For Writers: Genre, Conrad Traveling, B. Traven Remembered

 One of my hodgepodges, I am afraid. Time is needed to be spent on other activities. (Like, I should be working on my fiction!)

On Genre vs Literary Magazines with Neil Clarke, EIC of Clarkesworld Magazine (Sub Club) is much more an inside publishing interview, but it may hearten writers about genre writing.

Patience, Patience (Story Club with George Saunders) is very much a piece that other writers should read. I have always been impatient, and I have been worrying about not getting to work on my fiction, so this came at the right time for me.

I’m drifting off this topic of patience a bit….although I’m really trying to suggest how we might get more of it. I’m saying that “patience” is what we have toward something we are considering quitting. But, if giving up on a piece is disallowed, what would “patience” even mean?

If, instead, we view a work-in-progress as something that wants to solve itself and just needs time – as much time as it needs – then our role becomes attending to it, no matter what – rather than, you know, standing there with a stopwatch, going, “Hello, my career, if you please.”

I appreciate Joseph Conrad much more than I did when I was young.  During my time in prison, I caught up with a few more of his books, and a biography. I think he is a slyer writer than most give him credit for being. JSTOR Dail's Joseph Conrad’s Travel Stories Weren’t Black and White refinforces my opinion.

Academic Clive J. Christie has weighed in on how British writers talked about travel in Southeast Asia in the “era of colonial retreat” during the early to mid-twentieth century.” He draws a distinction between “exoticist” writers like Conrad who “set out to evoke an ‘atmosphere,’” and the more scientifically minded authors of “essential guides…which had a sober scientific purpose.”

Yet, upon reflection, Conrad might well have been attempting to do both tasks at once—treading a fine line, and, judging from scholars’ long-running debates, succeeding.

Once upon a time, I picked up a couple of B. Traven's novels. I had seen The Treasure of Sierra Madre, and I think I knew of his mysterious history. Reading Timothy Heyman on the Incomparable Legacy of the German-Mexican Novelist B. Traven (Literal Magazine) leaves me thinking the biography is now solved. That leaves only the mystery of Elena Ferrante. I still feel the need to read B. Traven, reading the interview may give you the same feeling.

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.

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