Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics)

Home > Other > Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics) > Page 305
Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics) Page 305

by Ambrose Bierce


  COLUMBUS

  CONCERNING PICTURES

  COUNSEL FOR THE DEFENSE

  CRIME AND ITS CORRECTIVES

  DECADENCE OF THE AMERICAN FOOT

  DETHRONEMENT OF THE ATOM

  DID WE EAT ONE ANOTHER?

  DISINTRODUCTIONS

  DOGS FOR THE KLONDIKE

  EDWIN MARKHAM’S POEMS

  EMANCIPATED WOMAN

  EMANCIPATED WOMAN

  EMMA FRANCES DAWSON

  ENGLAND’S LAUREATE

  ENTER A TROUPE OF ANCIENTS, DANCING

  EPIGRAMS OF A CYNIC

  FAT BABIES AND FATE

  FETISHISM

  FIN DE SIECLE

  FOR BREVITY AND CLARITY

  FOR LAST WORDS

  FOR STANDING ROOM

  FOUR DAYS IN DIXIE

  GENIUS AS A PROVOCATION

  GEORGE THE MADE-OVER

  GODS IN CHICAGO

  HALL CAINE ON HALL CAINING

  HOW TO GROW GREAT

  HYPNOTISM

  IMMORTALITY

  IMMORTALITY

  IN THE BOTTOM OF THE CRUCIBLE

  IN THE INFANCY OF “TRUSTS”

  INDUSTRIAL DISCONTENT

  JAPAN WEAR AND BOMBAY DUCKS

  JOHN SMITH’S ANCESTORS

  LA BOULANGERE

  LUST, QUOTH’A!

  MALFEASANCE IN OFFICE

  MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF

  MODERN WARFARE

  MONSTERS AND EGGS

  MONTAGUES AND CAPULETS

  MORTUARY ELECTROPLATING

  MUSIC

  NATURA BENIGNA

  NEWSPAPERS

  ON A MOUNTAIN

  ON BLACK SOLDIERING

  ON KNOWING ONE’S BUSINESS — AN INSTANCE

  ON LITERARY CRITICISM

  ON POSTHUMOUS RENOWN

  ON PUTTING ONE’S HEAD INTO ONE’S BELLY

  ON READING NEW BOOKS

  ON THE USES OF EUTHANASIA

  OPPORTUNITY

  OUR AUDIBLE SISTERS

  OUR GRANDMOTHERS’ LEGS

  OUR SACROSANCT ORTHOGRAPHY

  PECTOLITE

  POETRY AND VERSE

  PORTRAITS OF ELDERLY AUTHORS

  POVERTY, CRIME AND VICE

  RELIGION

  REVISION DOWNWARD

  SLEEP

  SOME ASPECTS OF EDUCATION

  SOME DISADVANTAGES OF GENIUS

  SOME FEATURES OF THE LAW

  SOME PRIVATIONS OF THE COMING MAN

  STAGE ILLUSION

  SYMBOLS AND FETISHES

  THANKSGIVING DAY

  THE AGE ROMANTIC

  THE AMERICAN CHAIR

  THE AMERICAN SYCOPHANT

  THE ANCESTRAL BOND

  THE ART OF CONTROVERSY

  THE AUTHOR AS AN OPPORTUNITY

  THE BACILLUS OF CRIME

  THE BATTLE OF NASHVILLE

  THE BEATING OF THE BLOOD

  THE BLACKLIST

  THE CHAIR OF LITTLE EASE

  THE CLOTHING OF GHOSTS

  THE CRIME AT PICKETT’S MILL

  THE CRIME OF INATTENTION

  THE DEATH PENALTY

  THE DEATH PENALTY

  THE DEATH PENALTY

  THE GAME OF BUTTON

  THE GAME OF POLITICS

  THE GIFT O’ GAB

  THE HOUR AND THE MAN

  THE JAMAICAN MONGOOSE

  THE JEW

  THE KREUTZER SONATA

  THE LATE LAMENTED

  THE LION’S DEN

  THE LOVE OF COUNTY

  THE MATTER OF MANNER

  THE MIRAGE

  THE MOON IN LETTERS

  THE NATURE OF WAR

  THE NEW PENOLOGY

  THE NOVEL

  THE OPPOSING SEX

  THE PASSING OF SATIRE

  THE PASSING OF THE HORSE

  THE PRUDE IN LETTERS AND LIFE

  THE RAVAGES OF SHAKSPEARITIS

  THE REIGN OF THE RING

  THE RELIGION OF THE TABLE

  THE RIGHT TO TAKE ONESELF OFF

  THE RIGHT TO WORK

  THE RURAL PRESS

  THE S. P. W.

  THE SCOURGE OF LAUGHTER

  THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL

  THE SHORT STORY

  THE SOCIALIST — WHAT HE IS, AND WHY

  THE TURKO-GRECIAN WAR

  THE TURN OF THE TIDE

  THE TYRANNY OF FASHION

  THE VALUE OF TRUTH

  THE WAR EVERLASTING

  THERE ARE CORNS IN EGYPT

  THEY ALL DANCE

  THOUGHT AND FEELING

  TIMOTHY H. REARDEN

  TO ELEVATE THE STAGE

  TO TRAIN A WRITER

  VISIONS OF THE NIGHT

  WARLIKE AMERICA

  WAY DOWN IN ALABAM

  WHAT I SAW OF SHILOH

  WHAT OCCURRED AT FRANKLIN

  WHO ARE GREAT?

  WHY THE HUMAN NOSE HAS A WESTERN EXPOSURE

  WIT AND HUMOR

  WORD CHANGES AND SLANG

  WORKING FOR AN EMPRESS

  WRITERS OF DIALECT

  The Letters

  Bierce, c. 1895

  THE LETTERS OF AMBROSE BIERCE

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION by Bertha Clark Pope

  A MEMOIR OF AMBROSE BIERCE by George Sterling

  THE LETTERS OF AMBROSE BIERCE

  1892.

  1893.

  1894.

  1901.

  1902.

  1903.

  1904.

  1905.

  1906.

  1907.

  1908.

  1909.

  1910.

  1911.

  1912.

  1913.

  Swinnerton’s conception of Bierce

  INTRODUCTION by Bertha Clark Pope

  “The question that starts to the lips of ninety-nine readers out of a hundred,” says Arnold Bennett, in a review in the London New Age in 1909, “even the best informed, will assuredly be: ‘Who is Ambrose Bierce?’ I scarcely know, but I will say that among what I may term ‘underground reputations’ that of Ambrose Bierce is perhaps the most striking example. You may wander for years through literary circles and never meet anybody who has heard of Ambrose Bierce, and then you may hear some erudite student whisper in an awed voice: ‘Ambrose Bierce is the greatest living prose writer.’ I have heard such an opinion expressed.”

  Bierce himself shows his recognition of the “underground” quality of his reputation in a letter to George Sterling: “How many times, and during a period of how many years must one’s unexplainable obscurity be pointed out to constitute fame? Not knowing, I am almost disposed to consider myself the most famous of authors. I have pretty nearly ceased to be ‘discovered,’ but my notoriety as an obscurian may be said to be worldwide and everlasting.”

  Anything which would throw light on such a figure, at once obscure and famous, is valuable. These letters of Ambrose Bierce, here printed for the first time, are therefore of unusual interest. They are the informal literary work — the term is used advisedly — of a man esteemed great by a small but acutely critical group, read enthusiastically by a somewhat larger number to whom critical examination of what they read seldom occurs, and ignored by the vast majority of readers; a man at once more hated and more adored than any on the Pacific Coast; a man not ten years off the scene yet already become a tradition and a legend; whose life, no less than his death, held elements of mystery, baffling contradictions, problems for puzzled conjecture, motives and meanings not vouchsafed to outsiders.

  Were Ambrose Bierce as well known as he deserves to be, the introduction to these letters could be slight; we should not have to stop to inquire who he was and what he did. As it is, we must.

  Ambrose Bierce, the son of Marcus Aurelius and Laura (Sherwood) Bierce, born in Meiggs County, Ohio, June 24, 1842, was at the outbreak of the Civil War a youth without formal education, but with a mind already trained. “My father was a poor farmer,” he once said to a friend, “and
could give me no general education, but he had a good library, and to his books I owe all that I have.” He promptly volunteered in 1861 and served throughout the war. Twice, at the risk of his life, he rescued wounded companions from the battlefield, and at Kenesaw Mountain was himself severely wounded in the head. He was brevetted Major for distinguished services; but in after life never permitted the title to be used in addressing him. There is a story that when the war was over he tossed up a coin to determine what should be his career. Whatever the determining auguries, he came at once to San Francisco to join his favorite brother Albert — there were ten brothers and sisters to choose from — and for a short time worked with him in the Mint; he soon began writing paragraphs for the weeklies, particularly the ARGONAUT and the NEWS LETTER.

  “I was a slovenly writer in those days,” he observes in a letter forty years later, “though enough better than my neighbors to have attracted my own attention. My knowledge of English was imperfect ‘a whole lot.’ Indeed, my intellectual status (whatever it may be, and God knows it’s enough to make me blush) was of slow growth — as was my moral. I mean, I had not literary sincerity.” Apparently, attention other than his own was attracted, for he was presently editing the NEWS LETTER.

  In 1872 he went to London and for four years was on the staff of FUN. In London Bierce found congenial and stimulating associates. The great man of his circle was George Augustus Sala, “one of the most skilful, finished journalists ever known,” a keen satiric wit, and the author of a ballad of which it is said that Swift might have been proud. Another notable figure was Tom Hood the younger, mordantly humorous. The satiric style in journalism was popular then; and “personal” journals were so personal that one “Jimmy” Davis, editor of the CUCKOO and the BAT successively, found it healthful to remain some years in exile in France. Bierce contributed to several of these and to FIGARO, the editor of which was James Mortimer. To this gentleman Bierce owed what he designated as the distinction of being “probably the only American journalist who was ever employed by an Empress in so congenial a pursuit as the pursuit of another journalist.” This other journalist was M. Henri Rochefort, communard, formerly editor of LA LANTERNE in Paris, in which he had made incessant war upon the Empire and all its personnel, particularly the Empress. When, an exile, Rochefort announced his intention of renewing LA LANTERNE in London, the exiled Empress circumvented him by secretly copyrighting the title, THE LANTERN, and proceeding to publish a periodical under that name with the purpose of undermining his influence. Two numbers were enough; M. Rochefort fled to Belgium. Bierce said that in “the field of chromatic journalism” it was the finest thing that ever came from a press, but of the literary excellence of the twelve pages he felt less qualified for judgment as he had written every line.

  This was in 1874. Two years earlier, under his journalistic pseudonym of “Dod Grile,” he had published his first books — two small volumes, largely made up of his articles in the San Francisco NEWS LETTER, called The Fiend’s Delight, and Nuggets And Dust Panned Out In California. Now, he used the same pseudonym on the title-page of a third volume, Cobwebs from an Empty Skull. The Cobwebs were selections from his work in FUN — satirical tales and fables, often inspired by weird old woodcuts given him by the editors with the request that he write something to fit. His journalistic associates praised these volumes liberally, and a more distinguished admirer was Gladstone, who, discovering the Cobwebs in a second-hand bookshop, voiced his delight in their cleverness, and by his praise gave a certain currency to Bierce’s name among the London elect. But despite so distinguished a sponsor, the books remained generally unknown.

  Congenial tasks and association with the brilliant journalists of the day did not prevent Bierce from being undeniably hard up at times. In 1876 he returned to San Francisco, where he remained for twenty-one years, save for a brief but eventful career as general manager of a mining company near Deadwood, South Dakota. All this time he got his living by writing special articles — for the WASP, a weekly whose general temper may be accurately surmised from its name, and, beginning in 1886, for the EXAMINER, in which he conducted every Sunday on the editorial page a department to which he gave the title he had used for a similar column in THE LANTERN — Prattle. A partial explanation of a mode of feeling and a choice of themes which Bierce developed more and more, ultimately to the practical exclusion of all others, is to be found in the particular phase through which California journalism was just then passing.

  In the evolution of the comic spirit the lowest stage, that of delight in inflicting pain on others, is clearly manifest in savages, small boys, and early American journalism. It was exhibited in all parts of America — Mark Twain gives a vivid example in his Journalistic Wild Oats of what it was in Tennessee — but with particular intensity in San Francisco. As a community, San Francisco exalted personal courage, directness of encounter, straight and effective shooting. The social group was so small and so homogeneous that any news of importance would be well known before it could be reported, set up in type, printed, and circulated. It was isolated by so great distances from the rest of the world that for years no pretense was made of furnishing adequate news from the outside. So the newspapers came to rely on other sorts of interest. They were pamphlets for the dissemination of the opinions of the groups controlling them, and weapons for doing battle, if need be, for those opinions. And there was abundant occasion: municipal affairs were corrupt, courts weak or venal, or both. Editors and readers enjoyed a good fight; they also wanted humorous entertainment; they happily combined the two. In the creative dawn of 1847 when the foundations of the journalistic earth were laid and those two morning stars, the CALIFORNIAN of Monterey and the CALIFORNIA STAR of San Francisco, sang together, we find the editors attacking the community generally, and each other particularly, with the utmost ferocity, laying about them right and left with verbal broad-axes, crow-bars, and such other weapons as might be immediately at hand. The CALIFORNIA STAR’S introduction to the public of what would, in our less direct day, be known as its “esteemed contemporary” is typical:

  “We have received two late numbers of the CALIFORNIAN, a dim, dirty little paper printed in Monterey on the worn-out materials of one of the old California WAR PRESSES. It is published and edited by Walter Colton and Robert Semple, the one a WHINING SYCOPHANT, and the other an OVER-GROWN LICK-SPITTLE. At the top of one of the papers we find the words ‘please exchange.’ This would be considered in almost any other country a bare-faced attempt to swindle us. We should consider it so now were it not for the peculiar situation of our country which induces us to do a great deal for others in order for them to do us a little good.... We have concluded to give our paper to them this year, so as to afford them some insight into the manner in which a Republican newspaper should be conducted. They appear now to be awfully verdant.”

  Down through the seventies and eighties the tradition persisted, newspapers being bought and read, as a historian of journalism asserts, not so much for news as to see who was getting “lambasted” that day. It is not strange, then, that journals of redoubtable pugnacity were popular, or that editors favored writers who were likely to excel in the gladiatorial style. It is significant that public praise first came to Bierce through his articles in the caustic NEWS LETTER, widely read on the Pacific Coast during the seventies. Once launched in this line, he became locally famous for his fierce and witty articles in the ARGONAUNT and the WASP, and for many years his column Prattle in the EXAMINER was, in the words of Mr. Bailey Millard, “the most wickedly clever, the most audaciously personal, and the most eagerly devoured column of causerie that ever was printed in this country.”

  In 1896 Bierce was sent to Washington to fight, through the Hearst newspapers, the “refunding bill” which Collis P. Huntington was trying to get passed, releasing his Central Pacific Railroad from its obligations to the government. A year later he went again to Washington, where he remained during the rest of his journalistic career, as correspondent for
the New York AMERICAN, conducting also for some years a department in the COSMOPOLITAN.

  Much of Bierce’s best work was done in those years in San Francisco. Through the columns of the WASP and the EXAMINER his wit played free; he wielded an extraordinary influence; his trenchant criticism made and unmade reputations — literary and otherwise. But this to Bierce was mostly “journalism, a thing so low that it cannot be mentioned in the same breath with literature.” His real interest lay elsewhere. Throughout the early eighties he devoted himself to writing stories; all were rejected by the magazine editors to whom he offered them. When finally in 1890 he gathered these stories together into book form and offered them to the leading publishers of the country, they too, would have none of them. “These men,” writes Mr. Bailey Millard, “admitted the purity of his diction and the magic of his haunting power, but the stories were regarded as revolting.”

  At last, in 1891, his first book of stories, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, saw the reluctant light of day. It had this for foreword:

  “Denied existence by the chief publishing houses of the country, this book owes itself to Mr. E. L. G. Steele, merchant, of this city, [San Francisco]. In attesting Mr. Steele’s faith in his judgment and his friend, it will serve its author’s main and best ambition.”

  There is Biercean pugnacity in these words; the author flings down the gauntlet with a confident gesture. But it cannot be said that anything much happened to discomfit the publishing houses of little faith. Apparently, Bierce had thought to appeal past the dull and unjust verdict of such lower courts to the higher tribunal of the critics and possibly an elect group of general readers who might be expected to recognize and welcome something rare. But judgment was scarcely reversed. Only a few critics were discerning, and the book had no vogue. When The Monk and the Hangman’s Daughter was published by F. J. Schulte and Company, Chicago, the next year, and Can Such Things Be by The Cassell Publishing Company, the year following, a few enthusiastic critics could find no words strong enough to describe Bierce’s vivid imagination, his uncanny divination of atavistic terrors in man’s consciousness, his chiseled perfection of style; but the critics who disapproved had even more trouble in finding words strong enough for their purposes and, as before, there was no general appreciation.

 

‹ Prev