ustxtxb_obs_1964_07_24_50_00027-00000_000.pdf

Texas AFL-CIO recommends EDWARD P. MORGAN and the news Coast to Coast on ABC Monday thru Friday 7 P.M. Eastern Time’ * Check your paper for local time with his blood, as it’s my guess he did, why this is something like the love of now, finding its book as the maker finds its form. ALTHOUGH I think one finds, down this bytrail, intimations of meaning and value for this region’s writers in Dobie that have generally been missed, it is down the main trail of his life and work whereon we can follow his main value to us young onesthat he has been our fiercely honest elder, making of the earlier people’s tales and travail here a library of written-down life that is therefore saved for us. He has been personal proof of the possibility of a writer working Here where things of this kind seemed strange and beyond us. Bill Brammer said the other day, in Austin where he is writing again, “It never occurred to meeveruntil I read Frank Dobie, that I could be a writer. There simply were no writers in Texas.” Dobie, and Bedichek and Webb also, have been our frontiersmen of letters, not only holding before us the idea that culture is wherever it occurs, but also themselves being models who prove that enlightment can bear here. And that integrity can last here. Dobie’s irascibility against sentimentality is one expression of this. Now and again he has apprised me of his wearying with what he sees to be an attitude of charity toward the underprivileged, and of unrealistic egalitarianism, rather than intellectual en lightenment, in the Observer. Once, speaking of the movie about the Alamo, I believe he was, he said, “You can’t have intellectual integrity and slopappeal to slop!conscious appeal to slop!” He has been stronger and more honest than the state university has, and the irony of the institution buying his library that spurned having him living and working within itself is not lost upon us, nor is the university’s failure, for all its glomming onto the celebrations of him, to make personal amends to him commensurate to the wrong it did him and continues in force against him. Last February he spoke to the Texas Institute of Letters banquet in Dallas. “I was more of a Texan in 1936 than I am now,” he said. “I almost am as much a not-regionalist as Katherine Anne Porter told Lon ‘Tinkle that she isn’t. But when I write I have to write about something that I know something about. “But increasingly I wonder what the Texas Institute of Letters stands for. I don’t think it needs to stand for anything but quality. . . . I became aware of its standing for something only about ten years ago when it adopted the resolution condemning, opposing, and damning the censorship of John Howard Griffin’s novel, The Devil Rides Outside.” If, he said, a gentleman is one who never gives offense, “Well, I’ve seen lots of mesquite posts that fit that definition. I’m in favor of rebels, I always have been.” He also said that evening, “After I became grey headed, my mother said, ‘Frank, why are you always trying to learn about the past? You make me think about an old man, this interest in the past.’ Well, at that time, I guess I was thinking about the pageantry of the past and not trying to relate it to the pageantry of the present. But I can see times changing. . . . Life gets more complexjudgments of people get more complicated.” BEFORE THE WINTER became spring but near enough to warmth that the Dobies thought to turn on their air conditioning so they could enjoy their front room fires for longer, they were indulging me a little while before the fire when suddenly Mrs. Dobie thought of something from long ago. “You know, a long time _ago, Frank Dobie, when you were very drunkI didn’t know it, though, I was still innocent” He turned from her face and looked over to me with a wide-open smile “You said,” Mrs. Dobie went on, ‘From nothing, I am as various as Shakespeare!’ ” He laughed heartily, and he turned to the window, and looked out. “You see,” she said, “I’ve remembered that all these years, Frank Dobie.” R.D. July 24, 1964 27