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Traven Really Was - New York Times

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His Widow Reveals Much Of Who B. Traven Really Was
By LARRY ROHTER, Special to The New York Times
Published: June 25, 1990
Who was the man who wrote under the pseudonym B. Traven? One of the most intriguing literary mysteries of the century may at last have been
solved, and a new puzzle opened, because of the willingness of the widow of the secretive author of ''The Treasure of the Sierra Madre'' finally to
reveal what her husband had told her of his past.
''I always knew,'' Rosa Elena Lujan said as she stood in the writer's studio here, near Traven's Remington typewriter and amid paraphernalia
from his days as a jungle explorer. ''Sometimes, at midnight, when we were already in bed, he would start to talk, and then he would talk and
talk. But he told me no one else could know the truth until after his death.''
The question of Traven's identity has fascinated both critics and readers of his novels and stories, which have sold some 25 million copies in more
than 30 languages. From the moment his first works were published in Germany in the 1920's Traven evaded all efforts to identify him and
encouraged contradictory and often fantastic accounts of his life. When he died here on March 26, 1969, he left all the important questions
unanswered.
Some of the Possibilities
Was he Traven Torsvan, born in Chicago on May 3, 1890, of Norwegian immigrant parents, as indicated by the passport he received when he
became a Mexican citizen in the 1950's? Or was he, as most literary detectives suspected but Mrs. Lujan always denied, Ret Marut, a shadowy
German actor turned revolutionary who took part in the uprising that briefly established a Soviet republic in Bavaria in 1919? Could he also have
been Hal Croves, a taciturn ''agent'' of Traven's who served as technical adviser to John Huston when he directed the classic film version of ''The
Treasure of the Sierra Madre''? And what about the surnames Arnold, Barker, Feige, Kraus, Lainger, Wienecke and Ziegelbrenner, all of which
were associated with Traven at one time or another?
In the absence of any reliable information on Traven's origins, a variety of bizarre theories have evolved. There have been suggestions, some of
them fostered by the writer himself, that Traven was a pseudonym adopted by Jack London or Ambrose Bierce or Adolfo Lopez Mateos, a former
President of Mexico.
The Mexican Government would also like to know more about the writer, whose politically charged novels of life among oppressed Indians,
peasants and oil workers, such as ''The General From the Jungle'' and ''Rebellion of the Hanged,'' are now required reading in Mexican schools.
On the occasion of what it believes to be the centenary of the writer's birth, the National Council for Culture and the Arts is sponsoring an
investigation into Traven and his work.
Mexico Seemed in His Bones
''There has never been a case like Traven, and not just because of the mystery about him,'' said Jorge Ruiz Duenas, secretary general of the
council. ''He seemed to feel Mexico in his own flesh. Other foreign-born writers, such as Malcolm Lowry or D. H. Lawrence, have written well
about Mexico, though with a certain sense of detachment or rejection or mimicry. Not Traven. He doesn't translate Mexico's social reality and
culture, he incorporates and captures it as if he were born here a Mexican, with all of the feeling.''
After years of silence and tantalizing obfuscations, Mrs. Lujan says she has finally decided to clear up much of the mystery surrounding her
husband. In an interview in the house in downtown Mexico City where she lived for nearly two decades with the writer and her two daughters
from a previous marriage, she acknowledged that her husband ''lived something like 10 lives'' and had in fact invented and assumed the identities
of Marut, Croves and several others.
''He told me that once he died, I could say that he had been Ret Marut, but not before,'' she explained. ''He was afraid he would be extradited. So I
always had to lie, because I had to save my husband.''
Centennial Ends Silence
Mrs. Lujan, 74 years old, said she had not disclosed in earlier interviews what she knew of her husband's identity because ''even after his death, I
knew it would bother him.'' She decided the centennial was an appropriate time to make public what she knows.
Traven's fear of being sent back to Germany stemmed, Mrs. Lujan said, from his involvement in revolutionary politics immediately after World
War I as an editor of a fiery anarchist journal called Der Ziegelbrenner (The Brick Burner). Following the collapse of the Soviet Republic he had
fought for, Ret Marut was apparently captured by the police in Munich, jailed, and sentenced to death.
The Mexican film director Gabriel Figueroa, one of Traven's closest friends, said: ''The version he told me is that he was handcuffed and placed
aboard a truck to be taken away and shot. But the truck wasn't shut very well and there was complicity on the part of the driver, so he kicked the
door open and jumped out with another prisoner. But the other man, who was also handcuffed, fell on his head and died instantly.''
Arts
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Even as an old man, Mr. Figueroa said, Traven ''had a very large scar on his hand,'' as if from handcuffs, leading the director to believe the story
was true. A Clue May Lie In His Own Hand Dr. Karl S. Guthke, a professor of German art and culture at Harvard University, has also concluded
that Traven and Marut were one and the same. Dr. Guthke is the author of a book tentatively titled ''Traven: Biography of an Enigma,'' to be
published next year by Chicago Review Press, Traven's American publisher. Dr. Guthke was given access to the author's papers by Mrs. Lujan.
''One thing that makes me sure is the handwriting,'' he said in a telephone interview from Cambridge, Mass. But he also cited circumstantial
evidence, such as ''his first diary in Mexico, in which Traven writes that 'the Bavarian of Munich is dead,' '' and certain hints in the books that
Traven would later write after he landed in the port of Tampico in 1924, apparently after jumping ship.
Once in Mexico, Traven worked as a field hand, picking cotton, before being hired as a photographer for an archeological expedition. He also
claimed to have worked as a book vendor, nut grower, exterminator, translator, mechanic and baker.
''When he was B. Traven, he wrote his novels in German and occasionally made allusions to places, small provincial towns, where Ret Marut had
been an actor,'' Dr. Guthke continued. ''There is a kind of hide-and-seek with tiny places that had figured in the biography of Ret Marut.''
Treating Identity As a State of Mind 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.
''He loved to tangle things up,'' Mrs. Lujan said. ''In a certain sense, it was a defense, a form of vengeance. He would tangle people up and then
laugh about it. He invented many lies and loved it when people made mistakes.''
When Mrs. Lujan first met the writer, at a party here for the violinist Jascha Heifetz in the 1930's, he was introduced as Traven. But when she
next met him more than a decade later and was hired to help him translate a movie script into Spanish, she was surprised to hear Mr. Figueroa
and others call him a different name.
''From the moment he started with the movie thing and writing scripts, he used the name Hal Croves,'' she said. ''Once I said to him, 'And what
about Croves?' He said: 'I had a grandfather who had a surname pretty close to that. It's Scottish.''
Mrs. Lujan found, though, that she could not press too closely on questions of Traven's past, accepting that she would learn no more than her
husband was willing to tell. ''When I suspected something and asked him about it, he would get furious,'' she recalled. ''He used to say, 'Nobody
should ask anyone else about anything, because questions only oblige one to lie.' '' The Final Enigma Within the Mystery As a result, Mrs. Lujan
acknowledged, one fundamental question about her husband remains unanswered: Who was Traven before he assumed the identity Ret Marut?
''I doubt that question will ever have an answer,'' Dr. Guthke said. ''Ret Marut can be traced back to 1907. But where and what he was before that,
nobody really knows. It is a question that is going to remain unsolved unless a miracle happens.''
A decade ago, an investigation carried out by a team from the British Broadcasting Corporation, the results of which were later televised as a
documentary and published as a book, ''The Man Who Was B. Traven,'' concluded that Traven had actually been Hermann Albert Otto
Maximilian Feige, who was born in 1882 in the town of Swiebodzin in what today is Poland. But both Mrs. Lujan and Dr. Guthke find that
hypothesis unconvincing.
Another theory, sometimes referred to approvingly by Traven himself, was that the writer was actually the illegitimate son of Kaiser Wilhelm II,
offspring of an affair between the German ruler and an actress. At his home here, Traven kept a large collection of newspaper clippings and
photographs of the Kaiser, an odd trait in a self-proclaimed anarchist. In addition, Ret Marut was known among his revolutionary associates in
Munich as the Little Prince. Dr. Guthke said, ''If you don't know who your father was, why not pick the best?''
But during World War I, Ret Marut told German authorities that he had been born in San Francisco in 1882, a claim he later repeated to the
British police before he was jailed and deported in 1923 as a ''German Communist'' and illegal alien, and also to American Embassy officials in
both countries. His widow now says, though, that this too was just another example of his lifelong effort to confuse pursuers real and imagined.
''That's why he picked San Francisco,'' she said. ''Nobody could prove anything because everything had been burned during the earthquake'' that
destroyed the city in 1906. Traven Assumes His Mexican Persona In the mid-1950's, the writer acquired a Mexican passport under the name
Traven Torsvan, giving his place and date of birth as Chicago on May 3, 1890. On Mexican Government immigration documents dating to the
1930's, he claimed to have entered Mexico for the first time at Ciudad Juarez in 1914 and to be a native of Chicago.
''For me it is most likely that Traven was born there,'' Mrs. Lujan said. ''He talked to me of childhood things in Chicago.'' He also talked,
disapprovingly , she said, of his mother, ''a beautiful actress of Irish or English blood'' named, as best she can remember, Helene Ottorent. But
the few tape recordings of Traven, one of which was played recently on a television program sponsored by the Mexican Government about his life
and work, show that he spoke English with a pronounced German or Scandinavian accent.
''I don't rule out an American birth,'' Dr. Guthke said. ''He may have been the son of a German actress who performed in the United States and
returned to Germany when he was a kid.''
Once, when one of the more persistent journalists wrote Traven and bluntly asked ''Who the hell are you?'' the writer replied, ''If I knew, I think I
would not be able to continue writing, or wouldn't have written the books I have written.''
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Mrs. Lujan recalled, ''He used to say to me: 'I am freer than anybody else. I am free to choose the parents I want, the country I want, the age I
want.' '' But ''the reality of it is that he did not know exactly how or where he had been born,'' Mrs. Lujan continued. ''He never had a birth
certificate.''
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