"Last seen wearing...": The Writer Vanished

Ambrose Bierce, satirist and fantasist, seems to have stepped into one of his own stories of the uncanny when he disappeared without a trace, in Mexico.

His themes were ghosts and war; he went to Mexico to observe a war, and became a ghost.

Someone ought to write a nursery rhyme, only make it rhyme.

And if anyone is interested, there is a mediocre novel which was made into a bad movie on the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce: The Old Gringo. Elsewhere we connected Bierce and Clark Ashton Smith. There is another connection - Lovecraft. Bierce's story, "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" is cited (somewhere) as a precursor to the "Cthulu Mythos".

The best thing about the movie was the break out role for Jimmy Smits. Jane Fonda was dreadful and poor Gregory Peck appeared to be so ill he didn't even have to act sick.

I like Barbarella! (Remember The Bongos? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEITxYywcfw).

I did not know Gringo was about Bierce! That makes it interesting--I've gone off Fuentes after reading Diana: the Goddess Who Hunts Alone, about his affair with Jean Seberg. A perfect example of a completely unnecessary book.

Come on, Ben, think of a thread title for Deaths, Curious... do the honours...

I will - percolating at present.

Rimbaud vanished for awhile, but he came back for the news.

How about B. Traven? Perhaps, though, given that wikipedia describes him as "a German novelist, whose real name, nationality, date and place of birth and details of biography are all subject to dispute," it would be more accurate to say, not that he vanished, but that he was never there at all.

I recall The Man Who Was B. Traven as an entertaining bit of literary detective-work. It seemed fairly clear that the eccentric old codger who hung around the movie set of "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" passing himself off as Traven's literary agent was, in fact, the author. I think he was some sort of German socialist or anarchist named Ret Marut (or something like that) who took great pains to conceal his identity.

There's the case of Shams-i Tabrizi, last seen exiting his bff Rumi's house in December 1248.

Yes, Rumi took that rather hard.

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When I think back to the "American" stuff I consumed as a kid that was actually produced by Europeans--movie Westerns and comics by Italians, romances by Germans--I begin to feel it's America that's never been really there, built out of pure dream instead!

B. Traven was crazy popular, judging by the number of his titles I used to come across in Europe. I read several of his books as a kid, but at the time I preferred Karl May. I remember something about cotton-pickers, and something about tobacco--I preferred slave traders and bandits then.

#11

That is a wonderful example of vanishing.

Why should I seek? I am the same as
he. His essence speaks through me.
I have been looking for myself!

Rumi (transl. Coleman Barks)

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, flying alone over the Mediterranean in a tiny plane, with fuel enough only for six hours, vanished in 1944 in a reconnaissance mission.

One could say he too foreshadowed his destiny in his books--in Vol de nuit (Night flight), a pilot disappears over the Andes; in Le petit Prince, the hero lets himself be transported "back home" by death. (Suicide: by snakebite.)

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At the time I read it, I thought The Death Ship was extraordinary. A sustained seething anti-capitalism from beginning to end.

Yeah, at age twelve I didn't care for the lack of capes and swords in anti-capitalist fights.

Aware of Karl May mostly because I knew that Kafka read him, I was surprised to see, when I was last in Germany, for sale everywhere from street markets to bookshops, the complete Karl May—many, many volumes—in elegantly bound editions. I guess the buyers of these sets would be people who'd grown up on May and now have more money than they know what to do with?

Oh, I think he's still read avidly, by children. Like Asterix and Tintin, both of which are 50+ years old. And he's been a very popular children's author for more than a century, so I imagine there must be some finer editions of his works too, but what I have (and what I've seen most frequently, in bookshops or libraries) are smallish hardcovers, nicely designed, well printed, fairly nice paper--I forget the publisher, I think they just reprint in the same format, with different cover designs maybe. Yes, the complete works run to close a hundred titles, I think. I probably read about fifteen...

Last spring, in The New Yorker, there was a very interesting article about Karl May's enduring popularity in Germany. Apparently it's not just kids that love him there...

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/04/09/120409fa_fact_galchen