I have no idea of how I stumbled across "Go Down Together", but I am certainly glad I did. While I enjoy mysteries and police procedurals, I don't consider myself to be a crime buff. My experience with Bonnie and Clyde was limited largely to the classic 1967 movie and bits and pieces that I had acquired here and there.
Guinn is very serious about his subjects, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. He fills 82 pages with notes, bibliography and acknowledgments. It was his good fortune that he secured access to two previously unpublished manuscripts by family members. Guinn acknowledges that the historical record of the infamous pair is incomplete and cluttered with lies, exaggerations, questionable recollections and much else that isn't true.
Clyde and Bonnie - the way the pair was known until the movie - were children of poverty. Though most impoverished kids made it out of their West Dallas slum neighborhood without robbing a corner grocery or killing someone, Clyde Barrow didn't. Petty thefts and stealing cars became a way of life for the poor boy and he was packed off to prison.
Texas wasn't a congenial state to the poor in the 1930s. (What state was?) The agricultural markets had collapsed followed by the financial markets and the economy as a whole. Social mobility wasn't what it is today: back then, if you were born poor, you generally stayed poor. Texas prisons were harsh environments and young Clyde Barrow was assigned to Eastham, a farm run from the notorious Huntsville prison. There he was continually raped by another prisoner. Clyde demonstrated his outlook on life by murdering the perpetrator.
Released from prison, Clyde put together a "gang" that was incredibly inept. Clyde and his successive "Barrow Gangs" never really achieved much success. But he had one person who never left his side: perky, would be poetess Bonnie Parker. Their relationship and dedication to each other is the real subject of this story.
Clyde was the boss of the "gang". Bonnie was his woman, always present, but never really a part of the actual commission of the crime. She didn't shoot anyone or even rob anyone.
Unlike the movie and many stories, Guinn shows there was little glamor in the lives of these fugitives, both of whom were in their early 20s. Much of the time, they slept in primitive camps, eating Vienna sausages from cans, often cold. They were constantly on the run, always with an eye out for police, of whom they killed several without much reason, other than Clyde's not wanting to go back to prison.
Clyde and Bonnie supported themselves largely through the gang's robberies of grocery and drug stores and gas stations. Occasionally the gang robbed a bank, usually without great financial success.
The Depression era media played up the exploits of Clyde and Bonnie because crime news was cheap entertainment and there was more than a hint of "Robin Hood" in the story of the poor kid from the slums striking back at the capitalist class. None of Clyde's gang was really making a social statement: crime was just how they made their living, though both Bonnie and Clyde basked in the publicity they received.
It was an era of gangsters. While Al Capone was perched at the top, bank robbers like John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd and others captured the attention of the nation, stoked by lurid, glamorizing stories in the press. Bonnie and Clyde wanted to be part of the upper echelon of crime, but they never rose above small-time criminal activities, no matter how much they were written about.
Guinn paints an intimate portrait of Clyde, Bonnie and their families,whom they were very close with. The unhappiness and despair of the Depression comes through as does the love of the respective mothers for their wayward children. Siblings of both Clyde and Bonnie spent time on the road with them. Clyde's brother, Buck, in fact, was a part of the gang and was the first to die.
There is much here. Guinn has done a first rate job of research not only into the lives of Clyde and Bonnie, but into the times, the West Dallas slums, the lawmen (using the term loosely) charged with protecting the public against criminals,the generally brutish society of the time in rural Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and other states where the gang operated.
Clyde and Bonnie eventually became too great a nuisance, having killed a bunch of police officers and a murderer with a badge was set on their trial. Frank Hamer was a sometimes Texas Ranger who had killed more than 50 men as a "lawman". Eventually with the help of a traitorous member of the Barrow Gang, Clyde and Bonnie met their end, perforated with bullets as a half-dozen lawmen ambushed them.
The story, told with greater historical accuracy than most accounts (though the author is quick to point out that the entire truth is hard to reach)is compelling. These two young kids captured the attention of the media and the populace in a two year crime spree. They weren't noble. They weren't victims of society. They were two young kids who decided to lead a life of crime because they wanted to.
It is a strange story, well told and infinitely interesting. The fatalism of 23 year old Bonnie Parker, crippled for the last year as the result of a car accident caused by the reckless driving of her lover Clyde Barrow, knowing that one day soon she would soon die with him is unnerving.
Jerry
