Word: traven
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Variations on a Theme. If Traven had run perfectly true to this type, his place in literature would be so low that no one would bother for a moment about his identity. He has excited interest precisely because he has played such impressive variations on his class-struggle theme. In The Death Ship (probably his best novel), his seascape of enslaved stokers struggling to keep a leaking tub afloat was drawn so well that it inflamed the reader's heart regardless of his politics. Similarly, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre sounded the rousing bell note of treasure-hunting...
...Traven gets his best effects by using a prose of such naturalness that it gives an immediate illusion of truth-to-life. Much of what he has to say is bitter to the point of savagery; and he is capable of heightening this grimness still further by laying on strokes of humor that seem to come from the bile of a grizzly bear. Only at his worst does he ever sound like a doctrinaire hack...
...latest Traven novel to be published in the U.S., The Rebellion of the Hanged, shows both the best and the worst side of his manner. His story, set in Mexico some time before the revolution of 1910, tells how the peons used to be duped into almost lifelong servitude on the big estates and timber properties. Like a man telling an enthralling tale to children, Traven describes the plain peasant, Candido, going off to the mahogany forest to join the slave-labor gang. As a fee-greedy doctor has let his wife die, Candido has to take his two little...
John Brown Heat. By midnovel, Traven has piled atrocity upon atrocity, and the doctrinaire is in full command. The villainous capitalist is playing the old, old game of raping Candido's sister. He is also happily chopping off the ears of Candido and one of his little sons. As for the workers, they are beginning to make such set speeches as: "Over the whole country the fire is spreading, the first flames are rising everywhere . . . Down with the dictatorship...
Finally, like a man departing suddenly into a dream, Traven forgets all about his principal characters, including even the invaluable piglets, and turns his novel into a featureless mass drama which he can neither inspire nor bring to a conclusion. His Rebellion winds up as third-rate Uncle Tom's Cabin, with the debilitating difference that the slavery Traven writes about with John Brown heat has already been abolished...