J. Frank Dobie

“ The love and cheer associated with Christmas will always be the best thing about it. How often just a good word that conveys the word-giver’s generosity of spirit enriches people! I remember the “Merry Christmas, sir!” of a gray-haired woman scrubbing stone steps at a college in Cambridge, England, during the war; and recollection of her sturdy, cheerful, kind nature brightens my world. I can hear my mother’s “Christmas Gift” or “Merry Christmas” as I write these words. Whoever heard her greeting received a gift, for she meant every syllable of it, felt every tone in it. ”

“ Seldom deeper than the chronicles does range fiction go below physical surface into reflection, broodings, hungers—the smolderings deep down in a cowman oppressed by drought and mortgage sitting in a rocking chair on a ranch gallery looking at the dust devils and hoping for a cloud; the goings-on inside a silent cowboy riding away alone from an empty pen to which he will never return; the streams of consciousness in a silent man and a silent woman bedded together in a wind-lashed frame house away out on the lone prairie. ”

“ There is no essential opposition between history and literature. The attempt to study a people's literature apart from their social and, to a less extent, their political history is as illogical as the lady who said she had read Romeo but had not yet got to Juliet. Nearly any kind of history is more important than formal literary history showing how in a literary way Abraham begat Isaac and Isaac begat Jacob. Any man of any time who has ever written with vigor has been immeasurably nearer to the dunghill on which he sank his talons while crowing than to all literary ancestors. ”

“ THE OBJECT OF THEME-WRITING is to make a student observe, to become aware, to evaluate, to enrich himself. Any phase of life or literature named or suggested in the foregoing chapters could be taken as a subject for an essay. The most immature essay must be more than a summary; a mere summary is never an essay. The writer must synthesize, make his own combination of thoughts, facts, incidents, characteristics, anecdotes, interpretations, illustrations, according to his own pattern. A writer is a weaver, weaving various threads of various hues and textures into a design that is his own. ”

“ Drought blasts the turf, but its unhealing blast to human hope is glossed over. The body's thirst for water is a recurring theme, but human thirst for love and just thinking is beyond consideration. Horses run with their riders to death or victory, but fleeting beauty haunts no soul to the "doorway of the dead." The land is often pictured as lonely, but the lone way of a human being's essential self is not for this extravert world. The banners of individualism are carried high, but the higher individualism that grows out of long looking for meanings in the human drama is negligible. ”

“ Then they heard a scuffle, accompanied by a click of steel, a moan, and a voice crying, “Come in.” By the light of a lantern Bowie was seen standing in a pool of blood, the other man dead.
Bowie must have lain awake nights thinking up novel ways in which to exercise his knife. It is humiliating to record that in all likelihood he did not think up what might be denominated “the grave duel”—the most exquisite form that hand-to-hand combat with knives could assume. ”

“ Any orthodox American would have shot the lobo at first appearance. Ruxton had the civilized perspective on nature represented by Thoreau and Saint Francis of Assisi. Primitive harmony was run over by frontier wrath to kill, a wrath no less barbaric than primitive superstitions.
But the coyote's howl is more tonic than all theories about nature; the buck's whistle more invigorating; the bull's bellow in the canyon more musical; the call of the bobwhite more serene; the rattling of the rattlesnake more logical; the scream of the panther more arousing to the imagination ”

“ In using that word INTELLECTUAL, one lays himself liable to the accusation of having forsaken democracy. For all that, "fundamental brainwork" is behind every respect-worthy piece of writing, whether it be a lightsome lyric that seems as careless as a redbird's flit or a formal epic, an impressionistic essay or a great novel that measures the depth of human destiny. Nonintellectual literature is as nonexistent as education without mental discipline, or as "character building" in a school that is slovenly in scholarship. ”

“ I cannot think of yew trees, which I have never seen, without thinking of Wordsworth's poem on three yew trees.
Nobody has written a memorable poem on the mesquite. Yet the mesquite has entered into the social, economic, and aesthetic life of the land; it has made history and has been painted by artists. In the homely chronicles of the Southwest its thorns stick, its roots burn into bright coals, its trunks make fence posts, its lovely leaves wave. ”

“ Individuals who study birds and native flora experience an almost daily refreshment of the spirit and growth of the intellect. For them the world is an unending Garden of Delight and a hundred-yard walk down a creek that runs through town or pasture is an exploration. Hardly anything beyond good books, good pictures and music, and good talk is so contributory to the enrichment of life as a sympathetic knowledge of the birds, wild flowers, and other native fauna and flora around us. ”

“ The one thing essential to writing if it is to be read, to art if it is to be looked at, is vitality. No critic or professor can be hired to pump vitality into any kind of human expression, but professors and critics have taken it out of many a human being who in his attempts to say something decided to be correct at the expense of being himself—being natural, being alive. The priests of literary conformity never had a chance at the homemade chronicles of the Southwest. ”

“ If nothing in written form pertaining to the Southwest existed at all, it would be more profitable for an inhabitant to go out and listen to coyotes singing at night in the prickly pear than to tolerate the Increase Mather kind of thing. It is very profitable to listen to coyotes anyhow. I rebelled years ago at having the tradition, the spirit, the meaning of the soil to which I belong utterly disregarded by interpreters of literature and at the same time having the Increase Mather kind of stuff taught as if it were important to our part of America. ”

“ It is not necessary for an interpreter to write a whole book about a feature to bring out its significance. We need more gossipy books—something in the manner of Pinon Country by Haniel Long (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York, 1941) , in which one can get a swift slant on Billy the Kid, smell the pinon trees, feel the deeply religious attitude toward his corn patch of a Zuni Indian. Roy Bedichek's chapters on the mockingbird, in Adventures with a Texas Naturalist, are like rich talk under a tree on a pleasant patch of ground staked out for his claim by an April-voiced mockingbird. ”

“ In any civilized land, birds, trees, flowers, animals, places, human contributors to life out of the past, all are richer and more significant because of representations through literature and art. No literate person can listen to a skylark over an English meadow without hearing in its notes the melodies of Chaucer and Shelley. As the Southwest advances in maturity of mind and civilization, the features of the land take on accretions from varied interpreters. ”

“ Although sheep are among the most salient facts of range life, they have, as compared with cattle and horses, been a dim item in the range tradition. Yet, of less than a dozen books on sheep and sheepmen, more than half of them are better written than hundreds of books concerning cowboy life. Mary Austin's The Flock is subtle and beautiful; Archer B. Gilfillan's Sheep is literature in addition to having much information; Hughie Call's Golden Fleece is delightful; Winifred Kupper's The Golden Hoof and Texas Sheepman have charm—a rare quality in most books on cows and cow people. ”

“ He is deeply happy only when in harmony with his work and environments. The backwoodsman, early settler, pioneer plainsman, mountain man were all like some infuriated beast of Promethean capabilities tearing at its own vitals. Driven by an irrational energy, they seemed intent on destroying not only the growth of the soil but the power of the soil to reproduce. Davy Crockett, the great bear killer, was "wrathy to kill a bear," and as respects bears and other wild life, one may search the chronicles of his kind in vain for anything beyond the incidents of chase and slaughter. ”

“ Actualities in the Southwest seem to have stifled fictional creation. No historical novel dealing with Texas history has achieved the drama of the fall of the Alamo or the drawing of the black beans, has presented a character with half the reality of Sam Houston, Jim Bowie, or Sallie Skull, or has captured the flavor inherent in the talk on many a ranch gallery. ”

“ Any people have a right to their own cultural inheritance, though sheeplike makers of textbooks and sheeplike pedagogues of American literature have until recently, either wilfully or ignorantly, denied that right to the Southwest. Tens of thousands of students of the Southwest have been assigned endless pages on and listened to dronings over Cotton Mather, Increase Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Anne Bradstreet, and other dreary creatures of colonial New England who are utterly foreign to the genius of the Southwest. ”

“ In short, these books are mostly only the stuff of literature, not literature itself, not the very stuff of life, not the distillations of mankind's "agony and bloody sweat."
An ignorant person attaches more importance to the chatter of small voices around him than to the noble language of remote individuals. The more he listens to the small, the smaller he grows. The hope of regional literature lies in out-growing regionalism itself. On November 11, 1949, I gave a talk to the Texas Institute of Letters that was published in the Spring 1950 issue of the Southwest Review. ”

“ Weak fiction goes the same way. But a good deal of very bad prose in the nonfiction field has some value. In an otherwise dull book there may be a solitary anecdote, an isolated observation on a skunk, a single gesture of some human being otherwise highly unimportant, one salty phrase, a side glimpse into the human comedy. ”

“ The wild freedom, mobility, and fierce love of liberty of the mounted Indians of the Plains will perhaps always stir imaginations—something like the charging Cossacks, the camping Arabs, and the migrating Tartars. There is no romance in Indian fights east of the Mississippi. The mounted Plains Indians always made a big hit in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Little boys still climb into their seats and cry out when red horsemen of the Plains ride across the screen. ”

“ Yet the time is not likely to come when a human being will not be better adapted to his environments by knowing their nature; on the other hand, to study a provincial setting from a provincial point of view is restricting. Nobody should specialize on provincial writings before he has the perspective that only a good deal of good literature and wide history can give. I think it more important that a dweller in the Southwest read The Trial and Death of Socrates than all the books extant on killings by Billy the Kid. ”

“ Just the same, free play of mind upon life is the essence of good writing, and intellectual activity is synonymous with critical interpretations.
To the constant disregard of thought, Americans of the mid-twentieth century have added positive opposition. Critical ideas are apt to make any critic suspected of being subversive. The Southwest, Texas especially, is more articulately aware of its land spaces than of any other feature pertaining to itself. Yet in the realm of government, the Southwest has not produced a single spacious thinker. ”

“ The wide range of human interests leaves ample room for downright, straightaway narratives of the careers of strong men. If the literature of the range ever matures, however, it will include keener searchings for meanings and harder struggles for human truths by writers who strive in "the craft so long to lerne." For three-quarters of a century the output of fiction on the cowboy has been tremendous, and it shows little diminution. Mass production inundating the masses of readers has made it difficult for serious fictionists writing about range people to get a hearing. ”

“ ART MAY BE SUBSTANTIVE, but more than being its own excuse for being, it lights up the land it depicts, shows people what is significant, cherishable in their own lives and environments. Thus Peter Hurd of New Mexico has revealed windmills, Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri has elevated mules. Nature may not literally follow art, but human eyes follow art and literature in recognizing nature.
The history of art in the Southwest, if it is ever rightly written, will not bother with the Italian "Holy Families" imported by agent-guided millionaires trying to buy exclusiveness. ”