Charles Webb & Fred

When the author of The Graduate recently passed away blogger Ann Althouse wrote a number of thoughtful pieces about Charles Webb, focusing on him and his wife’s lifestyle choices. She was curious about their genuinely unusual relationship to money, referencing the New York Times obituary by John Leland:

Shedding their possessions became a full-time mission. They gave away a California bungalow, the first of three houses they would jettison, saying that owning things oppressed them. Mr. Webb declined his inheritance from his father’s family but was unable to decline the money from his mother’s; so they gave that away, along with artwork by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg…

But Althouse was even more interested in his ambivalence towards travel, as they largely mirror hers. She quotes Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate:

Now I don’t know what brought this up but I have no intention of hopping around the world ogling natives and peasants or whatever you had in mind.

Adding her own take, “I thought the translation of the bourgeois view of travel into ‘hopping around the world ogling natives and peasants’ was very nice. The character never knows what he wants to do (other than marry Elaine), but other people keep wanting him to do things, and you get the message that he’s more advanced just having eliminated all their bad ideas from his life. Traveling is just one of them.”

Having photographed the couple at a modest group residence in rural New Jersey for Premiere Magazine in 1992 I enjoyed Althouse’s posts. I dug out the pictures, and a postcard I later received from Webb.