It’s the fifth Monday of a month: time for the newsletter. Since my previous newsletter post, back in August, as usual, every Monday I have posted here to the Madam Mayo blog, with the second Monday of the month dedicated to the workshop and the fourth to a Q & A with a fellow writer.
No workshops are scheduled for the rest of this year. As for next year… it might be interesting. Meanwhile, the PDF of the handout from “Poetic Techniques to Power Up Your Fiction and Narrative Nonfiction,” the workshop I gave for the Women Writing the West virtual conference last month, is still available (free) at this link.
PODCAST
This finds me still editing the Marfa Mondays Podcast #22, a wide-ranging interview with Bill Smith about the history of Sanderson, the Cactus Capital of Texas. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, you can listen in anytime to the other 21 Marfa Mondays podcasts here.
Lynne Kelly’s TED Talk on memory. In the new year I’ll be blogging about more her jaw-dropping work on these ancient and surprisingly powerful technologies of the imaginal.
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Adriane Brown writes: “Many years ago, (2004, I believe), you taught a class at the Bethesda Writers Center called the Art and Craft of Writing. In that class, you had us write a 300 word exercise called ‘The Chef.’ You were very encouraging, and I continued to work on that piece over the years. It took a long time, but on July 30, 2020, it was published by Columbus Press as a 484 page novel titled The Café on Dream Street. It is currently for sale on Amazon, Barnes and Noble.com, and Indiebooks. You can also check out my website at www.adrianebrown.com .”
Adriane Brown, my warmest congratulations to you! Write on!
On the literary travel writing front: Count me a mammoth fan of Padraig Rooney’s The Gilded Chalet, on literary Switzerland, which I’ll be nattering on about, possibly, in my top books read in 2020 list, to be posted next month. Check out Rooney’s essay on Annemarie Schwarzenbach in Iraq, 1934.
Also, check out the trailer for Werner Herzog’s Nomad, about the incomparable literary travel writer Bruce Chatwin:
More Youtuberie: My favorite example du jour of “finding a niche.” The title is “Handy Spielen,” which I would translate from the German as “Playing with My Smartphone.” This is two German teachers teaching German to Taiwanese.
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Ja, I’ve got this German thing going on. By the way, here’s a fantastic BBC documentary on The Art of Germany.
For those who have an interest in the Mexican Revolution, as I do, an excellent conference on Jornadas Culturales de la Revolución en la Frontera:
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And, somewhat related, PBS reports on the Whitney and Mexican muralism:
“Many poets find their voice and stick to a sort of signature style their entire careers. That has never appealed to me. I’d get bored chewing on the same poem for eternity like an indigestible hunk of gristle. My eclectic nature in regards to style and voice remains driven by my eclectic reading habits. I like to read all sorts of things.”—Matthew Pennock
Last year my book, Meteor, won the Gival Press Poetry Award and, as per the contest rules, I served as the judge for this year’s award. In an impressive batch of finalists Matthew Pennock’s The Miracle Machine was the shining standout. Here’s my official blurb:
“With a craftsman’s deftest precision and a thunder-powered imagination on DaVinci wings, the author recreates a lost world within a lost world that yet—when we look—shimmers with life within our world. Elegant, wondrously strange, The Miracle Machine is at once an elegy and a celebration, tick-tock of the tao.” —C.M. Mayo
Matthew Pennock
By the way, the judge for the Gival Poetry Award does not know the names nor anything about the poets who submit their manuscripts. I only found out that the author of The Miracle Machine was Matthew Pennock—whom I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting in person—when Gival Press’s editor, Robert Giron, let me know by email. Well, it turns out that, no surprise, I had selected the work of one very accomplished poet. Pennock received his MFA from Columbia University and his PhD from the University of Cincinnati. His poems have been widely published in literary magazines, including Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, Western Humanities Review, Guernica, New York Quarterly, and LIT, and his first book, Sudden Dog (Alice James Books, 2012), won the Kinereth-Gensler Award.
Dear writerly reader, this is one of the pleasures of hosting a blog: I get to talk to people I might not otherwise. Right now, of course, the covid makes most meetings impossible anyway. So here we are, and may you find Pennock’s answers as interesting as I did. And at the end, a treat: one of his poems.
C.M. MAYO: What was the spark— what inspired you to write these poems?
MATTHEW PENNOCK: With too many of my poems, television provides the spark. I had been watching “Mysteries at the Museum,” which is like the TV version of clickbait. They start an interesting little teaser story, and you have to wait through a commercial break (watching commercials, how novel!) to get to end, and then the process starts anew. I think I’ve seen every episode.
Needless to say, I was lying there and this story came on the screen about an automaton in the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. I have always had a fascination with automata, like the miracle monk Juanelo Turriano created for Charles V, or the fraudulent Mechanical Turk, but I had not heard of this one. I did a little more research and found it on the Franklin’s website. I was delighted by the breadth and quality of the drawings it could create, and the fact that it wrote poems was the clincher. I felt I had to write a poem about the mechanical boy that wrote poems. One poem became two, and then I thought, why not a short series? The more research I did for the poems took me to new places and new characters, and the project just kept growing until it became its own book.
C.M. MAYO:As you were writing, did you have in mind an ideal reader?
MATTHEW PENNOCK: Not particularly. When I wrote the poems that comprised my first collection, I definitely knew who I was writing to, but this time was different. I wrote these for myself. By that, I mean I used them to make sense of the world as I saw it. This book began during a heated election year, not the 2016 election but the 2012. Due to the Trump era, I think many people have idealized the entirety of the Obama administration, and seemed to have forgotten how nail-bitingly close the 2012 election was until a few weeks before the denouement. That combined with the subsequent four years of obstructionist politics by Boehner and McConnell gifted us what seemed like a weekly Armageddon of debt ceiling crises and fiscal cliffs. In 2008, for a brief teasing moment, there was so much hope and potential for us to finally start tackling the ills that had so long plagued our country: healthcare, climate change, perpetual war, racism, etc. To have it all come to so little felt truly devastating. Then, of course, came Trump. I finished this book about a year into his reign, so I think that’s why the whole thing has such an elegiac tone.
I do want to make clear though that this book is not solely a political work, I think that reading of it exists, but that’s mainly because of the atmosphere in which it was scrawled, but I hope that’s only one dimension of it. I poured all the angst and joy I had into it, so the book is deeply personal for me, and delves into my struggle with so many other things: time, and its passage; love; the nature of reality, and so forth.
C.M. MAYO:Now that it has been published, can you describe the ideal reader for this book as you see him or her now?
MATTHEW PENNOCK: No, I can’t. I’m sort of a firm believer in once my work has entered the world, it has ceased to be mine. I really don’t have much control over what happens to it, and I’m fine with that. Every person who takes the time to read it has a right to see what they want in it. I really do not want to speculate who would get the most from it, or who would understand it the best. I’d inevitably be wrong, and I would feel like a parent telling my child that they must be a lawyer because I was a lawyer, or something like that.
C.M. MAYO:Which writers and poets have been the most important influences for you?
MATTHEW PENNOCK: I always struggle with this question. I don’t have any writers I return to over and over like a blessing of personal Olympians to whom I must pray. In creative writing, it’s hard to get very far before you’ve heard someone talking about “finding their voice.” A famous poet who led a workshop I was in during grad school once told me I’d never write a successful poem because I was too shifty and couldn’t stick to a consistent voice. I didn’t like that. Many poets find their voice and stick to a sort of signature style their entire careers. That has never appealed to me. I’d get bored chewing on the same poem for eternity like an indigestible hunk of gristle. My eclectic nature in regards to style and voice remains driven by my eclectic reading habits. I like to read all sorts of things.
In addition to fiction and poetry, I love narrative non-fiction about anything: history, science, politics, etc., and I get something from almost everything I read, or watch for that matter. The beautiful thing about writing a book like The Miracle Machine was that I did a good amount of research, and it took me so many places. I took influence from history books about pre-modern medicine, alchemy and mysticism; documentaries/movies like Ken Burn’s The Civil War, and Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York; Novels like Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell; and still other things like Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffman. I studied epic poetry and other long form works of poetry. Too many to list really, A few favorites: The Ring and the Book, by Robert Browning, Eugene Onegin, by Alexander Pushkin, Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto, and of course, The Dream Songs, by John Berryman.
C.M. MAYO:Which writers are you reading now?
MATTHEW PENNOCK: Books that I physically have a book mark in right now an am switching between: The Path between the Seas, by David McCullough, Snake, by Erica Wright, Dream of the Unified Field, by Jorie Graham, and I just finished Number 9 Dream, by David Mitchell and Toy Medium: Materialism and the Modern Lyric, by Daniel Tiffany, which was recommended to me by the great Timothy Donnelly after he blurbed my book.
C.M. MAYO:How has the Digital Revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?
MATTHEW PENNOCK: I am not particularly prolific. I do not write every day, and I’m often distracted by all the shows I can stream, and podcasts I can listen to. Social media has never really appealed to me, so I am okay there, but other than that, someone needs to give me some tips about how to get a little more done.
C.M. MAYO:Another question apropos of the Digital Revolution. As a poet, at what point were you working on paper? Was working on paper necessary for you or problematic?
MATTHEW PENNOCK: I kept a romantic attachment to paper for a little while, but once we got into the late aughts, and I made the permanent switch from having a home desktop to having a laptop I could carry around, writing directly on the computer became way too convenient. I can’t imagine going back to paper now. After all, the internet makes looking stuff up as you write so much easier. You never know when you might need to know an obscure fact about the health of Lake Champlain’s ecosystem, or whatnot.
C.M. MAYO:For those looking to publish, what would be your most hard-earned piece of advice?
MATTHEW PENNOCK: I don’t think I have to tell anyone that getting published is hard, the odds are long and the expense is hard to justify. I really dislike it when people try to gloss over that fact, and paint a rosy picture of the contest model. I spent nine years with Alice James Books, six of those years as Chair of the Editorial Board, and during that time, I saw around a thousand manuscripts for various contests. The best advice I can give is be adaptable, never stop looking for ways to improve your book. I saw manuscripts reappear unchanged year after year, while others would continuously change and improve. Those in the latter category would eventually break through, if not with us, then elsewhere. Good work will find a home, but sometimes, it takes longer than any of us want.
C.M. MAYO:What important piece of advice would you give yourself if you could travel back in time ten years?
MATTHEW PENNOCK: Forget about academia, go find something else to do to earn your rent.
C.M. MAYO:What’s next for you?
MATTHEW PENNOCK: I’ve been working on a manuscript for a novel. It involves an awful lot of research about foxes.
BROADWAY & ANN by Matthew Pennock From The Miracle Machine (Gival Press, 2020)
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.
The following examples of musical writing I took from what I had handy at the moment, e.g., a magazine article, a newspaper movie review, however, for the most part, from old favorites on my bookshelves. Notice how the rhythms and sounds provide energy and meaning.
There he is, in all his glory, Brad Pitt, that beautiful, chiseled chunk of celebrity manhood. You want him? Go see “Fight Club.” You want action, muscle, and atmosphere? You want boys bashing boys in bloody, living color? “Fight Club” is your flick, dude. —Desson Howe, The Washington Post. 10/1999
The first technique Howe uses here is the rise with questions, then a contrasting downward thrust with commands or assertions:
You want him? Go see “Fight Club.” You want boys bashing boys in bloody, living color? “Fight Club” is your flick, dude.
Howe also uses poetic alliteration— repeating sounds in adjacent or nearby words:
Brad Pitt, that beautiful, chiseled chunk action, muscle, and atmosphere boys bashing boys in bloody “Fight Club” is your flick
I could give many excellent reasons for my dislike of large dinner-parties, soirées, crushes, routes, conversazioni and balls. —Aldous Huxley, “The Traveller’s-Eye View”
Here Huxley also uses poetic listing, made poetic in part by his use of alliteration (crushes… conversazioni).
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Philadelphia, I was told in New York, was so slow that it was safe for people to fall out windows—they just wafted down like gossamer… —P. Gibbs, People of Destiny, 1920
Brilliant use of the arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables in this one. For more about that, see my post on Grokking Scansion.
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Further fun examples:
We knew you were wondering, and the answer is no. Mohair is not the hair of the mo. —Jonathan Raush, “The Golden Fleece”
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No typos in this one, by the way (not that I could find anyway); this is how Armstrong wrote it:
We don’t think that we could be more relaxed and have better neighbors any place else. So we stay put After all— we have’ a very lovely home. The house may not be the nicest looking front. But when one visit the Interior of the Armstrong’s home they’ see a whole lot of comfort, happiness + the nicest things. Such as that Wall to Wall Bed— a Bath Room with Mirrors Everywhere‘ Since we are Disciples to Laxatives. A Garage with a magic up + down Gate to it. And of course our Birthmark Car‘ a Cadillac’ (Yea). The Kids in our Block just thrill when they see our garage gate up, and our fine Cadillac ooze on out. They just rejoice and say, “Hi—Louis + Lucille— your car is so beautiful coming out of that rise up gate,” which knocks me out. —Louis Armstrong, In His Own Words
Tony Morrison said, “The function of freedom is to free someone else,” and if you are no longer wracked or in bondage to a person or a way of life, tell your story. Risk freeing someone else. Not everyone will be glad that you did. Members of your family and other critics may wish you had kept your secrets. Oh, well, what are you going to do? Get it all down. Let it pour out of you onto the page. Write an incredibly shitty, self-indulgent, whiney, mewling first draft. Then take out as many of the excesses as you can.” —Anne Lammott, Bird by Bird
I stepped onto the hot tarmac of Tan Son Nhut air base to the ear-splitting howl of jet fighters. These jets had an aura of aggression, with their pointed noses painted as sharks hurtling down the runway, bombs tucked under wings, afterburners aglow. The energy of the war was awesome. —Jon Swain, River of Time
…hold on with a bull-dog grip and chew and choke as much as possible — President Lincoln to General U.S. Grant
“When somebody threatens me,” he says, “I usually tell them to pack a picnic and stand in line.” — Mikey Weinstein quoted in “Marching As to War” by Alan Cooperman, Washington Post
There is about our house a need… We need someone who’s afraid of frogs. We need someone to cry when I get mad, not argue. We need a little one who can kiss without leaving egg or jam or gum. We need a girl. —George H. Bush, letter to his mother, 1953
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What are your favorite books? I would venture to suggest that those, the books you have already read and most truly enjoyed, are going to be your best teachers. I’m betting that, as you comb through them, abundant examples of musical writing will be easy to find.
What are your favorite books? I would venture to suggest that those, the books you have already read and most truly enjoyed, are going to be your best teachers.
P.S. To really make this sink into your writing mind, I would suggest that you try marking the stressed and unstressed syllables, and also identifying some of the author’s poetic techniques.
My writing assistant, Washi, bright and shiny in this rectangular image. Not yet ready for Hollywood Squares!
Thanks to the pandemic, I’ve just finished up with two virtual conferences, the American Literary Translators Association’s, which was to have been held in Tuscon, Arizona and went to Crowdcast, and Women Writing the West, slated for Colorado Springs, which ended up on Zoom. Kudos to all the many volunteers who made these conference conversions-to-virtual possible, and on relatively short notice! There was a learning curve, indeed! I did my nitpicks on their respective post-conference surveys, but in all, I’d call both conferences well done, well worthwhile to have participated in, and I am sincerely grateful.
For the American Literary Translators Association I read an excerpt from my translation of Mexican writer Rose Mary Salum’s short story “The Aunt,” and for Women Writing the West I gave a break-out workshop on poetic technique for fiction and narrative nonfiction. I also pitched a bunch of agents and editors, something I always find worthwhile for one reason or another (that would be another blog post). And there were cornucopias of readings and panels to Zoom in on. I guess that’s a new use of that verb.
Will I participate in another virtual writers conference? You betcha. I’m already planning on the Biographers International virtual conference scheduled for spring 2021.UPDATE Jan 2022: Meh.
It was weird, though. And frankly, the benefit of attending a conference isn’t quite so much in the quality of the panels, workshops, and readings— valuable and appealing as those may be— so much as it is the chance to get together with friends and colleagues old and new whether in scheduled meetings or serendipitous chats over coffee during the breaks, or say, in the evening, at a reading. For me conferences are about the people, and having to view those people boxed in Hollywood-Squares-style on a screen, and interact via computer program, and all while being recorded… Ick.
On the other hand, a real world conference can be far more expensive, time consuming, and exhausting—as you might guess if you read my report on AWP 2019. But I think that those massive conferences have had their Chicxulub. Post-corona, I wouldn’t be surprised to see AWP and some others, such as ALTA and Women Writing the West, return to their real world versions, however, on a much more modest and with tandem cheaper virtual options on offer—the latter at once appealing to new groups of participants and cannibalizing demand for the former. Many may remain virtual conferences permanently.
I took two lessons from these two recent virtual conferences, both surprising to me.
First, it’s really nasty, event after event, day after day, having to look at people’s grayish and distorted faces, swaths of oddly tilted ceilings, peculiarly placed pictures, and random household clutter. Ergo, turn the lights on, and clean the joint up! Get the camera elevated enough to avoid pointing at the ceiling (this can be accomplished by sitting the laptop on top of a fat book), and sit back a ways, so your face looks more natural. Thank you.
Second, email follow-up, always vital to making a conference worthwhile, has become even moreso.
The saddest, though unsurprising, thing to me about these virtual conferences was the fate of the book fair. Both conferences offered a virtual bookstore—at a click from each conference’s online brochure, the books of keynote speakers, award winners, panelists, could be found for sale online. But I missed both of them. By Jove, I already spend too much time sitting in front of a screen! Back when these conferences were held in the real world, however, strolling and browsing the conference book fair was always a joy.
Dear writerly reader, these virtual conferences may be here to stay, they do have some attractions and important benefits, and of course I would agree that, as I’ve heard others say many a time in recent months, they are “better than nothing.” I do not consider them an unalloyed “development,” however, for in turning us into disembodied images, and herding these images into the little boxes dictated by software programs, they seriously impoverish us as human beings.
“Traven hid his identity for many reasons, and became famous for the mystery of his identity… But people were mainly interested in his identity because of the quality of his works. He wrote 15 books and innumerable short stories, has sold more than 30 million books in more than 30 languages in more than 500 editions.” —Timothy Heyman
Last Monday this blog posted “Traven’s Triumph,” the English original of Timothy Heyman’s essay which was first published in Spanish in Mexico’s leading literary magazine, Letras Libres, in 2019, the 50th anniversary of Traven’s death. This week follows up with a Q & A with Heyman, who lives in Mexico City, where he co-administers the B. Traven literary archive together with his wife, B. Traven’s stepdaughter, Malú Montes de Oca de Heyman.
Official bio: 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.
Tim Heyman, co-manager with his wife Malú Montes de Oca de Heyman of the B. Traven Estate, delivers his keynote speech about B. Traven’s origins. For more about this historic 2019 conference at the Mexican Embassy in Berlin, click here. Photo by C.M. Mayo.
C.M. MAYO: Which is the first of the many works by Traven that you read, and what did you think of it?
TIMOTHY HEYMAN: The first Traven work I read was TheTreasure of the Sierra Madre just after marrying Malú, his stepdaughter, in 1981. The main reason was that I had heard of it. I had seen the movie and enjoyed it, but knew nothing about Traven’s biography, partly because at that time there were no satisfactory biographies in English. The only good one, by Karl Guthke, was published in English in 1991, 22 years after Traven’s death in 1969. My misty watercoloured memory is that it was a well told cowboy tale with a Chaucerian touch. As a still somewhat bookish Englishman, I had never read a Western novel, but only seen Western movies. I could not help comparing it with Chaucer’s “Pardoner’s Tale,” and considered it very well constructed with a very ingenious final twist, in many ways more interesting than Chaucer.
C.M. MAYO:Which is your favorite of all the Traven novels, and why?
TIMOTHY HEYMAN: This is a very difficult question for me, owing to my personal involvement. Malú lived with Traven from an early age, and her mother Rosa Elena Luján (Chelena) was his only wife (she married Traven in 1957, having begun to work as his translator in 1953). I have therefore been steeped in Traven’s life and work for a long time. More recently, when there was the first ever Traven exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City in 2016, I understood better the dimension of his life and work (looking at the show as an outsider). I became even more interested in him and realized I was in a unique position to study him, both because I know something about German culture (including the language) and because I have privileged access to his Estate.
Like many, I was intrigued by the “mystery” and began by piecing together his life from his work, and his work from his life. I have come up with what might be considered an original synthesis of proofs of the identity he revealed to Esperanza Lopez Mateos, his translator, and the cousin of his best friend in Mexico, the cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa. I believe that there is strong evidence of Figueroa’s revelation that he was Moritz Rathenau, the illegitimate son of Emil Rathenau (1838-1915), one of the most important businessmen during the era of Kaiser Wilhelm. Rathenau founded the first and most important electricity conglomerate, AEG, in Germany in 1888. His legitimate son, Walther Rathenau (1867-1922) succeeded him as head of AEG and became Foreign Minister of Germany in 1922, the most successful Jew in German political history, until his assassination in June of that year by a group of antisemitic far right activists, a seminal event that was considered the beginning of the Holocaust in Germany. This provenance would make Traven a member of the one of the most important families in Germany and could also shed important light on his work.
Traven hid his identity for many reasons, and became famous for the mystery of his identity, all of which I analyze in an article that was published in Letras Libres, a leading Mexican literary magazine, in 2019 to commemorate the 50thanniversary of his death in 1969. But people were mainly interested in his identity because of the quality of his works. He wrote 15 books and innumerable short stories, has sold more than 30 million books in more than 30 languages in more than 500 editions. More than 8 novels have been turned into movies or TV series, mainly in three languages, English, German and Spanish.
As I have explored his life and work more deeply, I have come to the conclusion that Traven is a genius. Extraordinarily versatile in word and deed, he was larger than life, and did not only deal with different subjects, but different genres, beginning with short stories, moving to novels, and then in the latter part of his life to the relatively new art form of the cinema, which was emerging in Germany in the 1920s when he was still living there. Not coincidentally, the epicenter of quality cinema transferred from Berlin to Hollywood, dominated by Central European emigrés, in the early 1930s, at a time when he was living not too far away in Mexico.
In response to your original question, if we think of creative people who we call “geniuses” it becomes difficult to choose a favorite. What is your favorite work by Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Mozart, Beethoven, or Picasso? In any art form, most geniuses’ work is divided either by genre or by period. In the case of Shakespeare, therefore, it might be more sensible to ask which is your favorite comedy, tragedy or sonnet. In the case of painters or composers, maybe we should ask which period you prefer, Beethoven’s first two symphonies (his first period), his middle symphonies (3 to 8), or his last, glorious one (9): idem for Mozart, or Picasso.
Traven is different from the geniuses I have mentioned above in terms of his development in time and space. When he was Ret Marut in Germany (1882-1923), he was an actor, director, and sometime writer of short stories, plays and novels, then became a political activist and producer of an anarchist magazine. That was temporally almost exactly the first half of his life. When he became B. Traven (1924-1969), and burst on to the literary scene in Germany, he was a fully-fledged writer, having been shocked into fusing his personal experience with his pent-up literary genius.
I consider the best (i.e., my favorite) works by B. Traven to be The Death Ship (published 1926), The Cotton Pickers (1926), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,and the six books of the Mahogany cycle (1930-1940).
The Death Ship is clearly autobiographical and tracks his voyage from Germany to Mexico. But it elevates the personal story to a discussion of identity in the modern world: the lack of the papers necessary to move from one country to another, the power of the state over the individual through petty bureaucracy, the plight of migrants who are victims of both bureaucrats and employers, the general theme of exploitation of the lower classes by unscrupulous employers. The reality and metaphor of the merchant marine is an extreme example of the riskiness of life and employment, as the hero is subject to the arbitrariness not only of countries and companies, but also of the climate. The book has a hero, Gerald Gales (beginning the constant use of the storm metaphor) and a plot, the hero’s journey to a destination, which is made deliberately ambiguous. The narration is spiced with humor, satire and savage criticism of the way the world is organized. Although in the end, apparently, the protagonist survives an extraordinary shipwreck, described in tremendous, realistic detail in the book’s climax, through its overall theme and tone, it could be considered a tragedy.
The Cotton Pickers is also autobiographical, about what happens to the hero when he arrives in Mexico. A hobo, a vagabond, he tries his hand at everything, whatever he can, in and around the town of Tampico, a magnet for many people from around the world because of its oil boom. The book describes how he tries five jobs: cotton picker, oilfield roustabout, cattle driver, baker and waiter. The skills required for each job are described in minute detail as is the socioeconomic reality of each job and the worker’s relationship with his boss, who typically exploits him. The humor, satire and social criticism remain, but because of the subtle irony of its ending this book could be considered a comedy.
Taking the two books together, if The Death Ship is Traven’s Iliad, The Cotton Pickers is his Odyssey.
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, on rereading, is more than a Western novel with a Chaucerian twist. It is an extension of The Cotton Pickers, with a vagabond hero, not autobiographical, but also set initially in Tampico. Having tried everything, he decides on gold prospecting, forms a group of three to start a business (a mine) in the middle of nowhere. Fraught with peril due to inclement conditions and the ubiquity of Mexican bandidos, the group find the gold, mine it, hide their trove, bring it down from the mountain in spite of the bandits, then lose everything. A classic novel, it became a classic movie.
The six Mahogany books are not autobiographical. They describe with extraordinary empathy the conditions in and around the Monterías, logging camps, in the state of Chiapas, where Traven (having been on an expedition to Chiapas in 1926) returned to the southernmost state of Mexico and spent most of his time there in the 1930s. Before reading them, it might seem difficult to imagine how Traven could write 6 books, apparently on the same subject: the exploitation of Indian workers in the Monterias (Carreta; Government; March to the Montería; Trozas; Rebellion of the Hanged; General from the Jungle). But each book focuses on a different aspect, normally with a different hero or heroine, although there is some overlap. Carreta on the oxcart drivers and on how they drive the oxcarts to the Monteria, Government on how the state, the towns, and the monterias are managed and how the workers are treated, March to the Monteria on how and why workers are recruited and how they are literally driven to the Monterias, Trozas on how the logs are moved from the monterias to the river, then down the river to their port of embarkation to be taken to world markets, Rebellion of the Hanged on how the workers eventually get their revenge on their bosses, and General from the Jungle on how they march back to civilization led by a natural general from among their number and defeat their bosses’ enablers, taking over haciendas and towns. Meanwhile, there are links through several characters between the different books, arriving at a climax with the last two books when the workers take over. The series forms an epic masterpiece.
C.M. MAYO: Which do you think is Traven’s most underappreciated novel?
TIMOTHY HEYMAN:The Cotton Pickers, for the reasons implicitly provided in the previous section.
C.M. MAYO:Have there been any notable and particular challenges in bringing his works from German into English? (Did he write all of his novels originally in German?)
TIMOTHY HEYMAN: Traven originally wrote his novels in German, for the German public. His first novel, The Cotton Pickers (Der Wobbly in German), was originally serialized in Vorwärts, the newspaper of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) in 1925. It was published the following year 1926 as a book, as was The Death Ship by the Büchergilder Gutenberg. Büchergilder was a publishing house and book club set up in August 1924 by the Educational Society of German Book Printers (Bildungsverband der deutschen Buchdrucker). In the words of Guthke his biographer, “Büchergilde not only ‘made’ Traven – Traven also made the Büchergilde.” Büchergilde gained its greatest visibility in the literary world as the publisher of B. Traven. By the end of the 1920s 100,000 copies of The Death Ship were in print and by 1936the total circulation of Traven’s works in German alone was half a million, covering the German, Austrian and Swiss markets. This was considered an extraordinary success, not least because Traven’s books were not typical “adventure” stories but had social and political content.
When Hitler came to power in 1933, the German market dried up, because Traven’s books were banned and Büchergilder was forced to emigrate to Switzerland. Traven had already considered the US in 1929 and signed a deal with Doubleday for the rights to the US and British markets not only for the books but also significantly for film and theater. After various disagreements, mainly about marketing strategy where he preferred anonymity and did not want to be “hawked like cigarettes, car tires, toilet soap, toothpaste, and the latest mattresses,” he bought back the rights from Doubleday. Then, in 1933, he was discovered by Alfred A. Knopf and reached an agreement with him to publish his books in English. There is an extraordinary exchange of letters between Knopf and Traven in our archive which demonstrates that Traven was not an easy author to deal with, as he set the conditions of their collaboration.
Traven translated his own books into English. He was lucky to have Bernard Smith as his skilled and sympathetic editor at Knopf, and Traven gave Knopf permission that Smith could edit his books if grammatical, syntactic or orthographic changes had to be made. Smith considered the text so Germanic that he had to “treat” at least 25 percent of the text. Meanwhile, Traven in order to preserve his anonymity (as not German) insisted that his books be stated as being “the English originals.” Meanwhile it is clear from the English texts that Traven’s mother tongue was not English, although he spoke it well, adding strength to my view that his mother was a native English speaker (Gabriel Figueroa stated that his biological mother was an Irish actress, Helen Mareck).
C.M. MAYO: The new editions of B. Travens’ novels just out with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, did these involve new translations from the German? Can you talk about this in any detail?
TIMOTHY HEYMAN: Two books were recently published as ebooks by Farrar Straus this July 2020, the first ever ebooks in English, as part of our agreement to make all his works available in English as ebooks over the next 18 months: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Aslan Norval, his last novel (1960). Treasure was also published as a Picador paperback. Treasure is the original Traven translation edited by Smith for Knopf in the 1930s. We are excited that Farrar Straus decided, as part of the package, to publish Aslan for the first time ever in English, fifty years after Traven’s death: imagine “discovering” today an unpublished novel by George Orwell, or Ernest Hemingway! It was translated by Anabel Aliaga-Buchenau, Professor of German at the University of North Carolina.
C.M. MAYO:Of all Traven’s novels, which one do you think best stands the test of time– and has the chance to be read into the deep future?
TIMOTHY HEYMAN: The novels which I mention (above) as my favorites.
C.M. MAYO:Do you think Aslan Norval will stand the test of time?
TIMOTHY HEYMAN: The book is unlike any of the other novels written by Traven. It is neither about the oppressed or unemployed white men, as the case with Cotton Pickers, Death Ship and Treasure (written in the 1920s), or the Mahogany cycle about oppressed indigenous people in Southern Mexico (written in the 1930s). It is about a young, rich, American girl in her twenties with experience in Hollywood (married to an older man), who wants to build a canal across the United States and hires an engineer, a Korean War veteran, to help her. The ambiance is very US 1950s, when Traven wrote the book and it is a wry satirical commentary on US capitalism, politics and foreign policy at the time. It is a 50s period piece, somewhere between a Cary Grant comedy, and a film noir. Traven became friendly with Bogart on the set of Treasure in 1947 and, quite possibly, might have imagined casting his wife Lauren Bacall (who was also on the set) in an Aslan movie. I enjoyed it and found it particularly interesting as it is autobiographical and reminiscent of Traven’s first unpublished book, The Torch of the Prince written in German under his earlier pseudonym Ret Marut, about an engineer who wants to build a railway in Vietnam, set in 1900, the time when Marut travelled in the Far East. Coming back to your original question, 3 months after publication, it is probably too early to say whether it will stand the test of time among the reading public in general.
C.M. MAYO:Having handled his vast correspondence, what is your sense of Traven as a creative entrepreneur?
TIMOTHY HEYMAN: Traven was an entrepreneur in many ways. In Germany, he first appears under the name of Ret Marut as an actor, based mainly around Cologne and Düsseldorf but also with a travelling theater company. He also appears to have done some directing. When he settled in Düsseldorf with an important theater company from 1913 to 1915, he was closely involved in the formation of a theater school. At the museum of that theater I personally examined the prospectus he wrote for the school, specifying the school’s curriculum, what was required of the teachers, and who could be the donors. He was clearly involved in the design of the cover of the prospectus. After the beginning of WWI, he moved in 1915 from Düsseldorf to Munich, and became more involved in political activism, having become a declared anarchist. He started an anarchist magazine Der Ziegelbrenner which he started publishing from his Munich apartment in Clemensstrasse 84 in 1917. Following his escape from the death sentence in Munich on May 1, 1919, he continued publishing it when he went underground until 1921. As publisher, he was responsible not only for the content which he wrote entirely himself, but also for design, printing, distribution and finance.
When Traven arrived in Mexico in 1924, he earned a living in the ways described in The Cotton Pickers. Meanwhile, he already began to write short stories, some of which were published in Vorwärts before the serialization of The Cotton Pickers. After establishing his publishing relationship with Büchergilder in 1925, he is continually interested in the sales of the books and even initiates methods of interesting his readers in Mexico, by offering prizes consisting of Mexican artefacts such as necklaces and dolls, which he mentions in his letters to the publishers. We have some of these objects in the Traven archive.
The Doubleday deal struck in 1929 (mentioned above) shows that Traven was already careful not only to grant literary rights, but also rights to movie and theater versions. In his correspondence during the 1930s interest is shown in adapting his works to these media. When war broke out in Europe in 1939, Traven realized that he could not rely only on the US market. Coincidentally he was approached by Esperanza Lopez Mateos, who had read one of his books in English, and wanted to translate him into Spanish. His initial misgivings were overcome when she sent him a translation into Spanish of The Bridge in the Jungle. He liked it so much that it was his first authorized translation into Spanish and published in Mexico in 1941. Esperanza then became his official translator and translated most of his books from English into Spanish, until her death in 1951.
Traven had for a long time wanted to make films out of his novels and Esperanza introduced him to her cousin Gabriel Figueroa, the most important Mexican cinematographer until that time, and it was through Figueroa that Traven made the contacts in Hollywood that led to the making of the movie in 1947 by John Huston of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, starring Humphrey Bogart and Walter Huston, John’s own father, which won 3 Oscars in 1948.
“it was through Figueroa that Traven made the contacts in Hollywood that led to the making of the movie in 1947 by John Huston of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, starring Humphrey Bogart and… which won 3 Oscars in 1948.
Following that breakthrough year, Traven was able to realize his dream of turning several more of his works into movies as filmscripts, in both English, German and Spanish. His most important German movie was of The Death Ship (1959) starring Horst Buchholz and Elke Sommer directed by Georg Tressler, long considered a cult masterpiece. His most important movie in Spanish was Macario (1960), which was the first Mexican movie ever to be nominated for the Oscar for best movie made in a foreign language. Details of the negotiations for these movies are in the archive.
During the 1950s, Traven complemented the various entrepreneurial skills he had already shown, producing material, adapting it to different genres, expanding into different markets, translating into different languages, surviving changes of publishers, representatives and translators, by beginning a proactive marketing campaign for his works with the publication of the BTNews in English and BTMitteilungen in German, that regularly informed the public about his works.
C.M. MAYO:Traven really must be considered a Mexican novelist. Can you talk a little about his attitudes towards and feelings about his adopted country?
TIMOTHY HEYMAN: Having been German as Ret Marut until he arrived in Mexico in 1924, Traven officially obtained papers as a Mexican citizen in 1951. So technically he was both a German and Mexican writer. If we were to take his beliefs into account as expressed in The Death Ship, he did not believe in nationalities or nationalisms, but would probably have considered himself a “universal” writer, or global in today’s terms.
Meanwhile, it is clear from his life and his writings that he loved Mexico. He liked it, first of all, as a place. He had acquired an affinity for the tropics as in his seafaring days as a very young man (until 1907) he had travelled by boat to the Far East. From his first unpublished novel The Torch of the Prince (Die Fackel des Furstens) it is likely that he spent quite a long time in Vietnam. He continued to eat with chopsticks when he made a home with Malú’s family from 1957 until his death in 1969. After living in Tampico in the 1920s, Traven spent most of the 1930s in Chiapas. As Mexico City filled up with emigrés from Europe in the late 1930s and during WWII Traven bought a property in Acapulco (Parque Cachú) and spent most of the 1940s there. He returned to live in Mexico City in the 1950s and 1960s.
“He loved Mexico… After living in Tampico in the 1920s, Traven spent most of the 1930s in Chiapas. As Mexico City filled up with emigrés from Europe in the late 1930s and during WWII Traven bought a property in Acapulco (Parque Cachú) and spent most of the 1940s there. He returned to live in Mexico City in the 1950s and 1960s.”
It is clear that Traven formed an enduring affection for the Mexican people, and showed uncommon empathy for their lives and feelings, as demonstrated in his novels, the most touching being Bridge in the Jungle and Macario, with the extraordinary healing scene in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre also particularly memorable.
Traven was notoriously a recluse. But shortly after arriving in Tampico in 1924, he had gone to Mexico City in 1926 and studied Mexican culture at the UNAM, Mexico’s national university, and made several friendships there and in the city. We know that his friends in the 1920s included Edward Weston, the photographer, along with Weston’s girlfriend, Tina Modotti, and the two of them taught him photography: we had a collection of Modotti photos in the Traven Estate which is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. This enabled him to be the official photographer of the UNAM expedition to Chiapas in 1926, and to produce his own excellent photographs (we have more than 1,000 negatives in our archive). His enduring interest in technology (supporting my belief about his parentage) is attested by his fascination with flying (he took flying lessons in the early 1930s in the US, and we have an airplane manual of that period in our archive). Through Chelena, he was friendly with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo as well as David and Angelica Siqueiros and other intellectuals such as the playwright Rodolfo Usigli. Through Esperanza Lopez Mateos he became close to her brother Adolfo, who was President of Mexico from 1958 to 1964, and had a direct telephone to the presidency installed in Traven’s house. Through Gabriel Figueroa, her cousin, he was friendly with many members of the Mexican film community.
“We know that his friends in the 1920s included Edward Weston, the photographer, along with Weston’s girlfriend, Tina Modotti, and the two of them taught him photography“
Finally, when Traven married Chelena, Malú’s mother, in 1957, he considered her two daughters, Rosa Elena (Chele) and Malú as his own, and they considered him their father. He underscored his stormy life by constantly referring to storms, not just in The Death Ship, his first important novel, but also when he formed a publishing company in 1943 with Esperanza Lopez Mateos, to be called Tempestad (storm). As if to stress his final tranquility he referred to his final home as a ship, he was the “skipper,” Rosa Elena was “first” (mate), Chele “second” and Malú “third,”
In an unpublished letter to Malú who was studying in Paris, written in 1967, he sums up his life:
“My dear Malú. Again you’ll have to put up with these crow’s feet which I’ve to use in communicating with you because as I told you before I don’t want to molest that old machine which has been so very faithful for many years, now on the high seas, now in the very midst of dense jungle, now with heavy rainstorms pouring down on the poor thing, that’s so very tired of hard work during so many years.”
In the same letter, referring to Malu’s travels in Europe, he says
“There is nothing like Mexico. If you didn’t know it before, you know it now.”
C.M. MAYO:Are there plans you can share for the Traven archive?
TIMOTHY HEYMAN: We plan to use the archive for at least the next two years to be able to write the definitive biography that he deserves and perhaps turn it into a movie or a TV series. Meanwhile we are exploring alternatives for the Traven archive in the three obvious countries: Mexico, Germany and the United States. Our decision about which institution should house the archive will depend on several factors: capability for storage and conservation, ability and interest to conduct continuing research into his life and work, ability to provide access and encourage interest in his life and work among the broadest possible public.
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> Learn more about B. Traven and his works at the official B. Traven website www.btraven.com
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.
Stressed, unstressed: Not all syllables are the same. My writing assistants model the concept.
Knowing how to work with scansion, whew, rocket fuel! Not all but many of the following examples are taken from Paul Fussell’s Poetic Meter & Poetic Form and John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction. The former is fairly technical, but serious fiction writers will find the chapter on scansion worth the price of the book. As for The Art of Fiction, the bit on scansion is an itsy bitsy bit, however, I consider Gardner required reading for any aspiring fiction writer. I read The Art of Fiction so many times that my copy fell to pieces and I had to buy another. Nonetheless, over the years, many of my writing students have told me, and oftentimes bitterly, that they found Gardner’s tone so arrogant as to induce a writing block! So you have that caveat. (But if Gardner’s arrogant tone is all it takes to induce a writing block…. hmmm… that will be another post.)
Scansion = representation of poetic rhythms by visual symbols ̆ = unstressed syllable / = stressed syllable
Because scansion marks are difficult to insert in this program, where we would expect to find a “/” above a stressed syllable, I have underlined that syllable instead and left the unstressed syllables unmarked.
Favors to none, to all she smiles extends; Oft she rejects, but never once offends.
If this is wigging you out already, trust me, there’s nothing too complicated about this. As you read a line aloud, just notice which syllables naturally sound a little stronger and maybe a little louder? Those are your stressed syllables. Everything else, those would be unstressed. And yes, sometimes some syllables can be stressed or unstressed depending on how you choose to read it. There are gray areas aplenty. La de da.
To slow down, make it heavy:
For this, following Fussell, you’ll want “a succession of stressed syllables without the expected intervening unstressed syllables” – for example:
When Ajax strives some rock’svastweight to throw The line too labours, and thewordsmoveslow
To go fast, lightly, and/or easily:
Here what works, says Fussell, is “a succession of unstressed syllables without the intervening stressed syllables” – for example:
Ripple on the surface of the water – were salmon passing under – different from the ripples caused by breezes – Gary Snyder “Ripples on the Surface”
Mirror the rhythm:
“all the waves of the billows of the sea” — H Melville, Moby Dick
To show something sudden / different / new:
Fussell: “an unanticipated reversal in rhythm”– for example:
The pig thrashed and squealed, then, panting, trembling, lay helpless. –John Gardner, The Art of Fiction
No scansion marks on the following. Try reading these aloud, listening carefully for for rhythms and the changes in rhythm– they will be obvious to your ear.
…the roller coaster’s track dips and curves like a barn swallow. Just now, a train full of flushed riders climbs, swerves, tilts on its side, then plunges on the rail’s fixed flight through the park… –Lynda McDonnell, “Veblen and the Mall of America”
I could not bear upper Madison Avenue on weekday mornings… because I would see women walking Yorkshire terriers and shopping at Gristede’s, and some Veblenesque gorge would rise in my throat. –Joan Didion, “Goodbye to All That”
Gorge! Well!
To conclude, here is an old poem with especially clear and energetic rhythms. Note the stressed and unstressed syllables:
THE FAIRIES by William Allingham W.B. Yeats, ed., Fairy & Folk Tales of Ireland
Up the airy mountain Down the rushy glen We daren’t go a-hunting For fear of little men; Wee folk, good folk, Trooping all together; Green jacket, red cap And white owl’s feather!
As you revise the draft of your short story or novel, and especially as you put your eye on crucial descriptions and/or actions, or lines of dialogue, see if by marking the stressed and unstressed syllables, you can identify where the rhythms work well and where your text might be rearranged or rewritten to make the rhythms more apt, which is to say, more congruent with what you mean to show, and thereby more vivid for your reader.
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.
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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.
