Candido & the Capitalists

THE REBELLION OF THE HANGED (377 pp.)B. Traven Knopf ($3.50).

"Who is B. Traven?" has been one of the tantalizing literary puzzles of the last decade. Even students dedicated to unraveling the symbolism of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake will lift their noses and loose an excited bay if Traven's name is drawn across the conversation. And if, as now seems pretty certain (TIME, Aug. 16, 1948), B. Traven is the pen name of Chicago-born Berick Traven Torsvan Torsvan, 58, a shy recluse who has lived in Mexico since 1913 and runs a restaurant near Acapulco, Traven is at last in the same position as any other novelist; his fame must depend on the qualities that show up in his work, not on the personal identity that remains in hiding.

From the literary viewpoint, B. Traven can be identified with no trouble at all. In his novels, e.g., The Death Ship (1934), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1935) and The Bridge in the Jungle (1938), he has written like a man with a bug in his ear, and the bug's favorite theme is the bad old days of predatory landowners and conscienceless capitalists. Any writer who follows this theme strictly is almost bound to fill his pages with the typed, dusty characters of proletarian fiction, Mr. Moneybags the Magnate, Mr. Whip the Overseer, Mr. Steel the Informer, Mr. Dawn the Red, Miss Cominform the Workers' Belle.

Variations on a Theme. If Traven had run perfectly true to this type, his place in literature would be so low that no one would bother for a moment about his identity. He has excited interest precisely because he has played such impressive variations on his class-struggle theme. In The Death Ship (probably his best novel), his seascape of enslaved stokers struggling to keep a leaking tub afloat was drawn so well that it inflamed the reader's heart regardless of his politics. Similarly, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre sounded the rousing bell note of treasure-hunting, and the reader might take or leave Traven's views on the effect of gold on human nature.

Traven gets his best effects by using a prose of such naturalness that it gives an immediate illusion of truth-to-life. Much of what he has to say is bitter to the point of savagery; and he is capable of heightening this grimness still further by laying on strokes of humor that seem to come from the bile of a grizzly bear. Only at his worst does he ever sound like a doctrinaire hack.

The latest Traven novel to be published in the U.S., The Rebellion of the Hanged, shows both the best and the worst side of his manner. His story, set in Mexico some time before the revolution of 1910, tells how the peons used to be duped into almost lifelong servitude on the big estates and timber properties. Like a man telling an enthralling tale to children, Traven describes the plain peasant, Candido, going off to the mahogany forest to join the slave-labor gang. As a fee-greedy doctor has let his wife die, Candido has to take his two little sons along: also with him are his devoted sister and three suckling pigs which, whatever their symbolic significance may be, are the most likable piglets in contemporary literature.

The mahogany capitalists and their overseers have only one aim: to make each slave fell four tons of timber a day. They have found that flogging with a bull whip has a poor effect on physique, so instead, they "hang" the workers when necessary, i.e., leave them suspended from a tree by ropes, where red ants, ticks, chiggers and mosquitoes can liven them up. Hanging is done at night so as to add to the physical anguish "the unspeakable, inexplicable horror . . . that the Indian feels of phantoms and specters."

John Brown Heat. By midnovel, Traven has piled atrocity upon atrocity, and the doctrinaire is in full command. The villainous capitalist is playing the old, old game of raping Candido's sister. He is also happily chopping off the ears of Candido and one of his little sons. As for the workers, they are beginning to make such set speeches as: "Over the whole country the fire is spreading, the first flames are rising everywhere . . . Down with the dictatorship!"

Finally, like a man departing suddenly into a dream, Traven forgets all about his principal characters, including even the invaluable piglets, and turns his novel into a featureless mass drama which he can neither inspire nor bring to a conclusion. His Rebellion winds up as third-rate Uncle Tom's Cabin, with the debilitating difference that the slavery Traven writes about with John Brown heat has already been abolished.

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