Word: traven
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...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...
...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...
...first novel, manages to trap the solar energy of his landscape; the shadowy Indian existence is thrown against the brilliant screen of another reality that hovers, shimmers and then vanishes the way it came. Claremon is a bit of a necromancer himself, easily summoning up the spirits of B. Traven, Garcia Lorca and-unhappily -Ernest Hemingway. It is in echoing Papa's Spanish style that the novelist makes his largest error. For to use "for" on almost every page is to bring a monotony to a highly charged work. For an author does not render Mexican into English that...