B Who?
by
Barry Kritzberg
October 8, 2007
Ask any
literary companion if he or she has read the novels of B. Traven and the
typical answer, more times than not, will be, “B Who?”
B. Traven is
the proverbial mystery man and no literary Sherlock Holmes has yet come along
to solve, to the satisfaction of other critics, the question of his identity.
He used the
name B. Traven, to be sure, and, for some years at least, before his death in
1969, he had a mailing address that was not exactly calculated to promote
obscurity: 61 Rio
He used the
name B. Traven, but whether it was a professional pseudonym or an alias is not
clear.
His will,
written three weeks before his death, stated that B. Traven was simply a nom de plume and that his real name was
Traven Torsvan Croves, son of Burton Torsvan and Dorothy Croves, and that he
was born in
This death
bed confession, if I might call it that, has left the issue of who the man
really was exactly where it was before: clouded in confusion. There is no 1890
birth certificate anywhere in
He said he
was of Swedish—another source says Norwegian—descent, but he gave his name,
Mexican fashion, with the father’s name preceding the name of the mother,
Traven Torsvan Croves.
Traven’s
first public interview, granted late in his life, in 1966, to Mexican
journalist Luis Suarez, offered no new insights into the elusive man’s
past. At the end of the interview, in
fact, Traven handed the reporter a “Declaration of Independence from Personal
Publicity.”
“I simply do
not understand why such a fuss is made about a writer,” the declaration
explained, “so that people want to know what time he gets up, when he
breakfasts, if he drinks, smokes, eats meat, if he plays golf or poker, if he
is married or single. My work is important, I am not; I am only a common
ordinary worker. The God of Nature granted me the gift of writing books,
therefore I am obliged to write books instead of baking bread. In making them,
I am no more important than the typographer of my books, than the worker who
wraps them or the sweeper of the floors in the office that handles my books.
Without their aid and good will there would be no books for the
readers, it would do no good that I could write them.
Nevertheless, I have never heard the reader of a good book having asked for the
autograph of the typographer, the printer, or the binder.”
“My life
belongs to me,” Traven asserted, “my work to the public.”
It is
perhaps a bit ingenuous to insist that the 1966 interview by Luis Suarez was
the first, for there were other interviews, but the man facing the reporters
always insisted that he was Hal Croves, literary agent for B. Traven, and not
Traven himself. Croves carefully spoke
of Traven in the third person, although he sometimes spoke of him more
familiarly as “Torsvan.”
In 1946,
when John Huston was in
Croves was
signed on as an advisor to the film. But, after some weeks, an enterprising
reporter showed a picture of Traven to Humphrey Bogart, who was playing the
role of Dobbs in the film.
Bogart was
asked if he knew the man in the picture. His reply sounded like a line from a
typical Bogart movie.
“Sure, pal,”
Bogart replied, “I’d know him anywhere; I worked with him for ten weeks in
Croves
disappeared from the set shortly thereafter, but several letters to Huston
followed —composed on different typewriters—denying that Croves was Traven.
Huston took the matter in
philosophical stride.
“Personally,”
Huston said, “I would deplore any definite proof that Croves and Traven are
one. Traven has worked very hard at being mysterious…in a world where too much
is known about too many.”
Some, it is
true, have claimed to have solved the riddle of Traven’s identity, but the evidence
offered is as specious as it is dubious. No critic who comes to look at the
work of Traven, it seems, can resist the Traven identity question, however, and
that includes me.
Donald O.
Chankin, in Anonymity and Death
(1980), the first book-length study of Traven’s work soberly reported what was
known and what was rumored about the man. He pointed out that his widow, Rosa
Elena Lujan, released information about Traven, shortly after his death, which
declared that her late husband was really Ret Marut, a German radical who fled
that country to avoid being sentenced to death on a charge of treason. He, like
his fictional protagonist, Gales, in The
Death Ship, jumped ship after being shanghaied. He may have bounced around
Europe a bit, but by 1925 he was a familiar figure in
The name he
was known by in
Rosa Elena
Lujan, skipping over a couple of decades, indicated that Traven became a
Mexican citizen in 1951, and married her in 1957. She had also been, she said,
his literary collaborator.
Traven never
told anyone, other than Rosa Elena Lujan, that he was Ret Marut. Hard evidence
once seemed to be lacking, but some critics have found that certain
coincidences can be explained, in part, by assuming that the fictional life of
Gales, in The Death Ship (1934), is
autobiographical.
Rosa Elena
Lujan aided this autobiographical interpretation of the novel by indicating
that Gales was the character with whom her husband most identified himself.
Gales, in
the novel, is an American citizen, but he is a man without a country because,
after carousing all night, his ship sailed without him. On the ship were his
passport and his sailor’s identity card. Gales cannot get a replacement
passport without his sailor’s identity papers and he cannot get new sailor’s
identity papers without a passport. He also cannot get another place on a ship
without a sailor’s identity card. It was a catch-22, long before Joseph Heller
coined the phrase.
In desperation, after being shunted
from one country to another and spending time in jail in each, he finds a ship
that will take him without identity papers. The owners are willing to do so, as
Gales discovers later, because it is a “death ship”—a ship that is bound for
nowhere because it is going to be sunk by the owners to collect the insurance,
and the death of a few sailors here and there will only make it that much more
convincing as an accident.
There is, in the novel, much satire
directed at the bureaucracies which insist that identity can only be
established with birth records and other official documents—none of which Gales
can produce.
There is
also a preoccupation with legitimacy in the novel and that has led some to
speculate that Traven’s obsessive attempts to conceal his identity stem from
his own illegitimacy. Judy Stone, in
several articles which appeared in Ramparts
in 1967, makes this assumption and then takes a dramatic leap and asserts that
Ret Marut was simply an alias and that Traven was the illegitimate son of
Kaiser Wilhem II.
This
assertion, I suppose, is one that we are expected to take on faith, for there
is no real evidence for this claim. It seems that Traven’s deliberate
mysteriousness has encouraged some to invent what could not possibly be
confirmed.
Judy Stone
was not the only critic who cheerfully adhered to what I call the Oscar Wilde
School of Historiography. “I can believe anything,” Oscar declared, “provided
it is quite incredible.”
Jonah
Raskin, in his My Search for B. Traven
(1980), found Rosa Lujan to also be an adherent of the Oscar Wilde philosophy.
He spent ten months in
“Rosa Elena fabricated stories about
her husband,” Raskin wrote. “She was not only a part of the mystery—the leading
lady, one might say—but an author of the drama as well. Rosa Elena had not met her husband until he
was in his sixties; he had not been honest about his extraordinary life. That
was, of course, a source of embarrassment to Rose Elena. She was unwilling to
admit that she did not possess the ‘truth’ about her own ‘late husband,’ as she
called him. To make up for the lack of information she concocted tales and
compounded the mystery. Mystery bred mystery.”
Mystery bred
mystery: indeed, it has. It has even been suggested that Jack London did not
die in 1916, as most of the world supposes, but that he faked his death to
avoid his creditors and continued to write from
Ivan
Ruzicka, a Czech critic, in a 1964 essay called “Traven Unmasked,” argued that
the death in
And who did
he become? Why, B. Traven, of course.
These are
interesting theories, fascinating examples of the power of the human mind to
believe what it wants to be believe.
Rosa Elena told Raskin that the word
“I” was absent from Traven’s vocabulary. His was a multiple personality, she
explained, and Marut, Torsvan, Croves and Traven all played their useful
parts. He had been an actor in Germany,
during his anarchist days, she said, and he was “always acting, always making
up stories, even when there was no audience to watch him.”
Will Wyatt,
in his confidently titled The Secret of
Sierra Madre: The Man Who Was B. Traven (1980), also thought he had the
answer to Traven’s identity. The dust jacket echoed that confidence: “Many have launched investigations into the
Traven mystery, but no one ever solved the case; at last Will Wyatt has.”
Wyatt’s book, based on his BBC
documentary called (with equal confidence) B.
Traven: A Mystery Solved, links Ret Marut with someone who was deported
from England in 1923 and who used the names of Barker, Arnolds, Albert Otto Max
Weinecke and Adolph Rudolph Feige, as aliases.
Marut—or
someone of that name—seems to have been in
Wyatt,
nonetheless, is convinced that Traven was Marut and Marut was Feige. Wyatt also claims to have found a brother and
sister of Feige, who identified a photograph of Traven as their long lost
brother, Otto, whom they had not seen in some sixty years.
Wyatt
produces the photographic “evidence” in his book, but I would not feel
confident in stating that Feige, Marut, and Traven looked like the same man. I
would never make that identification in, say, a police line-up. Nor am I
convinced that there is a resemblance between photographs of Otto Feige as a
young man and Kaiser Wilhelm II.
In short,
Will Wyatt, in spinning a new theory of Traven’s identity, did not solve the
mystery; he only added to it.
The title
pages of some of Traven’s books give his name, variously, as B. Traven, Ben
Traven, Benno Traven, Bruno Traven, and even Benito Traven. The titles
themselves have been equally contrary. I remember searching long and hard for
his novel, The Wobbly, only to
discover that I had already read it under the title of The Cotton Pickers.
Until fairly recently, I could not
even say, with any certainty, what language Traven’s novels were originally
written in. I have found an edition of The
Treasure of Sierra Madre in Spanish which indicated that it was translated
from English, but I have also found an English edition that said it was
translated from the Spanish. (Jonah Raskin claims to have read Traven’s
manuscript of The Death Ship,
handwritten in English, but with rather clumsy grammar and syntax. I don’t know
if that proves Traven wrote in English; perhaps it is one more deliberately
planted false clue.)
Bodil and Helga Christensen,
Danish-born sisters who knew Traven in
I have seen
an edition of The Treasure of Sierra
Madre, published in
The
biographical sketches on dust jackets of his novels are also often radically
different from one another.
All of this
only deepens the mystery of B. Traven, and I do not pretend to have any
solutions to the problem of Traven’s elusive identity.
His novels,
however, in whatever language they may have been written, speak to me with a
passionate eloquence that is far more important than who the man was.
Jonah Raskin
tells the story of how his own obsession with Traven began, with a chance
viewing the film version of The Treasure
of Sierra Madre in
sentimental. These were, as he would discover later, the
trademarks of Traven’s fiction as well.
Traven also
refused to allow his publishers to advertise his books in the typical ways.
“I write to
propagate ideas,” Traven explained, “not to make a profit. My books came to
readers precisely by the same means they came to you, that is, individual
recommendation…. My work carries all the publicity I need and all I want. If my
books are considered good, no publicity can make them better.”
He would not
even allow his publishers to take advantage of the fact his books had been
confiscated and burned by the Nazis. It took, in fact, the 1948 movie version
of The Treasure of Sierra Madre to
make Traven a best-selling author in the
Herbert
Klein, another man in pursuit of Traven’s identity, coined a useful word:
“Travening,” which he defined as “the frustrating and totally endless
search…for [another’s] identity.”
All of this,
while endlessly fascinating, is much ado about nothing, but “who was B.
Traven?” is a question that will perhaps perplex would-be literary sleuths for
centuries.
It will
become, I believe, much like that vexing question about to whom Shakespeare
dedicated his sonnets. The only clue is the initials in the dedication, W.H.,
and virtually every man of Shakespeare’s generation with those initials has had
his champions. There have even been several who have argued in favor of certain
courtiers
with the initials H.W., on the clever assumption that
Shakespeare transposed the initials to avoid easy discovery of the “only
begetter” of the sonnets.
Oscar Wilde
offered a solution that ingeniously argued that the punning repetition of “hue”
and “hues” in sonnet 20, alluded to William Hughes, whom Wilde claimed to be a
famous boy actor at the Globe Theater. This clever deduction only lacks one
element: evidence. The fairly complete
records of the acting company of Shakespeare’s Globe do not list a Hughes.
Oscar apparently just invented the name of the boy actor and let his
imagination do the rest.
Perhaps the
best identification of W.H. as “the only begetter of sonnets” comes, however,
from the Shakespeare scholar who, perhaps tired of all the nonsense, sought to
put the matter to rest once and for all by proclaiming that W.H. could only
stand for “William Himself.”
After many
years, partly out of frustration with the lack of evidence and, sometimes, the
downright silliness of some of the interpretations of B. Traven’s origins, I
developed my own downright silly notion about Traven’s past.
Surely, I reasoned, if one considers
the obvious radicalism of Traven’s novels, it points to a romantic leftist
past. Next, I considered Traven’s insistence that he was born in
Why 1890? If he was born in 1890, he
couldn’t reasonably be charged with an offense that happened before he was
born. And that led me to the conclusion that Traven
did indeed have something to hide, for he was the elusive
anarchist who threw the bomb on May 4, 1886 in
Oh, I can be as clever as the next
guy when it comes to pitching moonshine.
Now, however,
I would like to gracefully retract my own ingenious theory, for I have actually
found a scholar who offered what has been conspicuously absent in Traven
speculations: evidence.
Karl S. Guthke, in B. Traven: The Life Behind the Legends
(1987), has provided many answers to the perplexing questions about the
literary mystery man.
Guthke, by going to Mexico City and critically studying what
he called the “Traven archives,” demonstrated, for example, that the bulk of
Traven’s manuscripts and correspondence were written in German and that, later,
the manuscripts submitted to his American and English publishers were his own
translations of the German originals.
These
translations were heavily revised, with Traven’s advice and
consent, by his editors in
Guthke also
provides enough convincing detail to persuade me that Ret Marut and B. Traven
are (as others have asserted) one and the same person, although he candidly
acknowledges that Ret Marut is probably as much an assumed
identity as is B. Traven. The name of Ret Marut begins to appear in German
playbills as early as 1907, but the use of a stage name does not confirm any
particular identity.
Ret Marut,
at any rate, was an actor by trade and a revolutionary by conviction. He was a
minor player, a propagandist mainly, in German politics in the chaotic days
leading up to and following World War I.
On May 1,
1919, however, when government troops, led by General Von Epp, swept into
Marut,
writing (as Traven would later) in the third person, described his escape in
the Brickburner (December 1919): “Two
soldiers apparently felt a spark of humanity within them for a brief moment, as
they saw how the most precious thing a man possesses, his life, was being
mistreated. They were not uninvolved in his escape. Thanks are due to them for
saving the life of a fellow human being.”
The man who was once known as Ret
Marut in
One can certainly understand why a
man under a death sentence in
. My initial
purpose for this paper was to only briefly allude to the mystery of the man’s
identity, take him at his word that his stories are more important than the
man, and give a reasonable account of what the man did say in his books.
When I sat down to write, however, I
found myself absorbed in the old question of Traven’s identity and, since I
have spent too much time “Travening,” there is not time tonight to discuss the
novels.
Perhaps, in
another literary club season, there will be an occasion for a discussion of the
political articles written under the name of Ret Marut and whether the ideas
expressed in those essays have any similarity to the ideas in the novels the
mystery man wrote under the name of B. Traven.
Traven
asserted, remember, in his “Declaration of Independence from Personal
Publicity,” that, “My life belongs to me; the work to the public.”
I would like
to conclude with a suggestion.
Read what belongs to the public—The Treasure of Sierra Madre, The Death Ship and, the six “Jungle
novels,”—but don’t go a-Travening, as I have done.