Category: BOOK NOTES

B. Traven at the Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City; A Western Publisher; Tall in the Saddle

First Monday Book Notes. No AI-generated content.

C.M. Mayo

Welcome to this first post of the re-re-launch of my blog after another lengthy brumation. In days of yore, that is circa 2006-2022, this blog was entitled “Madam Mayo.” Last year I thought to revive it on self-hosted WordPress with a new name and sharper focus as “C.M. Mayo’s Book Notes & Convos”— and here we go again. Second try is the charm! From here on, look for book notes on the first Monday of the month and a convo (conversation) with another writer on the third Monday.

You will find no AI-generated writing here. If I say I wrote it, I wrote it. And precisely because I do a lot of writing I don’t have the wherewithal to wrangle with a comments section. I do welcome your comments. Write to me directly at pugandbee (at) protonmail (dot) com.

B. TRAVEN AT THE MUSEUM OF ANTHROPOLOGY, MEXICO CITY

B. Traven’s 1926 Smith Premier typewriter. C’est moi in the reflection on the exhibit case glass

If you’re anywhere near Mexico City, don’t miss it: Mexico City’s Museum of Anthropology, one of the most outstanding museums in the world, has inaugurated a fascinating exhibition on the occasion the 100th anniversary of B. Traven’s iconic novel The Death Ship (in German, Das Totenschiff; in Spanish El Barco de la muerte). It also commemorates Traven’s photographic work for an expedition to Chiapas in 1926. The exhibition will continue through August 2026.

So who was B. Traven? Having fled the violent aftermath of the Weimar Republic, “Ret Marut,” publisher of the anarchist newspaper Der Ziegelbrenner, arrived in Tampico, Mexico in 1924 fresh out of prison and still fearing for his life— and hence presented himself under another alias, B. Traven. In Mexico B. Traven made his way as a photographer and writer, achieving international fame for his novel The Death Ship, and soon thereafter a series of stories and novels written and set in Mexico, the best known of which is The Treasure of Sierra Madre, made into a movie starring Humphrey Bogart.

Ever mysterious, the best-selling author remained in Mexico, sometimes Mexico City, oftentimes hiding away in Acapulco, until the end of his life in 1969. His death certificate carried the name Traven Torsvan Croves, but in recent years his stepdaughter Malú Montes de Oca and her husband Tim Heyman, who administer Traven’s literary archive, have revealed the author’s true identity— as Traven had revealed it to his Mexican Spanish translator, Rosa Elena Luján, who became his wife. He was Moritz Rathenau, the illegitimate son of Emil Rathenau and Helen Mareck, an Irish actress.

A captain of industry, Emil Rathenau founded Allgemeine Elektrizitäts Gesellschaft (AEG), one of the largest industrial enterprises in Germany. Also well-known to aficionados of German history is Emil Rathenau’s legitimate son, that is, Moritz Rathenau’s half-brother Walter, who, when serving as the Foreign Minister, was assassinated by machine gun fire and a grenade thrown into his automobile in 1922.

The exhibition shows Traven’s haunting photos including those of Lacandon Indians as well as his boots, equipment, and typewriters. From the exhibition catalog (my translation from the Spanish):

“1926. Traven becomes a photographer, explorer and anthropologist. As soon as he could earn enough from his writing, he registered as a student at the National Autonomous University (UNAM) in order to learn more about the country. He joined a group of artists and revolutionaries who gathered around Diego Rivera, among them the photographers Edward Weston and Tina Modotti. Ever curious, Traven learned photography from them. A group from the UNAM, organized by Enrique Palacios, hired him as a photographer working under the name Traven Torsvan, for an expedition to Chiapas from May to August, with the goal of preventing the recurrent plagues of locusts in that state. When the official expedition ended in August he discovered some previously undocumented Mayan ruins, and he analyzed the region from an anthropological perspective, studying its geography, ethnicities, languages, economy, agriculture, cuisine, textiles, folk art, and social organization. He returned repeatedly to Chiapas and wrote a unique book, a blend of anthropology and travel memoir: Tierra de primavera [Land des Frühlings / Land of Springtime], with 64 pages of original photographs, published in Berlin in 1928.”

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A Western Publisher: Paul Elder & Company 1898-1968
By David Mostardi
Book Club of California, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-7325482-7-5

At once an object of beautiful craftsmanship, a thought-provoking business history, and a reference work for rare book collectors and scholars, A Western Publisher: Paul Elder & Company 1898-1968 is the first book about this venerable bookseller and publisher. After his bookshop was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire, Elder built back and went on to loom over many decades more of the San Francisco book scene. And no small scene it was.

Because my father worked in San Francisco’s printing industry, from a tender age I was aware of the city’s fine printing tradition and vibrant literary culture. Paul Elder & Co. closed when I was 7 years old; while I cannot claim that I remember his bookshop, I vividly recall the elegance and unique energy of downtown San Francisco. It was arty, it was new England-y with a frisson of Chinese and Italian and beatnik, it smelled of the sea, and, seen even from the bottoms of the canyon-like streets lined with office buildings and hotels, flocks of seagulls wheeled overhead. Ladies sported tailored coats and wild earrings; the cable car bell clanged and, like some robotic megafauna, how it toiled up and down those steep hills with its unholy screeching and rumbling. (The cable car wasn’t just for tourists then.) San Francisco was always foggy and cold, or maybe rainy and cold, and the antiques stores, oh there were so many of them, all so beautiful and redolent of lemon polish.

For books I was taken to the public library in the suburb where we lived, but when I was old enough to get to the city on my own, I found that San Francisco was larded through with independent bookshops. Book culture, like commerce in general, has changed radically in my lifetime. Brick-and-mortar booksellers such as Paul Elder & Co. are, for the most part, gone with the wind, as are the many rare book dealers’ shops and, by the way, my mom’s favorite antiques stores. So much of what made the city worth visiting has disappeared or moved online. So for me, leafing through this lovely tome was a bit of time travel, sweet and sad.

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Tall in the Saddle: The Life of Ben Johnson, Hollywood’s Real Cowboy
By Kathryn Jones
University Press of Mississippi, 2026
ISBN: 9781496861559

Worldwide the 20th century’s entertainment was dominated by or, at a minimum, heavily influenced by that glamor factory known as Hollywood, and Westerns were among the most numerous and popular of its productions. What was the grounding for these Westerns, and why did they appeal so strongly to so many diverse peoples? It’s a question I’ve been sitting with for some years. I don’t pretend to have all the answers but I have concluded that one ineluctible element in the glamor of Hollywood’s Westerns has to do with horses— the mesmerizing beauty of the animals, whether they animal be standing, grazing, trotting, snorting, jumping, tumbling off a cliff— and most of all, men displaying their mastery over and communion with horses. Horsemanship is not specific to the American West, of course; until the advent of the widespread use of fossil fuels in the early 20th century, cattle have been fundamental in accumulating, displaying, and defending status and power. And that has been true since horsemanship first emerged in Mesopotamia some 4,000 years ago.

So we have rafts of Hollywood actors, professionals with agents, dermatologists, and dentists, who wouldn’t necessarily know a horse from a taxidermied antelope, and then we have the real deal: Ben Johnson. As he told one of his biographers’ sources: “I like to work cattle and I like to rope. That’s about the size of it.”

Son of the foreman of Oklahoma’s vast Chapman-Barnard Ranch, as a teenager Ben went on the payroll doing the rough, tough work of a ranch hand. How Ben ended up in Hollywood is a story that might come straight out of an American version of A Thousand and One Nights. The eccentric multimillionaire Howard Hughes got the notion to make a movie about Billy the Kid starring pinup girl Jane Russell— this would be The Outlaw which premiered in 1943. For his movie Hughes wanted a herd of 300 horses; the Chapman-Barnard Ranch out in Oklahoma was the ranch that could supply such an order. And who was to ensure that the herd arrived in Hollywood fed, hydrated, and healthy? That would be handsome young cowboy Ben Johnson, and writes Jones, Ben would be “trailed by a gaggle of reporters and studio press agents who met the train.”

Ben Johnson found his horsemanship skills in high demand in Hollywood. He worked as a wrangler and on camera doing doubling and stunt work, and soon took on acting roles himself. In the midst of this unlikely and highly successful career Ben went off to become the 1953 the world team roping champion, then returned to Hollywood full-time for more film work.

In a grand career that spanned decades he worked with leading directors, including John Ford, George Stevens, Sam Peckinpah, and Peter Bognanovich, and appeared alongside an astoundingly long list of stars, prime among them John Wayne, and including Clint Eastwood, Charlton Heston, William Holden, Alan Ladd, Steve McQueen and Steve Stewart. Of note, Ben Johnson played a villain in the iconic western “Shane,” and his career culminated in an Academy Award as supporting actor in “The Last Picture Show.”

Author Kathryn Jones is an experienced journalist whose works of poetry earned her induction to the Texas Institute of Letters, hence no surprise that Tall in the Saddle is both deeply researched and beautifully written. Given the span of Johnson’s career, and Jones’ meticulous research, including a broad range of interviews with people in the industry, this biography also stands as an important contribution to the history of the film industry and to the cultural history of the 20th century itself.

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© C.M. Mayo, 2026, all rights reserved. www.cmmayowriter.com No AI-generated content. Comments or questions? Write to me directly at pugandbee (at) protonmail (dot) com.

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A New Path Forward + Book Notes on Lewis Fisher’s Maverick & More)

The last few years have been… different. Everyone’s been getting through these times (or not) in their own way; a good part of mine was a tactical retreat from the screens. What I had expected to be a month or two away from my usual haunts on the Internet stretched into a sabbatical of more than 2 years. I’m sorry to say that I fell woefully behind on email, however, in other respects, I used the time well. In the coming months I’ll be posting more about the books that I have forthcoming in 2026 and 2027.

So I’m back and ye olde blog, that one that ran from 2006-2022 with the funny moniker, Madam Mayo, has a sharper focus and a new name: “C.M. Mayo’s Blog Notes + Convos.”

From here on, look for a post on the first Monday of the month with book notes, and on an occasional the third Monday of the month a convo, or conversation, however that be defined, usually with another writer.

UPDATE: April 1, 2026: Oh well, this announcement was only about a year too soon! It will happen, though. Look for a relaunch soon.

May these posts prove informative and fun, and spark your interest to learn more about these books and authors. If you’d like to subscribe, check out the mirror-site over at Substack [link will be live shortly] which offers an easy sign-up for the free twice monthly email. You can also follow the Substack version of this blog for free on the Substack app.

Herewith, this first Monday of April, some notes on three of the most sparkling out of the books I’ve read over the past two years.

Maverick: The American Name That Became a Legend
by Lewis Fisher
Trinity University Press, 2017
ISBN: 9781595348388

This slim book of 150 pages (not counting the ample notes, selected bibliography, and an index) is that rare confection of an entertaining read that is at the same time an important scholarly work, indeed one that stands as remarkable contribution to linguistic history, American cultural history, and Texas history. (It did nothing to improve my already much-eroded confidence in journalists, however. Seems that back when, a number of them made up perfectly fictional and defamatory stories about Sam A. Maverick.) Highly recommended.

Read more about this book at Trinity University Press
Read more about the author at the Texas State Historical Association

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The Outsider: The Life and Work of Lafcadio Hearn
by Steve Kemme
Tuttle Publishing, 2023
ISBN: 9784805317600

This is another of those rare confections, a book you can take to the beach, as it were, but that also stands as an important scholarly contribution. Lafcadio Hearn’s was an fantastically varied, strange, heart-breaking, and accomplished life. Born in Greece in 1850 to a Greek mother and an Anglo-Irish British Army officer, raised in Dublin by a paternal aunt, further educated in the Britain and France, twice abandoned by his family, and badly injured (losing his sight in one eye), he ended up as a crime reporter in Cincinatti, Ohio. Fired for having violated the miscegenation laws in marrying a black woman, he went to Louisiana, where he reported on creole culture and voodoo, from there to the French West Indies, and then, incredibly, Japan, where he secured work as a professor, married into a Japanese samurai family, and left such an extraordinary body of work on Japanese folklore that to this day he is considered an icon in Japan. The author of this biography, Steve Kemme, has done a magnificent job of researching all phases of Hearn’s life and works, from reporting to a cookbook to fiction to literary and anthropological essays. I am astounded that Hearn isn’t better known in literary circles in the United States. Inspired by this biography, I’ve dipped into some of Hearn’s writings, and am now making my way through Hearn’s 1903 memoir, Two years in the French Far West Indies. My main impression: this guy had mega duende. Highly recommended.

Read more about this book at Tuttle Publishing

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The Importance of Not Being Ernest: My Life with the Uninvited Hemingway
by Mark Kurlansky
Books & Books Press, 2022
ISBN: 978-1642504637

I first encountered Kurlansky’s work in 2007, when I selected his Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea for the Dayton Peace Prize. In the years since I’ve been slowly reading through Kulansky’s oeuvre— so far, The Basque History of the World, Paper, Salt, Cod, and Salmon— but it’ll be a marathon, if a fun one, to get through the half of them; he’s written 39 books. So, as you might guess, he’s been around for some time— including more than half of the 20th century.

I often wonder if younger writers can appreciate how Ernest Hemingway, as both a modernist writer with a uniquely entrancing style, and as a big handsome slob of a celebrity, loomed over nearly the whole of that century. Back when, even decades after Hemingway’s demise, I don’t think any American with serious literary ambitions could avoid nurturing a strong opinion or ten about Hemingway and, at some point, like it or not, mimicking his macho, childlike style. (“Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.”— From The Old Man and the Sea.)

Mark Kurlansky’s memoir of his own career as a playwright turned journalist and foreign correspondent and author is fascinating and important in its own right, but, to his consternation, in every major chapter of his writing life, from Paris, Basque country, to Havana, and then Idaho, there loomed that Macy’s Thanksgiving parade balloon-sized shadow of Ernest Hemingway. Kurlansky wasn’t following Hemingway, it was more as if Hemingway himself were following Kurlansky in some eerie way, as if time itself were not what we think it is, its warp and its woof perhaps some spiralling construct of other peoples’ imaginal projections. And so the book becomes a literary chimera: a personal memoir stitched onto someone else’s full-fledged biography— or viceversa. This is a serious, richly informative, and beautifully written book about Kurlansky and about Hemingway. But it is also deeply strange.

Read more about this book at the author’s website.

Comments? I don’t have the wherewithal to manage a comments section, however I do welcome your comments via email. Write to me directly at pugandbee@protonmail.com

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Please note: I do not utilize AI LLMs to generate content. If I said I wrote it, I wrote it.

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