Happy New Year! This first Monday of 2021 finds me rolling along at 80 MPH with writing my book about Far West Texas and, concurrently, editing the Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project episode # 22 about Sanderson (listen in to the other 21 Marfa Mondays podcasts here). Those of you who follow this blog well know that I’ve been at work on this book and the related podcast series for a whale of a while. One of many reasons for that is, to quote J.P. Bryan, a past president of the Texas State Historical Association, “More books have been written about [Texas] than any state in the union. In fact, there are more books about Texas than all the rest of the states combined.” Having been reading intensively about Texas for some years now, I believe it.
Starting this year, 2021, I’ll be dedicating the first Monday of the month to sharing with you some of the more interesting books in my working library. This post features a trio of biographies, two recent, and one I’d call an oldie but yummie.
Michael Vinson’s Bluffing Texas Style: The Arsons, Forgeries, and High-Stakes Poker Capers of Rare Book Dealer Johnny Jenkins(University of Oklahoma Press, 2020). Splendidly well-written and deeply researched, this page-turner about criminal rare book dealer Johnny Jenkins is by none other than Michael Vinson, a leading rare book dealer himself, and so a biographer with an insider’s knowledge of the business. Rare books and documents are the DNA of the stories we tell about our history; burning them or presenting forgeries is to mess with something sacred. This is not a simple story, and the subject was an extremely unusual person.
Gene Fowler’sMavericks: A Gallery of Texas Characters (University of Texas Press, 2008). I cannot recall how I first came upon Fowler’s work, but whenever it was, count me a fan. He writes high faultin’ art criticism and is himself a performance artist (e.g., “Astroturf Ranchette”). Now that I think about it, it may have been his wild-ride of a book, Border Radio… Or maybe it was Mystic Healers and Medicine Shows… or Crazy Water? (P.S. Maverick Bobcat Carter just might decide to pop into my book.)
Brad Rockwell’sThe Life and Times of Alberto G. Garcia: Physician, Mexican Revolutionary, Texas Journalist, Yogi(Alegría Press, 2020) I was delighted to give this book a blurb: “Dr. Alberto G. Garcia was Texas’ pioneer yogi, and so much more… This first biography of this extraordinarily accomplished man opens a new and strange window onto Austin history, Texas history, Mexican-American history, the Mexican Revolution, and the transnational development of esoteric movements and philosophies.”–C.M. Mayo
*
What can you find here at ye olde Madam Mayo blog in 2021? As noted above, this year I am dedicating the first Monday of the month to selected treasures in the Texas Bibliothek, that is, my personal working library. As in 2020, the second Monday of the month will be for my writing workshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing; the third Monday for my podcasts and publications, should I happen to have a new one; the fourth Monday Q & A with a fellow writer; and the fifth Monday, when there is one, for my newsletter and cyberflanerie.
My writing assistants advise me that winter is coming. It’s chicken soup time, they say, pumpkin time, cozy all the time– except when it’s time for the walk!
This finds us still working on the next Marfa Mondays podcast. I’m almost finished transcribing a fascinating 4 hour interview recorded in the Cactus Capital of Texas, which I’ll be editing down to a listenable 45 minutes (or thereabouts). Stay tuned. Meanwhile, with the peculiarities of the past in mind, herewith, a book review from the archive:
Thomas M. Settles’ John Bankhead Magruder: A Military Reappraisal
Originally published on this blog and my Maximilian-Carlota Research Blog (sharing research on Mexico’s Second Empire / French Intervention), February 15, 2011
As the subtitle indicates, most of Thomas M. Settles’ splendid biography of John Bankhead Magruder (1807 – 1871) is dedicated to a detailed examination of his role in the U.S. Civil War, specifically, his audacious if nonetheless inevitably doomed defense of Richmond, and later, Galveston. Though this part of the narrative does not have direct bearing on Mexican history, it informs the portrait of an unusually flamboyant Confederate who, in defeat, looked south to a future in Maximilian’s Mexican Empire.
Based on three decades of archival research, this biography must have been a titanic task, for Magruder left no diary and many of his most important papers were lost in a San Francisco fire. Worse, he was much maligned during his lifetime, victim of both malicious gossip from his Confederate rivals and less than sympathetic Federals– just the sort of thing to send a biographer down blind alleys. In addition, there were misunderstandings, as when earlier historians, in recounting what appeared to be a less-than honorable leave-taking from Washington DC at the start of the Civil War, confounded Magruder with a relative.
General John Bankhead Magruder was, as Settles convincingly argues– backing every point with what sometimes seems a forest of footnotes– a Civil War general whose tactical ingenuity and tenacity are deserving of far greater respect than he has been accorded. Most of the book details his early military career, from West Point to a garrison duty and recruiting at various army posts from the Carolinas to Maine, until, with the invasion of Mexico in the late 1840s, his fortuntes took a radical turn. Along with many of the men who would later play major roles in the U.S. Civil War– Grant, Lee, and McClellan, among them– Magruder distinguished himself in several major battles against the Mexicans. (Magruder’s artillery was, in fact, the first to fire upon Chapultepec Castle.) Following the U.S.-Mexican War, Magruder served in California, where in Los Angeles, briefly, he ran a saloon.
He was on a visit to Europe when recalled to Washington DC in 1861, only a month before his native state of Virginia seceded. He had not wanted to leave the U.S. Army, but as “he could not fight against his own people,” he resigned, calling it “the most unhappy moment of my life.” He walked across the Potomac, offered his services to the Confederacy and, in short order, was reporting to Robert E. Lee.
Settle’s treatment of Magruder’s return to Mexico in 1865, in the final chapter, “Postwar Odyssey,” is a relatively brief one; nonetheless, it is an important contribution to understanding the nature and role of the ex-Confederates in Maximilian’s government.
At the end of the U.S. Civil War, General Magruder was one of several thousand ex-Confederates who pulled up stakes for Mexico. In 1865 the French Imperial Army, considered the greatest in the world, occupied most, if not all of Mexican territory, while the ex Archduke of Austria, Maximilian, a direct descendant of the King of Spain during the Conquest, reigned as Emperor. Though by the late summer and fall of 1865, when the ex-Confederates began arriving en masse, the French occupation was beginning to fray at the edges, Maximilian and his consort, Carlota, still presided over a court and elaborate palace balls and other festivities that were, to Americans at that time, considered the height of glamor. In the words of journalist William V. Wells, this was the “high noon” of the empire, when it was impossible for many to even imagine the catastrophe that would, in only a matter of months, befall the “cactus throne.”
Some ex-Confederates came to Mexico because they could not bear living in a defeated South, others, because they had expected to participate in a dynamic plantation economy under the French-backed Maximilian (who, to entice the ex-Confederate colonists, proclaimed slavery legal in Mexico). But others, such as General Magruder, simply felt pushed out. As Settles writes:
“It must have been extremely difficult for so proud a man as John Bankhead Magruder to have signed the articles surrendering the Trans-Mississippi Department. But when the Federals began arresting and imprisoning high Confederate officials, he resolutely refused to submit to such personal humiliation. He was not eligible for the amnesty proclaimed by President Lincoln on December 8, 1863, or that proclaimed by Andrew Johnson on May 29, 1865”
Although I had spent several years researching Mexico’s Second Empire under Maximilian for my novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, until recently, I was flummoxed as to the background of the author of the exceedingly rare English language memoir, Sketches of the Last Year of the Empire, Henry R. Magruder. It turns out he was the son of General John Bankhead Magruder and I now know, from Settles’ biography, that father and son did not arrive in Mexico via the same route. General Magruder came down overland from Houston with General Shelby, while his wife, son Henry, and unmarried daughter, Kate Elizabeth, arrived via Veracruz, for they had come from Florence, Italy, where they had been residing for some years.
As Settles explains:
“[B]ecause of the hardships of travel, uncomfortable living conditions, and extremes of climate found in the remote locales where magruder was stationed during his military career, [Mrs Magruder] found it more practical to live and raise her children in the comforts of Baltimore, where she could stay closer to family business interests. She remained there until 1850 when, as a consequence of [daughter] Isabella’s ill health, she took her children to Europe. Mrs Magruder had relatives in Germany, but she moved to Italy, living briefly in Rome, then in Florence.”
From Texas, not yet reunited with his family, Magruder headed straight down to Monterrey and then to Mexico City, arriving in the summer of 1865.
Writes Settles:
“Magruder checked into a room on the first floor of the fashionable Iturbide Hotel, and there he received several distinguished visitors, including Matthew Fontaine Maury and his old friend Marshal Francois-Achille Bazaine, now in command of the imperial forces in Mexico. He also met with the British minister to Mexico, Sir Peter Campbell Scarlett, whose nephew, Lord Abinger, had married Magruder’s niece, Helen Magruder, in Montreal several years earlier.”
It appeared Magruder felt as at home as an American could be in Mexico City. He bought himself a new wardrobe, “‘a cut-a-way suit of salt and pepper color, with a tall dove-colored hat and patent leather boots,’ and then went to the palace of Montezuma [the Imperial Palace], which Scott’s army had victoriously occupied eighteen years earlier.”
Soon after a successful interview with Maximilian and Carlota, Magruder, now a naturalized Mexican citizen, was appointed head of Maximilian’s Land Office of Colonization. The idea was to establish colonies along the main route inland from Veracruz to Mexico City, on land Juarez (under the Republic) had expropriated from the Church.
Settles covers the rapid collapse of the scheme along with Maximilian’s government, and Magruder’s return to the U.S. In 1867– surprisingly, for memories of the Civil War remained fresh— he attempted to set up a law office in New York City. His family had returned to Italy, but he remained in the U.S. to work the lecture circuit with a crowd-pleasing talk on Maximilian and Carlota. He was on that tour when, in a Houston hotel in 1871 he died of a stroke.
When asked if I publish guest blogs, in recent years my answer has invariably been, “not any more.” But why have your own blog if you can’t make an exception? (Or two!) And an exceptional exception this Monday’s post is. Dear writerly reader, it is a tremendous honor for me to share Timothy Heyman’s essay “Traven’s Triumph” with you, for it imparts watershed news about one of the most important writers of the twentieth century– one who happened to have been Mexican, and originally– the long-standing mystery solved– German, the illegitimate son of an immensely wealthy Jewish industrialist, and the half-brother of the Weimar government’s Minister of Foreign Affairs.
There are a multitude of theories about B. Traven’s true identity, however, consider this source: Timothy Heyman, together with his wife, B. Traven’s stepdaughter, Malú Montes de Oca de Heyman, administers B. Traven’s literary estate.
Most people today will have heard of B. Traven because of his novel The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which was made into John Huston’s classic movie starring Humphrey Bogart. But Traven was the author of multiple best-selling novels, many still cult-classics and in-print in multiple languages. Find out more at the official B. Traven website, www.btraven.com.
TRAVEN’S TRIUMPH by Timothy Heyman
This essay was originally published in Spanish in Letras Libres
B. Traven
Of German origin and naturalized Mexican, B. Traven was one of the great writers of the twentieth century. He has been called the German “George Orwell” for his combination of the novelist’s art and moral, social and political engagement. He wrote fifteen novels and innumerable stories and has sold more than thirty million copies, so far five hundred editions in more than thirty languages. No less popular have been film and television adaptations of his work. Some are already classics such as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) which won 3 Oscars, Macario (1960), which was the first Mexican film to be nominated for the best foreign film Oscar, and Das Totenschiff (1959), a cult classic in Germany. Other films such as La Rosa Blanca, Días de otoño and Canasta de cuentos mexicanos are considered outstanding examples of the first golden age of Mexican cinema in the 1950s-60s.
Traven used many pseudonyms, using the argument that “the creative person should have no other biography than his works.” The year 2019 includes two Traven anniversaries: on March 26, 2019, it was fifty years since his death and, on May 1, one hundred years since he escaped a death sentence in Munich for having participated in 1919 in the government of the Bavarian Council Republic (Bayerische Räterepublik). My wife Malú, Traven’s stepdaughter, and I are using the opportunity of this double anniversary to reveal his parentage, with the desire that current and future generations focus more on his books than his family. This revelation could also contribute to a deeper understanding of his sources of inspiration and a greater appreciation for his work.
The Son of Emil Rathenau
On December 13, 1990, Gabriel Figueroa, one of the most important Mexican cinematographers of the 20th century, revealed for the first time to Ange-Dominique Bouzet, a journalist of the French newspaper Libération, that the real name of Traven was Moritz Rathenau, the illegitimate son of Emil Rathenau.
This version was also recorded in Figueroa’s Memoirs, which were published in 2005, eight years after his death. After his interview with Libération, Figueroa tried first to call Rosa Elena (Chelena) Luján, widow of Traven and mother of my wife Malú, to inform her of his revelation, but he was unable to reach her. Later he met with Malú and me at a Christmas party in Mexico City, and he told us about his revelation to Liberation. In his Memoirs, Figueroa recalls a comment from me that my father’s stepfather (Robert Pohl) had worked for AEG, the German electricity company founded by Emil Rathenau. Gabriel also writes that the day after the party he visited Malú in our apartment. Malú remembers the visit well.
Despite its importance, the Traven-Rathenau connection has not been picked up by the many people who have analyzed his life and work, called “Travenologists.” Both Karl S. Guthke, Harvard professor and author of the best and most complete biography of Traven (B. Traven: The Life Behind the Legends) and the scholar Jasmina Jäckel de Aldana ventilated the possibility in the 1990s, but neither of them took it further.
This lack of interest can be explained in several ways. Travenologists have attributed various fathers to Traven, from Kaiser Wilhelm II to a North German brickmaker called Feige. A skeptic might believe that the connection with Rathenau was just another smokescreen from Traven, who used more than 10 pseudonyms, with several different identity documents. In relation to the whole parentage issue, it has not helped that one of the prominent people who thought that Traven was son of the Kaiser was Gerd Heidemann, famous for discovering the fake Hitler diaries.
Meanwhile, many non-Mexican Travenologists are unaware of the Mexican environment, or the relationship that Traven maintained with Figueroa and Esperanza López Mateos, Figueroa’s cousin, translator and literary agent of Traven between 1941 and 1951 and sister of Adolfo López Mateos, subsequently President of Mexico (1958-1964). Malú knew Figueroa very well, to the extent that she considered him a member of the family: she was still a child when in 1951 Esperanza died at the relatively young age of 44 years. Many Mexican Travenologists do not know Germany and prefer to focus on Traven’s life in Mexico.
After the death of Traven in 1969, Chelena confirmed that her Mexican husband was the same person as the writer, actor and journalist Ret Marut in Germany, because Traven had authorized it. For many Travenologists, that statement was sufficient. However, also following the instructions of Traven, Chelena took the ultimate secret, Marut / Traven’s parentage, with her to the grave (she died in 2009).
Malú and I do not know anyone who has taken the trouble to follow up Figueroa’s revelation in the nineties. In our investigation, we have reviewed the biographies, documents and personal effects that are part of the the “B. Traven Estate” in our Mexico City home. Our research includes publicly available information on the Rathenau family in books and articles and a visit to the New York headquarters of the Leo Baeck Institute, the center dedicated to the investigation of the history of German-speaking Jews.
Traven and Emil Rathenau
For various reasons, we are convinced that Figueroa’s version is correct. It is very unlikely that Figueroa, who did not speak German and did not know the country well, would have heard of Emil Rathenau and his importance in Germany, or of AEG––with the almost correct spelling of the company (Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft)––if it were not through Esperanza López Mateos, who revealed to him the information about Traven. Esperanza, in a letter to her family, referred to Traven as “Mauricio.” She was also illegitimate, and this was possibly the basis of her close friendship with Traven, as evidenced by their copious correspondence in our archive. Until he hired Chelena Luján as her translator in 1953 and married her in 1957, Traven ́s closest friends in Mexico were Esperanza López Mateos and Gabriel Figueroa.
The life of Emil Rathenau (1838-1915) provides other clues. His father’s name was Moses Rathenau, but he later changed it to Moritz, the German translation of the Hebrew Moshe. In honor of his father, Emil’s full name was Emil Moritz Rathenau. He called neither of his two legitimate sons Moritz after him: the first, born in 1867, was called Walther and the other, born in 1871, Erich. In 1883 he had a daughter, whom he named Edith. It is possible that, due to its obvious “Jewishness” Emil chose not to call any of his legitimate children “Moritz.”
Until 1878, Emil Rathenau, engineer and entrepreneur, had tried many businesses. But none really paid off until in 1881 he attended the International Electricity Exhibition in Paris and it occurred to him to acquire the rights to Edison’s patents. In 1883 he founded the Deutsche Edison Gesellschaft and four years later he converted it into AEG. In 1903, with the support of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Rathenau through AEG formed together with Siemens & Halske (owned by his rival Werner von Siemens) a wireless communication subsidiary, Telefunken Gesellschaft für drahtlose Telegraphie (Telefunken). He went on to become one of the richest and most successful entrepreneurs in Wilhelmine Germany.
The birth of Traven, possibly in 1882 (one of the birthdates produced by the author himself in at least two identity documents) would have coincided with the creation of the Deutsche Edison. Probably, Emil had gained even more confidence as an assimilated Jew and changed his mind when an illegitimate child (i.e., Traven) appeared. That’s why he chose to call him Moritz.
Walther Rathenau’s letters to his mother imply that, in 1883, a year after the birth of Traven, she was not happy in her relationship with Emil. Like many others of his social and economic status, Emil liked the theater, its surroundings and its women. Figueroa said that Traven’s mother was an Irish actress, Helen Mareck, which would explain his mastery of English at an early age, as well as his affinity for the theater.
Traven and Walther Rathenau
One of the reasons why Traven hid his parentage was that he knew it. He knew who his relatives were and lived with one or both for a period. Walther, Traven’s half-brother, studied physics, chemistry, and philosophy and became an engineer like his father. When Emil Rathenau died in 1915, Walther succeeded him as president of AEG. In World War I he was commissioned to set up a Department of Raw Materials for the German government, and after WWI in 1921 he became Minister of Reconstruction and in 1922 Minister of Foreign Affairs of Germany, the most important political post ever held by a German Jew. He was assassinated on June 24, 1922 by an anti-Semitic extreme rightist group.
The success of his half-brother could have motivated Traven, at a young age, but in activities very different from Walther’s, specifically in theater and anarchist activism. In Mexico, Traven called himself “engineer” Traven Torsvan, like his father and half-brother. In several of his books, the hero is an engineer. Traven’s first unpublished novel, written in 1914, which we have in our archives under the title of Die Fackel des Fürsten, was written (under the pseudonym Ret Marut), its hero was an engineer and it was about a major engineering project in Vietnam. His last novel, published in German in 1960, was entitled Aslan Norval, and its heroine champions a major engineering project in the US.
After starting his career as an actor and theater director, Traven (under the pseudonym Ret Marut) became interested in politics at the beginning of the twentieth century, at the same time as his half-brother. Walther was considered a renaissance man of his time, for his interest in philosophy and the arts, and his literary activities. He embraced capitalism, but tried to sweeten it, in a Bismarckian way, with the social safety net and philanthropy. Traven / Marut went in another direction, towards a version of Max Stirner’s idealistic anarchism, or a more extreme form of “universalism”, to summarize a paragraph of Isaac Deutscher in his essay “The Non-Jewish Jew” (1968):
“They were a priori exceptional in that as Jews they dwelt on the borderlines of various civilizations, religions, margins or in the nooks and crannies of their respective nations. Each of them was in society and yet not in it, of it and yet not of it. It was this that enabled them to rise in thought above their societies, above their nations, above their times and generations, and to strike out mentally into wide new horizons and far into the future.”
Walther Rathenau published stories under the pseudonym W. Hartenau. He also wrote about the situation of “non-Jewish Jews” in Germany and the issue of assimilation. He was a friend of Maximilian Harden, a non-Jewish Jew who changed his name from Felix Ernest Witkowski. Harden began his career as a member of an acting company and founded a magazine, Die Zukunft, for which Walther contributed some articles. An interesting model for Traven, who used a pseudonym, Ret Marut, was also an actor and founded in 1917 in Munich an anarchist magazine, Der Ziegelbrenner. In this publication, Traven describes in detail how, having participated in the Räterepublik of Bavaria, he escaped the death sentence on May 1, 1919. After that escape he continued to live underground, mainly in Germany, until 1923 and the following year he arrived in Mexico.
Traven appears for the first time in 1907, as an actor under the name of Ret Marut. There are several reasons why he chose a pseudonym. The main one is that he knew he was an illegitimate child, and had a dual identity, a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother: a book on the Räterepublik of 1919 published in Munich in 1968, which is part of our Traven archive, says that Ret Marut self-identified himself as “Aryan-Jew.” Jews were increasingly assimilated, but they were tired of being identified as such, especially as anti-Semitism persisted.
At that time, it was common for people in theater and politics to use alternative names: Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky were pseudonyms. Furthermore, actors and writers were accustomed to playing with their identity or creating different names, and there is no doubt that for an anarchist like Traven any system, with names, passports and identities, was anathema.
A final consideration is that, as an anarchist, Traven did not want it to be known that he was related to a rich family, as it would have undermined his credibility (although he did insinuate in Der Ziegelbrenner that he had private means). Similarly, Emil Rathenau probably preferred to keep the relationship secret, both for familial and political reasons.
Traven and Ret Marut
Ret Marut was the main pseudonym Traven used during his German period, and it is similar to another name he used, Richard Maurhut. It is not difficult to see both names as anagrams of Moritz Rathenau. Marut has several etymological ramifications. It means “storm” in Sanskrit. When Traven founded a publishing company in Mexico with Esperanza López Mateos in 1943, he had no hesitation in calling it Ediciones Tempestad (“storm” in Spanish). The storm was a reality in Traven’s life and a frequent metaphor in his books. He even uses it in an unpublished letter to Malú when she was a girl. Traum is an anagram of Marut, and easily becomes Traven in Indo-European philology.
The change of Ret Marut (Moritz Rathenau) to B. Traven has a curious symmetry. In the first half of his life his last name Marut came from his first name Moritz and in the second half he used it as an anagram of his original surname, “Rathenau” becoming “Traven,” u becoming v, and a and h removed. The presence in his name of the letter “B.” reflects the second part of his life, an explanation he gave personally to Malú: he tirelessly corrected fictitious first names assigned to him beginning with the letter B. (such as “Bruno”). When Traven produced a document that he was born in San Francisco in 1882, he invented a name for his American mother: Helene Ottarrent. The first name is practically the same as that of his mother, Helen, and Ottarrent is another anagram of Rathenau (with O instead of u, adding 2 ts, and 1r, and removing the h). Malú mentions that, at the time when she and her sister Rosa Elena were growing up with him, Traven frequently enjoyed playing word games with them.
The Traven estate contains a selection of the things that his friends sent him from Germany. There is a booklet about Harden, his half-brother’s friend, and a technical book about the telephone published in the United States in 1904, a year after Emil Rathenau formed Telefunken with Siemens. There is a piece of paper where Traven practices different orthographic permutations of the name Cahn, a Jewish surname (Cahn is an important name in the family tree of Mathilde Nachman, wife of Emil). In the middle of Der Ziegelbrenner, there is a curious box advertisement with a reference to “St. Moritz “(an ironic canonization of himself); it is the only ad that includes an address in the middle of the text, in any of the editions of the magazine.
Many of the people in Ret Marut’s circle were non-Jewish Jews, among them: Kurt Eisner, Gustav Landauer (grandfather of Mike Nichols), Erich Mühsam, all participants in the Bavarian Räterepublik. It is an interesting fact that Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx, two paradigms of non-Jewish Jews, were born in the lower Rhineland, a border area next to France, which fits Deutscher’s paradigm. Marut’s career as an actor, director and anarchist began to flourish in the Rhineland (Essen and Düsseldorf).
After Traven’s death, the first visit that Chelena made to Germany was to donate to the Ludwig Museum in Cologne the collection of the lithographs of Franz Wilhelm Seiwert (also from Cologne) that Traven had in Mexico City. Other emblematic non-Jewish Jews were strong fans of Traven, including Albert Einstein (who publicly stated that Traven was his favorite author) and Bruno Kreisky, chancellor of Austria from 1970 to 1983.
Mexico: at peace with Chelena
Traven’s life was marked by several traumas, which were the root of his desire to hide his parentage until his death, according to Chelena Luján. In chronological order: his illegitimacy, his Judaism, his sentence and escape in 1919 and the 1922 murder of Walther Rathenau. This reinforced his conviction that Germany would be condemned to fascism and determined his decision to leave Europe. Some historians call this crime the beginning of the Holocaust, and it is interesting that Genius, the recent television series about Einstein, begins with the assassination of Rathenau, who was a friend of the physicist.
The murder of Trotsky in Mexico in 1940 was also important. The idea that hit men of a totalitarian regime could reach Mexico must have reinforced his decision to maintain his anonymity and spend most of his time in Chiapas and Acapulco, far from the German expatriate community, infiltrated by Nazis, in Mexico City. The premature death of Esperanza López Mateos in 1951 also had a strong impact.
The stormy years place the last years of Traven’s life with Chelena Luján, Rosa Elena and Malú Montes de Oca Luján from 1957 to 1969 on the Calle Mississippi in stark contrast: the calm after the storm. He could focus on publicizing his work (the BTNews and Traven newsletters BT Mitteilungen ), including returning to Germany for the first time for the premiere in 1959 of the film version of Das Totenschiff . He could turn his works into films, getting involved in every detail, returning to the beginning of his career as an actor and director of the Rhineland. Through his life and work, he had resolved his ambivalences (illegitimacy-identity, Jewish-non-Jewish, German-Mexican, individual-family, politics-literature) and could die happy.
Ironically, after the extraordinary entrepreneurial success of his father Emil Rathenau and the political success of his half-brother Walther Rathenau, the longest living and most famous member of the family (through his extraordinary life and work) was Moritz Rathenau, B. Traven. Traven is also probably the only member of the Bavarian Räterepublik to have survived to old age. Both achievements were the result of his ability to convert anonymity into an art form. Traven’s triumph.
Timothy Heyman is co-manager of the B. Traven Estate with his wife Malú Montes de Oca Luján de Heyman, stepdaughter of B. Traven. He has degrees from Oxford (in Greek and Roman language, literature, philosophy and history, with a specialization in indo-european philology) and from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (in Management, with a specialization in finance and information technology). In 2013 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II appointed him Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire(CBE) for his contributions to philanthropic and financial relations between the United Kingdom and Mexico.
I miss my dad more than I can say. This week, had he not passed on to further adventures in 2010, he would have celebrated his 85th birthday. Recently my sister sent me the text of his presentation at a conference on POW history, which I had not seen before, and I am honored to post it here.
He was not a professional historian but a veteran (late 1950s in Korea) and a businessman. His retirement he dedicated to researching the POWs of the Japanese in World War II, which was made possible after many US government files were declassified, and by his ability to interview some of the survivors, then elderly (almost all have since passed on). He founded the Center for Research on Allied POWs Under the Japanese, which continues, its website, www.mansell.com, managed now by historian Wes Injerd. How my dad found the inspiration to do this work is something he talks about in his presentation, below.
His book, which he had finished just before his death, was edited by noted historian Linda Goetz Holmes and published in 2012 by Naval Institute Press as Captured: The Forgotten Men of Guam. His papers, which include correspondence, and a multitude of documents and photographs given to him by POWs, are archived at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Since his passing I have maintained his memorial website, www.rogermansell.com.
#
Researching the History of the Mukden POW Camp
Roger Mansell Director, Center For Research, Allied POWS Under The Japanese
First, I want to make this very clear. I am NOT an expert of the Mukden POW Camp. Also, I am not an expert on the full story of ANY Japanese POW camp.
Many years ago, I was pursuing and advanced degree in civil engineering… in the days before computers and digital calculators. I shall never forget telling one of my college professors about a particular engineer I had met. I said, rather naively, the “he was a real expert on steel re-enforced dome structures!”
He looked over his glasses and said, “Experts are fools who THINK they have all the answers.”
Some 15 years later, having changed careers a number of times, I had started a printing brokerage and a few other related companies. In one of these companies, I hired a young man, Ken Grimes, as my office manager who, it turned out, had been interned in Santo Tomas in Manila.
Often, we would talk about history. Eventually, he related his own horrific experiences of seeing his father beaten into unconsciousness, he mother frequently slapped and his own endless sense of hunger. It was Ken who said, “Someday Roger, when you retire, you should research what happened to all of us and write a book about it. Tell the whole story, not some officer’s point of view.”
That had to be in September of 1987. I note that my oldest POW files (in DOS) stem from that date. Since then, I have easily spent many thousands dollars and more than 10,000 hours researching and documenting the Allied POWS of the Japanese.
I realized rather rapidly that a number of the books, considered valuable, were actually full of glaring errors, gross exaggerations, and extraordinarily myopic. When I began one could count, on their one hand, the books that gave an overall picture of the POW experiences. Oddly, the best overall book was Joan and Clay Blair’s, Return From the River Kwai [Simon and Schuster, New York, 1979]. It is an outstanding narrative of the Australians return from the Death Railway and the tragedy of the December Hell Ships. A few others stand out, e.g., The Pacific War 1931-1945, by Ienaga, Saburō [Pantheon Books, New York, 1978 (Original- Taiheiyō Sensō-1968)].
However, the early 1990’s was a dynamic period in the development of book publishing programs augmented by the rapid development of low cost, computer driven printing processes. Adobe Corporations’ introduction of scalable type (Postscript) and the introduction of the first PC publishing software (PageMaker) revolutionized the book industry.
A number of individual memoirs and unit histories began to appear in the market. POW experiences in many areas of the Pacific were finally being written and published. My own library began to grow. By 1994, POW histories became an important part of current literature with the introduction of Gavin Daws’ Prisoners Of The Japanese [New York, William Morrow, 1994]. The Australian writer’s book became a best seller in the realm of history books. In my view, it is probably the best overall book written so far on treatment of POWS under the Japanese in World War II. It tended to center heavily on a few main characters but Daws did give a stunning and horrendous overview of maltreatment of the POWS.
For those in United States, Hampton Sides’ Ghost Soldiers [Doubleday Publishing, New York, NY, U.S.A., 2001] reinvigorated the interest of historians to learn more about the Americans captured by the Japanese. Few Americans today can comprehend the scale of the disaster in the Philippines. For the first time in America’s history, we lost an entire Army. The story of the rescue of Allied POWS at the Cabanatuan POW camp, 25 miles behind the Japanese battle lines, was one of the great stories of the war. A brilliant writer, Sides covered the entire war experience of the prisoners, from the Bataan Death March, the hell ships, the massacres and the amazing rescue by the US Rangers. It became a wildly successful best seller, multiple paperback editions, and inspired the movie, The Great Rescue, badly done in the usual Hollywood fashion.
For those of you in academia, you certainly know the dangers of historical research. Many years must pass before the emotional and physical passions of the present disappear from the “Ivy Covered Walls.” In the United States, a young historian could not write a book that negatively portrays President Franklin Roosevelt or President Kennedy. To this day, it would still be an exercise in academic suicide and a sure path to the denial of tenure. Perhaps in another 10 to 20 years.
Not being part of academia I had the freedom to pursue my own interests. I quickly realized that I would never be able to write a book to record the history of the POWs. Perhaps in a six or seven volume set but that was, again, beyond my interest. However, I did decide to focus on an overlooked group of men captured on Guam. I could use the men of Guam as a microcosm to explain the whole.
The introduction of NETSCAPE in 1994 changed the world and the direction of my research. I decided that I would convert my company website into a site to document all that I had learned and what I hoped to learn. My father, as a young man, owned a newspaper in Brooklyn New York and I suppose I acquired a reporter’s gene. I wanted the world to know the facts: who, what, why, where and when.
I started the Center as a non-profit organization and solicited volunteers from the local schools where 20 hours of “volunteer” service are required each year. So far, I have funded every cent of the operation. With but rare exception, I freely make copies of everything we have for any researcher, former POW or descendent anywhere in the world. I pray this attitude will spread amongst those who research how the Japanese exploited the POWS.
Some local educators were (and still are) hostile to anything that they think glorifies war. Some have refused to even mention our work. Still, we regularly greet new volunteers. I assure you, getting more than an hour of effective work from the 20 required is a challenge in itself. Teenagers are easily distracted but at least I know we expose them to “real” history that they will never forget.
I started the site to tell just a simple story of the Guam captives. However, these men were eventually scattered all over Japan and I began to explore every camp.
In 2004 the National Archives in Washington finally permitted the use of personal digital cameras with tripod mountings and my researching ability changed dramatically. In my previous five visits to NARA, I averaged around 200 Xerox copies and 5 to 10 written pages of notes each week. It was a slow and tedious process… noting the contents and location of every document that I planned to copy so we could validly cite, tabbing each page I wanted to copy, securing a NARA permission tab, standing in line for a copier… waiting… and doing it all over again for each box.
Now, I could setup a tripod, point my camera to the table, get one permission tab for 16 boxes at one time, and never hesitate to copy an entire file if I thought it may give valid information. Yes, I often seem to photograph duplicates of the same page but when I get home, we try to strip this out. In five subsequent visits, we now have over 8000 pages of rosters, reports, affidavits and diaries. I don’t think twice… if it looks interesting, I shoot the page!
By cooperating with other researchers around the world, e.g., Michael Hurst who has done a magnificent job documenting the camps on Taiwan, Rod Beattie & Neil MacPherson of Australia who are documenting the Burma-Thailand Railways, we have created a VIRTUAL POW RESEARCH CENTER. We freely exchange data bases and work together to assure accuracy of the camp records.
Other than the roster, we have NOT begun to photograph the Mukden files. I do know that numerous affidavits, diaries and reports are at NARA that describe the experiences of Allied POWS here at the Mukden Prison. Probably a dozen or more books have been written by the survivors of Mukden.
Perhaps the most notable was Joseph A. Petak’s Never Plan Tomorrow.
We can be grateful to Corporal Petak, initially assigned to the 4th Chemical (Smoke Generators), for he created one of the most comprehensive stories about the men imprisoned at Mukden. As with any war history written by a participant, he writes glowingly of those who were his friends, ignores most of the others and relates the story from his point of view.
For the individual, war is “five yards.” He can only see and feel what is five yards in front, to the left, to the right, and to his rear. He can only hope that the enemy is not to his rear.
One is reminded of Sir Winston Churchill’s clear understanding of his historical importance when he stated he would be remembered well by history, “for I shall write the history.” As any reader of Churchill’s work can attest, he clearly placed himself in the middle of all decisions, cleverly evading the credit due to “Ultra,” the breaking of the German coding machine, “Enigma.”
Still, Churchill’s book has stood the test of time for it was sequentially accurate and offered insight into the conduct of the war. No student of the European War can begin to understand the full scope of the Allied efforts unless they read all five volumes.
So it is with Charles Petak. While his skill as a writer is not of literary merit, it is an excellent example of historic, non-fiction, literary narratives– a memoir using re-created conversations. The reader is projected into the milieu of prison life. We see and feel the daily struggle against hunger, the bitter cold of winter and the unrelenting brutality of the Japanese guards.
With over 150 hours of computer time, cross-checking each name against the National Archive list of American POWs, we have been able to correct every American name and all those who were deceased.
What Petak failed to include was a reasonably accurate time line of events. It is one of the most important details that must be known in order to investigate and document any camp or, if interested, the story of any individual man, hell-ship, unit or camp.
The second most important diary for this camp is that of Dr. (Captain) Mark Gardner Herbst. As a medical officer, the Japanese allowed him to have paper and pencils. In some camps, the possession of a pencil was a crime, punishable by a severe beating or even death. Many camp inmates knew that Herbst had carefully recorded the date, cause, and place of each known death. This diary, if found, would be a good time-line for numerous events.
Many researchers had heard of the diary but it could never be found in the National Archives. Despite many individual searches, the diary remained elusive. Finally, in May 2005, I stumbled across a diary labeled “Diary, Capt MARK G. HERREST”. Flipping the cover open, I realized immediately it was the Herbst Diary– not just his original diary but an additional written summary that included POW numbers, date and cause of death plus, most important, the exact location of all known graves.
Whoever prepared the diary for the archive mis-read his name and the error was simply a permanent part of the archive ascension order. No computer search or visual search of the finding aids would point you to the diary. In over 50 days of careful searching through over 500 carefully selected boxes, and skimming through at least twice that many more, I can say without reservation that ninety percent of research success is pure luck.
At the Imperial War Museum in London, we also found a diary (IWM File 96/41/1) of the British Major R. Peaty. Unfortunately Major Peaty clearly demonstrated the immense gulf between officers and, as the British term their enlisted men, the “other ranks” or OR’s. Still, he did, rather carefully, note the deaths of each man but rarely bothered with a name unless it was an officer he knew personally. He did make a reasonable time line, recording significant events, e.g., one yank died; 2 Yanks died; 1 Yank died, etc. But, he did record the arrival of the influx of men from the Oryoku sequence and the high ranking officers from Taiwan. Now we had a confirmation of Herbst’s dates of death. (I extracted notes for this for at the time, digital cameras were still not allowed at the IWM).
Last April, I found the Mukden rosters (in RG 407 Box 122, dated 1 November 1944) and we were at last able to determine the arrival dates, prior POW numbers and current POW numbers for the full camp… at least those that remained. The only surprise was that it now appears the Americans arrived in two groups. The larger group arriving on 11 November 1942 and a smaller group on 18 December 1942. We do hope to get one of our volunteers to add this important information to our data set. As the Japanese normally assigned one’s POW number based upon the day they arrived, we should be then able to sort and verify the EXACT composition of the arriving groups of men.
It is this type of information that will enable us to establish a complete and accurate time line of events for the camp. Until we have these POW numbers and arrival dates added to our data set, we cannot even be certain that we have the complete list of men transferred back to Japan in May of 1944. We noted these men in the Nagoya POW branch camp at Kamioka but we have also seen notations of a second group that may have been sent to a camp in Fukuoka. These newly found rosters, with arrival dates, old POW numbers and Mukden Camp POW numbers will resolve some of the mysteries– at least for our Center.
In a cursory look, however, we suspect there may be some errors in the numbers that were assigned to some of those who arrived from Taiwan. Remember, these lists were prepared by ordinary military clerks and prepared mostly on Mimeograph machines, a process that died in the 1960’s when Xerox developed the office copier. Having typed my share of these mimeo masters, I know for certain there will ALWAYS be errors. I have NEVER found a NARA roster without an error.
We have contributed the final list of Americans in this camp. We were spurred to create this full roster a few years ago by AO Wang and Linda Goetz-Holmes. Last year, I donated my personal copy of Petak’s book to this museum. We will soon add a separate and more accurate listing, including unit designations, of the first 100 Mukden Commonwealth prisoners (16 Australian POWS already fully documented).
These specific 100 men were part of 1000 men in the first group of “white slaves” sent into slavery for the Japanese industrial corporations. These were the men of Group “B” sent north from Singapore on the Fukkai Maru, arriving in Fusan (Pusan) Korea on 22 September 1942. Five hundred of the thousand captives remained on the ship and went sent to Moji in Japan.
The “A” Group were some 400 odd high ranking officers and aides sent to Formosa (Taiwan) and, as you all know, many of these “A” group men came to Mukden with the “Generals.”
Ridden with malaria, diarrhoea and dysentery, the 1000 men of “B” group were paraded for hours, marching through the streets of Pusan. Koreans lined the route as it was a national holiday and the Japanese fully intended to show the Koreans they were the master of the Pacific. The Japanese nationals were easy to spot as they were more colorfully clad and frequently tossed garbage, spittle and stones at the passing prisoners. The more harassment, the more the malnourished and malaria ridden troops stood up to the Japanese, finally marching in step, sounding off cadence and looking back at the Japanese with total disdain. The large number of Japanese photographers and film makers found little to use for their propaganda.
At best, the early Korean POW camps were poorly organized by the Japanese. The work loads were light, often non-existent. Compared to other POW camps, the food rations in Korea were actually equal to those of the Japanese soldiers. In general, their health improved over the next two months. But with the onset of winter, the sick rates climbed due to their weakened conditions.
In the first week of November, the most healthy 100 men were selected and sent by train on 9 November 1942 for their journey to Mukden. Their health, on average compared to the Americans who arrived at the same time, was markedly better. None of these men perished from illness or disease while at Mukden — not one — despite suffering the same privations. However, two men of the “B” Group died in the bombing of 10 December 1944.
The only other Commonwealth man to die at Mukden was an Australian Colonel Pigdon who died in July 1945 , having arrived from Taiwan in a severely malnourished condition. His death, incidently, was not recorded by Doctor Herbst nor his name noted by Major Peaty.
In researching the POWS, one also finds amazing little tidbits that open entirely new areas of interest. For example, in looking at other Korean files, I noted that a number of the “B” group men and some 100 Americans were eventually sent to a camp called KONAN in present day North Korea. The location of this camp is in a port city that some suspect was used by the Japanese in their efforts to process uranium. Hopefully, these files will all be declassified in my lifetime. Tucked into one of the of the Keijo (Seoul) files was a report on the balance of the “B” group who were taken directly to Japan on the same voyage as the Korean contingent.
This example is how we find we are able to tell the story of the POWs. One document leads to another and another mystery is solved. If you are new to the world of POW research, welcome! If you need help, ask! Don’t hoard information. Don’t make others waste time trying to find the same information. The facts of history should not to be hidden. Let others write their interpretations and tell their stories. As a researcher of the POWS, keep your opinions off the web sites unless you ARE the POW or relative thereof.
Now, I fully support this new Museum, here on the site of the Mukden POW Camp. I hope you will create a great web site to tell the story of the Japanese POWS, especially those men held here at Mukden. Let the men who were here write their stories on your web site. Tell the story of Unit 731. Tell the story of the civilian internment camps in China. Tell the story of ALL the Japanese camps in China. Let the world know what happened. Tell the facts. Show the pictures. Let the facts speak for themselves.
I hope that all of you, in this room, contribute your research freely so that the full story can be posted to a web site run by this museum. Make the site available in as many languages as possible. Make it the best POW site in the world and share the information freely.
Last, always remember that nothing in history is new. It is only information that YOU never knew.
C.M. Mayo here: If you have any questions about POWs and this research I am not the one to ask. Please check out www.mansell.com and from there, you can always email the webmaster, Wes Injerd, whom I am sure will be very glad to hear from you.
Poet, writer and teacher Pat Schneider has passed on. She left a remarkable body of work, and over many decades, as the visionary founder of Amherst Writers & Artists, she taught and helped and otherwise influenced uncounted writers and poets. Read her obituary here.
Pat Schneider. Screenshot of photo from Amherst Writers & Artists Founder’s bio.
Back when I was editing the bilingual journal Tameme, Noemí Escandell sent me her lovely translation of Pat’s poem, “How to Tell a Daughter.” It appeared in the third and final issue, “Reconquest/ Reconquista,” published in 2003. In tribute to Pat, here it is:
Hiding out! Chillin’! My writing assistants demonstrate the concepts.
I am hiding out this August Monday from the blog… and reading a most unusual novel, about which word soon. Meanwhile, herewith, an extra-crunchy post from the Madam Mayo blog archives:
Reading Mexico: Recommendations for a Book Club of Extra-Curious & Adventurous English-Language Readers
Originally published on Madam Mayo blog November 21, 2016
In recent days, I am delighted to report, more than one American has asked me for a list of recommended reading on Mexico for their book clubs. Before I present my correspondents, and you, dear reader, with my list, herewith a big fat flashing neon-lime caveat:
This list is unlikely to coincide with most English language writers’ and readers’ ideas of what might be most appropriate. Nope, no Graham Greene. No D.H. Lawrence, no Malcolm Lowry, nor John Steinbeck. Most of the usual suspects have gone missing from my list. I packed the bunch of them off, as it were, to Puerto Vallarta for margaritas (a drink invented by a Texan, by the way) and a purgatory of reading juicy crime-novels. About crime novels, I am not your go-to gal.
For those of you new to this blog, let me introduce myself. I am a US citizen who has been living in Mexico City on and off for over three decades, and not in an expat community, but as a part of a Mexican family. Over these many years I have written several books about Mexico, most recently, the novel based on the true story of Mexico’s Second Empire, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, and Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual. I have also translated a long list of Mexican writers and poets, and am the editor of an anthology, Mexico: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, which is not a guidebook but a selection of 24 Mexican writers on Mexico, many in translation for the first time. All of which is to say that although I have not read each and every last thing ever published on Mexico (a feat for a bot!), I am indeed familiar with both the Spanish and the English language literature on Mexico, fiction and nonfiction.
TWO CHALLENGES: SAD! VERY SAD!
But to make a list of recommendations for an English-language book club there are challenges. First, a number of Mexican works have been translated into English, but this amounts to only a tiny percentage of what has been published in Mexico over the centuries. To quote DJT completely out of context, “Sad!”
Second, also sadly, many of the best-known and easily available originally-in-English works on Mexico strike me as superb examples of a south-of-the-border species of what Edward W. Said termed “orientalism.” Translation: toe-curling. Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez, to take but one example, while a deserved classic for its lyric beauty (count me a fan), will tell you little about Mexico, never mind the Baja California peninsula that stretches for nearly a thousand miles along the Sea of Cortez; much of what Steinbeck says about it is either flat wrong or rendered through a filter of commonplace prejudice and presumption.
Much of the best of contemporary English language literature on Mexico covers the border, mainly focusing on illegal immigration, drug trafficking, and violence. There are several excellent works under that voluminous tent, but I’d like to get to those last. I submit that for a deeper sense of Mexico, one has to dig past the sorts of stories one can easily encounter in the mainstream news, television, and cinema, to go both deeper into the country and deeper into its past.
For a deeper sense of Mexico, one has to dig past the sorts of stories one can easily encounter in the mainstream news, television, and cinema, to go both deeper into the country and deeper into its past.
Nope, that sad little shelf in the back room of your local big box bookstore is not the place to look. Unfortunately, and head-scratchingly—for the United States shares a nearly 2,000 mile border with Mexico, and all the cultural, economic, ecological, historical, and political intertwinings that would suggest— the selection of such works in English, enticing a “box of chocolates” as it may be, is limited. Moreover, whether because of their scarcity, high prices, length, and/or academic prose-style replete with reams of footnotes, few English language works on Mexico lend themselves to a felicitous selection for a book club.
A NOTE ON (MORE THAN) A FEW TITLES NOT ON MY LIST FOR BOOK CLUBS
Historian John Tutino’s Making a New World, for example, is a scholarly doorstopper of a tome, so I wouldn’t recommend it for a book club; however, I do believe it is one of the most important books yet published about Mexico. Read my review of Tutino’s Making a New Worldhere and listen in anytime to my extra crunchy podcast interview with Tutino here.
Seriously, if you want to start getting an idea of Mexico beyond the clichés, stop reading this right now and listen to what Tutino has to say.
… RESUME HERE
Also, I would have recommended the magnificent The Mexican Treasury: The Writings of Dr. Francisco Hernández, edited by Simon Varey, but (sigh),Stanford University Press has priced it at USD 72 a copy. You might ask your university or local public library to order a copy, if they do not already have one.
Another wonder not on my list for book clubs— but do have a look at the digital edition free online— is Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagún’s Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, or General History of the Things of New Spain. The original 16th century manuscript, which contains 2,468 colorful illustrations and text in both Spanish and Nahuatl (the language spoken by the Aztecs phonetically transcribed using Latin), is also known as the Florentine Codex because it is in the Medicea Laurencziana Library in Florence, Italy.
Then there is Daniela Rossell’s hilariously outré take on Mexico City’s, as the title says, Rich and Famous, but at over USD 100 for a used paperback copy, that title did not make it to my list, either. (But if you and your book club have wheelbarrows of cash to spare for no better purpose than to rain down upon amazon.com for some dozen copies of Rich and Famous, well, pourquoi pas? Read it while eating your cake, too!)
Numerous Mexican fabulosities, including Rich & Famous, which cover is shown here, are not on my list.
My list, therefore, focuses on works in a variety of genres, from biography to history to poetry, that are not only illuminating but could be enjoyable reading for avid and thoughtful readers, and lend themselves to a spirited book club discussion. And, crucially for most book clubs, these are titles currently available at more-or-less-reasonable prices from major online booksellers and/or, as in the few instances when a work has lapsed into the public domain, as free downloads from www.archive.org.
Toss a tomato if you like, but I also recommend my own works, else I would not have troubled to write them.
> For those looking for more complete and scholarly lists of recommended reading on Mexico, as well as several more fine anthologies, click here.
PREHISPANIC, CONQUEST, COLONY (IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER BY AUTHOR)
Coe, Sophie D., and Michael D. Coe. The True History of Chocolate A scrumptuously sweeping history of Mexico’s most delicious bean by a noted food historian and anthropologist. This one should be an especially popular pick for any book club.
Paz, Octavio. Sor Juana or, The Traps of Faith Translated by the exceptional Margaret Sayers Peden. Catalog copy: “Mexico’s leading poet, essayist, and cultural critic writes of a Mexican poet of another time and another world, the world of seventeenth-century New Spain. His subject is Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the most striking figure in all of Spanish-American colonial literature and one of the great poets of her age.”
Roberts, David. The Pueblo Revolt: The Secret Rebellion that Drove the Spanish Out of the Southwest The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 took place in what was then the Kingdom of New Mexico and is now within the United States; nevertheless, this is an crucial episode for understanding the history of the North American continent, including, of course, Mexico.
NINETEENTH CENTURY (IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER BY AUTHOR)
Calderón de la Barca, Madame (Frances Erskine Inglis). Life in Mexico This delightfully vivid memoir of 1842 by the Scottish-born wife of Spain’s first ambassador to Mexico should go at the top of the list for any Mexicophile. > Also available on archive.org > Read my review for Tin House
Fowler, Will. Santa Anna of Mexico A new and revisionist history of that tremendous and mercurial personality who dominated the first half of 19th century Mexico, the “Napoleon of the West.” Hämäläinen, Pekka. The Comanche Empire A mite heavy-going for a book club, but essential for understanding the historical relationship between the U.S. and Mexico and the US-Mexican War. > Read my review of this book. > For a less rigorous but more entertaining and elegantly-written work on the Comanches, see S.C. Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon.
Hogan, Michael. Abraham Lincoln and Mexico: A History of Courage, Intrigue, and Unlikely Friendships In this shining contribution to the literature on Abraham Lincoln and that of the US-Mexican War, Michael Hogan illuminates the stance of a young politician against that terrible war, telling a story that is both urgently necessary and well more than a century overdue.
Magoffin, Susan Shelby. Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico Now considered a classic of mid-19th century Americana, as a work of literature, this book has its limits and faults, for it was written as a private diary by a Missouri trader’s bride who was only 19 years old. I warmly recommend it for US book clubs because it is easy to find an inexpensive copy, and if it has faults, it also has many charms; and moreover, it provides an unforgettable glimpse of historical context for US-Mexico trade. Y’all, US-Mexico trade did not start with NAFTA. > See my blog post of notes about this book.
Mayo, C.M. The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire A novel based on extensive archival research into the strange but true story of the half-American grandson of Agustin de Iturbide, Agustin de Iturbide y Green, in the court of Maximilian von Habsburg. A Library Journal Best Book of 2009. > Visit this book’s website for excerpts, reviews, photos and more > Related: From Mexico to Miramar or, Across the Lake of Oblivion A nonfiction novela about a fairytale: a visit to the Emperor of Mexico’s Italian castle. An award-winning long-form essay now available in Kindle.
McAllen, M.M. Maximilian and Carlota: Europe’s Last Empire in Mexico A deeply researched book about a period of Mexican history that, while vital for understanding modern Mexico and its relations with the United States and Europe, is of perhaps unparalleled cultural, political, and military complexity for such a short period. > Listen in anytime to my extra-extra crunchy conversation with M.M.McAllen about her splendid book, the first new major narrative history of this period in English in nearly forty years.
LATE 19th CENTURY, REVOLUTION, EARLY 20th CENTURY (IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER BY AUTHOR)
Azuela, Mariano. The Underdogs: A Novel of the Revolution This is the first and classic Mexican novel of the Revolution, translated by Sergio Waisman and with a foreword by Carlos Fuentes. The original title in Spanish is Los de abajo. Not everyone’s slug of mescal, but a century on, it remains a cult fave, especially around the border.
Cooke, Catherine Nixon. The Thistle and the Rose: Romance, Railroads, and Big Oil in Revolutionary Mexico This family history of Scotsman John George McNab and Oaxacan Guadalupe Fuentes Nivon McNab not only gives an overview of the transformation of the Mexican economy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but some of Mexico’s ethnic, social, and regional diversity, both of which are far greater than U.S. media and Mexican tourist industry narratives would suggest.
Reed, Alma. Peregrina: Love and Death in Mexico Edited by Michael K. Schuessler with a foreword by Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska, who knew Alma Reed back in the 1960s. Reed was a journalist from San Francisco who came to Yucatan on assignment and ended up engaged to marry the governor, Felipe Carrillo Puerto. Just before the wedding Carrillo Puerto was assassinated. > Listen in to my podcast interview with Michael K. Schuessler.
Tenorio-Trillo, Mauricio, I Speak of the City: Mexico City at the Turn of the Twentieth Century A leading scholar of Mexico takes on Mexico City from 1880 to 1940 in this beautifully written work. If you have ever visited or ever plan to visit Mexico City, this rich-as-a-truffle read is a must.
Traven, B. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre Although it seems he may have been born in Germany, one must count the mysterious B. Traven, who escaped a death sentence in Germany in the 1920s, as a Mexican writer. Little is known about his early life. According to his Mexican stepdaughter, the “B.” stands not for Bruno as some biographers have asserted, but for “Plan B.” Mexico City’s Museo de Arte Moderno recently closed its B. Traven show which featured clips from the movie “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart, as well as clips from several other major movies inspired by Traven’s novels, and displays of his papers, photographs, guns, and typewriters.
Urrea, Luis Alberto. The Hummingbird’s Daughter The novel based on the true story of his great aunt, the folk saint and mediumnistic healer Teresita Urrea, la Santa de Cabora (Cabora is in Chihuahua).
MID TO LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY (IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER BY AUTHOR)
Fuentes, Carlos. The Death of Artemio Cruz New translation by Alfred MacAdam. The famous novel by the famous author. Muy macho. Dark. Bitter. Ayyy a real jaw-cruncher.
Herrera, Heyden. Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo The best introduction to Mexico’s most famous and uniquely flamboyant artist of the 20th century.
Isaac, Claudio. Midday with Buñuel: Memories and Sketches, 1973 – 1983 Mexican filmmaker Claudio Isaac’s very personal and poetic recollection of his friendship with his mentor, the Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel, a major influence on Mexican (and world) cinema, who died in Mexico City in 1983. I do not have the original Spanish for a comparison, but the English is so vivid and smoothly elegant, I am sure that Brian T. Scoular’s must be a superb translation. Mastretta, Angeles. Women with Big Eyes Short stories about “aunts” translated by Amy Schildhouse Greenberg. A best-seller in Mexico and widely read in Spanish in the United States as well. (A story from this book is in my anthology, Mexico: A Traveler’s Literary Companion.)
Mayo, C.M., ed. Mexico: A Traveler’s Literary Companion A portrait of Mexico in the work of 24 contemporary Mexican writers, many translated for the first time. Among them: Agustín Cadena, Rosario Castellanos, Fernando Del Paso, Ricardo Elizondo Elizondo, Laura Esquivel, Carlos Fuentes, Mónica Lavín, Angeles Mastretta, Carlos Monsiváis, Juan Villoro. > Visit this book’s website for excerpts, podcasts, and more. > NPR interview about this book.
Monsiváis, Carlos. Mexican Postcards Edited, Introduced and Translated by John Kraniauskas. A collection of essays by Mexico City’s most beloved social commentator. (His essay “Identity Hour or, What Photos Would You Take of the Endless City?” is included in my anthology, Mexico: A Traveler’s Literary Companion.)
Novo, Salvador. Pillar of Salt: An Autobiography, with 19 Erotic Sonnets Introduced by Carlos Monsiváis; Translated by Marguerite Feitlowitz. The memoir of a major and controversial figure in 20th century Mexican letters. Never a dull moment with Sr. Novo.
Poniatowska, Elena. The Skin of the Sky. Poniatowska is one of Mexico’s most respected journalists and literary writers. Her better-known works include Massacre in Mexico, and Here’s to You, Jesusa. For a book club seeking a fresh and unexpected look at Mexico, however, I would recommend first reading The Skin of the Sky.
Rulfo, Juan. Pedro Paramo The surrealist novel of the 1950s now translated by Margaret Sayers Peden.
MEXICO POST-2000 & THE BORDER(IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER BY AUTHOR)
Burton, Tony. Western Mexico: A Traveler’s Treasury A unique guidebook by an English geographer that is chock full of surprises, plus illustrations and many maps. Yes, I am recommending a guidebook for a book club; it is that special.
Call, Wendy. No Word for Welcome: The Mexican Village Faces the Global Economy A passionate look at Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec, a little known and yet culturally, economically, historically, and politically vital part of Mexico. Winner of the Grub Street National Book Prize for Nonfiction.
PLUS! PLUS! PLUS! PLUS! PLUS! FIVE BOOKS ON MEXICO THAT I HAVE NOT YET READ, BUT IF I WERE IN A BOOK CLUB I WOULD VOTE TO READ THEM
Boullosa, Carmen. Texas: The Great Theft Translated by Samantha Schnee. Why I would vote to read this book: Boullosa is one of Mexico’s best-known literary writers; Schnee is a respected literary translator, and the flip-side of the story of Texas is one Americans rarely if ever hear.
Gamboa, Federico. Santa Translated and edited by John Charles Chasteen. Why I would vote to read this book: It was a racy best-seller of its day in Mexico and its author, Federico Gamboa, was a noted literary figure and politician.
Prieto, Carlos. Adventures of a Cello It is a Stradivarius and Prieto is one of the best cellists in the world. From the catalog: “To make the story of his cello complete, Mr. Prieto also provides a brief history of violin making and a succinct review of cello music from Stradivari to the present. He highlights the work of composers from Latin America, Spain, and Portugal, for whose music he has long been an advocate and principal performer.”
Valenzuela-Zapata, Ana G. and Gary Paul Nabhan. Tequila: A Natural and Cultural History From the catalog: “Ana G. Valenzuela-Zapata, the leading agronomist in Mexico’s tequila industry, and Gary Paul Nabhan, one of America’s most respected ethnobotanists, plumb the myth of tequila as they introduce the natural history, economics, and cultural significance of the plants cultivated for its production.”
Wulf, Andrea. The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt wrote about his research and explorations in Mexico; it would be difficult to overestimate his influence on how Mexican scientists saw their own country, and how Europeans saw Mexico in the 19th century. Friends have raved about Wulf’s book, so it would get my vote for a read.
Technology is a topic I often touch on in this blog* because first, it’s directly relevant to my book in-progress on Far West Texas, and second, the digital revolution we’re all living through is so dizzyingly, all-at-once enchanting and consternating. Where is this all taking us? Mars? The Stars? Or, will we all end up like the pudding-like protagonist of E.M. Forster’s eerily prophetic short story “The Machine Stops”? How does this digital revolution connect to / echo with technological change in the past, for example, with the advent of the printed book, the telegraph, radio, telephones, cinema, television? With other technologies, from the railroads to airplanes? Or for that matter, the bow and arrow, or say, or the clock? And how is the digital revolution, in fact, or not in fact, fundamentally different from what has come before? Most importantly, how to live a human life, a good and creative life, say, this writer’s life, that is not hijacked by technological imperatives, above all, the constant pull to the glamor of the screens? (And I mean “glamor” in its original, occult sense.) So many questions… Sometimes some of the literature begins to answer them.
Doug Hill’s Not So Fast: Thinking Twice About Technology
Doug Hill’s Not So Fast: Thinking Twice About Technology. That fuzzy blurb on the cover is from Jerry Mander: “This book is the most comprehensive, provocative, and entertaining review of technological thought, expression, impact, and controversy that I have yet seen.” Yours Truly concurs.
The first and major thing I appreciated about Doug Hill’s Not So Fast is that he provides an up-to-date general overview of the literature on the history and the philosophy of technology. Francis Bacon, Henry James, Martin Heidegger, Aldous Huxley, Marshall McLuhan, Lewis Mumford, Langdon Winner, Norbert Wiener, Jacques Ellul, Ray Kurzweil, Kevin Kelly, Stewart Brand, Steve Jobs–and an army more– they’re all there. Secondly, in engaging, butter-smooth prose throughout, Hill tackles, as he quotes philosopher Albert Borgmann, “the pervasiveness and consistency of [technology’s] pattern.” I mean to say, Hill has accomplished a rare combined literary and intellectual feat.
Here’s the catalog copy for Not So Fast:
There’s a well-known story about an older fish who swims by two younger fish and asks, “How’s the water?” The younger fish are puzzled. “What’s water?” they ask.
Many of us today might ask a similar question: What’s technology? Technology defines the world we live in, yet we’re so immersed in it, so encompassed by it, that we mostly take it for granted. Seldom, if ever, do we stop to ask what technology is. Failing to ask that question, we fail to perceive all the ways it might be shaping us.
Usually when we hear the word “technology,” we automatically think of digital devices and their myriad applications. As revolutionary as smartphones, online shopping, and social networks may seem, however, they fit into long-standing, deeply entrenched patterns of technological thought as well as practice. Generations of skeptics have questioned how well served we are by those patterns of thought and practice, even as generations of enthusiasts have promised that the latest innovations will deliver us, soon, to Paradise. We’re not there yet, but the cyber utopians of Silicon Valley keep telling us it’s right around the corner.
What is technology, and how is it shaping us? In search of answers to those crucial questions, Not So Fast draws on the insights of dozens of scholars and artists who have thought deeply about the meanings of machines. The book explores such dynamics as technological drift, technological momentum, technological disequilibrium, and technological autonomy to help us understand the interconnected, interwoven, and interdependent phenomena of our technological world. In the course of that exploration, Doug Hill poses penetrating questions of his own, among them: Do we have as much control over our machines as we think? And who can we rely on to guide the technological forces that will determine the future of the planet?
I spent that terrible day and many of the days afterwards glued to the television– what a waste of time. Even still, if briefly, I worked on my query and submission letters, so determined was I, after having let my second agent go (long, boring story), to place my memoir, Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico. That month, it seemed the publishing world, already in decline, had stopped dead. But later that very same month, an acceptance letter came from the University of Utah Press, and so Miraculous Air was published in the fall of 2002. All these years later, I am proud of that book, and I believe it is a healing book. I believe it will be read beyond my lifetime. Like other such books, it’s a gift, a gift to the artist, and by the alchemy of intention, persistence, work, skill, and time, a gift from the artist. This is what art is.
And books, by their nature, are time-travelers. Right now I’m reading (wild laugh) about the Thirty Years War. And Pierre Hadot on the wisdom of Marcus Aurelius.
So what do I have to say apropos of current events? If you’re interested, and you have a chunk of time and the attentional focus for something complex, this, which I wrote last fall, and this, which I delivered at a writer’s conference in 2016.
#
Because I’m deep into doing some deep work, this Monday’s post is from the deepdom of the Madam Mayo archives: a note about Cal Newport’s Deep Work. (One of these days I’m going to make a kooky little desk-top altar to this guy, light a candle, and bring it flowers.)
Cal Newport’s “Deep Work,” Study Hacks Blog, and On Quitting Social Media
Originally posted on Madam Mayo Blog, September 26, 2016
Find out about a must-read book, a must-read blog, and a must-watch TED Talk by Georgetown University Associate Professor of Computer Science Cal Newport, all in one handy post at his Study Hacks Blog, “Quit Social Media.”
What Newport says in that post is provocative– undoubtedly just the title will rub many people’s fur the wrong way, and no surprise, it already has many commenters a-huffing & puffing.
Here is my comment on Cal Newport’s post:
Thank you for this blog, for your TED Talk, and for your books, especially Deep Work. I am a writer with 2 finance books published under another name, plus 4 literary books, plus an anthology– all of which is to say, I understand the nature and immense benefits of deep work.
But dealing with the Internet… that has been a challenge for me over the past several years, and especially when all these shiny new social media toys seemed to be so necessary and (apparently) effective for promoting one’s books. Every publicist, marketing staff, my fellow writers, all seem slaves now to social media. I can assure you, every writers conference has a panel on book PR and social media.
For a while, at the enthusiastic urging of one of my writer-friends, by the way, a best-selling and very fine historical novelist, I maintained a Facebook page, but when I realized what a time-suck it was, and how FB made it intentionally and so deviously addictive, I deactivated my account. I had also come to recognize that people addicted to FB, as seemed to be not all but most of my “FB friends,” often as they might “like” and comment on my posts there, are probably not my readers. (My books require sustained focus; I admit, they can be challenging.) I deactivated my FB more than a year ago, and I breathe a sigh of relief about it every blessed day.
As for your book, Deep Work, much of what you say was already familiar to me from my own experience as a writer, but I appreciated the reminders, especially in light of these contemporary challenges to sustaining focus. What was especially interesting and intriguing to me was the new cognitive research you mention. Next time I teach a writing workshop you can be sure that Deep Work will be on the syllabus.
Do I miss interacting with friends and family on FB? Yes, but now I have more time for higher quality interpersonal interactions, such as, say, emails, telephone conversations, and–Land o’ Goshen!!– actually getting together in person.
However, for the record, I’m not (yet) giving up the three social media tools I still use, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube, because:
(1) With LinkedIn and Twitter I appreciate having a way to contact certain individuals when email is not a workable option (nieces and nephews, you know who you are!);
(2) I appreciate the broadcast opportunity, modest as it is. Check out my YouTube channel here. As for Linked In and Twitter, usually I just zip in to tweet a blog post or a podcast, then out, and not every day;
UPDATE: Twitter, meh. Now, with the rarest of exceptions, I tweet once a month, as a courtesy to the authors who do a Q & A for Madam Mayo blog.
(3) I turned off their notifications;
(4) I do not find these services addictive, as I did Facebook, hence, I am not tempted to constantly check them.
In sum, for me– and of course, this might be different for you– at this time– and no guarantees for the future– the benefits of maintaining my LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube accounts outweigh the costs.
SPEAKING OF COSTS
Speaking of costs, one of the vital arguments Cal Newport makes in Deep Work is that pointing out the benefits of utilizing any given social media tool is not enough; one must also take into full account its opportunity costs in your actual practice. Oftentimes these costs are devastating. But fear of “missing out,” fear of admitting that one could have done so much better than to have spent weeks, months, even years of precious hours agog at mindless trivia– in short, the fear and pride behind cognitive dissonance– make many otherwise highly intelligent people blind to this simplest of common-sense arguments.
One question that popped up in the comments there at Study Hacks blog was about the definition of “social media”: Does it include blogs? Ironically, since he publishes comments and on occasion responds to them, I consider Cal Newport’s “Study Hacks Blog” to be social media. I do not consider this blog, “Madam Mayo,” to be “social media,” however, because an eon ago I closed the comments section.
That said, dear thoughtful and courteous reader, your comments via email are always welcome. I invite you to write to me here.
P.S. My recommended reading lists for my writing workshops are here. You will find Cal Newport’s excellent Deep Work on my list of works on Creative Process. And you can read my review of Cal Newport’s earlier book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You,here.
After a battle with brain cancer, my dear amigo Bill Gruben has passed onto new and surely most wondrous adventures. He had such a good heart and a brilliant, wildly whimsical sense of humor. I will miss him more than I can say.
I met Bill some 30 years ago when I was working as an economist in Mexico City and he as an economist with the Dallas Fed. New flash: Not all economists are just economists! Bill, who spoke fluent Spanish and knew more about Mexico than most Mexicans, had written jokes for Joan Rivers and Phyllis Diller and published some of his brilliant comedic essays about Texas in no less a venue than The Atlantic Monthly. I was then already writing poems and short stories, and translating Mexican poetry. Later, when I got the notion to publish Tameme, a bilingual literary journal that brought together writers and poets from Canada, the US, and Mexico in bilingual English/ Spanish format, I asked Bill if he would contribute something to the first issue. I was immensely honored and quite tickled when he sent me “Animals in the Arts in Texas.” It was translated into Spanish by the splendid Mexican poet and novelist Agustín Cadena. In Bill’s memory, herewith that piece from Tameme, originally published in 1999:
#
From the Dallas Morning News, March 29, 2020: William Charles Gruben III died peacefully at his Dallas home on Tuesday, March 17th, 2020, at the age of 76, due to complications from an inoperable glioblastoma. Husband, father, economist, polymath, polyglot, musician, humorist, prankster, Bill was a classical thinker, a Medieval scholastic, a Renaissance man, a modern theorist, a postmodern ironist, and, above all else, a true soul of The Enlightenment, in that his whole life was a determined, joyous pursuit of knowledge fueled by the power of human reason and an endless supply of jokes.
Born on September 29th, 1943 in Sacramento, California, Bill was a conscientious and devoted older brother (one not above launching a younger sibling down the occasional laundry chute) during a childhood of multiple family moves: from Illinois to rural Texas, San Antonio, Houston (where he swam the bayous, alligators included) and suburban Dallas. He was an enthusiastic cadet in the Junior Yanks in the mid-50’s, and spent a few weeks every summer at his grandparents’ cotton farm in West Texas. As a high school student he mastered the guitar and the trombone, earning spending money gigging with a Dixieland band. Later in life, he learned to play a mean and somewhat soulful didgeridoo.
A graduate of Richardson High School, SMU, and The University of Texas, where he earned a doctorate in economics, Bill’s working life was a paradox. He spent the better part of his career at The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, where he specialized in practical applications of economic theory and the then emerging Mexican and Latin American markets, and where he co-created The Center for Latin American Economics. But Bill’s relationship to “The Dismal Science” was anything but. He understood that at the root of economic study was both the human and the quite-possibly marvelous: that economies were more than diminishing marginal return curves and income elasticity, but places where our desires and dreams collide with reality in all kinds of fascinating and exhilarating ways. An inspiration to colleagues and mentees alike, Bill’s favorite rejoinder while crunching data or preparing a paper or presentation was always, “Do you believe we get paid to do this?!” followed by another one of his brilliant one-liners. For, much as he found joy in Peso stabilization forecasts and comparative GDP analyses, Bill Gruben found hilarity in everything else.
In the 1970s, he, along with his brother, wrote, produced, and hosted a 30 minute comedy show on KCHU called “Dallas Arcade.” In the 80s, he published pieces in The Atlantic that satirized the excesses of oil-boom Texas. He wrote jokes for Joan Rivers, who used some on The Tonight Show, and for Phyllis Diller, who tried to persuade him to dump economics, move to Hollywood, and write comedy full time. Bill Gruben was too good an economist to take her suggestion. But he was terribly flattered.
Upon his retirement from The Dallas Fed, Bill spent his time among homes in Dallas, Laredo, and Monterrey, Mexico. From 2008-2014, at Texas A&M International University, he was Director of the Ph.D. Program in International Business at the University’s A.R. Sanchez, Jr. School of Business, and a Radcliffe Killam Distinguished Professor of Economics; from 2013-14, he directed The Center for Western Hemispheric Trade.
Upon his second retirement, Bill transferred his creative energies from the literary to the visual arts. His last series of canvasses depict the suffering of narcos tormented by comically enraged demons. And even this past January, when he struggled to walk and eat, he insisted on going to Fort Worth to see the Renoir show. He spent two hours on his feet looking at every painting.
Bill is preceded in death by father WIlliam Charles Gruben II, mother Virginia Dorothy Anderson Gruben, and wife, the artist Marilu Flores Gruben. Bill is survived by beloved spouse Nieves Mogas, daughters Adrienne Gruben, a film executive and documentarian, and Anna Gruben Olivier de Vezin, a non-profit director, sons-in-law David Goldstein, a technical director for live broadcast events, and Charles Olivier de Vezin, a screenwriter and film editor, grandchildren Maria Francisca Goldstein and Manel Olivier de Vezin, sister Patricia Gruben, brother Roger Gruben, and a host of adoring nieces, nephews, and cousins. The family expresses its deep gratitude to caregivers Penelope Clayton-Smith, Dario Delgado, and Frank Aven. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, services are on hold, but there will be a virtual service in mid April.
In lieu of flowers, the family welcomes contributions in Bill’s name to The Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association or to El Instituto de Atención Integral Discapacitado Retos, A.B.P.
In this age of Instagram and Tripadvisor & etc. etc. etc. it would seem that increasingly fewer people have the interest, never mind the attentional focus, for literary travel memoir. But readers of this genre were always a tiny minority of the general population. I say, on this planet of billions of people, there will always be a good number of people who read, and read insatiably, seriously, broadly, and deeply. Ergo, we can be sure that someone somewhere will be writing something about someplace, and some number of these works, however small, will undoubtedly be read by some intelligent and thoughtful someone.
I write literary travel memoir and, on occasion, I teach a workshop on that genre, so when, as part of my reading for my book in-progress on Far West Texas, I came across cultural historian David M. Wrobel’s superb Global West, American Frontier, apart from its helping me get my mind around “Texas,” I felt moved to make a few notes on what he has to say about this oft-undervalued literary genre. Dear writerly reader, may you may find these quotes as heartening as I did.
“The travel book remained a key genre throughout the twentieth century, and still is today. In the early twenty-first century, when it is possible to fly to nearly anywhere in the world within a day and to travel virtually anywhere via the Internet, a quaint, old-fashioned printed companion remains surprisingly popular. A distinctive hybrid of the fiction and nonfiction forms, of reflection and reportage, of anthropology, history, and literature, still serves as an essential accompaniment for actual travel or provides core background reading for a journey.” (pp. 5-6)
“The truly gifted and valuable travel writers are, I would venture, the ones who come to realize that they are not just traveling through other landscapes but through the landscapes of other people’s lives; they are visitors who care to learn what a place means to the people who live there.” (p.13)
“[T]he travel narrative form has remained an important guide to western America even as new technological developments have compressed space and rendered the most faraway places more readily accessible. For this reason, the travel book can be deemed an unlikely survivor in the digital age.” (p.17)
“The travel book lives on, oblivious to the assumption that its time should long since have passed.” (p.187)
“The real authenticity or value of the genre surely lies in the expansiveness of the vision of its practitioners. This is why the travel book has persisted for nearly two centuries since its death was first announced and for more than three-quarters of a century since its demise was dramatically reproclaimed, and why today it seems as vital as ever, even though getting to almost anywhere in the world in next to no time at all is now more a chore than a challenge. The ease of travel does not restrict the vision of the obervant travel writer in the postmodern age any more than the difficulty of travel guaranteed smart observation in the premodern or modern periods.” (p.187)
“It is the ability of the traveler to experience and reflect on what is encountered along the way that is most important.” (p.187)
-David M. Wrobel, Global West, American Frontier
#
PS I would consider these among the best of the genre:
See also the Q & A’s here on Madam Mayo blog with the brilliant Shelley Armitage (Walking the Llano); Bruce Berger (A Desert Harvest, etc.); and Sara Mansfield Taber (Bread of Three Rivers, etc).
