The Nation, April 14, 2021
B. Traven: Fiction’s Forgotten Radical
The enigmatic author’s anarcho-communist politics seep into his novels
about wage labor, class consciousness, and the violence of capital.
By Clinton Williamson
In England, Germany, the U.S.A., everywhere it is the police who do the
whipping and the one in rags who gets whipped. And then the people who
sit smugly at their well-laden tables are surprised when someone rocks
the table, overturns it, and shatters everything to fragments.
—B. Traven, The Cotton-Pickers
The first novel by B. Traven appeared as a serialization in Vorwärts,
the newspaper of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, in 1925.
Originally titled Die Baumwollpflücker (The Cotton-Pickers), it was
renamed Der Wobbly (The Wobbly), after the popular appellation for
members of the radical American syndicalists of the Industrial Workers
of the World, in its initial book printing in 1926. The novel follows
Gerard Gales, an unemployed, itinerant American in Mexico who
peripatetically moves from cotton picking to drilling in the oil fields
to baking to driving cattle. Throughout, Traven’s narrator barely
manages to stay ahead of total immiseration. The only jobs to be had are
those which pay the least, if at all, and require the hardest exertion.
By the time one job pays out, the money ends up spent in trying to find
Gales’s next position. Consequently, labor agitation on behalf of better
pay and conditions seems to follow Gales from job to job, though Gales
himself is never the one to evangelize to the workers as some heroic
voice of class consciousness.
BOOKS IN REVIEW
THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE
By B. Traven
Traven’s novel depicts radicalism as an atmospheric presence, absorbed
via osmosis, alive wherever the exploited gather outside of the boss’s
earshot. The workers herein, an international and multiracial
conglomerate of Black, Chinese, Mexican, Indigenous, and white
characters, share a mutual discontent for the class of property owners
who can always cheaply buy the degrading and difficult labor of the
desperate. In this novel we see the struggles against capitalism,
racism, and imperialism Traven would depict over the rest of his
literary career, returning to the plight of those inextricably caught in
the brutal cycles of precarious life on the margins of wage labor.
Despite writing a remarkably diverse body of work focused upon the
multiple, intersecting freedom struggles of the poor, nearly every
discussion of B. Traven begins with the enigma of his identity. Too
often, critical engagements with his work have ended on this point. The
man behind the pseudonym sent his manuscripts from and received his
royalty checks in Mexico, living there from at least 1924 through 1969.
According to an anarchist comrade, Erich Mühsam, and decades later
seconded by Traven biographer Rolf Recknagel, he most likely was Ret
Marut, a German stage actor and anarcho-communist writer who briefly
served as the director of the press division of the short-lived Bavarian
Soviet Republic. Marut narrowly escaped execution by the Freikorps
following its vicious reprisals carried out in the wake of the Bavarian
Soviet Republic’s overthrow. It appears that Ret Marut, too, was also a
pseudonym, just like Traven Torsvan and Hal Croves, two other identities
he seems to have adopted while in Mexico.
He may have been born in Chicago, as he often claimed, though at other
times he said San Francisco. His novels were most likely written in
German and translated into English, even as he stated that the reverse
was true. Traven’s widow, Rosa Elena Lujan, claimed that he was at least
Marut, Torsvan, and Croves, and provided the most compelling rationale
for his biographical instability, telling The New York Times in 1990
that her husband never knew the circumstances of his birth and feared
extradition to Germany. Lacking a definitive narrative of his origin,
Traven merely wrote and rewrote his own life as a perpetual evasion.
That the mystery of authorial biography has loomed omnipresent over his
textual corpus is made especially ironic by the fact that Traven’s
pursuit of anonymity appears directly tied to the his novels’ leftist
politics, continually focusing narrative attention upon the ragged, the
downtrodden, the homeless, the vagabond, and the stateless. Traven’s
particular brand of anarcho-communism resists the heroic individual to
such a degree that it even seeks to evade the capture of authorhood,
casting it as one more authority to be kicked against.
Traven’s second novel, Das Totenschiff (The Death Ship), also published
in 1926, follows Gerard Gales again, who is now a sailor who loses his
identity documents and ends up caught in a hellish bureaucratic maze
before being relegated to hiring himself out as a stateless employee
aboard a ship with horrendously exploitative labor conditions. “Every
age has its Inquisition,” Gales muses at one point. “Our age has the
passport to make up for the tortures of medieval times. And
unemployment.” His most famous novel remains his third, 1927’s Der
Schatz der Sierra Madre (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), a story of
unemployed Americans in Mexico making a go of gold mining, and it was
quietly reissued by Picador last year. The novel’s fame is due in no
small part to John Huston’s 1948 film adaptation, which stars Humphrey
Bogart and won three Academy Awards. Like much of Traven’s work, The
Treasure of the Sierra Madre often falls under the classification of the
adventure novel, even as it frequently negates the genre’s conventions.
The work opens upon an unemployed beggar, Dobbs, who takes off to find
work in the oil fields of Túxpam only to discover they have gone bust.
When he eventually finds employment from an American rigging a new oil
camp, he and his coworkers find themselves stiffed of their wages. The
only adventure found here is in surviving the capitalist’s capacity to
exploit. Eventually, Dobbs, along with a coworker who had also been
cheated and an old prospector, head off to hunt for gold, yet we do not
see any fantastic bonanza so much as endless drudgery and the logistical
challenges of transporting their treasure. Even as the work eventually
takes up familiar narrative pathways (greed and paranoia appear and, in
an ironic twist, the gold is lost), Traven steadfastly attends to the
underlying problem of work, whereby nothing can be extracted without
loss: “Gold is for thieves and swindlers. For this reason they own most
of it. The rest is owned by those who do not care where the gold comes
from or in what sort of hands it has been.” In Traven’s world of
stultifying, piecemeal employment, solidarity and resistance hold out
the only assurances against deprivation, as no bootstraps are made
strong enough for the myth of individual success to ring true.
What most intrigues about B. Traven, what ties his work so irrevocably
to our present moment, is precisely that which is not mysterious about
his work at all. The boom/bust cycles of fossil fuel extraction, the
exploitative conditions of service work, global shipping, and farm
labor, Indigenous dispossession, the bureaucratic horrors meted out upon
the sans-papiers, and the cyclical traps of un(der)employment all mark
sites of struggle nearly a century later. We know these all too well.
His novels remain absent of any utopianism, instead depicting the
resiliency of those relegated to the harsh peripheries of capital
accumulation and the possible gains made through collective action and
internationalism. Traven hid himself and, in so doing, made the violence
of the capitalist world-system all the easier to see.
Clinton Williamsonis a PhD candidate in English at the University of
Pennsylvania, specializing in 19th and 20th century American literature.
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