An American Original: The Life of J. Frank Dobie, and: My Works and Days: A Personal Chronicle (review)

278 biography Vol. 4, No. 3 how Tinkle, An American Original: The Life of J. Frank Dobie. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1978. 264 pp. $10.00. Lewis Mumford, My Works and Days: A Personal Chronicle. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979. 531 pp. $13.95. Lon Tinkle's biography of J. Frank Dobie is a mixture of goods and bads that may set a didactic precedent for biographers of what not to do. Admittedly, there was once a rationale for the exhaustive study, but I am not sure what it is anymore. If a book can't be finished, all the defînitiveness in the world is wasted. Tinkle's main error—an error of much biography—is indiscriminacy. Perhaps Boswell began this in the eighteenth century, endowing all but Johnson's commas with incomparable importance. It is much later in the day now. Frank Dobie—Texas folklorist and regionalist, humanistic cowpuncher , academic who got his hands dirty, undsoweiter—certainly deserved a biography, and by and large Tinkle has done him justice. Only the exhaustiveness mars it. There are too many things here that we do not need to know. We learn that Dobie was liking, then not liking , then liking his work during his early years teaching at the University of Texas; that he and his future wife went rowboating on the Brazos River; that when they married, he searched the want ads for bargains; that during World War I (when millions were dying in insane offensives), he was having problems deciding whether to acquire a rocking chair or a Morris chair; that for the wedding he had hesitated between a bow-tie or a four-in-hand, and wondered also about gloves; that his mother-in-law sent two dozen jars of preserves. If we stick long enough with Tinkle—and in this age of media saturation , I'm not sure how the author may be sure we will—we continue to wade through maybe not oceans, but certainly lakes of irrelevance to get to the real Dobie who finally surfaces as a champion of the American Southwest in the 1920's. The highwater mark of stupid detail, comical to those raised in the era of Woody Allen, concerns Dobie's war efforts, in which he arrives in France a few days before the armistice and has a battle record that consists of dull comments on the French countryside. This after one million French deaths and preoccupations still on the order of that Morris chair, preoccupations much quoted in letters home that I could willingly have seen deleted, or severely pruned, by the biographer. So a major problem for biographers is how much, and Tinkle has failed in this regard. The book begins to gain pace with Chapter 3—"The Western Side REVIEWS 279 of a Train." Now we can finally understand the interest of this character . The contemporary mind may be most drawn to Dobie's struggles with orthodox academe—struggles against esoteric scholarship, rote teaching, promotion politics, and the like; and also his conversion to regionalism and folklore, not quite with the intensity of Theodore Herzl's "basalt mountain" shift to Zionism (no Loyola here), but authentic enough to make him a kind of artist in the Southwest. Besides academics, Dobie had other bugbears—especially Hollywood and New York imposing their myths on Texas. All in all, he helped give a push toward authentic regional study and love of region. To students, he could lecture as easily on bears or mesquite trees or bowie knives as on Shakespeare or Montaigne. His was a transitional mind—humanist-in-the-sticks, steeped in Western civilization, but still in love with and a part of those same sticks. This literal educationist never lost his love for horseback riding and cowpunching.He had to endure a certain snideness in the air around him: "Some of the departments here . . . have no more sympathy for the life of the Southwest than they have for life in Patagonia." It is an attitude that still persists. And yet he was no dull teller of local stories, no mere chronicler, but also an aesthete, devoted in a rough way to...