Three Friends: Bedichek, Dobie, Webb by William A. Owens (review)

70 Western American Literature William A Owens: Three Friends: Bedichek, Dobie, Webb. Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden ity, New York, 1969. $6.95. This book might well be considered a necessary complement to Ronnie Dugger’s Three Men in Texas (recently reviewed in Western American Liter­ ature). Dugger put together essays by friends of Roy Bedichek, Walter Prescott Webb, and J. Frank Dobie—the three men who have come to be recognized as contributing most to the understanding of Southwestern heritage and culture. William A. Owens calls this book a personal history. It is just that. As a graduate student at the University of Texas in the early ’30’s, Owens came to know the three subjects at close range. He made automobile trips with these men when they went all over Texas on speaking engagements. Later, in contemplation of this book, he recorded their voices on tape by personal inter­ views; and he is now the literary executor of Bedichek’s unpublished writings. This book is a collection of personal letters between the men, intertwined with the taped recordings and the editor’s comments. Though Owens wisely limits his own comments to the minimum, they are necessary to the framework and essential details not included in the correspondence of the subjects. The arrangement of the material is largely chronological, dealing with the life-spans of all three men and showing their somewhat parallel developments as inter­ preters of the physical, political, and academic matrixes that affected them. It soon becomes obvious to the reader that Bedichek was the one who held the three friends together. There were letters aplenty between him and Webb, there were many between him and Dobie, but none between Webb and Dobie. This, of course, does not mean that Webb and Dobie were distant or (to my knowledge) ever at odds; but it was Bedichek who whetted their appe­ tites to put on paper in private letters the essence of their philosophies, and it was Bedichek who planned their camping trips. It was Bedichek who was the pivot for their exchanges, both oral and graphic, both humorous and serious, both intellectual and otherwise. The subject matter of their letters is interesting if for no other reason than its variety. It ranges from latrine graffitti to profoundest concepts of the nature of things, from observations of wild life to the attempted tyranny to squelch academic freedom, from subjective venomous indictment of certain individual personalities to high praise of others caught up in the issue of the firing of Homer P. Rainey and the hiring of Theophilus S. Painter as President of the University of Texas. Though this controversy occurred over twenty years ago, the University has never fully recovered from its repercussions. It produced the stormiest faculty meeting that ever occurred on that campus. As a teaching fellow with friends on both sides of the feud, I was present and could well under­ stand how distasteful the whole affair was to all concerned. The complete story of this conflict between the liberals (including our three friends) and the conservatives on the campus may never be told in its Reviews 71 entirety. However, the intimate words in this book reveal facets not heretofore disclosed. Be it ever so important, however, the portrayal of this clash is not Owens’ main purpose. It is, rather, simply to acquaint the reader with the personalities of these three stalwarts and to preserve for posterity portions of their portraits not otherwise easily obtainable. And it may well be that a distant posterity will look back upon these three friends and come to appreciate their incisive insights more than critics of the current scene and their analyzers. George D. Hendricks, North Texas State University ‘Dear Old K it: The Historical Christopher Carson. With a New Edition of the Carson Memoirs. By Harvey Lewis Carter. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968. xix + 250 pages, illus., maps, index. $5.95.) In 1856 Kit Carson related the story of his life to someone whose identity long remained uncertain until the present work by Harvey Carter. At that time Carson was serving as an Indian agent and had already established himself as one of the most famous figures...