Pen Pals
For decades the triumvirate of Dobie, Bedichek, and Webb ruled Texas letters. Here’s the tale of a lifelong friendship wholly dedicated to intellectual pursuits—and the ultimate dirty joke.
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But Dobie, Bedichek, and Webb didn’t become legends simply on the basis of their writings. It was their personalities, their roles in the public and the intellectual lives of their era, that clinched their fame. Especially Dobie, for he was the darling of the press and he courted publicity with the ardor of a man running for office. Webb was the quieter, more professorial sort, though, like Dobie, he also chafed at the rituals and duties of academic life. He once wrote Bedichek about what lay ahead on a particular day: “And now it’s eight o’clock and I’ve got to read a goddamned Ph.D. thesis and go to town and hold a seminar and sit on a goddamned faculty club council. It makes me want to stretch sheet iron.” Bedi, humorous, philosophical, and gentle, was the glue that cemented the threesome’s lifelong professional and private friendships.
In the public arena all three were outspoken in defense of civilized values. Dobie garnered headlines with his iconoclastic views and actions. Webb wrote of him, “Dobie is by nature a maverick, and has always been so.” Bedichek called him “a sort of gadfly.” It appears that Dobie delighted in living up to the labels. His cantankerousness ranged from grandstanding to serious fulminating against follies he observed in political and public life. He could also, and often did, take on serious subjects. Football, for example, a matter of high, almost religious import to most Texans, was a topic about which Dobie had decidedly against-the-grain thoughts. Hearing of a coach who led his football team in prayer before every game, Dobie wrote: “Who believes that God cares whether one bunch of young apes or another one has the most success with an inflated pig bladder?” Though Dobie could invoke the deity when rhetoric called for it, he was, on the whole, a devout agnostic and detested most preachers. At the funeral of Bedichek, in 1959, Dobie sat at the end of a pew and every time the preacher mentioned “everlasting life,” he uttered “no, no” in a voice that could be heard all around him. Webb also held a dim view of professional religionists. One time a preacher inveigled him to give a talk on cowboys and religion. Webb appeared at the appointed time, stood up, said, “I have been asked to speak on the cowboy and his religion. He had none,” and then sat down.
The most serious public controversy that they all took part in was the acrimonious debate that occurred at the university in the mid-forties over the firing of President Homer Rainey by the board of regents. Rainey incurred the ire of certain regents because he refused to dismiss four economics professors for their “radical” ideas. The English department also came under fire for including John Dos Passos’ novel U.S.A. on a reading list for sophomores. One regent even wanted Bedichek cashiered because of a UIL ruling that negatively affected the athletic eligibility of his two sons, who were then seniors at Orange High School. Dobie, Bedichek, and Webb leapt to the defense of Rainey, and Dobie eventually paid a price for it. His drumbeat of Texan foibles had left him vulnerable to attacks from yahoos. Dobie’s “radical” politics—which in Texas at that time meant merely being an outspoken New Dealer and civil libertarian—more than irritated the powers that be. In 1945 Dobie had the gall to argue, in print, that blacks should be given full voting rights, and in a speech in Fort Worth, he declared that he would welcome qualified black students to the University of Texas. Opinions such as these drew criticism in the state Legislature and anonymous hate letters like one addressed to “Mr. Dopey,” calling him a “decrepit, good-for-nothing old fossil and fool.” Bedichek, like Dobie an ardent advocate of such unpopular issues of the day as integration and academic freedom, remarked to Webb in a letter: “Dear Dobie works so hard, and smashes so relentlessly in the daily papers at reactionaries in politics, literature and religion that I know the good Lord is laying up a reward for him in heaven if he fails to connect with it here on earth.” The university certainly wasn’t laying up any reward. When Dobie, who had been granted numerous leaves of absence over the years, applied for another one for the fall semester of 1947, the administration turned him down. Texas novelist George Sessions Perry couldn’t believe that the university had “finally turned its back on great, lovable, intractable Frank Dobie, who for so long a time has been the state’s and the university’s ambassador to the world.”
ALTHOUGH THERE IS NO PHOTOGRAPHIC evidence of Webb ever having been at the site, it is appropriate for him to be included in the circle of friends at Barton Springs. He did not have to be there physically, and much of what transpired there was communicated to him by Bedi and Dobie, either in conversation or in letters. Statues constitute a species of myth by defining history, charging a site with new meaning, formalizing an idea. It is interesting to speculate what the three friends would have thought about their own apotheosis in bronze. My guess is that Dobie would have loved being immortalized in public, his vanity being no less than and probably equal to that of most people enamored with the blandishments of fame. After all, he didn’t get to be Mr. Texas by being a shrinking violet. And Dobie commented memorably on public statuary. The Littlefield Fountain, at the south end of the UT campus, for example, offended him mightily. He described it as “a conglomerate of a woman standing up, with arms and hands that look like stalks of Spanish dagger; of horses with wings on their feet, aimlessly ridden by some sad figures of the male sex, and various other inane paraphernalia.” A statue of a spraddle-legged, braying burro would have been more natural, he said. Bedichek was no less interested in public statuary. In a 1941 letter copied to Webb and Dobie, he went into ribald detail about a local statue of a fireman that had once adorned the south entrance of the Capitol grounds but, because of scandal, had been removed to an obscure spot on East Sixth Street. Bedichek deliciously described the thing that caught everybody’s eye: “Do you remember how this hideous figure of gigantic size, drawing a hose over his hip, appeared, at least from a certain point of the compass, to be holding not the nozzle of a hose, but something else, stiff and straight, protruding at an angle of about 45 degrees from his inguinal region?”
He then told how he and other “dirty-minded boys” construed the fireman’s figure as Priapus bent on having his way with the goddess surmounting the dome of the Capitol. State authorities agreed that the statue had an unfortunate sexual subtext and ordered it removed. When Bedichek rediscovered it in a grass-grown lot on East Sixth, he was almost nostalgic in noting “the same extension . . . , the same threat to virginity, the same eternal erection.”
The elegant frankness of Bedichek’s observations points to another dimension of the circle of friendship. These were men, not demigods, and theirs is a story of men with the bark on. Like many phrases from the past, this one may need explanation. “With the bark on” means “the unvarnished truth.” A tree with the bark off (though the phrase is never used that way) would be prettified, denatured, inauthentic. Dobie, Webb, and Bedichek all had the bark on.
Their letters are a bountiful index of their wide variety of interests, and they were interested in damned near everything. Birds, for instance. All three of them were as daft as any Englishman on the subject of birds. Bedichek wrote and received hundreds of letters about birds. Birds could move him to ecological passion: “The red-headed woodpecker is getting scarcer and scarcer here in Austin, since the damned city and thrice damned telephone company began creosoting their ten times goddamned poles.”
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