The Night Visitor
The Jungle Novels
Government
The Carreta
March to the Montería
The Troza (unpublished)
The Rebellion of the Hanged
General from the Jungle
Other Books by B. Traven Published in English
The Death Ship
The Cotton-Pickers
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
The Bridge in the Jungle
The White Rose
Stories by the Man Nobody Knows
The Night Visitor and Other Stories
The Creation of the Sun and the Moon
B. Traven
The Night Visitor and Other Stories
INTRODUCTION by CHARLES MILLER
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Table of Contents
Copyright Page
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Introduction
B. Traven is an eminent storyteller of our times, but his stories and novels are neglected in the United States. Although Mr. Traven’s books have appeared in thirty languages and have sold in the millions of copies and although he has enjoyed fame abroad for forty years, he is known to readers here chiefly for an early novel, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Four other novels—The Death Ship, The Bridge in the Jungle, The Rebellion of the Hanged, and March to the Monteria—have been published in the United States, but none is in print in hard cover today. There are seven novels, some novellas, and many stories yet unpublished in the United States.
Traven’s life is a mystery. Ever since his sudden leap to fame in 1926, when The Death Ship was published in Germany, he has refused to meet the press or public in person, or to submit more than a few facts about his adventurous life. But Traven has stated that his fiction is drawn mostly from personal experience, and he asks his readers to meet him only in his published work. Therefore, from such passionate first-person novels as The Death Ship, The Wobbly, and The Bridge in the Jungle, and from a few letters to editors, critics, and readers, as well as testimony from reliable sources, we can trace some of B. Traven’s strange and adventurous life.
B. Traven emigrated to Mexico many years ago. His Mexican “Form-14” passport gives his full name as Traven Torsvan, born in Chicago in 1890; and his parents are listed as Burton and Dorothy Torsvan (whom he has described to friends as Norwegian-Swedish immigrants). He has used the name Berick Traven Torsvan at times, so “B. Traven” is less a provocative pen name than part of his alleged family name. To some personal friends he has described how he avoided school and truant officers, how he went to work at an early age, running errands, shining shoes, and delivering papers. And so he began to learn by ear the languages and dialects spoken by Chicago’s polyglot immigrants of the 1890’s. Probably he knew little family life or parental love. About 1900 he shipped as a cabin boy on a tramp freighter, and he made intermittent voyages until about 1920 in the international merchant marine. It is recorded in Mazatlán, Mexico, that Traven entered that Pacific port in 1913; and it is known that he returned to Mexico periodically from various entry points until the time (about 1920) that he established residence in the State of Tamaulipas. Mexico, and her oppressed Indians, became Traven’s chief literary subject.
Little is actually known of Traven’s life from 1913 to 1925, but persistent myths pursued him, including (1) that he was an underground revolutionist in Germany from 1913 to 1919; (2) that he had a brief political career in the Bavarian Socialist Republic of 1918-19; (3) that he was the German pamphleteer-philosopher Ret Marut or a close associate of Marut; (4) that he was an active “Wobbly” of the Industrial Workers of the World in the United States and Mexico; and (5) that he was expelled from the United States in the anti-Wobbly witch hunts of 1918-19.
However, Traven’s literary career is no myth. It began in 1925 with the publication of some stories and sketches in German, in the progressive Berlin daily, Vorwärtz, whose editors announced the first-person narratives as being from “… the young author’s own bitter experiences.” Then other European editors wrote to Traven in Mexico asking to see more of his work. Thus in October, 1925, the unknown B. Traven of Tampico received a cablegram from the world’s first successful book club, the Gutenberg Book Guild of Germany, offering to publish The Death Ship. The Book Guild editors announced a first printing of 91,000 copies and requested Mr. Traven to submit some personal history and photographs for publicity purposes. His prompt refusal to promote his person was printed in the Book Guild’s magazine, Zeitschrift, in March, 1926, prior to publication of his first book. It reads in part: “My personal history would not be disappointing to readers, but it is my own affair which I want to keep to myself.” And he has kept it to himself for forty years.
The Death Ship, subtitled “The Story of an American Sailor,” became a maritime classic to millions of readers in most of the world’s great nations, but not in the United States. Traven’s first nine books appeared in five years, and all but two of his sixteen books were first published in German as Gutenberg Book Guild selections. Translations appeared promptly, and book clubs in several nations selected various Traven titles. His books continue to be reprinted and the separate editions now number in the hundreds. In fact, few living authors can equal Traven’s record of four decades of sustained popularity and critical acceptance with so many readers in so many languages and nations.
Mr. Traven refuses to say which language he employs in writing his books. But it is known that he is an accomplished linguist who speaks several languages and writes letters, essays, and scripts in English, German, and Spanish. In 1937 he wrote a letter (in English) to Harry W. Schwartz, Milwaukee book collector, confiding with characteristic irony:
May I just mention that my first name is not Bruno, of course not; neither is it Ben nor Benno. These names like the many nationalities I have, among them the German, are inventions of critics who want to be smart and well-informed. Several times I have protested in European publications that I am not even of German race or blood. The publishers of the German editions of my books knew from the first day of our relations that I am an American born in the U.S.A. Why my books were published in Europe and not in this country first this is another story.
In another letter to a reader, Traven refers to other rejections in the United States, where his efforts earned him only “five bucks in five years.” As late as 1924, Traven sent typescripts of The Death Ship, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and some stories to a prominent New York publisher, who rejected them as having “no commercial possibility whatsoever.” So Traven sent them to Europe, where they had great possibilities.
Part of Traven’s incomplete publishing record in the United States is attributable to the early rejection of his work in New York and its immediate acceptance in Berlin. But another part of the record is related to our national taste in literature. We have had small appetite for radical, revolutionary, and proletarian literature, to which Traven’s work belongs. Our neglect is our loss, for Traven’s proletarian themes have proven to be universal and his subject matter of oppressed people in Latin America is as pertinent today as it was thirty years ago. As a philosophical revolutionist, Traven
understood the causes of Latin American revolutions and described them in his fiction.
In 1933, after B. Traven was famous abroad with his first twelve books published in many languages, Alfred Knopf offered to publish his books in the United States. And so The Death Ship appeared in New York in 1934, with some critical but slight commercial success. Five other Traven titles were published here, but unpublished are such major novels as Rosa Blanca, which treats the Mexican-United States petroleum problem; The Carreta, about the Indian carters of the ox-drawn covered wagons of Chiapas; Government, a dramatic account of regional dictators in tropical Mexico; and The Wobbly, an early picaresque, autobiographical novel of Traven’s work adventures in Mexico. Refusing to mourn for his native audience, Traven continues to write for a world-wide readership that is still growing.
B. Traven is often called the great outsider, but his work is very much inside Latin America, where we find some clues to his personal life. Critics, journalists, and fans have doubted his very existence, but President Lopez Mateos of Mexico discussed the “invisible” B. Traven at a press conference in Buenos Aires in 1960.
Question: “Señor President, what about B. Traven, his existence and personality?”
President Lopez Mateos: “A legend has been created around B. Traven in Mexico. It has been said that my sister [Esperanza Lopez Mateos], unfortunately deceased already, was B. Traven, and that she wrote the books, while actually she was his secretary and translator. Also, they have said that I was B. Traven. Neither of these two rumors is true. Traven’s first book was published when I was five and my sister four. Actually, B. Traven exists, he bears that name, he continues to write. My sister only represented him for several years in Mexico, while at the same time she was translating his books into Spanish.”
Thus one Traven myth is refuted by Presidential testimony. But the mystery of B. Traven does not exist simply because he refuses to state or clarify the facts of his adventurous life. It exists because the nature of his obscure origin and his embattled career as philosophical revolutionist induced him to choose “exile, silence, and cunning” for his personal defense. His early refusal to publicize himself was characteristic of many a revolutionist, and of all Wobblies (and Traven Torsvan was either a Wobbly or an intimate fellow-traveler of that idealistic organization).
Decades ago Traven’s seclusion was a wise habit when Germany’s Third Reich officials banned his books, confiscated his German earnings, and threatened his life. Even in his chosen land of Mexico, Traven’s life was threatened by various landowners who considered his detailed accounts of guerrilla warfare (published in some of his “jungle novels” yet to appear in the United States) as threats to their vested interests.
Perhaps there are two available keys to a better understanding of Traven: his Wobbly attitude and his anarchist philosophy. In The Wobbly he described “direct-action” strikes as he saw them, but reserved the right (as first-person hero) to his own beliefs and “private affairs.” His literary career is that of an exemplary Wobbly who takes public action via his books while he avoids personal glory. Traven’s complete works reveal a hard core of philosophical anarchism not unrelated to that of another recluse, Henry Thoreau. A Wobbly-Traven-Thoreau? In The Wobbly, the philosophical hero glorifies solitude in the Mexican bush, describes a sit-down strike, and consistently speaks against the machinations of police, bureaucrats, and governments that oppress individuals. He attacks the inhuman aspects of state control of any type or any ideology, including armies and wars; he, as a strong individualist, champions all individuals—that is the essence of his benevolent anarchism.
Of course the reader needs to know nothing about Wobblies or philosophical anarchism to enjoy these unique stories, which may serve as an introduction to the works of Traven. Here are glimpses of young Gales-Traven exploring Mayan ruins; of an exuberant cowboy-Gales driving cattle across Mexico; of a testy but confident Dr. Gales aiding a wounded underground revolutionary. Here is a storyteller who loves to write about everything, from daily trifles to the eternal verities. He describes calves that repay human kindness, a dog that prizes friendship, an Indian who weaves private dreams into the material of his baskets, and Indians who know just why they don’t want to be converted to the Cross. In his long story, “Macario,” Traven gives a New World twist to the old Faustian theme; the hungry Macario, who sometimes earns as much as two bits a day at woodcutting, is a universal figure confronting Old Man Death. The Mexican film of “Macario” won ten international film awards, and the story is one of the finest New World folk tales in our literature.
In the truest sense, B. Traven’s stories and novels are American, being set in the Americas and being concerned with man’s ancient quest for identity, dignity, and individual freedom. The United States will catch up with Traven, though tardily, and recognize his neglected body of work as a major contribution to philosophical-proletarian literature. It is ironical that Traven has been neglected so long in the United States, for he is very much the American individualist, and he has criticized and praised the land he claims as his own. Now he continues to write about his adopted land, undertaking a grand historical work on Mexico; and recently he was commissioned by Clasa Films of Mexico to write the script for a documentary on the new Mal Paso Dam in Chiapas, Mexico.
Chiapas was Traven’s first love, as well as the setting for several of his novels and stories, and he still spends part of each year there. As ever, he values his privacy and wishes his readers to meet him only in his published works. And these stories are one way of meeting B. Traven, for they are a casual introduction to a complex author who left the United States to become Mexico’s most famous storyteller.
CHARLES H. MILLER
Mexico, 1966
The Night Visitor
A Mexican had sold me fifty acres of raw land located in dense tropical bush. I’d paid him twenty-five pesos down, the balance to be paid on receiving the titles.
I built myself a type of Indian hut and started cultivating the soil. It was no easy task, there in the midst of the jungle, but anyway I started.
Soon I learned that I wasn’t the only white man in that region; a one hour’s ride on my pony brought me to my nearest neighbor, a Doctor Cranwell.
The village, inhabited by Indian peasants, was twelve miles away, and the depot was eighteen. Close to the depot, two American families were trying their luck; besides farming, buying and shipping charcoal and firewood fuel produced by local Indians, each of these two American families ran a rather sickly looking general store.
Doc Cranwell’s ranchito was situated on a hill in the midst of the bush, just as was my own place. He was all by himself in a three-room, crudely constructed bungalow. I didn’t know why he buried himself in this jungle, and I never tried to find out. It was none of my business.
He did a little farming, or what he said was farming. He had a couple of cows, a couple of horses, three mules, and a score of beehives. Wild birds were after the bees all the time, catching them as they left or returned to the hives. That limited the bees’ production to just enough for the doc to have some honey for breakfast now and then.
His closest neighbors were two Indian families who lived about half a mile from his ranch. The men were employed by him as farm hands, while their women attended to his little domestic affairs.
He spent most of the time reading. When he wasn’t reading, he just sat on the porch of his bungalow, staring down at the thousand square miles of jungle spread out before his view in a cheerless color of dull, dusty green. It was a bright green only during four months of each year, after the end of the rainy season.
A score of Indian settlements, none consisting of more than three families, were scattered over that vast region, but the only way you could tell they were there was by the smoke which at certain hours of the day could, be seen playing above those hidden jacalitos.
The average person could get tired, perhaps even go insane, if he had no other object to look at but such an imm
ense space of gloomy jungle. The doctor, though, liked this view.
So did I. I could gaze over that jungle for hours on end without ever getting tired of it. It wasn’t what I could actually see that interested me. It was being able to imagine the big and little episodes which were happening in those thorny thickets down there. There wasn’t a minute’s rest in the eternal battle for survival, for love. Creation and destruction… . I wasn’t sure, but I guessed that the doctor felt the same way. Only he never said so.
My place was on the same mountain ridge as the doctor’s, though slightly lower than his. I was farther away from any neighbors. Very rarely did I feel lonesome. But when it happened, I saddled my pony and called on the doctor, just to see a human face and hear a human voice.
A tropical jungle is so rich with life that you simply cannot become desolate if you feel the whole universe in every little insect, in every lizard, in every bird’s chirp, in every rustle of leaves, in every shape and color of flower. But, once in a while, I did have sort of a spell of fright and a sinking in my heart. It was something like being on a solo flight, surrounded by clouds, with the motor idling and with no instruments to guide you. Or like sitting alone in a small boat, far off the coast, with no bird in sight, on a quiet sea, and dusk falling.
The doctor was not much of a talker. Living in the tropical bush all by yourself makes you silent, though very rich in thought. There is never one second of the day or night when the bush does not talk to you, whether with its never-dying voices, or by its permanent growing and decaying. Inevitably you reach the conclusion that life has but one meaning: “Enjoy it as long as it lasts and get the most out of it—for death is within you from the moment you are born.”
The doctor and I would often sit in our rocking chairs for two or three hours without either of us saying a single word. Yet, somehow, we felt happy.