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.
(Page 3 of 3)
They also had a rich sense of humor, and that humor was not infrequently scatological, bawdy, risqué. On the rock in the afternoon they didn’t always speak of high-minded things. Nor did they in their letters always speak of birds, ideas, and current events. Born during the reign of Good Queen Victoria, they carried with them a certain ingrained reticence in the company of women, but in their letters and conversations they relished outhouse and sexual humor to a fare-thee-well. Bedichek and Webb worked for years on a top-secret collection of dirty anecdotes and jokes that they intended to call “The Privy Papers of Sitting Bull.” Their chief source was graffiti on the walls of public toilets. In one letter to Webb, Bedichek mentioned having discovered a rhyme so foul that he had, against his will, found himself memorizing it. He wrote another friend about the collection: “We got the darndest assortment of it that you ever heard in your life. But we were ashamed to sign our names to it.”
It is safe to say that Bedichek and Dobie, at least, were fascinated with the subject of sex. Bedichek hoped that some day Walt Whitman’s influence would be so thorough and liberating that “people can write and talk of sex as naturally as they do of other fundamental appetites.” He read the Kinsey Report with scrupulous attentiveness and concluded that the greater incidence of sodomy in urban centers had to do with the absence of animals for the purposes of bestiality. He raised prescient questions about the nature of scatological and sexual humor. In one letter he asked, “Why is the Anglo-Saxon word for defecation taboo, and why are there so many funny stories about this natural function?” In the same letter, he mentions a friend of his who, like Montaigne, was so struck by the ludicrous aspects of human copulation that he was overcome by the sheer physical absurdity of the act. There is also a charmingly told whorehouse story. It begins with a mild disclaimer of Dobie’s assertion that Bedichek was an authority on whorehouses. When Bedichek was a young man, he writes, he visited a local establishment on West Fourth Street run by one Dixie Darnell. Bedi engaged the services of one of Dixie’s young women only to discover, once in the room, a volume of poetry by Heinrich Heine, one of his favorite poets. The prostitute, who was of German extraction, was a great fan of Heine, and for the next several hours they discoursed on the beauties of his verse. Bedichek paid for his time, during which the only thing he removed, he says, was his detachable collar.
Bedichek was also a master of the dirty joke. In a letter to Dobie he told the one about the two cowboys who had been together on the range for too long and who were getting mighty tired of each other’s company. One night one of the cowboys made some biscuits that the other cowboy couldn’t eat, they were so bad. He said they were so bad their hound wouldn’t eat them. But the hound gobbled them right up, and the cook, vindicated, said, “You see, he et ’em all right.” “Yes,” said the other cowboy, “but he had to lick his ass to take the taste out of his mouth.” Such jokes endeared Bedichek to Dobie and Webb.
Dobie was every bit as interested in sexual folklore as he was in cowboys and gold seekers. One of his research habits was to collect items, stories obtained in interviews, anecdotes, scraps of folk idiom, scholarly articles, newspaper stories, anything pertinent to a topic, and place them in an empty typing-paper box. When the box was full, he had a book. Among his archives at UT’s Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center is a box of clippings and related materials collected for a book to be called “Piss and Vinegar.” This is not exactly the usual Dobie title, and what he had in mind was something along the lines of his friends’ secret “Privy Papers of Sitting Bull.” The box contains dirty jokes going all the way back to Sam Houston, who has always been good copy for Texas historians. One tells of how Houston would ride across Texas with an erection and would camp at the spot where the erection fell limp. Obscure informants sent Dobie jokes and stories, and famous ones too. John Graves, for example, sent along a limerick about a young lady from Bombay. The joke turned upon the c word. Dobie’s friend Mody Boatright, like Dobie a folklorist and English professor at UT, sent him a Texas brag sexual joke: There was a rancher who boasted that his son weighed sixteen and a half pounds at birth. “My goodness, how much does he weigh now?” asked the listener. The rancher answered, “Six and a half pounds.” “How can that be?” asked the listener. The rancher said, “We’ve just had him circumcised.” Also in the box are lists of folk expressions based on Anglo-Saxon words for the familiar excremental functions and numerous unpublished essays. The essays bear titles like “Obscene,” “Sexual Potency,” “Why Southern Men Fought for Slavery,” “On the Size of Pricks,” and so on. There is another on that treasure trove of f and c words, Dobie’s favorite modern novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by D. H. Lawrence. One of the frankest essays was titled “C—: The Word and the Thing.” It quoted the self-proclaimed expert on the subject, Henry Miller, and told off-color stories detailing the sexual escapades of well-known Texas figures.
Dobie, ever the moralist, had a serious purpose apart from the thrill of the word chase. The essays, both fragmentary and complete, always pleaded for honesty and frankness in dealing with natural functions and inveighed against hypocrisy, puritanism, and censorship. In “Obscene” he professed, “I can’t for the life of me see that a picture or a piece of writing of civilized nature, often beautiful and more often natural, that stirs the sex impulse is obscene.” In “Doing Dirt to Sex” he let it rip: “Like Rabelais, I contemplate only with derision some gut-stuffing, fart-stinking, ballicks-sweating, mouth-snoring piety-intoning priest, smelling terribly of mortality while pretending to have God by the ear because he professes to deny sex.” Like “The Privy Papers of Sitting Bull,” “Piss and Vinegar” remained underground, scraps in a box stuffed with the blue, the bawdy, the unnameable, the humorous.
DOBIE, WEBB, AND BEDICHEK WERE men, as Dobie would have said, “out of the old rock.” They prided themselves on their connectedness with the earth, for which they have been much celebrated, and to that I would add their connectedness to earthiness, a humor that Chaucer, Rabelais, and Henry Miller, among others, would have enjoyed. Their public contribution to Texas culture is perhaps the place to conclude. Webb, a master of the plain style, said, “My theory holds that the true distinctive culture of a region, in this case of Texas, springs from the soil just as do the plants.” Dobie eloquently championed the cause of regionalism in an oft-quoted passage: “If people are to enjoy their own lives, they must be aware of the significances of their own environments. The mesquite is, objectively, as good and as beautiful as the Grecian acanthus.” And in a marvelous passage from his Letters, which represent Bedichek’s best work, he speaks with admirable energy of his commitment to the Austin of Barton Springs, of local knowledge: “Personally, if I have to fight for this country, I will not fight for the flag, or democracy, or private enterprise, or the American ‘way of life,’ or for any other abstractions, which seem cold as kraut to me. But I will fight to the last ditch for Barton Creek, Boggy Creek, cedar-covered limestone hills, blazing star and bluebonnets, golden-cheeked warblers and black-capped vireos, and so on through a catalogue of the natural environment of Austin, Texas.”
The books of the triumvirate are there for readers who seek them, and if you happen to journey to Barton Springs, there the men loom, in all their one-and-one-quarter-size glory, intentionally bigger than life, according to sculptress Goodacre. With its anchored solidity and gravity the statue has a reasonably good chance of outlasting even the springs themselves, if ecological jeremiads prove accurate. Under sun and moon, there the old three are, eternally sharing some gem of discourse, a passage from Keats perhaps, or the one about the preacher’s wife, some moment of pleasure, something natural that amused them.
My Library
