Dreamer of Dune

by Brian Herbert

  Babe was a strong, earthy woman, though barely five feet tall. With informal training as a nurse, she even delivered babies on occasion. One story in particular says a lot about her and F. H., and about the times in which they lived. When F. H. was still on the State Patrol she went on speakeasy raids with him. While her husband and other officers raided the illegal establishments and arrested scofflaws, she waited in the backseat of the patrol car, wearing a big fur coat. “When we pulled out of there,” Babe recalled years later, “I tinkled (with bottles) under my coat.”

  Young Frank often read past his bedtime, using a bare lightbulb on the end of an extension cord under his bedcovers, to prevent casting light under the door. The bulb often browned the sheets. He was safe from scolding, though, since now his family could afford to have their laundry done outside the house, and his mother always blamed the laundry company and their mangle.

  But trouble was stirring between the dance-hall partners. During their first year of operation they got into a heated argument, in which my grandparents accused their partners of cheating them. In a huff, F. H. and Babe quit the business without compensation, then devoted their full attentions to the service station.

  Over the next four decades the Spanish Castle became one of the most celebrated dance halls in the United States, visited by famous bands from all over—a situation that constantly rubbed salt into my grandparents’ wounds.

  Depressed when they saw what a huge mistake they had made, my grandparents began drinking more heavily than ever. This detracted from the operation of the service station, which was already struggling in the Great Depression. Soon the business went bankrupt and my grandparents lost everything. To make matters worse, Babe was pregnant. Without any source of income, F. H., Babe and Frank (now eleven) moved in with one of the McCarthy families in Tacoma. Frank—commonly called “Junior”*—shared a bedroom with two of his cousins, Thomas and Leonard McCarthy, and each night before they went to sleep regaled them with adventure stories. The boys became like brothers.

  After six months, F. H. secured a job as a salesman. This enabled him to move the family to a beach home on Day Island, connected by a short bridge with the city of Tacoma. It was the spring of 1933. In May, Babe gave birth to a baby girl, Patricia Lou. After Dad’s family moved to Tacoma, he visited Burley at every opportunity to see his grandparents and his old friend, Dan Lodholm.

  Early one morning, just across the channel from Day Island, Frank was fishing but not doing well. It was near Fox Point on Fox Island, where much of the shoreline was densely forested. After a while he noticed a Native American man sitting on the shore, watching him intently. The man, in his late forties, motioned the boy over and showed him how to make a herring dodger, which subsequently worked very well. Over the next two years the man—Indian Henry—and my father became fast friends. Henry was a Hoh, one of the Coast Salish, and lived by himself in an old smokehouse. He semi-adopted Frank, teaching him many of the ways of his people.

  This included how to catch fish with your feet, how to poach fish, and how to identify edible and medicinal plants in the forest. The Indian ate sweet red ants and found protein-rich grub worms under logs, which he also ate. The boy tasted ants and worms for the experience of it, but did not develop a taste for them! Henry also taught him how to catch a sea gull by laying a slip knot tied with fishing line on the ground and placing a piece of herring inside. When the bird stepped into the circle of line, the noose was tightened, thus securing one or both of the gull’s legs. In Soul Catcher (1972), Frank Herbert would write of another hunting technique that he learned from Indian Henry:

  Katsuk had taken the grouse from a giant hemlock near the pond. He had called it a roosting tree. The ground beneath it was white with grouse droppings. The grouse had come sleepily to the hemlock branches at dusk and Katsuk had snared one with a long pole and a string noose.

  Though Indian Henry never admitted as much, his young Caucasian friend—tending toward the melodramatic—became convinced that he was a murderer who had been excommunicated from the tribe. The man hinted at something troublesome in his past, but the boy never obtained details and never felt at risk in his presence. Forty years later, Frank Herbert wrote about many of these experiences in his suspense-packed novel of Indian rage, Soul Catcher.

  After learning how to fish in the Indian way, young Frank always brought back big bunches of fish. Finally a man who operated one of the general stores in Tacoma asked him how he did it. Naively, Frank showed him the dodger. After that, the man marketed identical dodgers, in such volume that he made a tidy sum.

  To make extra money my father put a twelve-horsepower King outboard on his rowboat, and used it to tow logs back to shore, where they could be cut into firewood and sold. One day he found a 20'©20'©10' half-submerged container of fine Tennessee white oak, which he pulled in. Some of the wood was wormy, but the bulk of it was in good condition and of considerable value. By this time his family was on its economic feet again, so he got permission from his parents to barter the oak for a twenty-seven-foot sailboat that the owner didn’t want, since it had a problem staying upright. By the time he was fifteen, Frank had the sailboat rebuilt and ballasted with concrete, which he poured into the hull. He took fourteen people out sailing once, including a guitarist, a clarinetist, and an accordionist. In those days, my father told me, they called an accordion a “squeeze-me-pull-me.”

  On sailing trips, young Frank Herbert liked to sleep out on the deck. Stars lined the roof of the sky over his head, and he memorized the names and locations of constellations and major stars. He learned to use a sextant for navigation.

  When he was fourteen, he swam across the Tacoma Narrows, a mile through treacherous currents. A short while later, he and a seventeen-year-old friend, Ned Young, took a small Willits sailing canoe all the way to the fjords of the British Columbia mainland, just south of the Alaskan panhandle, a round trip of nearly two thousand miles. They turned the canoe over on beaches and slept under it. But when they got to the fjords there weren’t any beaches, so an Indian woman let them sleep on the porch of her little house, and gave them breakfast.

  Through learning of my father’s experiences in the outdoors, I’ve gained an insight into the thought processes that went into his writing. His great “mainstream” novel Soul Catcher, about an Indian who could not accept the ways of white men, comes into clearer focus. He also wrote another Indian book, which was never published: Circle Times, a fictionalized but historically accurate account of the wars of the Coast Salish. My father admired the link between Native Americans and their environment, the way they lived for centuries in harmony with nature, not wreaking havoc upon it as the white man did. Frank Herbert developed a deep respect for the natural rhythms of nature. The ecology message, so prevalent in much of his writing, is one of his most important legacies.

  There is also an interesting, recurrent water-and-ocean theme in his writings, from his submarine novel The Dragon in the Sea (1956) to the sand formations of Dune (1965) that resemble slow-moving waves upon a great ocean. He was a sailor, fisherman, and swimmer, and would serve in the U.S. Navy during World War II. He understood the critical importance of potable water to a backwoodsman, hiker and sailor. A tiny drop of water is the essence of all life.

  One of my father’s earliest short stories, “The Jonah and the Jap”(1946), concerns a seaplane that makes an emergency landing in the China Sea. In “Try to Remember!” (1961), aliens threatening Earth arrive in an immense spaceship that resembles a tiny freshwater organism with cilia. “The Mary Celeste Move” (1964) describes a phenomenon in which people abruptly leave their homes and move far away, often leaving their belongings behind—an idea based upon the mysterious sailing ship Mary Celeste, found floating in 1872 with its passengers and crew missing. “The Primitives” (1966) describes a man named Swimmer who is adept at underwater criminal activities. “The Mind Bomb” (1969) takes place in an oceanside town. “Seed Stock”(1970) concerns a world with a purp
le ocean, where the primary food source is a creature like a shrimp. “Songs of a Sentient Flute” (with Bill Ransom, 1979), like their collaborative novels The Jesus Incident (1979) and The Lazarus Effect (1983), involve ocean worlds covered with vast, sentient kelp formations.

  As a young man, Frank Herbert was close to his grandmother, Mary Ellen Herbert. A kindly, thin woman with a long face and large round eyeglasses, she favored long dresses with flower prints, and usually wore an apron, even when away from home. Mary usually tied her gray hair in a bun, and it had a beautiful sheen from shampooing with secret ingredients. Some folks in Burley thought it was a concoction of beer and eggs, while others said it was whiskey and olive oil. Mary just laughed at all the guesses.

  Though an illiterate country-woman, she was a genius with figures, and no matter how big the numbers were that anyone wanted her to add, subtract, multiply, or divide, she always got the answers right. She instilled a love of math in her favorite grandson, which he employed in his science fiction writings. She also had an incredible memory, and recalled details perfectly from decades before. Mary Herbert was, in effect, a human computer, and she became a model for the Mentats of Dune.

  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.”

  Chapter 3

  Cub Reporter

  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 wal
ls 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.