The Case of the Unknown Novelist

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BOB SUTCLIFFE reviews The Man Who Was B.

Traven by Will Wyatt, published by Jonathan Cape, A scene from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre £8.50.

B. Traven was a anți-capitalist and anti-imperialist writer.

Not only do his novels, written in the 1920s and 1930s vividly and passionately portray the lives of the exploited and their struggles; but also in writing them Traven set out consciously to translate political ideas and theories into the form of fiction.

It is that which gives Traven's fiction a very special originality. At times, when he doesn't completely succeed in his aim, his work is a bit too didactic.

But where he does fully succeed as in his famous novel The Treasure , of the Sierra Madre-he is responsible for a unique form of writing.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is an exciting adventure story, a profound description of human deprivation and exploitation and their effects, a very convincing study of human characters and their interaction, and a fictional demonstration of the Marxist theory of value-all in one.

Short stories

Some of his short stories, which along with the novels are now being republished by Alison and Busby after being many years out of print-have something of the same brilliant combination of levels.

His early novel The Death Ship is another brilliant evocation of the exploitation of seamen and their struggle against it.

Others like March to Caobaland and Rebellion of the Hanged relate the ferment among Mexican forest workers in the years leading up to the Mexican revolution of 1910.

Other works, like The Caretta, Bridge in the Jungle and many of the short stories show the deep sympathy and understanding of Traven for the life of the oppressed poor peasants of Mexico.

For those who appreciate such sympathetic yet committed and militant writing -and for socialists in particular -Traven's works should hold a special interest.

His books have been burned by Hitler, censored both by US publishers in the McCarthy era and by the Stalinist bureaucrats of Eastern Europe.

Identity

The reason for his wider fame, however, has always been very different from the content of the books-it has been the special mystery of Traven's real identity.

This is because, despite his literary success, he went to almost incredible lengths to conceal his real identity from the general public, from his readers, from the numerous Journalists and writers who sought out the mystery author -and even from his publishers.

The mystery of his identity has for decades been an intriguing topic of investigation or speculation.

Many books and. articles, learned and not so learned, have been written about the "Theories" have been offered to show that Traven was the illegitimate son of the last German Kaiser, a pseudonym for Jack London, a group of several writers and many other possibilities.

The mystery surrounding Traven's identity has regrettably come to eclipse any serious interest in his remarkable works.

Two years ago producer Will Wyatt of the BBC, along with TV presenter Robert Robinson made a • relatively competent film which claimed to solve once and for all the mystery of Traven's identity.

They argued that Traven the mysterious author was one and the same as ket Marut, a German anarchist actor, editor of a revolutionary journal the Bricklayer, who fled persecution after the counter-revolution and who turned up briefly in Britain in 1923 where he was held in Brixton prison before deportation.

The theory that Marut then resurfaced as the novelist Traven in Mexico has long been held and Wyatt supports it without worrying about the problems associated with it.

The main one of these is how only a matter of months atter disappearing from the European political scene Marut/ Traven was able to write books which suggest a long and profound knowledge of Mexican peasant life.

But it is not, alas, literary questions which bother Wyatt and Robinson. They are concerned only with the historical whodunit aspects of the story.

Their unquestioning acceptance of Marut as the author of Traven's novels is part of their acceptance of the other common feature of the Traven story-that he was a man known variously as Torsvan and as Hal Croves who lived in Mexico between the early 1920s and his death in 1969.

No proof Wyatt produced a fair amount circumstantial evidence, though no proof that lorsvan/Croves was the same person as Marut.

Torsvan himself used "Traven" as a first name. And Croves turned up during the making of the great 1947 film of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre as script advisor.

But none of Wyatt's circumstantial evidence for a single person who was Marut, Torsvan and Croves amounts to a proof that he was the author of the Traven novels.

It is not insignificant that such a sensitive artist as John Huston (director of the film of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre) was never convinced that Croves, whom he came to know well, was the writer Traven.

Wyatt produces something of a coup of detection by tracing the identity of his character back one further stage before Marut.

Basing himself on the British Home Office files on Marut, Wyatt does convincingly prove that he was originally Otto from The Treasure of Wienecke (later Feige when his parents married) and was born on February 23 1882 in Schwiebus, then in Germany.

From Wyatt's research it seems that Feige certainly became Marut. It is possible that Marut became Torsvan and certain that Tarsvan became Croves.

But whether this person or persons was Traven retains much of the mystery it had before Wyatt claimed to solve it.

In a way the best literary evidence for Wyatt's theory is Traven's obsession in his own writing with the question of personal identity and its elusive nature, and the oppressive nature of a fixed identity.

In the Rebellion of the Hanged a character remarks:

"The first thing we must do is attack the registry and burn the papers, all the papers with seals and signatures-deeds, birth and death certificates, tax records, everything . . . Then nobody will know who he is, and what his father had ... What do we want with birth certificates?"

Oppressive

Traven saw the identity expressed in official documents lineage and so on as part of the perpetuation of an oppressive system and state which as an anarchist socialist he passionately loathed.

It is not improbable that such a man, like some of the characters in his books, slipped from one official public identity to another.

But, ironically by the same token, Traven would have been the most dismissive critic of Wyatt's book.

Dismissed

Wyatt himself dismissed a letter from Traven to his publishers as nothing but a homily:

"I would like to state very clearly: the biography of a creative person is absolutely unimportant. If that person is not recognisable in his works, then either he is worth nothing or his works are worth nothing. The creative person should therefore have no other biography than his works"

Wyatt mistakenly attributes all this to a quest for privacy, whereas Traven's attitude to his own identity was surely a part of his creative and political concerns as a writer:

Wyatt has discovered nothing about that because he has skimmed Traven's writings, looking only for the odd quotation which will illuminate his biographical reconstruction.

» He is altogether blind to Traven's ideas and literary achievements.

Hor instance, ne grotesquely describes The Treasure of the Sierra Madre as a "morality tale about greed and riches in an ironic fable about the corruption brought by wealth".

Such remarks are one of the infuriating aspects of this book.

Among the others are the pretentious tendency to go into laughable detail about the making of the TV film.

There is no denying that even given its limitations, the subject of Wyatt's book is interesting to anyone interested in Traven.

But the book all too frequently lets what is tedious and boring get in the way.

In the end the book's obses sion is with writing the biography of a man and not that of a creative writer.

Mundane

But is the mystery solved! The answer is, in the mundane sense Wyatt conceives of it, "perhaps but by no means completely convincingly"

When the creative side of Traven is brought in the mystery changes its form.

It is not a mystery with a solution but a mystery which is itself part of the creation of Traven's imagination.

Traven himself wrote to his publisher that:

"The creative person should therefore have no other biography than his own works".

The mystery of his identity is not one to be "solved" but to be assessed as one of its author's works alo with writing.

That ask still remains to be done.

Now that Will Wyatt has squeezed as much from the mundane mystery as is there, perhaps the republication of Traven's works will stimulate many more people to think about the real mystery.

TROTSKYIST

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