Dead Letters: The Agent

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent

They sent me into the mountains above San José de Purúa in the spring of 1948 to find a man who had spent twenty years making sure no one could.

His name, on the books, was B. Traven. He had written The Death Ship and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and ten other novels that sold in the millions across a dozen languages, and nobody who published him or paid him could tell you who he was. He conducted his business by mail, from postal boxes in Mexico that moved when you got close. He answered questions about the work and none about the man. He had written once that a creative person should have no biography other than his books, and where the rest of us only say a thing like that, he had gone and done it, so thoroughly that the sentence was the single fact anyone could prove about him.

John Huston was down there turning Sierra Madre into a picture, with Bogart, and Huston had done what everyone eventually did. He wrote to the author and asked him to the set. Traven did not come. A week into shooting a man arrived in his place, small and thin, with a long nose and a face that gave nothing back, and he carried a letter. The letter said the author was unwell and could not travel, and that its bearer, a Mr. Hal Croves, held his full authority and would answer anything the production required. Croves stayed for the length of the shoot. He answered what he was asked, and I have never met a man who could give you so much and leave you with so little in your hand.

I put myself in his way for three weeks. He let me, with the flat patience of a man who had nowhere he would rather not be. He stood near the camera in a heat that had the rest of us wringing our shirts and watched the picture get made the way a landlord watches a tenant hang pictures, tolerant and unhurried and entirely certain whose walls they were.

On the second day I watched him stop a scene. There was a line with a bird calling in it, a bird chosen for the pleasant noise of its name, and Croves went to Huston and told him, low, that no bird of that name lived at that altitude, and that the call the scene wanted came from a different bird, and he made the sound himself, there in the dust, quietly, exactly. Huston, who took direction from no consultant living, cut the line. Croves went back to his chair. I sat with that for a long time. An agent guards a percentage. This man had reached across twenty years and a continent to defend the accuracy of a birdcall in a book most of the world had read as an adventure story, and he had done it the way you correct a thing about your own child.

After that I stopped hunting for evidence and started hunting for the seam, the place where the performance met the man. I never found it. I said to him once, walking between setups, that the novel was an angry book, and admiring about the anger, and I watched his face for the small light a man cannot help when a stranger hands him back his own conviction. Nothing lit. He allowed that the author felt strongly on such matters and kept to the third person, and the third person held against me like a wall a man leans on without noticing he leans. Another day I said, idle, watching a grip haul cable, that a man who sold what Traven sold must want a house by now, a name on a deed, a place to be found. Some men, he said, and did not look up from the ground glass, found being found more expensive than staying poor.

On the last week I asked him straight, because I had watched Huston decline to ask out of what the director called delicacy, and I have never been able to afford delicacy. I told him I believed he was B. Traven, that I would think no less of him for saying so, and that the world would think a great deal more.

His eyes stayed on me. I was watching for the small flight the eyes make when a man steps back inside himself to check the locks, and it did not come. He said he was often taken for the author. He said he had worked so long and so near the material that some of it had surely settled into his manner, and that this was a natural mistake and I should not feel foolish for it. He said he was Croves, and he said it the way you say your own name, with nothing held down underneath it. I have watched men keep a lie standing across a hundred rooms, and the work of it always shows, the way a man's arm shows the weight of a thing he is pretending is light. There was no weight in him. This is the part I have never gotten anyone to feel the way I felt it: it was not that he lied to me well. It was that there was no longer a man in there for the question to reach. Whoever had first come across the water out of a country he never named had been folded under so many others, so long ago, that asking him to produce that man was asking him to produce a stranger he had read about once. I do the opposite of what he had done. I have spent my life prying the person out from behind the book. He had spent his climbing the other way, out of the person and into the book, until there was nothing left on the near side of the paper to pry.

The shoot ended. Croves collected his authority and went down the mountain, and inside a week no one could say where, and what came apart came apart long after, when he was dead and past all asking, into more names than one man should have been able to answer to.

I never kept anything of his but the letter, and I did not keep that either, only read it twice while it sat on Huston's table, four lines in a careful, unhurried hand. It regretted that the author was unwell. It regretted that he could not appear. It commended the bearer, who would speak for him in all things, and it was signed with the name off the spines of the books, which was no one's name, which he had made up. That was the whole of the man I had gone to find, in his own hand at last: a note excusing himself from the story of his own life, carried down out of the mountains by the only person on earth qualified to deliver it.

— F.M.

Fletcher Moody is a literary correspondent. His column, "Dead Letters," covers the stranger truths of literary history. It appears when it appears.