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The Texas Book – Panel Discussion Videos - Don Graham
Don E. Carleton:
Don Graham is the J. Frank Dobie Professor of American and English Literature and teaches Dobie's course on the life and the literature of the southwest. Over the years Don has been a frequent visitor to the reading room at the Center for American History where I'm proud to say he researched many of his books including Kings of Texas, The 150-Year Saga of an American Ranching Empire; No Name on the Bullet: A Biography of Audie Murphy; and Cowboys and Cadillacs: How Hollywood Looks at Texas. Don's contribution to The Texas Book is titled, "J. Frank Dobie: A Reappraisal." Please welcome Don Graham. [applause]
Don Graham:
Thank you very much. We had an event like this on October the 28th and I'm going to repeat myself I'm afraid, because I haven't learned anything new since then. My piece actually feels historical to me. It was published in 1988 and I hadn't read it in a long time and when Dick said he wanted to use it in the book, I was very, very pleased and obviously still am. Dick mentioned something about the long shadow, I believe it was, cast by Frank Erwin. The same thing is certainly true with J. Frank Dobie. This is something I see now that I could not really have seen in 1988 that in that period in the mid-1980s, particularly in the year 1985, a lot of very significant writing was produced in Texas and was published that year. And all of it really has a connection with J. Frank Dobie. All of it is in some way a fulfillment of Dobie's lifelong commitment to dealing with Texas' past and Texas culture. When I say Texas culture, I'm reminded that someone once said that is an oxymoron. I do not agree with that assessment. In 1985 James Michener's Texas appeared. This was obviously a Dobiesque project in its breadth and its depth, but I believe not in its style. In that same year, Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove appeared and Dobie would have been very pleased and I think surprised to see a book like Lonesome Dove because McMurtry over the years and Dobie had not connected. Let's put it this way. There was a very short intersection of time in which the two could have connected. But Lonesome Dove clearly derived in part from a book like Dobie's The Longhorns, one of his famous early books and it is the ultimate trail drive. The novel is something that Dobie worked on for much of his career. Finally there is the very difficult, very artistic and highly praiseworthy novel by Cormac McCarthy called Blood Meridian, published in 1985. So there were three really important, big books published in that year and there's actually a kind of connection between Cormac and Dobie. Dobie had written about the scalp hunters. The scalp hunters after the War with Mexico in 1846 is the subject of Cormac's bloody book. Dobie had written about this back in 1939. I'm pretty sure Cormac read the chapter in Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver.
So the other thing I would mention about the 1980s that has a UT connection is that in 1983 a major literary conference was held here. It lasted three days and drew about one thousand people, if you can believe that, from around the state for three days. All the big players were here—John Graves, Larry McMurtry, and many others, and Dobie's legacy was very much apparent. Now that year, 1985, to go back to that benchmark year, was twenty-one years after Dobie's death and my point is Dobie was still very much present. Two thousand six is twenty-one years after 1985 and the question now is, what is Dobie's stock at the present time? I would say on the basis of my experience among younger Texans, among the students in my course on Life and Literature in the Southwest, Dobie is not generally known at all, except for Dobie Mall, a building that Dobie would have, I believe, despised, on the basis of his dislike of the tower and everything else. In 1995 (everything seems so historical as I talk) anyway, in 1995, I surveyed my class (and I need to do it again, before the class begins) in Life and Literature of the Southwest on the first day, before I'd said anything about who Dobie was, and here are a couple of responses. "J. Frank Dobie, infamous businessman involved with UT who hated the UT tower." And part of that is true. The second response, "J. Frank Dobie, the man after which Dobie Mall is named. He was I think a Texas Ranger with some authority. He was an outspoken racist. I learned that in a class, the History of Mexican Americans in the U.S." A lot to do with that student's point of view, but anyway. And what all these misconceptions or legendary errors about the legend, they give me a lot of things to talk about during the course of the semester. And one of the things I do is tell them that Larry McMurtry is a famous Texas Ranger and that Dobie is a sculptor whose most famous work is the Littlefield fountain. Thank you.