End of the Chase

By John Skow

When a skinny, secretive old man who called himself "Hal Groves" died in Mexico eight years ago, one' of literature's strangest paper chases came to an end. Services were held not for Groves but for "Traven Torsvan," a naturalized Mexican citizen. The dead man's widow acknowledged what had been widely suspected: that Torsvan, who had hidden his identity for 45 years, was indeed the reclusive novelist B. Traven. The author's broody, metallic style echoes that of Stephen Crane and Joseph Conrad. His once acclaimed books and short-story collections (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Death Ship, The Rebellion of the Hanged, The Man Nobody Knows) were half-forgotten. The man seemed more compelling than his work.

The posthumous identification soon led to other puzzles. Why, if he had been raised in the U.S. (as Torsvan hinted), was his written English so Germanic? Was Torsvan-Croves-Traven also, as rumored, a German-American anarchist and pamphleteer named Ret Marut, last seen under that name in Munich in 1919, facing a sentence of death?

The clouds became cloudier: who was Marut? All that can be ascertained is that from 1917 to 1920 he published the inflammatory journal Der Ziegel-brenner (The Brickmaker), which raged against all human institutions. Because Marut seemed unaccountably free from wartime censorship, and because he managed to escape before being shot for his revolutionary activities, the rumor arose that he was protected by the German regime. Decades later in Mexico, Marut-Torsvan-Croves-Traven seems to have hinted mischievously that he was the illegitimate son of Kaiser Wilhelm and an American actress. What is so absurd about this roguish fancy is that it cannot be dismissed as so absurd; scandal has long been part of the royal German tradition.

Hohenzollern Prince. In The Mystery of B. Traven (128 pages; William Kaufmann; $6.95), American Journalist Judy Stone tells of a series of interviews with Hal Groves, wangled in the years just before his death. "Forget the man!" he demanded, speaking with a slight German accent. "What does it matter if he is the son of a Hohenzollern prince or anyone else? Write about his works. Write how he is against anything which is forced upon human beings, including Communism or Bolshevism." Hiding behind age and deafness, he stopped just short of admitting that he was Traven, Torsvan or Marut. Deference and fear that Groves might cut off the interviews apparently kept Stone from pressing hard for answers. The portrait drawn from such material is lively, affectionate and, inevitably, less than satisfying.

A good companion piece to Stone's journalism is the less personal and more scholarly study, B. Traven: An Introduction (184 pages; University of New Mexico Press; $9.50), by California State University English Professor Michael L. Baumann. The bilingual author is convinced that Marut's writing in Der Ziegelbrenner and Traven's in his novels (all written and published first in German) are the work of the same man. He demonstrates that Marut's German, though fluent and expressive, is not that of a native. The man might indeed have had an American background, but complications soon enter Baumann's argument. The Traven novels, which began to appear at an astonishing rate in 1925, contain a body of experience that Marut simply would not have had time to collect. He lived in Europe through the war years and remained there until 1922. By about 1923 Traven was already busy in Mexico firing off the manuscripts of three novels to German publishers.

Plausible Wobbly. As a provision al explanation, Baumann retails the the ory of a Swiss Traven expert named Max Schmid, who suggested that in the early 1920s Marut met another man, named Traven Torsvan, in Mexico. This plausible Torsvan was an American, an ex-sailor and onetime Wobbly who had written a pile of unfinished but powerful tales of the sea and the Mexican jungle. His contempt for authority matched that of the Munich pamphleteer, and they became friends. Torsvan disappeared during a trip into the bush, and Marut rewrote the manuscripts, using German, the language he handled best, but including Torsvan's Americanisms for effect. To honor his friend (and to cover his tracks) Marut took Torsvan's name and identity papers.

And so it goes. No matter what the genealogy, no matter how these literary sleuths try to run the true B. Traven to earth, his trail ends as it began: a riddle inside an enigma. The biggest conundrum of Traven's career remains his neglect by the general reader. John Huston's faithful film adaptation of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is about all most people know of the canon.

Yet Treasure is not the best of the author's works. To understand the cross-grained talent of the author, with his rejection of all religious and secular institutions, as well as his rage at man's accursed genius for suffering, the curious might begin with The Rebellion of the Hanged, then move on to Government, The Night Visitor and Other Stories and the indelible The Death Ship. They are as curious, as ambiguous and as provocative as the au thor's life. Not much that is better has been printed -- in German or English -- since the death of the mystery that was B. Traven. John Skow

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