Dreamer of Dune Read Online Free PDF Page B

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…”
    â€œThen 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