Chapter 18

A New Relationship

Somehow, inside yourself, your relationship with your father is something you need to come to terms with. Only then can you go on with your life.

—Actor Brandan Lee, son of Bruce Lee

MY FATHER was one of the most interesting men in the world. His writing was only part of that, a dimension of the man. He had other aspects, fascinating ones. Of all the complex characterizations he drew in his stories, including that of Paul-Muad’Dib, Frank Herbert was a more complicated person. He was not a man to be understood readily, not a man easily read.

By long-distance telephone from my apartment in San Francisco to Dad’s in Seattle, he and I made something of a truce, without either of us apologizing. We didn’t speak of our last confrontation, an argument over my drinking, and went on from there rather uneasily, talking instead about various family matters. How my brother Bruce was doing, and my sister Penny and her husband, Ron, who now had three sons, David, Byron and Robert. Dad said it was beautiful in Seattle, that he was glad to be home.

Then my father surprised me by asking if I might consider moving north.

“Maybe,” I said.

The month Frank Herbert arrived in Seattle, astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the moon. In a subsequent conversation I had with Dad, he told me of his tremendous excitement about that. And he added a bit of practicality: “We have to get off this planet. We can’t have all our eggs in one basket.”

In his position as education editor for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Dad met interesting people on the University of Washington beat, including the world’s leading expert on land law and land reform, law professor Roy Prosterman. Prosterman invited his new friend to accompany him to South Vietnam to study land ownership, farming methods and problems of overpopulation—all areas of keen interest to my father.

Only six weeks after arriving in Seattle, Frank Herbert–the-adventurer had been inoculated against Third World diseases and was on his way to South Vietnam as a war correspondent for Hearst Headline Service—on the payroll of the Post-Intelligencer.

Shortly after his departure I called to see how Mom was doing. She sounded despondent, lonely. “I feel strange when your father’s away,” she said. “As if a light around me has dimmed.” She said she missed his energy around her, his constant ebullience. When she arose in the morning she no longer heard his typewriter clacking rapidly from another room, a sound which for its comfort and familiarity had become music to her ears. She no longer felt his embrace or, when she was tired, the loving way he massaged her shoulders.

It was a time of heavy U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and more than thirty thousand Americans had already been killed in action. Many Americans were vocally opposed to U.S. participation in the conflict, and thousands had been taking to the streets in protest. Dad stayed at the USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development) VIP House in Saigon, where visiting U.S. senators and congressmen were housed. He was assigned a car and driver, and his Hearst press credentials permitted him access to the most important people in the country. He also received the assistance of American military pilots, who provided air taxi service, taking him almost anywhere he wanted to go.

Now for Hearst Headline Service he wrote of a bungled U.S. war effort in the region, asserting that our policy was poorly thought out and based upon faulty data and incorrect assumptions. As a result, he said, thousands of Americans were dying. His stories ran daily in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer for the two weeks he was on assignment. Each morning Mom read them and clipped them out.

Frank Herbert was, at various times, both a war protester and, almost paradoxically, a member of the National Rifle Association. It is important to understand that he was not opposed to all wars, although he could certainly see the folly of most of them. Wars had a tendency to destroy the habitat of mankind, he thought, the Earth-nest. One of his unpublished poems speaks to this point of view, and of the resilience of nature:

Boots march past ruins—

Then, one blade of grass springs

Upright—and another….

Just prior to the publication of Dune Messiah in hardcover by Putnam, it ran in five installments in the science fiction magazine Galaxy, from July through November, 1969. “The Mind Bomb,” a Frank Herbert short story, also ran that year in the October issue of If magazine.

The serialized Dune Messiah was named “disappointment of the year” for 1969 by National Lampoon, Harvard University’s satirical magazine. Messiah had earlier been rejected by legendary Analog editor John W. Campbell, who, like the Lampooners, loved the heroic aspects of Dune and hated the anti-heroic elements of the sequel. They did not understand that Messiah was a bridging work, connecting Dune with an as-yet-uncompleted third book in the trilogy. Messiah flipped Dune over, revealing the dark side of a messiah phenomenon that had appeared to be so glorious in Dune. Many readers didn’t want this dose of reality; they couldn’t stand the destruction of their beloved, charismatic hero, Paul Muad’Dib.

Dad was not entirely deaf to his readership. In Dune he had killed off the popular Swordmaster of the Ginaz, Duncan Idaho. This upset fans so much that he resurrected Idaho in Dune Messiah in an altered form—a “ghola” that was cloned from cells of the dead man, resulting in a creature that did not have the memories of the original.^*

In Messiah my father wrote of the dangers of following any leader blindly. And during impassioned speeches on university campuses all across the country, he warned young people not to trust government, telling them that the American founding fathers understood this and attempted to establish safeguards in the constitution.

“Governments lie,” my father said.

In the transition from Dune to Dune Messiah, Dad accomplished something of a sleight of hand. In the sequel, while emphasizing the actions of the heroic leader, Paul Muad’Dib, as he had done in Dune, the author was also orchestrating monumental background changes and dangers, involving machinations of the people surrounding that leader. These people would vie for position to become closest to Paul; they would secure for themselves as much power as possible, and would misuse that power.

Many critics didn’t understand this subtle message and lambasted the book.

Through it all, Dune continued to increase its readership. Readers passed dog-eared copies back and forth, and word got around. They loved the novel so much that they read it over and over, discovering something new on each pass through. One fan claimed to have read the book forty-three times!

Four years after publication in novel form, Dune received what Dad considered to be its first “really perceptive” review, from Reyner Banham of New Society London. Banham loved the novel, and tabbed it as the next great cult book after Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings. The first Whole Earth Catalog in 1969 included a big spread on Dune, presenting it as a revolutionary ecological handbook couched in a “rich and re-readable fantasy.” The catalog sold paperback copies of Dune at ninety-five cents apiece, giving sales of the novel a sharp kick upward.

In January 1970, my insurance company transferred me to Seattle. This was at my request, for I had been born in Seattle. The move felt comfortable to me. Beyond that, I had been missing my parents, even Dad. The abuses of neglect and overzealous discipline that he had visited upon me in my childhood were fading in memory, and I was trying to be positive about him.

When we visited their home on a frosty, clear day, Dad was wearing a rust-red sweater that Mom had made for him. His full, slightly wavy beard was freshly trimmed, giving him a professorial appearance. His alert, youthful blue eyes had Santa Claus crinkles around them. His movements were energetic, belying his forty-nine years.

My mother’s dark brown hair was cut stylishly short. Her eyes were a darker shade of blue than his, and with her nearly round, gentle face and quiet ways, she was the perfect complement to his dynamism. Each of them wore a simple gold wedding band. I always felt a sense of permanence about their relationship when I looked at those rings exchanged at their marriage in 1946—that no matter the vicissitudes of life, their rings would never change, would never be removed.

During dinner Dad told some of his favorite jokes and anecdotes. In the telling of a story, he often switched between characters, and if they were ethnic he mimicked their accents, usually quite well. His accents could range among various ethnicities, and this evening he told a rollicking tale of three retired British officers. At the conclusion of the story we all laughed heartily. When Dad laughed he invariably took a couple of extra gulps at the end, like an earthquake with ensuing tremors.

I sipped my red wine and gazed out upon Seattle, at the sparkling lights of the city. Beyond the Space Needle a harbor tour boat, brightly illuminated and filled with revelers, plied the waters of Elliott Bay, heading out toward Bainbridge Island. From an early age, I used to listen to my father’s wondrous array of amusing and interesting stories as he regaled friends. He never told them directly to me or to my siblings, so whenever I heard them I felt like an eavesdropper, hanging around on the fringes. Now, for the first time, he was telling the stories to me. I was no longer a child, but was an adult with a wife and a child and all of the rights attached thereto.

As time passed I established a new relationship with my father. Both he and my mother became more than parents. They became friends to Jan and to me. But Dad was so busy, with public appearances and writing deadlines, that we had to make appointments to see him, fitting ourselves into available niches in his calendar. It wasn’t a relationship where we could just pop over to their place unannounced.

As Dad’s schedule permitted, we made occasional trips with them to the beach, to the woods, and out on boats. Above all, there were wonderful dinners, many of them prepared by my mother and father. Both had become, in recent years, gourmet chefs. At every sitting, Dad told marvelous stories in his rich, full-bodied voice, peppered frequently with his deep, contagious laughter. The voice that had once seemed so objectionable to me from the stern discipline it imparted was now quite the opposite, a source of delight.

At times, even when my father was being kind to me, I had difficulty shaking childhood memories of him towering over me with his hand upraised and voice thundering. I tried not to think of such things, but I needed to talk with him about them, to clear the air. But with someone as dominant as this man, that was not an easy task. Reluctantly, I set it aside.

On an adult level I began to see sides of my father I had not previously noticed. He dominated every conversation, even when a room was full of people, and sometimes I found his ego hard to bear. But that was his way, and he was, after all, the most interesting person any of us knew.

Whenever Jan or I had important announcements to make to my parents—something to do with our personal lives—such news would receive a few moments of polite, often excited reception from them. Then Jan and I would listen with rapt interest for hours to the thrilling events of their lives. At times this made us feel comparatively insignificant, but such thoughts were fleeting and of little concern to us.

Dad’s criticisms of me were gentler than in earlier years, more considerate and better thought out. I came to realize that it had more than a little to do with my age, and that this man could relate better to adults than to children. He had little patience for the activities of the young, for their hyperactivity, for their loud and importunate behavior.

Also I was no longer living with him, which must have helped immensely. The plethora of personal habits that can irritate a housemate weren’t occurring. With breathing room our relationship was beginning to look as if it might stand a chance.

Conversely, there were large sparks flying between Dad and Bruce, almost every time I saw them together. Bruce was eighteen, of an age when he instinctively wanted to break away. Around 5'10" and slender, with long brown hair, he was speaking his mind more freely to Dad, venting previously pent-up hostilities. Bruce had also developed an intelligent procedure of minimizing confrontations with Dad by coming in the back door and heading straight for his room.

My brother’s feelings of attraction toward other males were mixed with feelings that he should be attracted to women, that he should behave in socially accepted ways. He took girls to high school proms and other dates and had one particular girlfriend for a time, an intelligent young woman with round eyeglasses.

But Bruce was experimenting with amphetamines, getting “high” on a regular basis. He told me of a dinner one evening with my parents when he was so high that he laughed at everything they said. They didn’t comment on his behavior, perhaps thinking it was only the wine that was served with the meal. Or perhaps, as Bruce suspected, our mother “turned her head” on this occasion and others, not wanting to see, not wanting to face the possibility that her second son was on a destructive path.

When University of Washington students gathered in opposition to the Cambodian War, my father the Post-Intelligencer education editor was in their midst, as supporter and reporter. The protesters commandeered the I-5 freeway through Seattle, preventing cars from using it while they marched on the federal courthouse, an army without arms.

Some months earlier, a Los Angeles community group concerned about air pollution had paid for Dad’s services as an expert consultant. At one of their meetings, the conversation kept returning to the internal combustion engine as the primary cause of dirty air.

Frank Herbert told them that for every new car placed on the road, a hundred new trees would have to be planted to make up for the oxygen consumed by the vehicle. Then he discussed a personal pledge he had taken to drive his present car into the ground and never buy another one with an internal combustion engine. He qualified the pledge now and added that he wouldn’t buy such a vehicle until government and industry took drastic steps to clean up the air. Dad said he had once driven a Packard powered by a Dobel steam engine in Santa Rosa, and he was intrigued by another steam engine built in Ohio. Such power plants could burn a variety of combustibles with an efficient system of external combustion that left no unconsumed hydrocarbons.

“The Packard has five hundred thousand miles on it,” he said, with anger rising in his voice. “Detroit is wedded to planned obsolescence, to bringing out new styles each year. It’s no wonder they aren’t interested in steam power.”

Upon hearing this, a man and a woman stood up and took the pledge. Word about the incident spread around Los Angeles, and converts began joining a new cause.

In April 1970, Dad was one of the principal speakers at Earth Day ceremonies, held in Philadelphia.^* He told a crowd of thirty thousand people: “I refuse to be put in the position of telling my grandchildren, ‘Sorry, there’s no more world for you. We used it up.’” He asked the attendees to begin a love affair with Planet Earth, and they applauded wildly.

Frank Herbert spoke of his internal combustion engine pledge and asked if anyone in the audience would join him. Enthusiastic cheers rang out. All thirty thousand stood to repeat what became known as “The Frank Herbert Pledge.”

Book sales accelerated.

Certainly my father, being a former political publicist and married as he was to an advertising copywriter, understood the basics of promotion. But he wasn’t being phony or hypocritical. Innately honest, he believed wholeheartedly in the causes he espoused, and his audiences knew it.

In conjunction with Earth Day, Dad wrote entries for and edited New World or No World, a book about the importance of protecting the environment. Published in paperback in 1970 by Ace Books, it included entries by Senator Edmund Muskie and Secretary of the Interior Walter J. Hickel. The book also contained transcripts of interviews by Hugh Downs of NBC’s Today Show, in which he spoke with environmental experts such as Margaret Mead, Rene Dubos, Paul Ehrlich, Barry Commoner and Ralph Nader.

Unlike many authors who could not speak in public, Frank Herbert was a natural at the podium. Universities all over the country invited him to lecture and conduct writing conferences. His beard was an entree to college campuses—distinguishing him from establishment types who could not be trusted. He smiled often, was at ease and funny on stage. When he built up a head of steam about abusive political practices or the lack of environmental planning, he was absolutely captivating, as fascinating in person as he was in print.

After his performances, students mobbed around him. He received telephone calls from people who seemed to be on drugs, telling him they had been reading Dune aloud to acid-rock music. In an interview conducted by Bill Ransom, Dad said a stoned fan woke him at 3:00 A.M. and exclaimed, “I just had to call and tell ya, man, what a trip!”

Of course Dad intended his book to be lyrical, but not in the sense he was discovering. Too many unsolicited telephone calls were coming in day and night, taking precious time from his writing and disturbing his serenity. My parents changed to an unlisted telephone number under my mother’s initials, “B. A. Herbert,” so that their many personal friends could still contact them.

A drug element in Dune, along with its ecological messages, made the book particularly attractive to college students in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Melange, the spice drug guarded by the great and ancient sandworm Shai-Hulud, was the most precious commodity in the universe described in Dune.

University intellectuals had been among the first to embrace Dune, and such connections were a continuing source of comfort for my father. With his long history of rejections from publishers, a number of political campaign failures and his inability to deal with the labyrinthine passageways of bureaucracies, he had not always been on the inside during his life.

The status he had earned in Mexico for a brief time in the 1950s, where he had been an unofficial farm adviser to villagers, had been an exception. Now through hard work and perseverance he had earned a much higher standing. He was the talk of the younger generation on campuses from coast to coast. With this group he was developing a strong base of support—a platform from which he could fight for his political beliefs, particularly environmental protection and the control of abusive political power.

Despite the accolades he was receiving on campuses, he was discovering, to his dismay, that most book stores still were not carrying his novels. This was proving to be very embarrassing to him, as well as financially unrewarding.

Dad and his literary agent complained to Chilton, publisher of the hardcover edition of Dune. But the publisher pointed its finger at bookstores, saying book vendors were more interested in newer titles, not in a book first published five years before.