Audio – 2 – 3 – 4
Other Transcripts – 1 – 2 – 3 – 4
Frank Hebert Masterpost
Willis E. McNelly: This is um… tape recording’s being made February 3rd 1969 in the home of Frank Herbert in Fairfax California. Frank and his wife Bev are sitting around myself – Dr. Willis E. McNelly of Cal State English department in Thornton California – sitting around talking about science fiction, and Frank Herbert as we all know is the author of Dune and many other science fiction novels. Frank, I wonder if you’d tell us a little bit about the origins of Dune? – you started a little bit earlier and you said you can trace the germinal idea.
Frank Herbert: Oh yes, the idea came from a.. an article, I was going to do an article, which I never did, about the control of sand dunes. What many people don’t realize is that the United States has pioneered in this, how to control the flow of sand dunes, and it started up here at Florence Oregon, there is a pilot project up there of the U.S. Forest Service, which has been so successful that it has been visited and copied by.. experts, related.. departments, from Chile, Israel, India, Pakistan, Great Britain – several other countries.
WM: Well I know I drove along the Oregon coast this summer, and you had mentioned this a year ago that had begun with this, what was happening along Oregon, and I remember stopping at one fork there right south of the Columbia River it said [FH: yeah] Oregon State Park now.
FH: That’s a story – well Florence is considerably south of that [WM: South of that?] yeah, it’s about centrally located on the Oregon coast, and it was an area where sand dunes blew across Highway 1, US Highway 1, frequently blocking the highway. And the Forest Service put in a test station down there, to.. determine how they could control the flow of these sand dunes, and I got fascinated by sand dunes because, I’m always fascinated by the idea of something that is either seen in miniature and then can be expanded to the macrocosm, or which, but for the difference in time, in the flow rate, in the entropy rate, is similar to other features which we wouldn’t think were similar like all of the-
WM: How long ago was this by the way?
FH: Oh this was in ‘53 this was considerably [WM: Oh fifteen years ago] yeah this was a long time ago. Sand dunes are like waves in a large body of water, they just are slower, and the people treating them as fluid, learn to control them.
WM: fluid mechanics in other words?
FH: that’s it fluid mechanics with sand [WM: hmm] and the whole idea fascinated me so I started researching sand dunes, and of course from sand dunes you, it’s a logical idea to go into a desert, and the way I accumulate data is I start building file folders, and before long I saw that I had far too much for an article, and far too much for a story, for a short story, so I didn’t know really what I had – but I had enormous amount of data, and avenues shooting off at all angles to gather more and I was following them, I can’t read the dictionary you know, I can’t go look up a word, [FH & WM: laughs] I have to get stopped by the, by everything else on the opposite page, but, so I started accumulating these file folders, which I’ll show you later, and, as a result I finally saw that I had something enormously interesting going for me about the ecology of deserts and it was, for a science fiction writer anyway, it was an easy step from that to think what if I had an entire planet that was a desert? and during my studies of deserts, of course, and previous studies of religions, we all know that many religions began in a desert atmosphere, so I decided to put the two together because I don’t think that any one story should have any one thread, I build on a layer technique and of course putting in religion and religious ideas, with ecological ideas you can play one against the other, now this is you see I’m talking about the surface now, [WM: that’s right] I’m not talking about the way things are layered down [WM: within the novel itself] that’s right, yeah, and the way character is developed for various reasons, in the story, this is just the germ of the idea, but that’s where it began.
WM: it began 15 years ago then. Well what made you, or at what point did you, go from the sand dunes of Oregon and the ecological background there, to the decision to utilize, let’s say the Arabian mystique as a um, as another counter notion or contrapuntal notion working within the novel?
FH: Well of course in studying Sand dunes you immediately get into, not just the Arabian mystique, but the Navajo mystique, and mystique of the Kalahari primitives, and all of [WM: Kalahari primitives?] yeah the Kalahari Desert, the black folk [WM: oh, oh] of the Kalahari and how they utilize every drop of water… and you can’t.. just stop with the people who are living in this kind of environment, you have to go on to how the environment works on the people and how they work on their environment, just, I mean you could look at this thing on the Oregon coast quite simply if you wanted to and say ‘ah yes the sand was covering the highway and that’s bad’ so [WM: so we plant certain grasses and that stops the sand from moving and that’s good] and that’s the end of it you see and that’s the end of it, but if you start going into the mechanics of how the United States Forest Service set up this project, and all of the internal politics undoubtedly that were involved, I only know part of them but I know enough to know they were quite a few more, then you would probably have a story there, a mainstream type, type of story [WM: yeah] but I got off on a different kick because of the science fiction angle and the emphasis on ecology. It’s been my belief for a long time that a man inflicts himself on his environment… that is Western man.
WM: I think we can see that just looking around us.. the simple thing of.. beer used to be packed in bottles which eventually disintegrated, then it was packed in cans and that took, at a 50-year half-life, and now it’s packed in aluminum cans and that, you know lives forever and we’re grabbing the [FH: unless it’s corrupting our] yeah well alright, but we’re gradually corrupting our environment as a result of that [FH: plastic] kind of thing.
FH: Plastic is the thing that we, do you know Bev and I were up on the Washington coast last year, and.. an area unspoiled, originally, very primitive area above the, where the macaws tribes live and so on, and even there, down among the driftwood logs on that primitive beach, on that almost unspoiled beach, you frequently, much too frequently, come on these blue, orange, green, white, plastic containers, Purex, Ivory soap… [Bev Herbert: coming on the tide] they, and they’re virtually indestructible… and there they are, they float.
WM: Well man is then, as you view him, a creature who ecologically is a.. destructive force, a divisive force.
FH: Well we tend to think in Western cul- I’m talking about Western man [WM: yeah] you realize that? We tend to think that.. we can overcome nature.. by a mathematical means, we accumulate enough data and, and just subdue it. [WM: and examine the parameters of that data] Yeah [WM: and subdue it] yeah we subdue nature. This is a, a one-pointed vision, of man, because if you really start looking at, at man, Western man, you’ll see that.. you can cut him right down the middle and he’s blind on that backside you see.
WM: This is a point that you made earlier Bev in talking about the death of the planetary ecologist in Dune being a very touching spot I think you said it, very moving-
BH: [garbled] Well it also was a… a significant point, the whole, a lot of the story swung around this: How the ecologist dies, I thought it was very important that the planet kills the ecologist.
WM: Even though the planet, what I mean, even though the ecologist was… technically able to subdue anything within that.
BH: Well there he lay dying [WM: dying] and understanding everything that was happening [WM: exactly] much more than if someone else died on desert floor alone, complete understanding – I think it made it more it more horrible that the fact that he completely understands,
WM: That he knew what was happening to him and understood it and was technically capable of controlling it.
BH: He knew it had gotten him [WM: yes].
FH: This of course was done deliberately for that purpose… to turn, it’s a turning point of the whole book, but, a pivot you might say, and… the very fact that Kynes… who is the Western man… in my original construction of the book… sees all of these things happening to him as mechanical things, doesn’t subtract from the fact that he is still a part of this system because it is observing him, he’s lived out of rhythm with it, and he got on the, in the trough of the wave and it tumbled on him.
WM: And we are polluting our atmosphere, we’re polluting our rivers, we’re polluting our beaches because we don’t understand the principles of ecology… among other things.
FH: Well ecology as somebody said, and I used this, I don’t recall [probably Paul B. Sears] I’d like to attribute this, but I don’t recall where I encountered it, I did read over 200 books in the, as background on this novel. Somebody said that ‘ecology is the science of understanding consequences’.
WM: I remember that.
FH: Lovely expression [WM: yes, I remember that] and… of course we’re, each of us individually is the product of everything that has happened to him, and this happened to me and hit me, and so I used it, because, as far as I was concerned one of the purposes of this story was to delineate consequences… of inflicting yourself upon a planet, upon your environment.
WM: So you have a number of forces then that are inflicting themselves upon the planet: you have the Fremen forces, you have the… forces of the house of Atreides do you pronounce it? [FH: Atreides] Atreides… parenthesis I’d love to examine with you the possible implications of the house of Atreus in the Greek legend there, end parenthesis, and you have the off-planet forces of the Spacer’s guild and the entire Imperium also as being forces inflicting themselves on this planet, hmm.
FH: The name of the game is power you see [WM: yeah] as it is today… We play the game today with counters called money, and we talk about laws of supply and demand and so on, and there is a law of supply and demand, as long as you only have one form of exchange, but once you start getting other media of exchange.. such as force.. then the law of supply and demand gets different beats on it, different rhythms.
WM: It may interest you to know that um… one of the, in fact the major question on my final examination for my science fiction course this, last, two weeks ago, was the… asking the class to examine the effects of power in its various forms, abuses, and uses in two of the major works read during the semester, and you’re mentioning power just now as being the name of the game as far as Arrakis is concerned
FH: Yeah…[WM: huh] You see Western man has assumed.. that if.. you have, that all you need for any problem is, enough force, power, um and that there is no problem which won’t submit to this approach… even, even the problem of our own ignorance [both laugh], which you see throws it out the window right there, because it’s an asinine assumption, and it is the basic fallacy of Western man’s approach to living. Now I’m not saying that we immediately drop this and adopt Vedanta.
WM: although that might not be a bad idea.
FH: No, we need what I would call a science of wisdom.
WM: I think among the things that we need.. and this is indicated to a certain extent in the novel but, we need a clear distinction in our minds, in the minds of Western man, between the ethical norm and the moral life, the moral life is subject to change, ah it is the law etc. etc. etc. but the ethical norm are those things which we must do because they are the proper thing to do regardless of the law [FH: they’re an abstract] they are an abstract and this conflict between the moral and the ethical norms we see obtaining in certain situations within Dune as I recall [FH: well.. well the moral..] at least I could extrapolate.
FH: Yeah.. ah that’s correct, although the moral norm is I saw it in Dune was something that is imposed upon people by their environment [WM: yeah] I mean it says.. fixed as how many wives a man in this culture might be able to support and thereby have, or, or ah what possessions he can carry from one stopping place to another, and how this would control the moral laws [WM: yes] that would be built up in society – we see it in our society for example… out of our nomadic background… and herdsman background, we see all kinds of moral injunctions which grew up out of that which we accept today… logically, I’m not trying to denigrate them, but we can trace them this way, now this is where moral law comes from, ethical law takes a step in [FH & WM: another direction] and it says that… I, the thinking animal, see that the logical consequences of these moral actions are such as and so, and maybe I better.. modify the moral law slightly by a higher ethical law.
WM: I I find this then in one of the, in some of the internal conflicts which are bothering Paul [FH: yeah] that the ethical norm which he sees as being an… want to say absolute rightness as opposed with a… the law of moral necessity, and these are clashing in him, these are tensions at work within Paul which cause him I think to have a depth of characterization that you do not normally find within the normal science fiction novel.
FH: You’ve hit on of course the way the character of Paul was constructed, it was a conflict between… absolutes and the necessity of the moment [WM: yeah] and [WM: it’s almost an existential necessity incidentally as I caught it, as I read it] that’s right… yeah that’s absolutely right [WM: and] absolutely [laughs] [WM: gee thanks] yeah you see this is an exercise in… showing up you might say the fallacy of absolutism.
WM: Even to be absolute about being non-absolute because Paul is bothered with that very problem [FH: that’s right] it seems – how absolute can he be and get in his relationships with his subordinates? with the Stilgar for example if he’s too absolute he loses, you know he gains um, how did you put it in the novel? he, he saw, he sees the loss of a friend and the gain of the worshipper almost I think. [FH: He gains um a… he loses a friend and gains a worshipper] a worshipper yes, and this kind of conflict which you were, if he’s too absolute here and not absolute there, or in the necessity, or in the, when the tribe tries to force upon Paul the apparent necessity for killing Stilgar and he has to talk to tribe out of one of their tribal rules in order to [FH: a moral] yeah, right [FH: a moral rule] a moral rule.
FH: And you see how the moral rule was developed out of the necessities of their background [WM: exactly] and he has given them then an ethical rule.
WM: Yes, and yet this conflict is continual within Paul, I think, and it makes, I think, for certain added dimensions in the novel that, again the normal science fiction novel does not have. Well you began this then in ‘53, you began doing research and filling file folders with facts, and extrapolating to the… the sand dune planet, tell me further about the writing process itself.
FH: Well, this was the first book where I really started carefully.. applying.. these ideas about the building of a rhythm within a story. [WM: Would you just define this a little bit more for me?] I will I’ll be specific about it… and I can use an analogy which is familiar to both of us – poetry, [WM: alright] but it is used only as analogy [WM: okay] you know how you choose a word in a given poem.. to control the beat.. of the poem.. [WM: are you familiar-] the way.
WM: -with Hopkin’s poem the windhover…? if not I’ll get it up for you later and show you how there is one word in there which absolutely controls the total poem.
FH: Yeah, this happens in many poems [WM: many poems] yeah and the poem then develops a certain fixed rhythm, now by changing the phraseology, the placement of words, you can change that rhythm, you can slow it down, you can speed it up, well there is an analogous thing in prose, I think this is [WM: yeah] quite easily defensible, that length of sentence, number one, modifying clauses, [WM: variety of sentence structure] variety of sentence structure, all of these things, control the pace of controlled reading or control, controlled silent reading or oral.. and I work orally.. because I think that.. the language was spoken long before it was written, and I think that unconsciously, we still accept it as an oral transmission.
WM: That’s something I’m going to have to try with um some of my classes – is reading parts of Dune aloud.. to them um, I’ve done this, I do this as the standard device in, in when I teach Joy, Sir Yeats, or Eliot I read great gobs of it aloud in class.
FH: Well this was done deliberately as to control that oral pace. I, by the length of sentence, by the variety of sentence, by the words in the second, whether long convoluted words or short chopping words [WM: Anglo-Saxon] Anglo-Saxon is against.. [WM: Latin] Latin. I control the pace so I have several rhythms built into the story deliberately, one is a long term rhythm, and we’ll get to the ending of the book and what I, the ending is camp… high camp.. deliberately and a number of people interestingly have seen it. I wanted to say-
WM: I found it sheer action, almost for the sake of action] [FH: Yes] and overly dramatic maybe, and you know ‘in the future they will call us wives’ I said that almost, but you call it high camp and I hadn’t thought of it that way.
FH: Well, I wanted to turn the story around on itself, but in two very specific ways, and obviously you don’t limit if you do… the way it turns, if you do that if you do one way [WM: sure] that you know of. One: I was talking a little fun at the idea of the person who always sees things verbally, and must write about them and record them you know, the historicity of anything that happens you see you’re not living it you’re recording it [WM: yeah] you see [WM: just as we’re doing right now] yeah [WM: laughs] that’s right yeah.
BH: The man who never sees anything except through his [FH: yeah but we’re having a-][WM: say that again please] the man who never sees anything except through his camera viewer, he sees the whole world he’s seeing just through that little square box [FH: the viewfinder..] [WM: right.]
FH: yeah, so I wanted to.. kind of.. have a little snicker about this you see right at the end, and, you detected that sheer action treatment there, and you see how that this does what I’m describing. [WM: yes, and that is a limited point of view action of the sheer action treatment] yeah that’s right and… also by making it a.. a.. man to man battle, at that point, between… Paul who is a an extremely complex character [WM: yeah] and.. this almost stick figure, black you see.
WM: Who is sort of.. in many ways Paul’s counterpart
FH: Exactly.
WM: he’s a, he’s a foil in the classic sense of the word
FH: A foil, a classic sense, and other places, but at this point right he becomes.. that that impossible thing, that non-existent thing, the absolute evil [WM: yep] you see, so if we turn the whole thing, whirling backward through the story. There was another thing there, in the pacing of the story, it was very slow at the beginning, it’s a coital rhythm all the way through the story.
WM: It’s a what?
FH: A coital rhythm [WM: okay] very slow, pace.. increasing all the way through, and when you get to the ending of it, I’ve chopped it… at a, at a non-breaking point, so that the person reading the story skids out of the story trailing bits of it with him… on this I know I was successful because people, come to me and say – they want more and…
WM: I have said this to my classes that, in many ways as satisfying as Dune is, I find it unsatisfying because there are so many.. unanswered questions you don’t tie up the loose ends of say Paul’s sister.. unless you read.. what is ‘The Huntress of a Thousand Worlds’ that marvelous little, little footnote, Princess Alia but, or several other things the the whole question of the Spacing Guild [FH: yeah] itself and how it got to be the way it was, is a, a, is handled very you know.
FH: Well, let’s examine something as far as fiction in general [WM: alright] is concerned. um, Now there are other reasons why stories are remembered, and I’m talking about story in the classic sense of the, of the.. Jongleur who goes from castle to castle to earn his meal… [WM: alright] Entertainment. [WM: sure] The stories that are remembered, are the ones that.. strike sparks from your mind.. one way or another… it’s like a grinding wheel, they touch you and sparks fly.
WM: whether this be something like ‘The Miller’s Tale’ of Chaucer, or ‘Sir Gawain and the Greene Knight’ [FH: Yes indeed] if you please or um, well.. we could adduce thousands of other examples of to say ‘Treasure Island’ or, or what you will there’s sparks then okay? I understand your term.
FH: Now we all have stories that we go on with after finishing reading them… ah as children we can remember.. playing Treasure Island.. [WM: right, or playing Tom Sawyer] or Tom Sawyer… any of these, we remember playing these. The story stayed with us… the characters and, their conflicts, their joy’s, their play… all stayed with us. [WM: And it enkindled sparks in our own imagination so that…] we give out and we told [WM: the basic, we we, we were then active in creative play] that’s exactly right we went on and told the story ourself. [WM: Yeah] Now, I deliberately did this in Dune, for that purpose, I want the person to go on and construct for himself, all of these marvelous flights of fantasy and imagination, I want him to to, you see you haven’t had the Spacing Guild explained completely just enough so that you know its existence. Now with lots of people they’ve got to complete this [WM: yes] so they build it up in their own minds [WM: yeah] now this is right out of the story though [WM: yeah] you see, [WM: or the whole] the sparks have flown
WM: Bene (‘benei’) Gesserit you pronounce it?
FH: Bene (‘benee’) Gesserit.
WM: Bene Gesserit, their whole.. mystique and so on, is relatively unexplained – why do they want the Kwisatz Haderach in the first place? you see is a relevant-
FH: The name of the game is power.
WM: yeah and they want power hmm? that that explains it to a certain extent but-
FH: They want power in a specific.. way. You know I’ve always been amazed by the statement, or by the label… ‘psychological warfare’, there could be no such thing as psychological warfare. If you develop.. a psychological weapon… sufficiently; that it is destructive to any potential enemy, it will destroy you with the enemy…. It’s a two-edged sword without a handle and if you grab it hard enough to wield it, you’re going to [WM: unless you’re self-destructive] yes.
WM: Hmm… So we could have a, a variation on the Lord Acton.. notion ‘power corrupts, both the user and the receiver of the power both absolutely’ [FH: right] uh-huh.
FH: Acton saw it.
WM: Yeah… how interesting I hadn’t, I hadn’t thought of the.. who power corrupts and-
FH: Now the Bene Gesserit.. see this.. you see how they keep themselves in the background [WM: Yes that’s true] they want.. a user of power… they can control… [WM: mhm I see… with safety to them] that’s right it’s a safety device you see [WM: uh huh yeah] and and I say this in several ways – not in this way, [WM: yeah] not in this blatant, you know, way, but implying it and with all of its.. ah, permutations, because there’s much more to this, we can go on for several hours discussing this aspect of it.
WM: Yeah the whole… attitude of Reverend Mother Gaius Mohiam [FH: yeah] for example, Helena Gaius Mohiam. Umm, yes I see how we could, various aspects of it, well I’d like to, I’d like to examine this a little bit further in some of the religious constructs.
FH: Before we get into that [WM: okay] let me tell you something. I was up at Sonoma State last month, to talk to a class up there, and the question that seemed to attract the most attention from the class, somebody asked back there, ‘what’s all this nonsense about controlling people with voice’? [WM: laughs] and there seem to be a lot of agreement with this point of view, that it’s impossible.. to do this, and so, [chuckles] I said we do it all the time [WM: well of course we do] and it’s amazing to me that anybody could even begin to question this as a, as a.. as a fact of our existence, and they couldn’t see it so I said ‘well I’ll give you an example… I’m going to describe a man to you.. you know this man, and I’m going to give you a task of controlling him by voice… after I’ve described him and after you recognize him’, I said ‘this is a man who was.. in World War I.. as a sergeant.. came home.. from World War I.. to his small town in the Midwest, married his childhood sweetheart and went into his father’s business, raised two children who he didn’t understand they don’t understand him… he joined the VFW and the Legion, went on every picnic, every convention.. lived by the double standard.. he thought… now… on the telephone, strictly by voice, I want you to make him mad’. [WM: laughs hysterically – oink, oink, oink!] or any one of a hundred other variations [WM: coughs – variation] yeah [WM: certainly] yeah [WM: certainly], simplest thing in the world. [WM: yeah] Now what we’re seeing here is, that, see I’ve I’ve drawn a gross caricature [WM: of course] but, but we’re saying that if you know the individual.. well enough, if you know the subtleties, of his strengths and weaknesses, that merely by the way you cast your voice, by the words you select, [WM: by the intonations] whatever [WM: whatever] yeah [WM: right], you can control him, now if you can do it in a gross way.. obviously with refinement you can do it in much more subtle fashion, and it done all the time in politics.
WM: And this is one of the techniques incidentally that science fiction I think does, it takes a possibility or something that does actually exist today and extrapolates from that, perhaps refines it, makes it more specific.
FH: The science of control by voice [WM: yeah] [BH: Isn’t there a word in semantics for these.. ‘messages’ that we get across? What, what is a?] a meta [BH: meta-message] yeah meta-message [WM: meta-message?] ah it’s a well-recognized ah, thing in semantics and and you see it, Hayakawa uses the example, of um, you’re talking, you’ve met somebody… for the first time maybe in a business meeting at a convention, and.. you get acquainted, you’re speaking, you exchange views, at the end of it.. you say.. ‘we must get together for lunch sometime’. Now, under one example of this, the fellow will call you, the next week, or you’ll call him, and you will get together for lunch, and he knows you’re, he’s supposed to call you and make this luncheon date. Under the other example, of this same phrase, he knows that ‘this is goodbye I don’t care to talk to you anymore,’ but it’s the same phrase [BH: and they’re both polite] and they’re both polite [WM: oh yes] and this is the meta-message.
WM: Yeah mhm, the hidden message underneath the message and so on yeah.
FH: Yeah that’s right.
WM: Yeah I can understand that, well I had, I had no trouble understanding that question of the voice as I read the novel because… among the other things which the novel.. gave to me was the whole question of communication, and how we communicate, on multiple levels, whether it be Paul communicating by shedding a tear, that’s an act of communication.. on a very profound level to the Fremen, but um… whether or, the communication of the voice, or the communication by sword, or the communication by a dozen different ways that we all do constantly, as we’re doing in this room right now, you see you’re communicating but, in one sense, by the way.. you’re both watching me as I speak and watching Frank and watching the recorder and watching what you’re doing with your hands, they’re all sorts of communications just as.. I’m communicating and you are in a dozen, hundreds of hidden, different ways – I had no problem with that in the novel and I thought it was rather well done. Let me go off on another parenthesis here, did you ever read the novel ‘Nostromo’ by Conrad?
FH: No.
WM: I was reminded very much, as I.. read um.. Dune for the first time, of the reaction that I had when I first read Nostromo. I think that Nostromo is one of, if, probably Conrad’s greatest novel, his, certainly his most artistic achievement, as well as his most profound and I found myself thinking about Nostromo as I read.. as I read Dune.
FH: Now I’m going to have to read it.
WM: Well I, I mean it as very high praise because Nostromo is ultimately the creation of an entire… universe, it is the country of Costaguana in Central America, there is one thing in central, in this country of Costaguana that influences everybody, and it is the presence of a gigantic silver mine, and the silver.. corrupts [FH: ah] everybody in the country, in one way or another, it can, corrupts the British people who are running the silver mine, it corrupts the incorruptible Nostromo, our man, who is the sort of a folk hero of the thing [FH: Yeah] it corrupts everybody, it totally controls the country and, in watching how these people interrelate to the problem of of a silver mine, and the parallels there you see between Dune and Nostromo, to me as I read it, as a professor of English, were, were very strong, and this is one of the things I object to in, among my own compatriots, is that they are unable to see that something like Nostromo is in a very real sense a type of science fiction, we have created a mythical country based upon reality, [FH: Yep] where the people react in certain ways to things which we would react to in other ways, but it’s said over here just as the Fremen react to-
FH: Oh yeah it is [WM: yeah] my contention that in.. especially in Dune, and Dune is an.. an exposition of this.. point, that… man himself is going to change. We have changed… but our changes the the actual basic change is a gradual.. climb. Now I don’t see this as progress, I see it as a, a sort of entropy, and as a growth of complexity. But.. that this is such a slow process, that in thousands upon thousands upon thousands of years we would still recognize, the emotions, the reactions, all of these things, and given, any set of forces which you can delineate, the silver mine, the geriatric spice… [WM: right] the existence of certain hard lines of power, control, and communication [WM: as perhaps oversimplified by say the Harkonnens versus the Atreides] yes [WM: families] yeah [WM: yeah]. You have a-a classical feudal [WM: yeah sure] system here. It’s my contention that feudalism.. is a natural.. condition of human beings… not that it is the only condition, not that it is the right condition, but it, it’s just a way we have a falling into organizations. I like to use the example of the Berlin Museum beavers, you ever come across this? [WM: no] well my… the numbers are going to be wrong here but it’s on this order, [WM: yeah] before World War II there were a number of families of beaver in the Berlin Museum. They were European beaver. They had been in there, raised in captivity, for something on the order of 70 beaver generations… in cages… World War II came along and a bomb freed some of them into the countryside, what did they do? They went out and they started building dams. [WM: Whistles… Wow… Wow] [laughs] Now… tribal organization, feudalism is tribal organization [WM: oh yes] and that’s what I’m talking about so – tribal organization is a natural organization of humankind. We tend to fall into it, given any chance at all, given the proper stresses or given the proper lack of stresses.
WM: And I think we could extrapolate from that notion and say we have many more… feudal or tribal aspects in our society than we might have otherwise thought about it, I would think that the existence of the Roman Catholic Church in its feudal state as long as it has existed is sort of proof of what you’re saying.
FH: The hippies are proof of it [WM: ah yes] look at the organization they’ve set up it’s a tribal organizational- [BH: a business office is feudal] yeah or a company is feudal…
BH: A university perhaps?
WM: Oh yes indeed a, an English department [laughter] Very true.
FH: Well of course what we’re doing here is oversimplifying [WM: yes] the the complexities of it and the variations, on the theme are… multitude, but.. the, the framework is there, the skeleton is there, and you can recognize that skeleton. So… I set up the situation in Dune, where the natural evolvement, was a classic.. feudalism, and for a very specific purpose, I wanted the lines of power to be clear.
WM: Yeah, at the same time feudal lines of power, were extremely, were extremely complicated I don’t mean to contradict you but-
FH: No no I understand what you’re saying, that’s why I said that.
WM: Though while they were simple they were nonetheless multi-leveled [FH: Yes], as you indicate with… Baron Harkonnen [FH: Yes] and the Na-Baron, and and so on, all of these things of the relationship to the Imperium, this – you want to go back to the 14th, 13th no, 14th century in England with the War of the Roses.
FH: Though by clear in this, I meant in this sense, recognizable by anybody who knows those the first damn thing about history.
WM: Precisely the fief is a set of obligations from top to bottom and from bottom to top, mutual back and forth ultimately [FH: Yeah it’s a feedback situation.] Exactly, and this kind of thing, the kind of loyalty to say
Gurney Halleck gave Paul [FH: Yeah] or gave Paul’s father… this is the kind of thing that you mean [FH: the loyalty to the family] yeah certainly, and I am the rightful Duke of.. Atreides [FH: Yes] at the very end of the thing, not as he is speaking to the Sardaukar.. do you pronounce it?
FH: Yes, the Sardaukar.
WM: Yeah… very interesting. I know my students have had a lot of fun, tracing down the.. background of the Fremen as far back as they can from the hints you drop in the novel and coming to the surprise, ah delighted surprise, that they were once probably.. on Salusa Secundus.. ah.. and that this accounts for part of the way they are, even hardening there, and further.. the tracing the lifecycle of Shai-Hulud is really.. an interesting thing, for them because you don’t quite complete the whole thing in your, in the appendices.
FH: Course what have I set up there? We know, our information about the cyclic nature, the interdependence, of our own environment it’s still quite sketchy in many areas, but we do know this, we know that you need.. to create large bodies of sand, dust, what not, [WM: yeah] you need water action, some anyway [WM: yeah] and so I’ve set up.. multitudes of creatures… who substitute for this… [WM: yeah] quite logical [WM: yeah, why not?] they, they do this… ah… and I’ve postulated that in one.. vector of their life circle.. water is poison to them… [WM: right] we see this.. sort of thing on.. planet Earth right now, where a creature can live in one environment, in one vector, but that environment will kill it – in another vector, the Anopheles mosquito is a good example… and it doesn’t take much of a stretch of the imagination to.. carry this further in that classic science fiction way, saying that, given other circumstances, [WM: right] on another planet, a creature could develop something that we could see was analogous to this… and but would do these other things. Now there’s another element of Shai-Hulud too. Shai-Hulud serves a specific function, among other things in the story, but a specific… leitmotif function [WM: alright] it’s the unthinking beast… it’s the black beast… it’s the, the personification of the bull in the arena, not the way the bull in the arena actually is, but the personification [WM: the mystique of the back] the mystique of it and it there it is.
WM: I never took… the black beast has connotations that I never gave it, maybe it’s my, my taking it wrong from your terminology, it’s the… the mythic beast, the… it’s the archetypal beast, is that what you- [FH: the archetypal beast] is that what you mean by black beast?
FH: That’s right and I bring this up because of you mentioned earlier of the, of tracing the archetypal backgrounds [WM: yeah] and I meant it classically, the archetypal black beast, the one that lives.. underground, in the cavern, with the gold.
WM: I see okay right well this is the dragon of Beowulf who lives in a cave [FH: Yeah] guarding gold [FH: with the golden dagger] right precisely, incidentally Frank Baum used the G, in one of his Oz books, used the dragon Garda hoarding gold, guarding gold believe it or not. [FH: yeah] yeah,
FH: Well this, that was why I put this in there, it’s a familiar.. Theme.
WM: And gold of course becomes the geriatric spice, [FH: that’s right] in another sense, [FH: yeah] which I once figured out and one of my students figured out the geriatric spice itself is probably the defecated matter of Shai-Hulud [cackles] in one of its vectors… or it might have been, no not not in defecated matter [struggling not to giggle] it also, no no was um, the eggs perhaps.. well any who and that’s why they’re guarded, among other things [BH: look at the value of bat guano] [FH:yeah] yeah uh huh… well true… and lots of y’know [FH: of course] kids have lots of fun with this.
FH: Of course they, and I did that deliberately [WM: sure] the value of a good story in the entertainment sense, is how much of this it tips off, [WM: Yeah] how much it starts rolling [WM: Sure] so that you start creating your own story [WM: sure] the one that’s in all of us you see.
WM: And in that sense there is no right answer to… the final, let’s say, complete lifecycle of Shai-Hulud.
FH: Yeah do you want me to pin it down for you? I can I mean I had it in mind [WM: you had it in mind?] yeah but ah..
WM: I had it worked out too let’s, let’s compare notes.
FH: Well, I’d be interested before I say anything… to hear what you have to say.
WM: I got to get my book, I’m going to turn this off for a minute.
[cuts]
WM: Now we’re back again. We were talking about the archetypal patterns in Dune for a moment, off on this tangent now.
FH: Well we got onto the sequel for a moment [WM: yeah] and there’s a point here that I think should be made. Campbell, turned down the sequel. [WM: hmm?] Now his argument was.. that I had created an antihero… in Paul, in the sequel… and, he has built his magazine, I’m oversimplifying, grossly oversimplifying, [WM: sure] but this is the excellence of it really and truthfully.. accurate [WM: yeah] but he’d built his magazine on the hero. Now it’s my contention that the difference between a hero and an anti-hero is where you stop the story. And if you’re true to life.. if you’re true to life, giving these, these ingredients.. then the story goes on, because human beings go on. Now you can confine your story to one individual… and therefore, as far as he’s concerned, story begins with birth and ends with death… but if you’re dealing with larger movements [WM: it.. the parameters are much broader] that’s right, as they are this book [WM: yeah] then there is no real ending; it’s just a place where you stop the story. And one of the reasons by the way why.. in.. the book Dune, I stop it the way I do, deliberately building up a carrying momentum as though you were going down a slide, and then just chopping it [WM: to a moment of triumph and then that’s it] and you skid out of the story [WM: yeah] with all of this clinging to you.
WM: yeah, I can see that yeah.. but as I understand the Jungian archetypal pattern, you know the Lord Raglan [FH: yeah] steps of the hero I, Dune takes up about the first 15 of them more or less and if ah, I know nothing about the sequel other than the few words you’ve told me, but I would be willing to.. predict that um, if you follow the pattern, the archetypal hero pattern, he goes through many of the things that Lord Raglan sets out in the, in the notion of the hero, in the quest hero, ultimately some, Paul has to die, it’s a question of how, and ah.. under what circumstances, and ah, probably as a result of some of these tensions which have been previously operating.
FH: Yes several of them, and one of them of course is the tension of prognostication [WM: yeah] or prediction.
WM: This is foreshadowed in here [FH: yeah] he never sees his own death moment but he’s always concerned about it.
FH: Yeah, we bring this, that’s right, we bring this to a head… this idea that I’m expounding that.. you know when you talk to any of the average individual and he says ‘oh god if I could only know everything that’s going to happen tomorrow wouldn’t that be wonderful’ [WM: oh jesus] what he is talking about.. is the fifth race at Hialeah [WM: yeah, or will that girl say yes or no? laughs] that’s right, that’s what he’s talking about, and he doesn’t really want to know.. everything that’s going to happen tomorrow. Because this is precisely what I do to Paul. We carry this to its logical… outcome. And we reach a point, in the sequel, where… he is physically blinded… he is without sight, I think this is what set Campbell off ‘Messiah’ [WM: Oh he becomes an antihero in that sense] yeah. [WM: yeah] But here is Paul he’s physically blinded and yet… he knows everything, everything that’s going to happen, he’s lived this one before. Well think of how boring that is, but think of how mysterious and terrifying that it [WM: it would be to everybody else, sure] yes, a guy, it would be as though.. I, without sight you could see I have nothing but a couple of sockets here, and my wife comes in and picks up.. um a cigarette out of a package, I lean over and light it for her [WM: and say it’s a Pall Mall] yes, say ‘oh you’re back to Pall Malls.’ [WM: yeah] Paul does such things as grabbing a.. a microphone out of ah, a trooper’s hands and relaying orders.. immediately after the accident in which his eyes are lost… and, ah, greeting people in the hallway as he passes them. The [WM: um well] and of course it builds up this terrifying.. [WM: this] godhead among the people around him but it also foreshadows they’re turning against him because [WM: yeah] if a person really does this sort of thing to you, you’re going to get away from him one way or another.
WM: They’d crucify him [FH: yeah] in in in.. many ways they would, I would I could I can see this and ah, this would lead us ah to all sorts of possible.. symbolic interpretations of.. knowledge and so on going back [FH: Yeah] to the Oedipal notion perhaps [FH: yeah, yeah it’s my contention of course] and I’ve always wondered about the Oedipal aspects of the… [FH: oh they’re there] the novel but let’s not go to that right now [laughs].
FH: They’re there and deliberately [WM: yeah] the… no it’s my contention I think I’m probably right on this but the thing that got to Campbell was not that I had an antihero in his sense but that I had destroyed one of his gods, [WM: Ooooh] see because prediction and esp [WM: OH of course with Campbell that’s you know, obviously] yeah [WM: yeah] you see, if you know that the magazine and his editorial [WM: right, sure I’ve been reading it since 1940] all right then you know that he, he is completely devoted to this idea [WM: yeah] and and I’m, I’m not arguing against him but I’m merely saying that this is his point of view and this… pokes a great deal of fun, and not so much fun as it pokes a big hole the whole theory, that [WM: and, yes] it would be great to know everything that’s going to happen tomorrow, [WM: and so he rejected it?] and so he rejected [WM: isn’t that interesting] but Galaxy snapped it right up and payed Campbell’s rates [WM: huh? well well well well… looking for another Nebula for that one? – laughs] I don’t know. I didn’t even look for a Nebula for the first one, I didn’t write it with that in mind. My chief concern is to tell a good story, it really is.
WM: Virginia High Line says that a.. every time that Bob wanders away she says ‘cut to the chase’ [both laugh] [FH: yeah I heard them say] [continue to laugh] [FH: this is a classic Hollywood approach] yeah well could we go back a little bit and tell us more about the… the novel as it developed in your mind-
FH: But you were going to, to ah do something.
WM: Oh I was going to trace Shai-Hulud for you well.. I can’t quite do it completely without referring to the text, and I’m afraid that most of it is given in the text, but, I think that um.. ah the the question of the sand trout and the, [FH: that’s right] is is one of the vectors, from the sand trout to… the dry leathery, to the Sand trout no, dry leathery thing, sand trout… to little maker.. to.. a.. [FH: to the, to the worm, to the big one] to the yes, well but it goes through, does little maker just go directly into the worm? or is there another?
FH: no that’s it, it goes directly, it grows [WM: directly into the worm]. It’s a matter of growth process from there.
WM: Growth? alright, to, to the, to Shai-Hulud itself, and then Shai-Hulud… spice I think becomes the eggs.
FH: Well the spice, [WM: spermatic material?] the spice [WM: or] as I conceived it was necessary for.. the ah ah.. development from, let’s say the pupil stage… [WM: yeah].. to go beyond the pupil stage, they, they had to ah, have be in the presence of the spice. Well that’s the way I conceived it [WM: I see] and that’s why it’s so-
[WM: I think the spice itself is almost as being.. spermatic material [FH: that’s right, that’s right, exactly right] and then the spices growing into.. the… well ultimately little maker… as I saw it.
BH: is it something like royal honey, royal nectar?
FH: No the way I saw it, is slightly different but, ah… the spice, in the presence of a ah.. of a dead… [FH: OH] worm [WM: yes through, killed by the water of life] that’s right [WM: then this becomes.. and you’re off in the spice blow] that’s right, [WM: right okay] this becomes [WM: yeah] the seed of the new life cycle.
WM: Yeah, it’s almost orgasmic in that sense.
FH: That’s right, yeah.
WM: Probably deliberately so.
FH: Yeah it, I built these things in there, [WM: yeah] deliberately, all the way through it.
WM: Yeah… how interesting. Well if we can go back then and talk about… um a little bit more about the ah, ah formation of the novel from say 1953 and the germinal ideas and your ah, file folders and so on, we were up, up to about there a little while, a while ago?
FH: Well I’m not… too…. [WM: clear on dates] dates, but they don’t concern me [WM: no] I’m more involved with the actual… [WM: Well how..] piece of paper in front of you.
WM: alright how long a writing process did this take then? from the time you.. this began, till the time you-
FH: The actual physical writing process? About two years.
WM: About two years, you wrote it ah when you’re in Mexico?
FH: No [WM: oh] I wrote it here [WM: wrote it here] um, but I had the idea with me in Mexico, was adding to it. You see, you were talking about two different things here: the accumulation of data [WM: data and the physical writing process] and the physical [WM: right] sitting down in front of paper and actually putting a story down, it’s almost as though you’re filling a container [WM: I see that has been pretty well built up] yeah.
WM: at that time. Ah it’s interesting, Harry Harrison ah, describes the writing process with him, rather well in a tape I made with him a few months ago, ah, he is absolutely.. ah uninterruptible, from say 12:30 in the afternoon till five o’clock at night, because the ideas, as they form in his mind, sort of become.. into the extension of its, [coughs] excuse me, fingers in the typewriter, and that they are up here and at the fay[cough] and that any interruption, whether it be a telephone ringing or his wife knocking at the door, or anything at all, is liable to shatter that idea as it transforms itself into paper.
FH: This is a very evanescent thing [WM: yeah, very] and ah, ah, I have to fight this, but ah, Bev is very nice to me about this, she keeps the-
BH: a writer’s children are always, they learn to tiptoe and ‘is daddy writing?’ in fact, you don’t have to say to be quiet you say ‘your father is writing’ and silence.
WM: Aha, what is your writing schedule?
FH: Well it varies, depends on what I’m doing, writing for the magazine down here, but as a general rule it goes like this: I’ll get home.. somewhere around five o’clock, when Bev is here, when she’s not working as she has been the last couple of weeks, she’ll have dinner ready at that time, or very close to that time, I’ll then take an hour’s nap, and then.. work, sometimes till one o’clock in the morning, then I hit the sack, then get up. And sometimes if a story is strong in me.. I get up in the morning and write… I get up at five o’clock in the morning or so and write for an hour or, two sometimes, before going down to San Francisco, [WM: yeah] ah this is the thing I want to get out of because.. ah, I can write eight hours a day, in two bursts… and I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t be doing, what I want, writing what I want to write, during those times. I don’t envision… supporting myself entirely by science fiction writing in the sense of writing only science fiction… of, because I have other axes to grind too [WM: yeah] I’m going to do a, a.. a nonfiction book on air pollution for example. I’m really hipped on this ecology thing.. the consequences of some of the things that we’re doing to our planet. And I don’t mean in the ah, the lock-it-up-and-throw-it-away sense of the ah, classic conservationist, in other words turn it all in the wilderness. I don’t mean that. But there are ways of living with our planet not against it, and this is the attitude that we have to develop. And it is an attitude. [WM: Thank You Mr. Kynes – laughs – Pardot Kynes] no it is an attitude [WM: Sure] it’s, it’s something it has to be ingrained into us as children.
WM: As my wife is fond of telling my children – a fountain-pen is not a screwdriver. [FH: very good – laughs] and each has its own purpose for whatever it may be, and if you misuse that thing, it will turn around and bite you, you’ll ruin a screwdriver, or ruin a, a fountain pen in trying to make it work like a screwdriver, and we’re rapidly ruining our air, our water, our planet, if you will.
FH: I’ve found that ah you’re talking about the economics of… writing and selling. [WM: yeah] Dune has made.. made us at this point about $15,000, since the first sale.
WM: This includes the sale of what was it? something like eight chapters to Campbell? [FH: that’s right] uh by the way uh, I did not read it in analog, I read it first in book form, how much of it did appear in ah? [FH: almost all of it] almost all of it okay.
FH: um in fact in one sense a little more because there were.. capsule recapitulations, these synopses [WM: oh yes, did you write those?] yes I did. um… the, the way it comes in, I’ve found, and this is broad.. for a novel, it makes somewhere between five and seven thousand dollars on the, in the first 12 months of sale… and this depends on how far you sell it, how many times you sell it. Then I found that with my own work it’ll go on earning, for a long time, we received ah, oh several hundred dollars out of ah, ah ‘Dragon in the Sea’ this last year.
WM: Is that right?
BH: Yeah, good old dragon.
WM: Yeah but still one of my favourites, yeah still one of my favourites.
FH: Oh it’s still selling, selling in.. beautifully in Japan.
WM: I understand ah that ah you speak Japanese [FH: no] no where did I hear that?
FH: No I-I don’t speak Japanese, I can read a bit of ideogram.
WM: ah sou desu ka.
FH: ah sou desu ka, [WM: hai], Hai Hai, but ah I was raised with ah, Japanese Americans, in the Pacific Northwest, in an area where there were a great many of us [WM: yeah] let’s put it that way. A place called Fife between Seattle and Tacoma, and…
WM: That’s up near.. glorious Tumwater [laughs].
FH: Yes it’s north of Tumwater [laughs], aah an Oly fan, ah if I’d known I’d have brought in a mess of beer, so by the way we have another wine in there would you like?
WM: Ah no I’m going to stick to coffee for a while thanks. I’ll be up all night reading but then what difference does it make.
FH: Well anyway I was raised with them, and… eat in Japanese, and I know a few phrases.
WM: yeah, I learned ah, quite a…
[cuts]
WM: Well you were speaking of ah, your writing plans ah for the future you said the sequel to dune will be out this fall sometime?
FH: Or earlier over [WM: or earlier] yeah, ah possibly in October, possibly earlier, there’s a, some question, I requested that it be moved up a bit, and I’m not sure that ah everyone’s in agreement, and maybe that’s best I mean I’m not ah [WM: yeah] I just thought it would be a better idea, for several reasons, so that they publish it earlier. One of the reasons is that I have built a Dune tarot.. into the sequel, [WM: and do that one again?] you know what the tarot deck is? [WM: Oh of course! yes!] yeah okay [WM: yeah oh, I missed that!] and I built a Dune tarot into it and that’s hot right now [WM: yeah] and I’m just thinking economically they ought to capitalize on it.
WM: Oh sure, why not? A Dune tarot well.. see I teach, ah Yeats and Eliot.
FH: Of course [WM: and so on, so I know] yeah. [BH: yeah] you’re very familiar [WM: very familiar with the tarot] right.
WM: In fact I, I own my own private deck and..
FH: We have one. It’s my contention that if you immerse a society in a great deal of, what we call fortune-telling you know, that you cloud the whole process…… You see what happened in classic times, in Greek, historic times, when the oracle was, had terrifying accuracy.. [WM: the Oedipus cycle for example] and there weren’t a lot of Oracle’s around.. you went to Delphi [WM: Delphi right] or to the local madman.
WM: Yeah… who looked at the birds and cast a few Augury’s here and there.
FH: Yeah and who ah might have, might kill a chicken and look at the entrails .
WM: Or note which way the blood spurts.
FH: Yes.
WM: And the knife that should cut it off yeah.
FH: That’s right… um, any one of these methods, which I called ignition principles, as far as ah… prediction is concerned. See I contend that there is such a thing, that you can do it, whether you do it by… um.. oh a subliminal thing, petites perceptions, or whether it is a ah..
WM: you use the petites perceptions in ah that scene in the conservatory incidentally, and I thought was rather well done…with um…. Countess Fenring?
FH: That’s right.
WM: leaving that a thing for lady Jessica to pick up, end parenthesis.
FH: Yeah, that’s right that’s, well whether our predictive faculties.. are prophecy… and we’ve had our prophets… is a product of, an accumulation, in the sense of a computer’s accumulating data, [WM: yeah] or something.. mystical in the sense that it’s unexplained, thus far unexplained. I’m looking at it through Western eyes now you should, undoubtedly see; that, that is that it’s a mechanical scientific principle, and if you get enough data to bear on it you’ll understand it, though this doesn’t necessarily follow of course that we can understand everything in the universe, ask me about the basic, what I think is the basic fallacy in science.
WM: Alright what is the basic fallacy in science? tell us pray tell? [laughs]
FH: Now you want a prognostication okay. You know I think, I think it’s the idea, that we can invent, of course science fiction is based on this, the idea that we can invent anything we imagine… and having invented it, we must use it. [WM: and then live by the consequences of it] exactly [WM: yeah]. Now this is the Western, see this is the Western fallacy.
WM: And.. this is one of the great things about the East, that it.. does not ah..
FH: It’s of course we frown on it because they achieve.. their ignition, by by methods that we can see are hogwash,
WM: Right and, or we misinterpret their methods, for example if we were to consider um, say the tantric yoga, all we would think of is that you know, ah they’re achieving Nirvana by means of sex and it’s much more than that.
FH: Yeah.
WM: Or as one specific example: we, we take only one aspect of it and make sort of an end out of it.
FH: Or hell man you go back to the, the slitting the neck of the chicken and watching which way the blood spurts [WM: yeah] – you see, you see what I’m saying by ignition? [WM: uh-huh] this ignites a ah, you see you have that confidence that you can do it… you have to believe you can do it, and believing you can do it, the process is ignited by any one of a million methods, we’ve experimented with many, the direction the birds fly, or any of this you see.
WM: Well I had a student a few years ago who’s, whose wife was so accurate with the Tarot deck that ah, she stopped using it completely, [I must tell you something] she frightened herself.
FH: I terrified a gal one time, when I was about seventeen. We were uh sitting in ah, in her aunt’s house, her aunt and an uncle were… out of sight but within hearing distance and down in some stacks in their library, which was nearby. We were sitting across the… from each other on hassocks… the mouth of the fireplace, a big stone fireplace, between us was down the embers. We’d been out on a date and I’d brought her home. We didn’t have any thing going, she was just a, a gal I knew, I happen to have had a crush on her younger sister, and, and she knew it, and ah, unrequited love at seventeen is a hideous thing you know [laughter] [WM: oh yes]. Anyway, ah that was a, there was a… great upsurge of wrying consciousness at the time, [WM: yeah] predicting the cards, of course, our interpretation of predicting the cards was, you know we only had one kind of that was a deck of cards [WM: sure]. So, she broke out a brand new deck of cards and shuffled them, we’d been talking about it on the way home, and.. quite shadowy in the room, there was the firelight, and the, Pat was sitting across the fireplace, and the light from where ah her aunt.. and uncle were playing cribbage in the back, and they’re both of them deaf by the way, and you could hear this ‘15 2 and 2 and is four’ [laughs] [WM: right I know that] coming from the [WM: ‘compare a 6’] yeah that’s right well there was a light from back in so she could see the cards, and she said ‘see if you can predict the cards,’ she’d been shuffling you see, so she picked up the first card, and I closed my eyes and I saw that card.. so I told her, and that was it, she put it down that was the card. I swear to you Will I went through that entire deck predicting every card that she was going to see, and there wasn’t a failure at all, I told her every card I did it the same way every time. Now whether I saw a reflection in her eyes, in other words we go back to [WM: yeah] petites perceptions [WM: yeah] or whether this was some actual keyed in transmission, we were ah, sympatico or.. some such, something…
WM: tuned in on her wavelength.
FH: Empathy was ah, rampant in this day atmosphere. uh I don’t know what it was but I predicted what the cards were, and I said ‘my goodness’, I said ‘this is fascinating let’s do it again, shuffle them again.’ So she shuffled the deck again, and cut ‘em a few times and we start going through ‘em again. [WM: hmm] And ah, we got down, oh five or six cards into the deck, and suddenly she threw the whole deck down, on the hearth of the fireplace and says ‘this scares me I don’t do this anymore.’ [WM: hmm… do you ever have that kind of success ah?] Never, never again, but it was a ah, ah the odds against being able to do this by.. ah.. anything but ah, some.. Unrecognized [WM: force] contact or force. As I’m not ruling out the fact that I may have seen, she wasn’t wearing glasses, but the light may have been such, that without [WM: sure] even recognize it I saw them, a reflection of them in her eyes or something of that nature. This is possible.
WM: ‘There are more things twixt heaven and earth Horatio then are dreamt of…’
FH: Oh, Oh, Will [laughter]
WM: well you, got to expect things like that from an english teacher don’t you?
BH: Not frequently.
WM: not frequently.
[cuts]
WM: Ah I’d like to ask a couple of more questions [coughs]. I wanted to talk about the religious constructs behind ah, ah.. the novel. It’s obvious that some of the Arabian mystique is there [FH: yes] um, and I think any perceptive reader can pick this up, but part of the questions relates to the ah identity of Paul as a, as an avatar, as a new Messiah, [FH: right?] or is a new prophet, or what you will… um would you care to talk about that a little?
FH: Well one of the, one of the threads in the story is.. to trace.. a possible way.. a messiah is created in our society, and I hope I was successful in, in making it believable that here we have the entire process, or at least the large, ah and some of the subtle elements, of the construction of this, both from the individual standpoint and from the, the way society.. demands this subject. It’s the reference in there you know that, that the man must recognize the myth he is living in… ah because the creation of an avatar.. is a myth-making process. We’ve done it in our, in recent times: Look at what’s happening to John F. Kennedy [WM: Oh sure] who was a very earthy.. real.. [WM: oh yes] and ah, not totally holy man. [WM: laughs] Yes, uh huh yes, ah so here we have a likeable person now you see, [WM: yeah] but real in the flesh-and-blood sense, who, by the.. process of emulation(immolation?) become something larger than life, far larger than life…. Well, and I’ve just explored all of, as many permutations as I could recognize in the process. [WM: Well I-I caught overtones of Lawrence Arabia in the thing ah for example] he could very well have become an avatar [WM: Yeah] for the, ah for the Arabs [WM: right]. If Lawrence of Arabia.. had died.. at the crucial moment of.. the.. British ah..
WM: Say when Allenby walked into Jerusalem.
FH: Yeah, if he had died, if, if for example he had gone up and killed, ah ah the people who were destroying his dream, [WM: yeah] walked into that conference and said ‘Gentlemen, I have here under my jillaba… a surprise’ bang bang bang, and he had been killed…
WM: ah he’d have been deified.
FH: He would have been deified… and ah, it would have been the most terrifying thing the British had ever encountered, because.. the Arabs would have swept that entire peninsula with that sort of force behind them. One of the things we’ve done in our society, is exploited this power – western man – has exploited this avatar power…
WM: Um well if I could ask then one more question along this same line – you mentioned a little bit earlier that you studied comparative religion at one time [FH; that’s right] or a student of it, um was it from your experience in ah, reading in comparative religions that brought you to this.. particular notion of an avatar?
FH: That was part of it, of course it was ignited by the idea, by the ideas that I encountered in.. reading about desert societies, [WM: yeah] and I think that.. the idea of.. the way.. Western society has exploited.. this force – we have you know. [WM: yeah] We’ve used it as a quite conscious-full… We’ve set out our missionaries [WM: oh] and to do our dirty work for us, um, and then come.. along behind them, with the certain belief that we are right in anything that we do [WM: right right] because God has told us so – [WM: yeah] God in the person of the avatar.
WM: Well one, one last personal question then, um if um. One last personal question then if you don’t mind, ah do you profess any specific religion yourself? You mentioned Vedanta earlier or.. other backgrounds, I’m a little curious if it’s not at all pertinent why say so.
FH: Oh I don’t mind saying so, I mean as a, I don’t really profess a religion in the sense that… we normally recognize religion. I.. believe in.. more in self-development.. in the Zen sense.
WM: Well I caught those, the Zen elements from time to time I thought in, in Dune and ah, ah in fact the whole Zensunni school I thought was a, an aspect of that.
FH: You know don’t you that one element of the construction of this book… um, it’s all the way through there, that I wrote.. certain.. parts of it.. ah in.. haiku and other poetical forms, and then expanded them to prose.. to create a pace.
WM: I hadn’t picked those out specifically, but I, I sort of caught something of that and that’s ah.
FH: Some of my friends have come back to me with ah, examples out of it and said was this a ah, [WM: Haiku?] was this a haiku and [WM: or a tanka or something?] yeah, or a tanka [WM: yeah] and ah, yes they’re in there.
WM: Well that’s very good and thank you very much we certainly appreciate this.