The White Rose: a novel by B Traven

After reading this I have only one Traven novel yet to read. Actually two, but his final novel that came some years after the others is not yet translated to English and I don’t read German. I clearly really like his stuff.

The White Rose is a study in contrasting worldviews. The main players, symbols of their classes, are an indigenous man who through family tradition holds the title to a large Mexican hacienda. This is presented as more of a long standing commune rather than a feudal set up. It’s as if the egalitarian, sharing, roots from hunter-gatherer times have somehow survived in this instance into a stable, and atypically fair, agricultural system. Things are shared and it is taken as a given that the title holding family has a duty to the other families as caretakers of the property. They are not seen as winners entitled to profit from this ownership of things that everyone shares. All the people are very close to the land.
They are of the land, the human creatures who emerge from the land, live by it, and return to it in constant cycles of renewal.

The contrasting entity is a USA businessman who has maneuvered himself into a position of enormous power heading an international oil company. He is portrayed in a way that highlights his need for status among his peers. Part of his aura involves his outside women and their needs. The fact that he has outside of marriage women is seen as a positive status symbol among the board members of his corporation. He has to procure symbols of wealth for his main lover. She wants a nice car, but then it needs a garage, but the garage must be attached to a house and not an ordinary house, a mansion. So our oil man has to go through a lot of money for this stuff. I also want to mention that the woman is shown as being more intelligent, and better educated than her lover. She is not a dumb airhead floozy like we see often in movies about this sort of situation, like in Citizen Kane. The big time businessman is not at all involved in the land, other people take care of all that. He is a modern North American. Except he needs land for drilling oil.

And he needs the hacienda, Rosa Blanca, The White Rose.

There is the contrast and the conflict of the novel.

The industrialist is driven by emotions: Fear, Greed, how others see him.
The indian is contained in love for the land and the people and things from it and the wish to see it go on for the sake of the people of the past who took care of it for the people of the present. They must care for it to assure the survival of those to come.

In The White Rose Traven approaches storytelling devices of mystery and suspense, the day just might be saved. It was good to hope that the miserable inevitable might somehow, through law, caring people, not occur.

Although it is clear where Traven’s heart lies in the conflict, his style is not particularly agitprop. He is not rallying comrades behind a particular banner. He is rather coolly showing the situation from various sides. There is no feeling of soft peddling the issues. He describes in detail what is going on rather matter of factly no matter how horrible, cruel, unjust, or plain nasty, that might be.

I like this tone. I feel I am asked to go along and look through his eyes rather than be verbally rhetorically persuaded. I read him with a recurring sarcastic edge that I think he intended.

B Traven was an outsider. The man who only wanted to be known for the work was not a Mexican and although distorting whatever his real biography was with USA root claims, he was not an American. Perhaps witnessing first hand events in German in the early part of the 20th Century and then landing in Mexico in the mid 1920s and absorbing that world, doesn’t put one in a mind that “if just this or that happened all would finally be well”.

He presents people who have lived a certain way for many years being suddenly confronted and challenged by international modernity, the machine that rode the rails that conquered Norte was on the next little  stop in it’s global voyage, and gathering endless momentum.

The book is from 1929. Surely I would look upon it as quaint and a period piece, if he offered me an easy solution to the complicated intricacies of modern global life that dazzles us with wonders and the endless brutalities that come with it.

We are in uncharted extremely complicated territory and anyone who is offering an answer to making things better, like the old days, or some glowing vision, ought to be viewed with suspicion.
Nobody knows what to do.

The Death Ship

The Death Ship
a novel by B Traven

Traven writes about work. Most of his novels involve people at work. This is not the usual work, but work at its most difficult, at its most exploitive of the worker. Work that takes full advantage of a difficult human situation, using it to enslave for the profit of a few. This is not kicking a person when they are down, although that is also a feature of this work environment, but first making a slave of them.  
These extreme conditions represent a broader situation that allows Traven to comment indirectly on all work.

In The Death Ship, we have a USA sailor on a nice ship with decent work, food and housing. He polishes brass, he paints, and paints again. This is a first person novel. This man is telling us his story. He goes to shore in Antwerp and for one reason or another the good ship leaves without him. He left his papers on the boat. He is suddenly a man without a country, a poor sailor who cannot prove his US citizenship, who is unwanted and deported from every European country he is forced into by the previous one.
Here the narrator points out that things were not always like this. Before the Great War, meaning WWI, there was less of this bureaucratic, passport necessary, control. He tells us that all this came in after the war. This novel was written in the 1920s less that 10 years after the war. What we know of the mysterious Traven is that he was a man in exile like in the novel, adrift across the globe and later to settle in Mexico.

Back to the story of the novel. Without papers, due the regulations, he cannot sign onto another ship. He is an unfortunate with no options ripe for the virtual slavery and the exploitation he eventually falls into on The Death Ship.

The work on the ship, the conditions, are the worst. He is a coal hauler. He brings the coal in the steam powered machine from where it is stored to the fireman who feeds the six coal fired furnaces that boil the water which creates the steam which powers the ship. It is extremely hot There is no electric light on the ship. It is an old piece of junk that has not been retrofitted with such modern luxuries. The coal hauler is at the bottom of the pecking order. He has to deliver the meals to another worker who doesn’t work as hard. The coal job also has frustrating details that make it worse. The heavy steel bar grates on which the coal fire lives often fall off the old rotted away ledge on which they rest and fall into the lower part of the furnace. He has to work with the fireman to reposition the hot heavy bars which takes him away and behind in the hauling as the steam drops due to lack of fire in the furnace in which they work. Traven goes into detail of this operation in which often other of the grate bars fall while they are attempting to reposition the first.

The ship gives him a wooden bunk in which to sleep, but no bedding, no pillows, sheets, blankets, no soap to wash up with. He is continuously black with coal dust.

In this and others of his fine and unique novels Traven presents his point of view on this phase of the globalized work situation on the ground and on the seas. Unquestionably in sympathy with the worker and presenting us with stories and situations where we can feel the worker’s pain, frustration, entrapment, and utter hopelessness, he comments about it all being at service of profit for some unseen remote wealthy businessman or business conglomeration, he doesn’t present a simple solution. He is not telling us that if the “Worker of the World Unite” all will be well, because he sees that picture clearly in an unblinking way. He knows that the workers of the world are not going to unite and if they do some among them will exploit that situation so that it will still not be set right with universal justice. While he tells us that the organized IWW ships are far better and more justly run he doesn't see much hope in the regionalism of the workers themselves to really get together to make a better world for all.
Yet these novels do not give one a feeling of demoralize cynical hopelessness. They are so solid with humanity that keeps going no matter what, that they override the horror of the situation with the human spirit to go on. I think that is the reason I love his novels. He doesn’t give me some pipe dream hope, pie in the sky, that I might be inspired by for a moment but ultimately not believe in, but presents me with humanity that adapts and will not give up on life as it is as hard as it is without the devices of melodrama.
This also shows me how relatively easy my own situation is and helps defeat the devolution into self-pity. This is the greatness of B Traven.

I still suggest The Bridge in the Jungle for a Traven beginner. It is not about work but is a very human story set among indigenous people in Mexico who are oddly affected by modernity.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre: A Novel by B Traven

I love B Traven’s work, the 6 novels of the jungle series are unusual and terrific in their vivid illustration of the exploitation of labor in virtual slave conditions and the power in the human spirit to keep going and struggling.
I finally got around to reading Treasure. It took me so long simply because it is the most well known. It is well know, at least the title, because of the 1948 Oscar winning film John Huston adaptation starring Humphry Bogart and Walter Huston. It’s a fine adventure movie for sure. Of course I should have known that the novel would be so much more than this adventure movie which is essentially about greed and the lust for sand that can be exchanged for wealth.
Well, the novel is so much more. Even though it came earlier than the jungle series books it is pure Traven for sure. The mixture of boy adventure gold mining tale with Traven’s sort of Left anarchism social and political philosophy and admiration for the indigenous people of the region worked just fine for me. It is a wonderful book.
The action is interrupted a few times during the course of the story, as the characters tell tales of legionary  previous mines. One of these stories that Howard tells before they begin their mining adventure goes on for 30 pages.
Huston’s Oscar winning script for the movie stayed fairly close to the plot of the novel with some obvious movieish simplification changes.
There is no other medium that can get inside the heads of the characters like a novel can. That is why I love to read.