Folklorist Abroad

A TEXAN IN ENGLAND -- J. Frank Dobie --Little, Brown ($2.50).

No pallid scholar is Professor J. (for James) Frank Dobie. In his years as head of the University of Texas English Department, the silver-haired, granite-faced, panther-hunting professor has spent about as much time in the shade of ranchers' chuck wagons in Texas, swapping yarns of gold strikes and bad men and vanishing longhorns, as he has in the university library. "Somehow ' or other," he once said, "I have been able to get to the heart of common people and rob them of their stories." Professor Dobie's many books on S. Southwest (Coronado's Chil dren, The Longhorns -- TIME, March 17, 1941) glow with the lyric magic of the region's folk tales. His mellow, witty impressions of England, gathered in a year (1943-44) as professor of American history at Cambridge, are as vividly colored: he met and "robbed" many an English man in college commons, in pubs, manor houses, railway carriages, on country meadows and London sidewalks.

Secret of Contentment. In a prosperous riverside pub, The Anchor, Texan Dobie spent many hours "when darkness came early," swapping countryside legend and philosophy. There he would find at a corner table cronies like Horner, who ran away to sea at the age of 13, inveighing bitterly against politicians, against women "because they spend their lives making men think that unessential things, like furniture, napkins, sheets and silver plate, are essential," or "the blasted superficiality and bogus pretence of education." There were also the medico from a High land regiment with his Cornish remedy for colds ("Hang a boot over foot of bed, go to bed, drink whiskey till you see two boots, go to sleep"), and the genial host, Jack Barrett, full of his customers' reminiscences : one, asked if he never broke his marriage vows, answered, "I ain't never exactly broke 'em, but I've sure give 'em a hell of a twist sometimes." Talk at the Anchor ranged from speculation on how partridges mated ("No man, they say, has ever seen the mating") to admiration of Patton's latest offensive.

"If [the Anchor's proprietors] operated such an establishment in America," Dobie speculates, "they'd take in a barrel of money. They'd enlarge it to take care of more & more customers and keep on enlarging it until it grew as big as Madison Square Garden. . . ." That the English proprietors are content to make only a simple living from the Anchor is, he thinks, the secret of England's proud contentment.

Customary Cockroaches. Dobie, who once described himself as "so damned old-fashioned I don't like to change," finds an ineradicable nobility in the British counterpart of his feelings, the omnipresent conservatism that extends from "the Old Squire sentiment for old names, old fields, old ways" to the obstinacy of coal miners who labor in wretched forms of physical drudgery, yet "are more averse to new machinery than the mine owners are. . . . When the love for an old hall by a college pf dons dooms charwomen to carry coal scuttles up and slop jars down three flights of stairs, the conservatism has a flavor not idyllic. Yet kitchen help in my college almost struck last winter over the installation of a plate-washer."

Love of the old, love of permanence and a decent concern for posterity have led this nation of "rememberers" to combine democracy and tradition, in Dobie's opinion, more successfully than any other people. "I go to a football game at home, and while I hear and look at the organized cheering, I remember the casualness with which a crowd in bleachers viewed a game of rugby between Oxford and Cambridge . . . applauded good plays on either side --without orders from any cheerleader to goose-step." Famed throughout Texas for his maverick individualism (he once went to jail rather than pay a $2 parking fine he considered "unreasonable"), Dobie found that England inspired in him a "renewed feeling for the individual."

Professor Dobie found Cambridge mercifully free from the German passion for organization and system that has pervaded U.S. colleges. Instead it relied mainly on custom and tradition, which worked very well in their way. "When a new steward swept the cockroaches, root and branch, out of his college kitchen, one of the cooks asked in dismay, 'What will the University Zoological Laboratory do? They have always depended on our kitchen for specimens.' "

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