A well-known author
whom no one really knew
Who was B. Traven?
He wrote 13 novels that have sold 25 million copies in 30 languages, yet he is among the most shadowy figures in the history of literature. He is probably best known in the English-speaking world for "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," a novel which was made famous in part because of the 1948 John Huston film. (A first edition of the book goes for about $5,000.) Traven's politically charged novels of life among oppressed Indians, peasants and oil workers are required reading in Mexican schools. Experts regard him as the best foreign-born writer ever to write about Mexico. But where he was born is just the beginning of the mystery of B. Traven.
He may have been born in Germany sometime around 1890. Literary detectives long suspected that he wrote under the name of Ret Marut, a revolutionary who escaped police custody and emigrated to America. He may also have been Traven Torsvan, whose Mexican passport stated that he was born in Chicago. Under the name of Marut, he told authorities that he was born in San Francisco, where (conveniently) birth records were lost in the 1906 earthquake. Another theory, sometimes referred to approvingly by Traven himself, was that he was actually the illegitimate son of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Or maybe he was none of the above and was actually Hal Croves, the taciturn agent of Traven's who served as technical advisor on "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre."
What we know for sure was that Traven always insisted that his life story was irrelevant and would distract readers from his works. One biographer said that he courted obscurity as another might court fame and notoriety, courted oblivion with an almost pathological intensity. He made reclusive J.D. Salinger look like one of the Kardashians.
The irrelevance of anyone's formal identity, in the form of documents like birth certificates and passports, is a major theme of "The Death Ship," which many critics regard as the finest of Traven's novels. An account of the adventures of an American sailor stranded in Europe without papers or money, the book mocks state bureaucracies and their insistence on documents, a practice Traven also brought to his own life. Credentials mattered little to Traven, or as he wrote in "Treasure of the Sierra Madre," "I don't have to show you any stinking badges!"
Traven died March 26, 1969. His will gave his name as Traven Torsvan Croves. So is that who he was? Maybe even Traven didn't know.
Sources: The New York Times, University of California Davis.
