B.
Traven was long a cult figure by the time I stumbled onto his legendary
adventure novels about Mexico when I traveled the gringo trail in the 70s. It seemed everyone on the road in those
days had a copy of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre stuffed into their backpack
alongside a Spanish-English phrase book.
B.
Traven’s books were required reading for anyone traveling south. Most of his novels,
written between 1926 and 1952, were set in Mexico. His themes paralleled what was happening in that country
during those traumatic, revolutionary times.
The
tales were part adventure, part historical fact, couched in fiction, all taking
place south of the border in a very different land. Secondly, his Mexico was
a place where abandoned gold mines and bandits still existed. His Mexico was
peppered with anarchy and rebellion. His Mexico had spice.
MAN OF MYSTERY
Best
known to American audiences because of the film The Treasure of the Sierra
Madre, Traven most likely would have remained unknown if John Huston hadn’t
turned the iconic greed and gold novel into a silver screen classic starring
Humphrey Bogart as down-on-his-luck prospector Fred C. Dobbs. Two scenes come to mind: Bogart going mad, and the other sports one
of cinema’s immortal lines, shouted by bandits on horseback imitating
federales, “Badges? We don’t need
no stinkin’ badges!”
By
the 1930s, Traven’s work was published everywhere else in the world but England
and the US, in dozens of languages, but not a word in English until Alfred
Knopf republished The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in 1935. His body of work
wasn’t published in the US until the 60s. Today, Traven’s books have been translated into 30 languages, sold more
than 25 million copies, and are required reading in Mexico’s schools.
Because
he lived in Mexico 35 years, Traven’s work evolves the grit and reality of
Mexico: He watched his adopted country adapt to a string of dictators and
revolutions. His tales dish out
depth and emotion, with a sizeable serving of the oppression of the lower
classes thrown in.
His
epics read as though inspired by stories he could have heard while sitting in
some outback cantina in a dusty pueblo anywhere in Mexico; or maybe he drew on
his own slices of Mexican life that occurred while living there till his death
in 1969. Or his supposed death . . .
TRUE IDENTITY
At
this point, I must explain that B. Traven was as much a character as those he
created in his novels. The jury is
still out on his true identity. B. Traven was a pen name. At a Traven conference just 20 years
ago at Penn State, scholars still debated what the “B” stood for, and if his
nationality was German, English or American.
Traven’s
biographers consider several possible identities: Either he was born in Chicago in 1890, to Swedish parents,
and spent his youth in Germany where he started writing anarchist literature
under the pen name Ret Marut, moving to Mexico in the 20s. Or he was Otto Feige, born to a German
pottery worker. After traveling
widely in his youth, he worked as a manual laborer and actor, and then edited
an anarchist journal in Germany before heading to Mexico. In the most recent scenario,
presented by professor Michael L. Baumann, Traven was neither Marut nor
Feige. Baumann suggests, in his
1997 book, Mr. Traven, I Presume, that Traven could have usurped the real
Traven’s identity and continued on with this man’s work, since his German published
books were written in two distinct handwritings and full of
“Americanisms.” Baumann also
asserts that given what background was known of Traven, he should have been a
much older man than the corpse claimed to be his after his 1969 death in Mexico.
In
his biography, John Huston adds another question mark to the Traven identity
search. While filming The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Huston invited the
author to come to the set, but he declined, sending instead his “agent,” Hal
Croves.
“Croves,”
Huston wrote, “was a small, thin man with a long nose,” and carried a letter
for the director explaining that Traven could not show up; Croves would answer
all pertinent questions. “He had a slight accent. It didn’t sound German but
certainly European. I thought he
might very well be Traven but out of delicacy, I didn’t ask.”
It
wasn’t until Traven’s death in 1969 when a photo of the author was published
that Huston confirmed Croves was, in fact, B. Traven.
On
Mexican government immigration documents from the 1930s, Traven claimed to have
entered Mexico through Ciudad Juarez in 1914. He settled first in either Tampico or Chiapas—there are
mixed accounts on this—writing stories he sent to German publishers under the
name B. Traven. His first
published book was The Death Ship, a story of an American sailor who loses his
birth certificate and with it his identity and is forced to take a job
shoveling coal on a ship destined to go down for insurance money.
THE WRITER’S WORK
According
to one biography, Traven wrote about social justice, cruelty, and greed from
the very beginning. In the 1930s
he moved near Acapulco. Around this time his books were banned by the
Nazis. Between 1931 and 1940 he
published six of his Mahogany, or Jungle, Series, which included: The Carreta, Government, March to Monteria, Trozas, The Rebellion of the
Hanged and General from the Jungle.
These
books chronicled the Mexican Revolution between 1910-1912 and lamented the
plight of the indigenous people of Chiapas who worked like slaves in the
mahogany forests. In Rebellion of
the Hanged, he tells how one man is duped into working in the monteria where
mahogany is harvested when his wife becomes ill. Before it’s over, the
man’s wife has died but the he has signed a contract with the mill—a deal with the devil. His
struggle to stay alive in hellish conditions is duly recorded in Traven’s
prose.
Upon Traven’s death in 1969 his
ashes were scattered over Rio Jatate in Chiapas, and his widow, (translator
Rosa Elena Lujan) was instructed to reveal that B. Traven was in fact Traven
Torsvan Croves, born in Chicago in 1890 and naturalized as a Mexican citizen in
1951. However, in a later
interview with The New York Times in 1990, his widow stated Traven told her he
had been Ret Marut but she could tell no one until after his death due to his
fear of extradition to Germany for his anarchist leanings.
Traven’s true identity is not
important. He said so
himself. But in reading his novels
about a very real Mexico, truths are uncovered through his gripping adventure
tales. The original anarchist, it’s
easy to see why he was so embraced by the 60s generation.
Who was B. Traven? As he said himself, “My life belongs to
me—only my books belong to the public.”
According to his widow, he said, “I am freer than anyone else, free to
choose the parents I want, the country I want, the age I want.”
No matter who the real B. Traven
was, his works—still relevant decades after publication—speak for the man
behind the mystery.
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