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Rough and Rowdy Ways: The Life and Hard Times of Edward Anderson by Patrick Bennett

1989; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 24; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wal.1989.0059

1948-7142

Ernestine P. Sewell,

Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights

Reviews 179 attempts an Indian persona. One of the finest pieces here is “Higher Educa­ tion,” a 1934 story demonstrating the deadly effects of enforced boardingschool education for young Indians, told from the point of view of a young anthropologist on the Navajo reservation. Similarly, “The Little Stone Man” is an effective first-person account by a young white man of his accidental betrayal of Indian friends and his immediate rejection by the tribe about which he had felt himself becoming an “expert.” Permeating these stories is La Farge’s admiration for and identification with the educated and sensitive Easterner who has come west and gained inside knowledge—precisely La Farge’sown situation. A disturbing note in the stories is the subtle but inescapable sense of the Indian as colorful and quaint —something one can become an expert on—a sense that comes across even when the author is attempting to debunk that very posture in his white char­ acters. Ahead of his time in his knowledge of and sensitivity to southwestern Indian cultures, La Farge nonetheless exploits those cultures for quaintness and color even while pretending to do otherwise. The result is an attractive volume of great interest to students of La Farge and of the period but one that—in spite of a good, succinct introduction by David L. Caffey—will do little to elevate the author’s reputation among Native American readers or seekers after first-quality western fiction. LOUIS OWENS University of New Mexico Rough and Rowdy Ways: The Life and Hard Times of Edward Anderson. By Patrick Bennett. (College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 1988. 191 pages, $16.95.) With two successful novels of the proletarian kind to his credit—Hungry Men (1935) and Thieves Like Us (1937)—Texas author Edward Anderson was lured to California, where he attempted script writing. When job after job ran out, he returned to his first career, newspapering. Ever ambitious to add to the meager canon of his works, he determined, as he sat with other Fourth Estaters in a hospital corridor waiting for John Barrymore to die, that he would be Barrymore’s biographer. When he divulged his plan to an artist acquaintance, he was told, “You’d have to know the man personally to write the biography. You couldn’t possibly write it without knowing the man.” Anderson did not write the biography. Patrick Bennett, also Texas newspaperman but turned academician, was not so easily deterred when he decided to be Anderson’s biographer. He knew little or nothing about the man; still, he sallied forth, playing the sleuth, to recover the story of this writer’s life and career. We go with Bennett to inter­ view John Knox, a one-time friend who helped Anderson win fame, and to sit with Anne Bates, the hometown girl who tried marriage to the writer three times, as she turns the pages of her scrapbook and reminisces. 180 Western American Literature The result is a melange, interlarded (in some places transition is weak) with bits and pieces of history to remind the reader the world continued to spin out its drama while Anderson pursued his muse. Perhaps one doubts the relevance of some of the items, such as Anne’s surprise that actor Edward Arnold ate his asparagus with his fingers and her disillusion with Sonja Henie, who could be a virago when crossed, or John Knox’s enthusiastic two-page report of a Thomas Wolfe lecture, or Professor Bennett’s fulsome account of the origins of the Texas Institute of Letters (in which Anderson had no part). However, readers will discover Rough and Rowdy Ways to be an absorb­ ing biography of a little-known wordsmith with “a great talent for one specific time and place”—the Depression Era. It also reveals the satisfactions of a scholarly adventurer’s detective labors. Yet the backward glance at the Twenties and Thirties, with close-ups of the homeless and deprived, makes it all worthwhile. Doubtless, when the last page is turned, readers will rush to the library for Hungry Men and Thieves Like Us. An accolade for meritorious service to the literary-minded for resurrecting Anderson and his classic novels...