Blanche Caldwell Barrow (1911–1988)

John Neal Phillips deserves some credit for doing a solid job transcribing and editing Blanche Barrow's handwritten memoirs. His effort to turn the memoirs into a critical edition, however, has failed utterly. The book is filled with problems relating to citation, historical context, and a tendency to lapse into unrelated trivia.

A book about Bonnie and Clyde and the Barrow gang should make for interesting reading. And Blanche's memoirs do that. But the key to understanding them is to read between the lines. Becoming too engrossed in their accuracy or historical fact at the cost of misreading Blanche Barrow's mythologized rendering of history means missing the forest for the trees. Phillips is all about counting those trees.

For me, as a reader accustomed to growing up around people with a similar background to the Barrows and Caldwells, the latter being Blanche's maiden name, it was as if I was rediscovering the idioms, speech patterns, and common views on life that formed part of the rural culture stretching from East Texas to Southeast Oklahoma. I have heard Blanche's same exact beliefs and attitudes (probably in a very similar voice) expressed by members of my own family, one part of which came from Kaufman County, in Texas, and the other from Bryan County in Oklahoma. Like the Barrows and the Caldwells, they, too, eventually made the Great Depression and Post World War II migration from the farmlands to Dallas. So this is a story that rings true to me. There is verisimilitude in its dialogue and the habits of its characters' talk. How Blanche adapted the specifics of her history of crime to fit her own emotional and psychological requirements, her own mythologizing, is another matter.

The problem with My Life with Bonnie and Clyde arises with the use of the editor's footnotes. They are a mess. Page long rambling, off topic filler takes place over 73 pages of endnotes. Much of it is repetitive (at one point, the fact that Blanche is a "good driver" is cited in the endnotes three times, all within a few pages and even lines of the memoirs' main text). Sometimes, it goes off into geographical rambling and what things used to look like before or what they looked like after Bonnie and Clyde and Buck and Blanche came through town. At other times, the editor unnecessarily cites sources for commonly agreed upon matters of history--and then still gets it wrong, writing for example that Germany "invaded" the Rhineland. (The Rhineland was already part of Germany; it was re-militarized, not invaded.) Essentially, endnotes/footnotes should be in place to provide sources--not long-winded commentary or discussions only tangentially tied to the topic. I am surprised that an academic press allowed this book to be published in this form. Even in the "Editor's Conclusion," he does this. Frankly, it became aggravating to flip back and forth continually, often four or five times within a paragraph, to the endnotes and thus losing concentration on the memoirs themselves.

Aside from Blanch Barrow's worthy memoirs, this is a very troubled book. It needs an extensive overhaul and rewrite.… (meer)

An interesting but not all that well written memoir by the wife of Buck Barrow, Clyde's brother. It covers the period of about four months while Blanche rode with the gang before she was captured and Buck was killed in one of many shootouts with the law. Blanche tries to play down her involvement with the gang's crimes since at the time she wrote the memoir she was still concerned about being charged with murder. What really comes out was what a miserable life these people lived on the run-and what miserable people they were. These were not some Robin Hoods of the Depression era or sophisticated jewel thieves, these people were vicious petty crooks. They robbed more gas stations and grocery stores than banks. The editor includes extensive notes on Blanche's text and a long afterword. Worth your while if you are interested in Bonnie & Clyde or even East Texas history where a good bit of the action took place.… (meer)