as he sang with her and played the lute. He may even have written the tune “Greensleeves” for her.

Before the age of twelve, Frank, ever curious, read the complete works of Shakespeare and discovered the poetry of Ezra Pound. With these readings, the boy began to realize the potential of the English language. He fell in love with the sounds of words. In other literature he discovered Guy De Maupassant and Marcel Proust, and had what he called “love affairs” with them. He admired the styles of both, and was intrigued by De Maupassant's plotting techniques and Proust's powerful characterizations.

Something Ezra Pound once said remained with my father all his life, and was quoted frequently by him: “Make it new.” To Dad, Pound was more than a poet. He was a nonconforming creative writer, and an ongoing inspiration.

In his early teens, Frank was for a time infatuated with the writings of Ernest Hemingway. Eventually, however, he came away with a sense that Hemingway's work was phony and filled with unnecessary brutality. Of all the writers my father read in his youth, he was perhaps most obviously influenced by Shakespeare. In
Dune
's palaces, with their great banquet halls and dark passageways, one gets a very similar feeling to the castles in which Shakespeare's characters brooded and schemed and murdered. Treason and treachery permeate the writings of Shakespeare. When, in
Dune
, Frank Herbert wrote of “tricks within tricks within tricks” and “treachery within treachery within treachery,” and “plans within plans within plans within plans,” his language was reminiscent of Richard II (II, iii, 87): “Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle…” Director David Lynch later picked up the Shakespearean mood in his 1984 movie adaptation of
Dune
.

Throughout his youth, Frank Herbert was a voracious reader, on every imaginable subject. At age eleven, he used to go alone to visit Dr. Jimmy Egan in Tacoma, their family practitioner. Frank was intrigued by his anatomy books, which the doctor let him peruse. Subsequently, Frank was able to tell his schoolmates how babies were conceived and born.

Whenever his schoolmates had a question about sex, someone invariably said, “Let's ask Herbert. He'll know.”

But one little girl told her mother what was occurring. Enraged, the woman stormed over to Frank's house and confronted his mother, Babe. From the kitchen, the boy eavesdropped. The woman was so upset she could hardly speak. After getting the gist of what the woman was saying, Babe asked, calmly, “Well, did he misinform her?”

Sputtering, the woman said, “No, but…uh…”

“Then what are you complaining about?” Babe wanted to know.

It went on like this, with Babe defending her son, to the point where the woman could hardly get a word in edgewise. Exasperated, she finally gave up the effort and left.

By then, Frank was in the kitchen making a sandwich, and hardly looked up when his mother came in. Suddenly she grabbed him by the ear and whirled him around. “Explain yourself,” she said.

At fourteen, Frank learned to type, and saved enough money to buy his own typewriter, a big, heavy old Remington. On it he hammered out his stories and a long, humorous poem describing Christmas and one of his father's jobs. He began copying the styles of writers he liked, such as Guy De Maupassant and Herman Melville, searching for his own style, something comfortable.

One day my father went for advice to a writer living in Tacoma who had sold a couple of novels and several short stories. The response: “Work like hell, kid.”

F. H.
AND
Babe disciplined their extremely active son erratically. At times they brought down a heavy hammer of authority on him, but on other occasions, especially when they were incapacitated by alcohol, it was exactly the opposite and they let him run free. For the most part he went wherever he pleased whenever he pleased.

As the years went by, F. H. and Babe drank more and more, to forget their business misadventures. Following a stint as a salesman, F. H. became a security guard for Northern Pacific Railroad, and after that, in 1935, a deputy sheriff for Pierce County, Washington. Many of his closest friends were on the police forces of various jurisdictions, including the State Highway Patrol where he had once worked. This did not curb the drinking.

In recalling the free-to-roam lifestyle of his childhood, my father described himself as having been a “punk kid.” Perhaps he was, but if so, he retained redeeming qualities, and it was only one dimension of a complex, developing personality.

On a number of occasions, his lifestyle led him into dangerous activities, such as the long and perilous boat excursions he took, and hunting trips taken without adult supervision. Once he nearly drowned in a tricky current while swimming off a sandbar in Tacoma's Hylebos Waterway.

His school studies were always easy for him, and frequently he became bored in class. In elementary school he used to shoot spitballs at insects on the walls of the classroom, at his classmates, and at his fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Pastor. While standing at the blackboard with her back to the class, she felt something wet hit the back of her neck.

No one told Mrs. Pastor who did it, not in so many words. But when she pulled the tiny wad of wet tissue off her neck and whirled around, all eyes turned toward the towheaded Frank, who sat in the middle of the class, near the front. She marched to his desk and plopped the spitball in front of him. A tall woman with thick glasses and her hair tied in a bun, she towered over him.

“So you're the one,” she snapped, her face wrinkled in anger. “Stay after school, boy, and I'll deal with you.”

I'm in for it
, my father thought, as she returned to the blackboard. His mind filled with a thousand terrors, and for the rest of the day he could think of little else.

After school he sat at a little chair by her desk, looking up fearfully into the reflective glare of her glasses, searching for a way to calm her. She glared down at him, her face a glistening, explosive mask of fury.

“Why are you so mad at me?” Frank asked, his voice small and breaking.

“I'm not mad at you!” she bellowed. And she grabbed him by his shoulders and shook him violently, and shook him, and shook him, screaming all the while, “I'm not mad at you! I'm not mad at you!”

It was a bizarre scene, and years afterward, when he had time to reflect upon the event, he became aware of unconscious behavior. His teacher had been angry at him without knowing it herself. He would use this facet of psychology in his writings and in his life, with great success. He would watch what people were doing, not what they were saying.

When he was sixteen, he took the family Buick out on a date, with permission from his father. He had a girlfriend and two other couples in the car, and roared along Highway 99 outside Tacoma at more than eighty miles an hour. Presently, a state motorcycle cop pulled him over, got off his bike and walked to the driver's side.

“You!” the patrolman exclaimed, looking in the window. It was Bernie Rausch, a good friend of the family. Rausch often visited the Herbert household at Dash Point, just north of Tacoma. He told Dad to follow him, and with his motorcycle led the offender straight home. While Frank waited in the car for what seemed like an eternity, Rausch spoke at the doorway with F. H. Presently, the old man took the car keys and told Frank to wait in the house. F. H. drove the friends home, while Frank suffered, wondering what his punishment would be.

He didn't get a beating that time, but was grounded for two months and prohibited from using the car. Extra chores were assigned too, and the young man had to chop several cords of firewood.

Frank Herbert's sister, Patricia Lou, almost thirteen years his junior, became an increasing source of concern for him. Their parents were on the brink of divorce, arguing constantly and drinking more than ever. Too often she was neglected. The boy took care of her when he could. On many occasions he bought baby food and other necessities with his own odd-job earnings. He also purchased toys for her, or made them of wood and whatever else he could find.

The family was living in South Tacoma at the time. He went to nearby Stewart Intermediate School, graduating in June 1935, with a grade point average of only 1.93. The following September, he enrolled at Lincoln High School, only a few blocks from his home. He failed Latin in his first semester, but on retaking the class in the spring of 1936 earned a B. Then in a subsequent attempt to take more advanced Latin, during the spring of 1937, he dropped out of the class, receiving no grade. The only other class he failed, also in the Spring 1937 semester, was Geometry. In other Geometry classes he received Cs each time. In English, where he would one day write prose read by millions, he had two Bs, a C, and a D. He received his only A in the Fall 1936 semester, in World History. His grade point average for the first two and a half years was a meager 2.05.

When he began his senior year in the fall of 1937, he was behind in the credits needed for graduation, so he took one extra class, and passed everything, with slightly better than a C average. He took a journalism class that semester, receiving a B. As part of this class, he was on the staff of
The Lincoln News
, a high school newspaper that was run according to professional standards by Homer Post, an ex-reporter and educational legend. The paper was a perennial national award winner.

Frank Herbert, who would later spend many years in the newspaper profession, was sixteen when he began the journalism class, and turned seventeen during it—an impressionable time of life in which to fall under the influence of a master. Earlier my father had been influenced by an ex-newspaperman living in Burley, Henry W. Stein, who regaled him with tales of life on a big-city newspaper.

Working out of the school news shack under Post's tutelage, Frank became a “general assignment news chaser,” a reporter doing school and community stories. It was like a real newspaper, and he learned the importance of deadlines, how to copy-edit and how to find the most interesting angle on a story.

He often wore a blue serge suit, a light tan shirt and a tie to his classes—rather neat, though inexpensive, attire for high school. By all accounts Frank Herbert was well-liked on campus, a young man with a buoyant attitude and boundless energy. Another student remembered how blond he was, and his pink and white “peaches and cream” complexion. One day he burst in the door of the news shack and shouted, “Stop the presses! I've got a scoop!”

In the spring of 1938, Dad took two extra classes, still trying to catch up on the credits he was behind. This workload, combined with problems he was experiencing at home, proved too much for him. In May 1938, he dropped all of the classes, earning no credits for that semester. Among the classes he dropped were Journalism and Public Speaking—areas in which he would excel in later years.

In the summer, he earned extra money working for a newspaper,
The Tacoma Ledger
. He performed copyboy and other office duties, and was sent on some reporting assignments when the regular reporters were on vacation.

The following semester, in the fall of 1938, he took a normal class load, including Journalism. All that year, he excelled on the school newspaper. A number of feature stories appeared under his byline, and he wrote a regular column on page two called “Riding the Rail,” in which he discussed school events, often humorously. His columns were high in political content, reflecting his knowledge of world affairs—a knowledge that was enhanced by his participation in the school debating team, where he starred. The debating experience whetted his appetite for politics, an area of interest that would remain with him for the rest of his life. He was promoted to Associate Editor of the paper.

In the 1930s there was a great deal of interest in ESP (extrasensory perception), particularly in “Rhine consciousness,” the term for paranormal experiments with cards conducted by Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine of Duke University. He conducted experiments in which subjects were asked to guess what card another person was holding, when the backside was only visible to the subject. The results seemed to prove the existence of ESP.

One evening Dad was on a date with a girl named Patty, and they tried their own version of the Rhine experiments, using a standard deck of fifty-two playing cards. One by one, she held cards up, and my father guessed all of them correctly. Thinking he was tricking her, she obtained another deck of cards and took great care to mix them up and conceal them from him. Again, he guessed each card correctly. Later, under different circumstances, Dad found himself unable to repeat the astounding results.

This experience of my father's became the basis of his short story, “Encounter in a Lonely Place,” published in 1973. A strong occult theme ran through a number of his most important works as well, including the
Dune
series and
Soul Catcher
.

When he was seventeen, Frank Herbert analyzed the Western fiction market by reading several boxes of books and magazines he had purchased at a used bookstore. A formula became apparent to him, and he used it to write a Western story under a pseudonym. It sold to Street and Smith for $27.50, and he was elated. Confident that he had discovered a path to instant success as a writer, he spent the money quickly. Then, in only a few weeks, he wrote two dozen more stories, all using the identical formula. Rejection letters poured in. He would not make another sale for eight years.

My father never revealed the title of that first story sale, or the pseudonym under which he wrote it. Not particularly proud of the writing, he said it was amateurish. Nonetheless, it was a sale, and he was still in high school at the time.

Displaying literary versatility and a curiosity about what lay before him on the uncharted course of life, he wrote a poem entitled “Your Life?”—published in the September 30, 1938, issue of
The Lincoln News
:

Only two months later, his home life would fall apart entirely. He could no longer stand the suffering of his sister, now five, so again he dropped all of his classes, earning no credits toward graduation. With his parents drinking heavily and near divorce, he ran away from home, taking Patricia Lou with him. The pair caught a bus to Salem, Oregon, and sought refuge with Frank's favorite aunt, Peggy (Violet) Rowntree, and her husband, Ken Rowntree, Sr. (Peggy was one of Babe's sisters.)

Within weeks the touchy family situation improved, and Patricia moved back home. But Frank—barely eighteen—remained with his aunt and uncle, and enrolled at Salem High. Peg and Ken had a son by Ken's earlier marriage, Kenneth Jr., and they were also taking care of Jackie and Larry Sullivan, whose mother, Carmen Sullivan (one of Peggy and Babe's sisters), had died in childbirth. The boys became close, particularly Frank and Jackie, who were around the same age. This was a much improved family situation for Frank, supported by an economically stable, loving marriage.

Dad graduated from Salem High School in 1939 with no immediate plans for college. Despite past problems the young man missed his parents and sister, and now that he was out of school he had a yearning to see new places. In the fall of that year he moved to San Pedro, California, near Los Angeles, where his parents were living. F. H. was chief of the Guard Force for Los Angeles Shipbuilding & Drydock Corporation, an important shipbuilder.

Shortly after arriving in California, “Junior” obtained a newspaper position at the
Glendale Star
as a copy editor, after lying about his age. He was just nineteen, but had a way of speaking and carrying himself that enabled him to pass himself off as a man five or six years older. He smoked a brier pipe, too, which made him look sophisticated.

At the
Star
there was an old, foul-tempered man who was also a copy editor, and the guy apparently thought that life had passed him by. He sat directly across the desk from an energetic upstart named Frank Herbert.