Bierce the satirist was for a time in his element; but there was little material wealth to be gained in London, and at times he was pretty hard up. He revived his failing fortunes for a short period by writing and publishing his series of “Little Johnny” stories — humorous, misspelled essays in zoology, supposed to be the work of a small boy. These were popular and added color to his name; but Bierce’s mind was now turning backward to the country he had deserted, and in 1876 he returned to San Francisco.
He remained then on the coast for a quarter of a century, save for a brief period of mining near Deadwood, South Dakota, where his adventures with road-agents and other bad men were hair-raising. On a night in 1880 he was driving in a light wagon through a wild part of the Black Hills. The wagon carried thirty thousand dollars in gold belonging to the mining company of which he was manager, and beside him on the wagon seat was Boone May, a famous gunman who was under indictment for murder. May had been paroled on Bierce’s promise that he would see him into custody again. The notorious gunman sat, huddled in his rubber poncho, with his rifle between his knees; he was acting as guard of the company’s gold. Although Bierce thought him somewhat off guard, he said nothing.
There came a sudden shout: “Throw up your hands!”
Bierce reached for his revolver, but it was needless. Almost before the words had left the highwayman’s lips, with the quickness of a cat May had hurled himself backward over the seat, face upward, and with the muzzle of his weapon within a yard of the bandit’s throat, had fired a shot that forever ruined the interrupter’s usefulness as a road-agent.
Bierce returned again to San Francisco. Through the warp and woof, then, of certain California journals, for many years, ran the glittering thread of his genius, and to this period belongs much of his finest and strongest work. He became a mighty censor who made and unmade men and women, a Warwick of the pen. It is no exaggeration to say that corrupt politicians, hypocritical philanthropists and clergymen, self-worshipers, notoriety seekers, and pretenders of every description trembled at his name. He wielded an extraordinary power; his pen hung, a Damoclean sword, over the length and breadth of the Pacific coast. Those who had cause to fear his wrath opened their morning papers with something like horror. He wrote “epitaphs” to persons not yet dead, of such a nature — had they been dead — as to make them turn in their graves. Many of his poetic quips were venomous to a degree, and he greeted Oscar Wilde, on the poet’s arrival in America, in 1882, with a blast of invective that all but paralyzed that ready wit. His pet abominations were James Whitcomb Riley and Ella Wheeler Wilcox. In the earlier days of his power an assault in print was believed sufficient cause for a pistoled reply, and Bierce was always a marked man; but he was utterly fearless, and as he was known to be a dead shot, himself, his life always was “spared” by the victims of his attacks. His vocabulary of invective was the widest and most vitriolic of any modern journalist, but it was not billingsgate; Bierce never penned a line that was not impeccable. His wit was diabolic — Satanic — but he was always the scholar, and he always bowed politely before he struck. The suave fierceness of his attack is unique in contemporaneous literature.
He cherished no personal enmities, in the ordinary sense, for his attacks were largely upon principles promoted by men, rather than upon the men themselves. One who knew him once said: “I look upon Bierce as a literary giant. I don’t think he really means to walk rough-shod over people, any more than a lion means to be rough with a mouse. It is only that the lion wonders how anything so small can be alive, and he is amused by its antics.” With his clairvoyant vision, his keen sense of justice, and his extraordinary honesty, what an international fool-killer he would have made!
Yet this fierce and hated lampooner had his softer side, which he displayed to those he loved and who loved him; and these were not too few. One of his oldest friends writes, in a letter: “His private gentleness, refinement, tenderness, kindness, unselfishness, are my most cherished memories of him. He was deeply — I may say childishly — human... It was in these intimate things, the aspects which the world never saw, that he made himself so deeply loved by the few whom he held close. For he was exceedingly reserved. Under no circumstances could he ever be dragged into physical view before the crowds that hated, feared or admired him. He had no vanity; his insolence toward the mob was detached, for he was an aristocrat to the bottom of him. But he would have given his coat to his bitterest enemy who happened to be cold.”
His humor, as distinct from his wit, was queer and picturesque, and was a distinguished quality. In his column of “Prattle” in the San Francisco Examiner, he once remarked that something was “as funny as a brick ship.” A friend giggled with delight at the conception, and repeated it to others; but to his dismay he could find none who would enjoy it. “A brick ship!” they repeated. “That isn’t funny; it’s simply foolish.” At another time, Bierce announced that he regarded every married man as his natural enemy; and the Philistines raved, saying he was evil, nasty, and a hopeless beast. The boyish fun of his remarks seemed always lost on the crowd. Again, when the missing-word nonsense was going on, he began to say obscure things, in his column, about a poem which Dr. David Starr Jordan had just published. At length he inaugurated a missing-word contest of his own, somewhat as follows: “Dr. Jordan is a — , and a — , and a — .” He invited the public to send him its guesses. Heaven knows what replies he received; but the Professor was worried, and asked Bierce’s friends why the writer was getting after him. Finally the missing words were supplied: “Dr. Jordan is a gentleman, and a scholar, and a poet.” Bierce supplied and published them himself.
Once a lawyer, whose remarkable name was Otto Tum Suden, broke out with some public matter that Bierce didn’t like. Accordingly, he wrote a little jingle about Tum Suden, the burthen of which was “Turn Suden, tum duden, tum dey!” It completely silenced poor Tum.
It is not unnatural, however, that Bierce should have been misunderstood, and people always were misunderstanding him. Standing, one day, with a friend, on a high elevation at a midwinter fair, he looked down at a vast crowd swarming and sweating far below him. Suddenly, coming out of a reverie, he said: “Wouldn’t it be fun to turn loose a machine gun into that crowd!” He added a swift and droll picture of the result, which sent his friend into convulsions, the latter knowing perfectly well that Bierce would not have harmed a single hair on a head in that swarm. But suppose his friend had been no friend at all — had just met the writer, and did not know him for what he was! That was Bierce’s way, however, and it ran into print. People could never understand him — some people.
Even his friends did not escape his lash. However deep his affection for them, he never spared them in public if they stepped awry. But they were inclined to think it an honor when he got after them in print, and, naturally, there was an admiring literary coterie that hailed him as master. I suspect they flattered him, although I cannot imagine him accepting their flattery. And he was a Master. One of this group, perhaps the closest of his literary friends, once sent him a story for criticism. Bierce returned it with the laconic remark that his friend “must have written it for the Waverly Magazine when he was a school-girl.”
Among his friends and pupils were the poets, George Sterling and Herman Scheffauer, and he was on the best of terms with the Bohemian crowd that made old San Francisco a sort of American Bagdad; but I believe he never participated in their café dinners, where they were gazed at and marveled over by the fringing crowd. He was unconscious of his own greatness, in any offensive sense, and either ignored or failed to see the startled or admiring looks given him when people were told, “‘That is Ambrose Bierce.” He was not a showman. I have heard it said that women adored him, for he was cavalierly handsome; but he was not much of a ladies’ man. As I have suggested, however, he was always a gentleman and gentlemen are none too plentiful.
An especially interesting chapter in his journalistic career began in 1896, when a great fight was being
waged in the nation’s capital. The late Collis P. Huntington was conducting a powerful lobby to pass his “refunding bill,” releasing him and his associates of the Central Pacific Railroad from their obligations to the government. Bierce was asked by William Randolph Hearst to go to Washington for the Examiner, to give what aid he might in defeating the scheme. A Washington newspaper man said to Huntington: “Bierce is in town.”
“How much does he want?” cynically asked Huntington.
This insult was reported to Bierce, who replied: “Please go back and tell him that my price is about seventy-five million dollars. If, when he is ready to pay, I happen to be out of town, he may hand it to my friend, the Treasurer of the United States.”
The contest was notable. As in the Eugenie case, Bierce was in his element. He wrote so fast and so furiously that it became a whimsical saying that he wrote with a specially prepared pencil, because his pens became red hot and his ink boiled. The result was happy, whatever he used, for he drove the corruptionist gang out of the Capitol, and forced a withdrawal of the insolent measure. It was not so long ago that the last installment of the entire debt was handed to Bierce’s “friend,” the Treasurer of the United States.
Later, Bierce removed to Washington, where he spent his last years. He was already a celebrity when he came there to live, and was more or less of a lion; but his anger always was great when he fancied anyone was showing him off. It is said that he indignantly declined to attend a theater with a friend, in New York, because seats had been procured in a box for the party that was to accompany them. Another story tells of an alleged scene he made in a Washington drawing-room, when his host presented a street railway magnate. The car baron extended his hand.
“No!’ thundered Bierce, in magnificent rage. “I wouldn’t take your black hand for all the money you could steal in the next ten years! I ride in one of your cars every night and always am compelled to stand — there’s never a seat for me.”
And the story goes that the black hand was speedily withdrawn. I do not vouch for the tale; but it sounds a bit tru-ish, if not entirely so.
It has been remarked time and again that Bierce was embittered by failure of the world to appreciate his work, by his “obscurity.” That is untrue. Recognition was slow, but he was certainly not unknown; indeed if a multiplicity of attacks upon a man may make him famous, Bierce was famous. It is the critics who are to blame for this myth; many attacked him, and many, eager to help him, spoke mournfully of his great and unappreciated genius; and after a time the story stuck. In a breezy jingle, Bierce himself summed up this aspect of the case, as follows:
My, how my fame rings out in every zone —
A thousand critics shouting, “He’s unknown!”
It is probably true, also, that the foreword to his first book of stories, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, had something to do with the legend:
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.
But, as the years went by, the cognoscenti came to know him very well indeed. And those who knew him best, in his later years, assert that he was not morose and unhappy, although he was a considerable sufferer from asthma, and had tried various climates without result.
Despite all his scoffings at clergymen and church folk, and despite his so-called heterodox opinions, Bierce made profession of a profound Christian faith. Even so, the orthodox will frown at it, but the man who wrote so exalted a tribute to Jesus of Nazareth could hardly have been the hopeless agnostic he was often pictured.
“This is my ultimate and determinate sense of right,” he wrote. “‘What under the circumstances would Christ have done?’ — the Christ of the New Testament, not the Christ of the commentators, theologians, priests, and parsons.”
And his friend, Edwin Markham, said of him: “He is a composite mind — a blending of Hafiz the Persian, Swift, Poe, Thoreau, with sometimes a gleam of the Galilean.”
II. THE MASTER
It seems likely that the enduring fame of the most remarkable man, in many ways, of his day, will be founded chiefly upon his stories of war — the blinding flashes of revelation and interpretation that make up the group under the laconic legend, “Soldier,” in his greatest book, In the Midst of Life. In these are War, stripped of pageantry and glamor, stark in naked realism, terrible in grewsome fascination, yet of a sinister beauty. Specifically, it is the American Civil War that furnishes his characters and his texts, the great internecine conflict throughout which he gallantly fought; but it is War of which he writes, the hideous Thing.
Perhaps it is the attraction of repulsion that, again and again, leads one to these tales — although there is a record of a man who, having read them once, would not repeat the experiment — but it is that only in part. There is more than mere terror in them; there is religion and poetry, and much of the traditional beauty of battle. Their author was both soldier and poet, and in the war stories of Ambrose Bierce, the horror and ugliness, the lure and loveliness of war are so blended that there seems no distinct line of demarcation; the dividing line is not a point or sign, but a penumbra. Over the whole broods an occult significance that transcends experience.
Outstanding, even in so collectively remarkable a group, are three stories, “A Horseman in the Sky,”
“A Son of the Gods,” and “Chickamauga.” The first mentioned quietly opens with a young soldier, a Federal sentry, on duty at a point in the mountains overlooking a wooded drop of a thousand feet. He is a Virginian who has conceived it his duty to join the forces of the North, and who thus finds himself in arms against his family. It is imperative that the position of the camp guarded by the young soldier be kept secret; yet he is asleep at his post. Waking, he looks across the gorge, and on the opposite height beholds a magnificent equestrian statue — a Confederate officer on horseback, calmly surveying the camp beneath.
The young soldier, unobserved by his enemy, aims at the officer’s breast. But suddenly his soul is in tumult; he is shaken by convulsive shudders. He cannot take life in that way. If only the officer would see him and offer battle! Then he recalls his father’s admonition at their parting: at whatever cost he must do his duty. The horseman in gray turns his head. His features are easily discernible now. There is a pause. Then the young soldier shifts his aim from the officer’s breast and, with stony calm, fires at the horse. A moment later, a Federal officer, some distance down the side of the cliff, sees an amazing thing — a man on horseback, riding down into the valley through the air.
Here is the conclusion to that story:
Ten minutes had hardly passed when a Federal sergeant crept cautiously to him on hands and knees. Druse neither turned his head nor looked at him, but lay without motion or sign of recognition.
“Did you fire?” the sergeant whispered.
“Yes.”
“At what?”
“A horse. It was standing on yonder rock — pretty far out. You see it is no longer there.
It went over the cliff.”
The man’s face was white but he showed no other sign of emotion. Having answered, he turned away his face and said no more. The sergeant did not understand.
“See here, Druse,” he said, after a moment’s silence, “it’s no use making a mystery. I order you to report. Was there anybody on the horse?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“My father.”
The sergeant rose to his feet and walked away. “Good God!” he said.
It may be claimed that the idea of this story — its conclusion — is not original with Bierce. I don’t know, although for all anyone can say to the contrary the episode may be a transcript from life. Certainly, in this form it is original enough. De Maupassant contrives the same sense of “shock” in the tale of a sailor who, after years of wandering, returns to
the village to find his old home vanished, and who, in consequence, betakes himself to a shadier section of town. In the midst of his maudlin carousing, he discovers in the half-naked creature he is fondling, his sister. Remotely, the idea is the same in both stories, and, I fancy, it antedates De Maupassant by hundreds of years. Since publication of Bierce’s tale, young writers in numbers deliberately have sought the effect (Peccavi!) with tales that are strangely reminiscent; and Billy Sunday rhetorically tells a “true story” of the same sort, which might have been taken directly from the French master. Thus does life plagiarize from literature, in later days, after literature first has plagiarized from life.
At any rate, it is a situation that was never better handled, an idea never more cleanly distorted, than by Bierce. “A Horseman in the Sky” is one of the most effective of his astonishing vignettes, and is given first place in the volume. It has one objection, which applies to all terror, horror, and mystery tales; once read, the secret is out, and rereading cannot recapture the first story thrill. It may be, however, that all literature, of whatever classification, is open to the same objection. Fortunately, as in the case of Bierce, there is more to literature than the mere “story.”
There is less of this story in “A Son of the Gods,” but as a shining glimpse of the tragic beauty of battle it is, I believe, unique; possibly it is Bierce’s finest achievement in the art of writing. He calls it a “study in the historical present tense.” In order to spare the lives of the skirmishers, a young staff officer rides forward toward the crest of a bare ridge crowned with a stone wall, to make the enemy disclose himself, if the enemy is there. The enemy is there and, being discovered, has no further reason for concealment. The doomed officer, instead of retreating to his friends, rides parallel to the wall, in a hail of rifle fire, and thence obliquely to other ridges, to uncover other concealed batteries and regiments...
Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics) Page 327