An Interrupted Life:
Franck, Frederick
venience sake I call God," and S.'s dream of being baptized by the Christ in person. What sets this book so apart from usual .~tobi.~?raphy, and even from any other ~ ~ book of the inner...
...The evil few are drug-addicted "whores" whose sense of wickedness includes characterizing themselves as "bankers" and who like to torture with a method that reminds one of ROSEMARY BOOTH has a Master's degree in city and regional planning from Harvard...
...If both relationships only clashed in her on rare occasions, it was not through some perversion, but because both involvements existed on different levels of this complex personal- ity who in "near ecstatic moments feels herself capable of God-knows-what," only to sink back in the deepest pit of uncertainty: "I fail to work each day at what I believe to be my only real talent, writing...
...a desire to kneel down some- times pulses through my body or rather, my body seems made and meant for the act of kneeling...
...Dante's Inferno is comic opera by com- parison...
...All the plot twists turn upon bad blood, racial memories, and Darwinian absolutism, that is, prophets are born not made, magic is preserved instinct and not chicanery, survival is a matter of a superior gene pool and adoration of one's environment...
...Secrets...
...over again...
...What does it mean that Leto II's plan lives on in pieces --those tablets --distributed in the brains of the big worms...
...A friend, who survived, saw her at the train to Auschwitz "talking gaily, a kind word for everyone she met.., perhaps a touch of sadness...
...Oh, let me feel at one with myself...
...But it is surely to S. that she cries out: "You were the mediator between God and me, you taught me to speak His Name...
...Again, Mr...
...She is clearly one of the latter, is driven "to be true to that in me that seeks to fulfill its promise...
...others know it and abuse it...
...This is the fun genre, and Mr...
...It was S. who from the beginning im- pressed on her that what "he had in the head must get down into the heart" and who tried to help her in letting this hap- pen...
...She at first doubted how his efforts could bring it about, but soon admitted: "They did...
...What sets this book so apart from usual .~tobi.~?raphy, and even from any other ~ ~ book of the inner journey, is the total absence of all posturing, all embellish- ments...
...One would have to apply strictly ~racist criteria to categorize the man who feels baptized by Christ, the girl who sees herself as made for kneeling down, as Jewish...
...Herbert's good few are drug-addicted "witches" who breed like prize bogs, ageless stoical warriors who kill in defeatist calms, and teenage children who bounce between virginal equestrian longings to ride the big worms and born- to-lose yearnings to rule the big worms like battalions of bikers...
...10016 For the enclosed $9 send the next 11 issues (6 months of Com-monweal) to: Name Address City, State,Zip...
...What is happening to this sophisti-cated girl growing to her full womanhood against this backdrop is unbearably mov- ing...
...Herbert knows how to crank out the old fate-of-the-universe-in-the-balance plot one more time...
...And then again: "At his side I ripen into a genuine and adult human being...
...But it is arguably a credible way to review mankind's history: There is a plan --some know it incrementally...
...I think they seek God inside...
...FREDERICK FRANCK'$ books include The Zen of Seeing and Art as a Way...
...A lavish motion picture of that original book, about a faraway and far- in-the-future desert world that is actually a paradise shot through with hal-lucinogenic powders and giant sand worms such as...
...but none of these were ever why one turned to science fiction...
...And is this plan benevolent or malevolent...
...It is not too late to join the parade...
...There is a really deep well inside me, and in it God dwells...
...At times she believes that the "foolish and passionate desire to 'lose myself in S.' has vanished...
...I prefer a full-year subscription at $24 9/7/84...
...In the first period of her diary, she is still confident that she is "a match for most of life' s problems, yet at times noth- ing more or less than a miserable, fright- ened creature, despite the clarity with which I express myself...
...Meanwhile the setting of this love story in which the bifurcation between the erotic and the spiritual had fallen away was getting more ghoulish by the day: ever increasing harassment and ter- ror, Stars of David to be worn, arrests, "the arbitrary dragging off of fathers, sons, brothers and sisters to concentra- tion camps," prohibitions for Jews to ride street cars and bicycles, to sit on park benches, to buy food at greengro-cers...
...To God...
...the proto apple might be infested with, will aggrandize America's ~opular culture next Christmas...
...By then, everything that happened seemed to strengthen Et- ty's "crystal clear mysticism...
...She was given a job with the Jewish Council, a liaison body set up by the Nazis for their convenience, and is forced to play an inevitably sinister role in as- sisting "the cold-blooded fanatics who clamor for our destruction" but of whom she was less afraid than of her "own demons I have to battle inside...
...She is simply true to her- self and to her way...
...At this early stage she sees S. as "a charming man.., charming smile despite his false teeth," and soon after as "a fifty- four-year old in whom the struggle be- tween the spirit and the flesh is still in full cry...
...Did she say it to the fellow pilgrim she lost...
...She still threw a postcard out of the train, which a farmer found and mailed: "We left the camp singing," it said...
...Nevertheless, the plot is concrete...
...He fascinated her, but she cannot yet imagine "ever being in love with him...
...But Julius Spier was to be spared the deepest pit of this hell, he became ill and died...
...Now I go down to read the Bible with him...
...The narcissism of the overture, the double relationship with two older men, the awakening to God in the deep well of the Self are as unconven- tional as they are true to her nature...
...All that is left of it is the will to yield myself up to God...
...She was well on her way to becoming the woman she was born to be...
...She was at the time still living with another man, even older than S., for whom she had both a high regard and warm tenderness...
...And it is largely because of this light-hearted phenomenon that the latest episode of the big worms, The Heretics of Dune, de-serves attention...
...Also, most impor- tantly, Mr...
...Herbert does not construct any of this with metaphorical or allegorical exac-titude, and this interpretation is as good or useless as any...
...Herbert has little interest in physics or chemistry...
...This makes the Dune series distasteful to one whose affections are for the gentle accidents of heterogeneity, democracy, and intellectual freedom...
...John Calvin Batchelor F RANK HERBERT is a sixty-four-year-old veteran journalist from the northwest coast who has exercised the easy story-telling talent and dispassion- ate cynicism of the daily reporter to create, over the last twenty years, a world-famous and extremely lucrative series of science fiction tales based upon his happy genius of a novel, Dune (1965...
...In men like S. a woman's soul is given welcome and shelter...
...Ours," S. says to her "is real Hell...
...Frank Herbert has a tin ear, an innocuous imagination, and no patience for sur-prise, character, forgiveness, love or what could be called the ha'penny details of humanity, like grumpiness...
...Mr...
...She discovers, however, how nat- urally they complement one another, un- derstand one another: "we have had wild and unfettered lives in many strange beds, and nevertheless we are shy all Commonweal's '84 Trial Subscription Offer--11 Issues for $9 COMMONWEAL, 232 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y...
...I know that I must see You amongst people in the world...
...Etty's book has been called both typi- cally Jewish and typically Christian...
...The house atop such a foun- dation is left to the tongue-twisting of Mr...
...most are ignorant of it and choose to remain so...
...Mr...
...On November 30, 1943, the drop of water that had been Etty Hillesum fell into the ocean of infinity, ready for it...
...A savior is required to rise from the obscurity of an outpost to plant the seeds of mankind's resurrection...
...one would have to be fanatically Jewish to excomCommonweal: 474 municate them, narrowly Christian sectarian to exclude them from the Mystical Body...
...JOHN CALVIN BATCHELOR wrote The Birth ofthe People's Republic of Antarctica (Dial...
...joy here to crash up against sentences of impenetrable Germanic epistemology and not to stop reading, "Nowhere in the Wekht of Jandola, not to the farthest reaches of Tleilaxu Yaghist, wag there a living powindah who knew this secret...
...His passion is for biology, specifically genetic engineering...
...There are people who pray with their eyes turned to heaven, they seek God outside them- selves...
...It is part of the 7 September 1984:475...
...As all of us, she is full of contradic- tions, but then she is neither a logician nor a moralist...
...this is not a book of spaceships or planetary geological events...
...Etty's journey simply had to in- clude all the experimentation she as-cribes to her "erotic adventuresome- ness," until she came to the painful reali- zation "all the adventures and transient relationships I have had, have made me utterly miserable, torn me apart.., what I really want is a man for life...
...And "I love him a bit more every day.., it is the first time I really kissed a man, it is the sharing of the breath that counts...
...Herbert has considerable hope for tired old mankind...
...Herbert's glossary...
...If this vital girl is to be called a mystic, which I do without hesitation, her way was of the Tantric kind...
...Then the shrill whis- tle when the train with a thousand 'trans- port cases' was moving out...
...And there are those who bow their heads and bury their faces in their hands...
...To both...
...I THE HERETICS OF DUNE Frank Herbert G. P. Putnam's, $16.95, 480 pp...
...He assigned to their proper place all that went on inside me, like a jigsaw puzzle with all the pieces mixed up, he put them together properly...
...It is fifteen hundred years after the close of the last cycle (Dune Messiah, Children Of Dune, God Emperor Of Dune), and across the limitless reaches of space, mankind has again fallen into a pregnant dark age that resembles, sort- of, the Fertile Crescent in the first cen- tury A.D.: aging priest cults, arrogant warrior cults, and the arrival from out- side of a new and vibrant empire of gold-hoarders that could be Rome with the emendation that the women are in charge because of their sexual prowess...
...Now that you have gone, my path leads straight to God, and I shall be the mediator for any soul I can reach...
...I love people so terribly, because in every human being I love something of A novel of half-baked ideas You...
...It is, typically, hurtingly human...
...What drives the book is the drip-drip-drip of secrets: Why did 'God Emperor Leto II, who was mad in ac-ceptably human ways, like a very glib Assurbanipal, leave behind the hidden makings of a new order like Alka-Seltzer tablets...
...Although she still tells herself that she is not "really in love with him," she con' cedes that in this relationship she has gone through a process of maturation she had never thought possible...
Vol. 111 • September 1984 • No. 15
