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

The cunman er på spil igen og endnu engang i litteraturen. Jeg har en hvis forkærlighed for mysterier, det er en lille kompulsiv ting for mig. Især interessere det mig når interesante mennesker forsvinder, gør noget aktivt for at forsvinde. Det er selvfølgelig friheden, modet til at skride fra det hele. B. Traven er en ganske god forfatter og man kan faktisk godt fornemme et eller andet mærkeligt der fik ham til at forsvinde. Jeg stødte på ham i en søgning efter anarkistiske forfattere og samme dag, faldt jeg over to bøger af ham på min mors boghylde - hun havde arvet dem fra min mormor. En af mine venner læste dødsskibet, før jeg gjorde og sagde den var god. Jeg selv kastede mig selvfølgelig over hans historie, eller de historier som tilfældigvis knytter sig til hvad man ved eller ikke ved om ham. B. Travens identitet kendes nemlig ikke, han er en af disse eksil forfattere og begrundelsen er i citatet ovenfor, i hvert fald tildels. Der er mange teorier og dem kan i læse nedenfor, den der fascinerede mig mest knytter sig tildels til Dødsskibet og til en mand kendt under navnet Ret Marut. En tysk anarkist der udgav en blad og som flygtede fra tyskland, til england, måske. Endda ser det ud til at han netop var i München på samme tid som Hitler og var en del af det oprør som Hitler så tyskesoldater slå ned der. Den anden del af historien som virkelig interessere mig er, at der var to, to mænd, en mand med historierne og en mand der skrev dem ned, eller to mænd der skrev. En forening, det er her the cunman for mig virkelig kommer ind, det er her historien virkelig har potentiale til at blive menneskelig, et mirakel og virkelig anarki af den slags som Amanda Ruth også forsvarede, nemlig at anarkiet er bag sokkerne, at hun var den sidste store husmor osv. at der blev lavet et arbejde. Den sidste ting er skrøbelighed, uden den ville B. Traven ikke være en cunman, men blot en eksileret fyr. Han forsvarer sig selv og sin identitet (måske hvis det er ham) med en hvis smertelighed. Det er som om det ikke bare er for spillets skyld, men nogle virkelige oplevelser, blandet ind i en fiktion der har gjort at han virkelig skjuler sin identitet, fordi han ikke har nogen, fordi han ikke vil have nogen. Det er der en hvis skønhed i, syntes jeg.


En lille tekst om ham, jeg kan ikke huske hvorfra... desværre.

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 Mississippi, in the Zona Rosa, in Mexico City.

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 Chicago on May 3, 1890.

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 Cook County that bears any combination of the names of Traven, Torsvan or Croves.

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 Mexico to direct a film based on B. Traven’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a man who identified himself as Hal Croves arrived on the set. Croves presented a letter to Huston, signed by B. Traven, indicating that Croves would act as his agent, for Croves knew the author’s work better than Traven himself.

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 Mexico.”

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 Chiapas, in southern Mexico, where he worked as an engineer and a photographer, sometimes working with Frans and Gertrude Blom on some archaeological investigations.

The name he was known by in Chiapas was Torsvan.

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 Mexico, reading Traven’s manuscripts and interviewing her and others, with the intention of collaborating with Traven’s widow on a biography of the novelist.

“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 Mexico under the name of B. Traven. It has also been suggested Ambrose Bierce’s disappearance during the 1913 revolution in Mexico can be conveniently explained by simply believing that he was resurrected with a new name: B. Traven.

Ivan Ruzicka, a Czech critic, in a 1964 essay called “Traven Unmasked,” argued that the death in New York in 1910 of the Czech anarchist writer, Arthur Breisky, was staged so that the author could create a new identity for himself.

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 England in 1923 or 1924, but that doesn’t prove that he later became Traven. Would a man who seems to have used aliases everywhere in Europe suddenly confess to the English police that his real name was Feige? Or was that merely another convenient, elusive alias?

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 Mexico for four decades, said that he spoke English with a Norwegian accent, not German.

I have seen an edition of The Treasure of Sierra Madre, published in England, that was quite different from the edition published in the United States, but neither acknowledged that it was a translation from some other language. I have encountered another edition of the novel that said it was translated from German.

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 Paris. He found the film fantastic, with its odd, but engaging blend of the bitter, the ironic, the funny, and the



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 United States.

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 Chicago. That was an almost too obvious smokescreen, almost as good a clue as the criminal returning to the scene of the crime. And there was also Traven’s insistence, over and over, that he was born in 1890.

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 Haymarket Square. Perhaps it was Rudolph Schnaubelt who threw the bomb and disappeared after he was indicted. Some say he went to Argentina, but perhaps he stopped off in Mexico and changed his name to B. Traven.

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 America and England. This explains the otherwise unaccountable differences which exist between the American and English editions of his novels. Traven’s English (in diaries and unpublished letters), by the way, was quite unidiomatic and often looked as though it had been badly translated from the German.

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 Munich to crush all leftist resistance, Marut was recognized and arrested. He was charged with treason and sentenced to death. As he was waiting to be brought before the firing squad, a scuffle broke out between guards and prisoners, and Marut escaped.

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 Germany found his way to Mexico, where he became, as it suited him, Traven Torsvan, Hal Croves, Bruno Traven, Benno Traven, or sometimes just plain B. Traven.

One can certainly understand why a man under a death sentence in Germany would not be too eager to embrace his German origins.







Mexico was attractive to a man who had escaped execution because, as he stated in his novel, The Cotton Pickers, “it is considered tactless [in Mexico], if not downright insulting, to question someone about his name, his occupation, his origins.”

. 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.