Steve Evans's Blog: The written world - Posts Tagged "b-traven"

This is the ninth post of my blog-out, which is mainly about writing and has settled into a wee niche of talking about writers who have influenced me. This one is about B Traven.

Traven was probably a German and his real name was possibly very prosaic: Otto Schmidt, or perhaps Feige. No one knew much for many years after his death as he had fabricated a range of identities to keep his real one secret, and when confronted - which was seldom as he didn't advertise his address - fell back on one or another of them, usually successfully. He was thought to be an American, possibly of Swedish extraction, possibly from Chicago, or New Orleans, possibly named Traven Torsen, or Torsven, or Hal Croves, or indeed B Traven.

There are adherents of all these and more theories, even that he claimed to be an illegitimate son of the Kaiser. Have a look at the very extensive Wikipedia article on him. It seems to me he was the German who was Ret Marut; the rest is even more unclear.

Traven as we shall now call him supposedly originally did this because he was a political refugee and didn't want to risk repatriation to his native Germany from Mexico, where he washed up under unknown circumstances in the 1920s. An anarchist, he had written under the name of Ret Marut in the chaotic period after Germany's defeat in WWI, was involved in a short-lived socialist government in Bavaria, and when it was overthrown was supposedly destined for the firing squad when he somehow escaped. If his first novel, The Death Ship, is to be believed, he ended up in Spain, and somehow from there made his way to Mexico.

The Death Ship was an international best-seller and must have enabled Traven just to write, though he must have travelled widely in Mexico before he made his breakthrough, and was among other things apparently, an orchid hunter. He fell in love with his adopted land, and with the inspiring upheaval of revolutionary activity that gripped the country from before WWI to the end of the 1920s, and that became the backdrop, if not the theme, of his work. Many of his novels dealt directly with the conditions of the Indians of southern Mexico who took part in the revolution, and they have acquired a cachet of their own as "The Jungle Novels" - March to the Monteria, Rebellion of the Hanged, The White Rose...in all seven as I recall. These overtly political thrillers stand out for their realistic, convincing portrayal of the conditions that led to revolt, and for their realistic assessment of the needs of revolution: Traven was no hand-wringing liberal (a Marxist I knew was thrilled by Traven's attitude on this score: he was "staunch").

Perhaps their dominant political nature kept the Jungle Novels in the background for a long time. The best-known of his works, Treasure of the Sierre Madre, is also political, but the politics is in this case in the background enough to allow this adventure story to succeed as an adventure story. Traven's success was assured when the novel was made into a film starring Humphrey Bogart; the film was made in Mexico and Traven seems to have turned up on the set as "Croves" representing the author. When questions about his real identity got too close, "Croves" disappeared.

Treasure of the Sierre Madre is without doubt Traven's most famous book, courtesy of the film I guess, but to me the one that resonates most strongly is The Bridge in the Jungle. Despite having "Jungle" in the title, it is not usually listed as among the Jungle Novels. It is the one that hit me strongest when I ripped through the corpus of Traven's work in the 1960s and 1970s. Its latest reprint says it is regarded by many as Traven's best book so I am not alone.

What this book did for me as a writer was to show me how to make larger points through the detail of narrative. Bridge concerns the death of a boy in a village in the jungle and whose brother has been working in the United States. The brother returns for a visit and gives the brother his first pair of shoes. The proud youth runs through the village to show everyone his wonderful gift, going back and forth across a wooden bridge. He disappears and his body is eventually found in the stream below the bridge after a local magician puts a candle on a piece of bark and floats it down the stream; the candle stops above where the body is found.

Traven's account of this small event and the trauma surrounding it is a masterpiece of storytelling. But it is more: it is a sobering account of the impact of industrial civilisation on pre-industrial culture, all told through the simple fact of a boy's death because he was wearing shoes for the first time in his life. Traven can't help but draw out the message later on; he was too political a writer to resist the temptation. But he didn't need to do it, and it taught me a lot that I stored carefully till I began to write fiction seriously decades later.

There was more to Traven's effect on me too: his secretiveness appealed to my own nature, and his radical politics were attractive for their realism. Here was a man who had been in the firing line - indeed, almost in front of the firing squad, and who had not resiled. Like Celine, the anti-Semitic nasty of my previous post, he was an anarchist, but an anarchist of a different stripe altogether: he believed as the Spanish anarchists who fought in the civil war in that country in the 1930s, in collective action.

So as with Celine, this taught me something about bravery in literature. My work is largely though far from wholly about people who stand for the weak and dispossessed or isolated and alienated, and if my work might be called more a plea for tolerance than a rallying cry for action, the possible need for action is implicit in it. Traven's politics would not be relevant today in the west, but his books instantly came to mind when a group of Indians in the south of Mexico briefly seized control of a town in the name of a revolutionary group espousing an ideology not a million miles removed from Traven's. Traven saw redemption for the human race in the close-to-the-soil culture typified by Mexico's Indian cultures, and Treasure of the Sierra Madre was a critique of the greed of western culture contrasted with the holistic appeal of pre-industrial Mexico, as Bridge in the Jungle was a heart-rending account of the effect of the one on the other, and for writers a guide for how to "show" while "telling".

Five stars if you want them. Buy them in a novelty shop, peel them off the backing, and stick them onto your screen.

Yesterday I read a "blog" on the British Telegraph website about a human named Lehrer, who is not the satirical songwriter/singer/pianist Tom Lehrer but another one, Jonah, aged 31. It seems this fellow, who was working for the once-revered New Yorker weekly magazine, had resigned after digging himself a hole the size of the Grand Canyon, just before leaping in.

His spadework related to having made claims about quotations from Bob Dylan in a book called Imagine. Lehrer is apparently one of these instant science gurus who tells us astonishing things about the world by linking apparently unrelated "facts".

In this case Lehrer made up the facts about Dylan. The quotes he quotes were made up, and when he was quizzed about them, he lied. Pressed, he lied some more. Eventually he had to admit he lied. His career prospects, which must have seemed quite remarkable up to that moment, now look dim. If you, dear reader, happen to encounter him mopping the floor somewhere later in life, flip him a tip in recognition of the effort he must have spent climbing out of that hole.

In recent times - the past twenty years or so - manufactured stuff has appeared in newspapers and magazines with big type over it, only to trash the reputations of the people who created it. There was a case in the Washington Post, another in the New York Times, and finally in the Guardian in Britain. These are all well-known and at least at one time highly-regarded titles, of a liberal bent. It makes one wonder - well, it makes me wonder - what it is in the cultures of these institutions that let these mountebanks in, and once in, to blaze, if briefly, in the firmament.

This is not plagiarism; the writers in all these cases did not copy others' work - as I have done in the heading of this post, which is a steal from the Monty Python television series so famous no one would ever think I was claiming it as my own. No, they made things up. In Lehrer's case, he made things up to support a case he could not otherwise have made - "facts" that did not exist to support "facts" that may or may not be true.

We don't like this. Well, I don't like it. Yet there is another way of making things up that I do like, that has fascinated me for the whole of my adult life, and that I have even done a little bit myself.

Two of the writers I've written about in this blog as influencing my work (and me) are Celine, and B Traven. These very different people lived their literary lives behind a mask, or masks. Traven manufactured a series of them and even now, a lifetime after his death, there are different accounts of who he really was. The obsessive secrecy may originally have had a political motive, but later on...so his "nom de plume", something many writers adopt, went much further. I admire the man for it.

Celine was more elaborate, and in a way more interesting. He was a doctor, and his real name was Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, Celine being his mother's first name. The one word was his original nom-de-plume. When he was outed, shortly after the publication of his first book, he dropped the pretense, and many of his later works were published as by "Louis-Ferdinand Celine". "His" character in his books, which are a bizarre kind of fictionalised autobiography, is usually called Ferdinand.

Celine manufactured a whole lot of stuff about himself that Traven never needed to do. He made up facts about his life, made up opinions he held even, to keep the public at bay. When he discussed writing, he held forth with ideas he almost certainly never took seriously. And when the guard dropped, and a peek at the "real" writer and thinker was somehow revealed, it was unclear whether it was, in truth, the dinkum oil*, or another pose.

Celine's attitude in this was that the work is what matters, and the public's craving for insights into the personality of the creator should not be satisfied. It should not matter if he was handsome, tall, short, ugly, if he believed in witchcraft, or whatever. Each work should stand on its own.

There is of course something in this that is true, but Celine so mixed up his own life and opinions with his work, that it often seems like special pleading. The anti-Semitic ravings of his pamphlets are known, from other sources, to reflect his real views, and his mockery of them within his works becomes a kind of defence against the attacks he must have known were bound to come, a peculiar false modesty: "Don't pay any attention! Only, do..."

Well, as I said earlier, there is something romantic, something attractive to me about these secretive personalities, and I've had a slash at this on my own. In 1984, I wrote a non-fiction pamphlet and self-published it in the country where I live, New Zealand. New Zealand law requires three copies of everything published to be sent to a central clearing house as part of building a national "collection", complete with "bibliographical details" about the author.

As it happened, I did not want too many people to know who wrote this pamphlet. Armed with Traven's example, I made up a character, gave him another birthdate, and sent the required three copies up to the National Library. They swallowed it, and the book was duly listed under the nom-de-plume.

Imagine my surprise when, several years later, I picked up a book on the same topic in a bookshop and, flicking through it, suddenly hit on the nom-de-plume. There was an index and my goodness, this fellow I had created had morphed into a great number of entries, a sort of weird guru whose knowledge was used as a stick to beat the targets of this new author.

Later on I used the name to keep up the reputation of my creation in shorter pieces for various radical publications, but in 1992, I put him to bed finally and forever (well, I think so anyway). He had an interesting life, and in future may become a tiny footnote in a tiny corner of the intellectual history of my adopted country.

How far does my wee creation, or B Traven's various disguises, differ from this Lehrer fellow's? They are not in the same league, I reckon. The ideas I put forward were real ideas; they didn't rely on the identity of a made-up author to be true or not: they stood or fell on their own. Traven's books are good novels, or not, whatever his real name and whoever he really was. Lehrer's "facts" are not facts, just as his "quotes" are not quotes.

Celine's case is a bit different. He made up a "real" persona no one was meant to take seriously - or that's how I see it - at the same time he made up a fictional one "not meant to be taken seriously" but actually at least partly meant to be taken seriously.

But he was, after all, writing fiction. We may know that his characters, his "Ferdinand" and others, espouse his views, whatever gloss he puts on them, but we also know that his books are fiction - novels. I think Celine felt that the harassment he got because of the anti-Semitic views he expressed in his novels was unfair precisely because they were novels and hence "not true", a view as naive as his beliefs about Jews.

For Lehrer, then - no comfort. He too is "completely different". Nice mop technique, Jonah.

Make as many stars as you like out of moonbeams, and stick them in your imagination. Dear reader, you are fabulous!

*dinkum oil - the real thing. Traditional Australian slang sometimes heard in NZ.

It's just barely possible that among the far-flung readers of this blog there is at least one person who will see the title of this post and say to her or himself, and silently to me, "You mean Dylan Thomas, do you?"

As the rest of us know - no. The namesake has overtaken the name. He who was once Robert Zimmerman is now, to virtually the entire planet, Bob Dylan, and he is the Dylan.

Dylan's choice of a new name was geniunely inspired. As with the Welshman, the new Dylan has a way with words, a quickness, that is remarkable - by which I mean sets him apart. But in a career that now spans more than 50 years, he has not just outlasted the poet, but supplanted him.

He came to mind while I was writing my last post, on greatness, as I was dabbling away with Shakespeare, who was called the spirit of the age. If there is an artist who can earn this rubric in our time, it surely is Dylan.

Dylan's gift is with words - words in English. But just as Shakespeare has survived translation to be loved and performed in every language, Dylan seems to get beyond the "limitations" of what I say is the world's most adaptable language. He performs to crowds whose members, for the most part anyway, cannot possibly hope to understand him in his native tongue and especially given that the nuances each native English speaker often but imagines she or he divines.

There are people who really study Dylan - see the post entitled Something completely different. I am not one of those, and if an expert happens to be reading this, please forgive my failure to be up with the literature. That he attracts not just a devoted following but a coterie of analysts proves he deserves respect in ways other people working in his field do not and never will. They will never be "discovered" to have hidden meanings and artistic qualities previously unknown. Dylan not just now but not far into his career was already heaving with them.

In the 1960s I saw a poster of him that showed just how amazing a man he is: Dylan's head was portrayed as a tree, with his many influences shown as roots: rock and roll, blues musicians like Blind Lemon Jefferson, country stars like Hank Williams, writers like Allen Ginsberg and many, many others, while in the leaves sat the birds he's influenced, musicians like The Byrds, but many others. Somehow Dylan has managed to speak to so many people in so many different ways, that today, if the poster were done again, the tree's roots would extend to take over the biggest yard in the world, and the birds would number in the thousands, and in the grandest sense, the tens of millions: Dylan's influence goes far beyond other artists. He has, truly, changed the way we see the world.

I'm one of those twittering in the foliage, a tiny sparrow trying to escape the notice of the big predators, the eagles and vultures and owls...all the same, I've got my perch, and till I'm thrust off it, I'll cling there, grimly...chirp when I feel in the mood...

Non-admirers like to knock Dylan. They complain about the simplicity of his music, the rawness of his voice, even his songs' "tunelessness". They see him not as an artist but an entertainer, and as an entertainer, for them he is so lacking in "talent" that their wonder is that he is such a star.

He is a star. But what he is beyond that, is a true artist. Like "greatness" that was the subject of my last post - and that partly provoked this one - "artist" is a word that needs some defining, and like greatness too, it's not so easy as one might imagine. "Art" has a lot of nuances, and can be applied in many creative fields, from music to painting to literature, between and beyond. I don't want to pretend to be an expert in this, but to me great artists creatively interpret the world in a way that changes it and changes the way we see the world - humanity in principle and if not universally typically personally in practice. No person, given the opportunity to listen to the popular music of the second half of the twentieth century, and to be further educated in it, would seriously be able to deny on the basis of this definition that Dylan is a great artist. What is acceptable, what can be stylish, how music can be performed, what sort of lyrics can be written - in all these, and beyond, Dylan has had a phenomenal impact, and it goes beyond music.

Dylan speaks to us in different ways, and some of those are perhaps unique in modern music - even all music. To me the most important is not what is easily understood, but what is difficult or even impossible to understand clearly. This is meant - fundamental to Dylan's technique.

For example, the song All Along the Watchtower. Dear reader, you can look this up for yourself on the internet if you don't know the words. This was released on an album back in the days when albums were the de rigeur and singles came off them rather than the other way around - Jimi Hendrix released a single of it. A review I read of this at the time said that Hendrix probably understood this song not at all but that it didn't matter as he'd done a good job: Hendrix was a brilliant guitarist who somehow made the song his own.

We weren't meant to understand that song, or many others Dylan has written over the years, in any kind of objective sense, in the sense of "this is what this song is about for everybody", or that is what I say. Dylan's genius was and is to write songs whose meaning is clear to each of us in a very personal way. We take deliberately ambiguous clues and give them sense in the contexts of our own understanding in our own lives.

Some songs are more clear than others but underlying the best of them, according to me, is this resonant ambiguity. "Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is - do you Mr Jones?" may have seemed a put down of the straight man in a wild hip party of the 60s, but who does not have something of the poor confused Jones in him? "You see somebody naked and you say 'who is that man'? You try so hard but you just don't understand what you will say when you get home..."

Some critics I've read have complained about this obscurity; they want a clarity that it seems to me would rob Dylan of his most significant contribution to modern art: he speaks to each of us individually. Our Dylan is OUR DYLAN and no one else's. That he manages to do this, in often extremely sly and incredibly complex ways, is wonderful.

Here's another example, that I like especially for its transformation in the course of a song from "You're an idiot" to "We're all idiots" but which begins "Some one's got it in for me - they're planting stories in the press. Whoever it is I wish they'd cut it out quick, but when they will, I can only guess. They say I shot a man named Grey, and took his wife to Italy. She inherited a million bucks, and when she died it came to me. I can't help it if I'm lucky."

The tag line to this verse renders everything that came before it even more ambiguous than it was till it got there. Did the singer, who we know is not "Bob Dylan" but the narrator of a song which is being sung by Bob Dylan (who also happened to write the song), shoot the man named Grey? The stories in the press say so but that doesn't make it so. It is strongly implied but not absolutely certain that he did go to Italy with Grey's wife, and that she died and he got the million bucks she inherited from her husband. Did he also do in Grey's wife? He can't help it if he's lucky...what is true and not true lives in a realm of possibility that can make sense to each of us quite differently, and for some, like me, there are no final answers - the very uncertainty lingers and is appealing in its uncertainty.

This is just one verse in one song. There are so many songs, and so many ways Dylan has incorporated this teasing, elusive sensibility into them, that his fans all have their favourites and their own ways of understanding. For many years, my favourite song of all by any musician was Positively Fourth Street, whose only positive feature was the word in the title. Arguably, it is the nastiest song ever written by anyone, and I loved it precisely for that. I have seen an interpretation that says it is an attack on his public, though I personally find that hard to believe - it just seems a put down on the New York scene in-groupies who snubbed him early in his career but suddenly wanted to be his mate when he'd made it - "when I was down, you just stood there grinning". These people exist and I've seen them at work in other areas of life. Dylan's rejection of the proffered friendship of those who'd once laughed at his failure is a testament to the power of hurt. When it's his turn to twist the knife, he doesn't pass it up..."I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes, and just for that one moment I could be you; yes, I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes: you'd know what a drag it is to see you."

Nowadays I still listen in my head to those words, and they still mean something to me, but I no longer regard it as the best song ever written. My Dylan, the Dylan who is in my heart and mind, has gone past that, as have I.

For a long time - about thirty years - I went away from Dylan. I didn't listen and didn't care that I didn't. Jazz and classical consumed my musical interests, and Dylan fell away for me after Blood on the Tracks and Desire. These days I still listen to very little popular music.

But about five years ago I happened to pick up a CD by him at a garage sale in Wellington, New Zealand, Love and Theft, made early in the present century. It was and is brilliant. His voice has become more expressive and jazz inflected - the "theft" in the title could be taken to refer to singing like Fats Waller, which he does beautifully...but then the opening to another song is ah, Creedence's Proud Mary...Bob and I were back together after all that time, all our different adventures...my Dylan...

Does Dylan affect my writing? Yes, but not in the sense that another writer might do, like Celine or Shakespeare, but nonetheless very definitely. If readers see in my writing some of the deliberately ambiguous prose I find in Dylan's verses (and in the short pieces of prose I've read by him), that could very well be written from my perch in his greenery. Whether he is aware of Celine or not - I can't imagine he isn't as he palled around with some of the beat poets for a while, including Allen Ginsberg - his explosive lyrics show his sensibility has passed that way at some stage.

Most importantly for me in my writing, I hope through a kind of spareness to get something of the personal into my books that Dylan gets into his songs. It would thrill me if readers "filled in the gaps" as I would like them to and make my novels theirs. I don't think I really succeed with this, or not as much as I would like, but when I am writing, it is an aim, always.

Recently I was watching Dylan sing in Hyde Park on YouTube...he sang among other songs, Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues ("when you're lost in the rain in Juarez and it's Easter time too/ and your gravity fails and negativity don't pull you through")...he had a good band including Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones and Al Kooper who was on his revolutionary album Highway 61 Revisited, and he showed he could sing and play the guitar. The clip was put up on YouTube by a German who called himself Ret Marut, with a message in German and a line in English wishing him well. Ret Marut was the early pen name of the man who later called himself B Traven, who is the subject of an earlier post. It seems there is a line of communication that runs through Dylan, a community of interest, that I share not only with this great musician, but with people I don't know and never will, but now know exist. Nice meeting you, "Ret".

Blagh! Not only that, blagh-plus! I am not sure about this feeling. On 8 December at around 10 in the morning I finished my new book, Attila’s Angels. For someone who writes weird books he thinks are pretty normal really, this one seems quite weird to me.

This may be a good thing. However, it really really really may not!

It is a departure for me in that it is a ghost story. I enjoyed thinking about, researching and writing these aspects. But there were other aspects I either did not enjoy or felt that I was perhaps treading water despite my desire to move into new territory. Well, such is life. Apparently.

Just now I am reading a serious novelist named Thomas Bernhard, an Austrian of, as Celine put it, the pessimist school. The influence of Celine on his work is obvious, and a Google trawl shows that other readers see this as easily as I do. What is strange is that “serious critics” do not. They compare Bernhard to others, sometimes stretching a very long bow to reach the target but leaving the Frenchman out.

Bernhard has stylistic mannerisms that I find irritating. In the first novel of his I read, Woodcutters, mostly set in a dinner party in Vienna, the narrator – like Celine it seems Bernhard likes first person narrators – keeps remarking that he thought such and such “sitting in the wing chair”. He said this enough times – hundreds – to make me want to go to Vienna, find this piece of furniture, and remove it from reality. In the one I am reading now, The Loser, he says frequently that he thought such and such as in “He should not be so depressed, she said, I thought”. This may be clever but it wears. Really, Thomas, up there in writer heaven, it does!

All the same Bernhard had both writerly and personal courage that evoke Celine in me though the two were on opposite ends when it came to some things if we accept at least a great deal of what their narrators say as their own views. Events in their lives also chime to me.

Both are very shrewd and ferocious to their targets, and can be extremely funny. Woodcutters apparently was banned in Austria when it was first published for the hate crime of making fun of Austrian cultural pretensions.

When I began writing fiction I chose a “sub-literary” form deliberately, not being a great fan of the so-called “bourgeois novel”. People like the literary conceit of the “bourgeois novel”, but I don’t. Writers like Celine and Bernhard didn’t either. That is part of their attraction to me, though other features of their writing also make me drool and when I think I can get away with it, emulate.

“Sub-literature” is nonetheless literature and the best exponents move easily into the realm of the truly great. Shakespeare for example. What! Sub-literary? I can hear the bleats all the way from the green and pleasant land, and elsewhere, but at the time, it was so. Ben Jonson gently mocked his literary merit. But Will also happened to be a genius who could turn his bums-on-seats skills into turns of phrase that echo down the centuries.

Even if you, dear reader, don’t agree with that you might think of detective story writers like Dashiell Hammett (especially) or Raymond Chandler, or even Dame Agatha, all good writers, espionage masters like Len Deighton and John Le Carre, adventure writers like B Traven, another special case. Traven may be the one 20th century great to have escaped notice in that century, despite uneven work. Even so, The Bridge in the Jungle, while flawed, is a masterpiece. The cleverness of the so-called Jungle Novels and Treasure of the Sierra Madre are a treat. .

Where was I? Oh, sub-literature and me, where I have tried to sit for 15 years or so with my “serious purpose in a frivolous genre”. Bernhard and Celine give any would-be writer a glimpse of what is possible, even if we accept that their misanthrophy was real and their cynicism even worse. Bernhard, for example, was so enraged at establishment attempts to capture culture for shall we say inartistic purposes that when he gave an acceptance speech tor a state=sponsored prize he had won, the Minister of Culture and a large section of the audience left the room as his barbs found their targets.

Celine would have applauded.He was extremely mischievous and at one stage during WWII assured a high ranking Nazi that Hitler had been replaced by a Jew.

In his last novel, Celine confidently predicted that “in 200 years I’ll be helping the kids through high school”. He may not have to wait that long. About fifty of those years have passed and parallel text (French on one page, English on the facing page) editions of his work have started to appear. What Bernhard shows is that Celine can continue to inspire.

Meawhile Attila’s Angels has appeared on the e-bookshelves ready to be read. More anon.

Thanks for reading.