ANOTHER ATTEMPT TO BOOST BIERCE INTO IMMORTALITY
FOR the third time in three decades, an American publisher has rediscovered the genius of Ambrose Bierce, and a new effort is being made, with the new edition of “In the Midst of Life” (Boni & Liveright), to establish the great San Francisco satirist as one of the supreme storytellers of America. In 1890 Bierce’s volume of tales of soldiers and civilians was refused by every publishing house to which it was offered. It was finally brought out in 1892 by an obscure printer, under the patronage of E. L. G. Steele, a merchant. In, 1898 it was issued again, under the imprint of a prominent New York publishing house. In 1909, Bierce’s complete works were published by the Neale Company in a limited and expensive edition. And now,- practically ten years later, the new house of Boni & Liveright is making a valiant attempt to secure for Bierce his own particular niche among the immortals of American literature.
The persistent obscurity of Ambrose Bierce’s genius is the more puzzling because of the praise that has been lavished upon his work by the most discriminating critics of England and America. His works have been translated into every European language, including Russian and Norwegian. Henry Irving, Austin Dobson, Clement Scott, Arthur Machen and Arnold Bennett all eulogized his genius. Joel Chandler Harris, Gertrude Atherton, Edwin Markham, the late Percival Pollard, Owen Wister and a score of other critics and writers swore to his supremacy in the field of satire and the short story. But for years his work was out of print in this country or unavailable at popular prices. This anomaly is to be corrected at last by Messrs. Boni & Liveright.
When, in 1909, a limited edition of 250 copies of the complete works of Bierce was published, Arnold Bennett, writing as “Jacob Tonson” in the London New Age, declared that Bierce’s was the most striking example of the “underground reputation” that he knew of. Admitting the superb power of Bierce’s imagination, Bennett nevertheless declared that all of these stories were composed according to the same recipe. “His aim, in his short stories, is to fell you with a single blow. And one may admit that he succeeds. In the line of the startling — half Poe, half Merimee — he cannot have many superiors.” Bennett continues:
“A story like ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ — well, Edgar Allan Poe might have deigned to sign it. And that is something. It Mr. Bierce had had the wit to write only that tale and ‘A Horseman in the Sky’ he might have secured for himself the sort of everlasting reputation that, say, Blanco White enjoys. But, unfortunately, he has gone and imitated himself, and, vulgarly, given the show away. He possesses a remarkable style — what Kipling’s would have been had Kipling been born with any understanding of the significance of the word ‘art’ — and a quite strangely remarkable perception of beauty. There is a feeling for landscape in ‘A Horseman in the Sky’ which recalls the exquisite opening of that indifferent novel, ‘Les Freres Zemganno’ by Edmond de Goncourt, and which no English novelist except Thomas
Hardy, and possibly Charles Marriott, could match. It is worthy of W. H. Hudson (another recipient of belated appreciation). Were Ambrose Bierce temperamentally less violent — less journalistic — and had he acquired the wisdom of a wider culture, he might have become the great creative artist that a handful of admirers believe him to be. As it is, he is simply astonishing. It occurs to me that Stephen Crane must have read him.”
The imagination that goes into Bierce’s most successful tales, asserts a critic in the New York Evening Post, is the imagination of genius, no less. Had this genius been adequately recognized during the period of its virility, this critic discerningly notes,
“The story of the soldier who, about to fire his cocked rifle at the retreating Confederates from an abandoned house, is caught in its ruins as it is demolished by a shell; who returns to consciousness to find the apparently loaded rifle pointing straight at his forehead, and so fixed in the debris that his slightest movement will fire it; and who dies of fright as he finally makes a convulsive effort to escape, the rifle, which had been previously discharged, falling harmlessly by his side — this is admirably effective. Pierre Mille has done it the honor of appropriating its plot for one of his French volumes. A finer fancy goes into the ‘Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,’ where a Confederate spy, executed by having a fastened rope tied about his neck and being pushed from a bridge, has a vision of an escape and a return home that seem to last for days, in the instant before his neck is broken.
“In the tales of the supernatural the narrowness of range, which annoys us slightly if we read a dozen of the war stories, is even more evident. The same motives, or more correctly, similar motives, recur in one tale after another: there are too many abandoned houses and too many sheeted corpses. But some striking effects are nevertheless achieved. The story which bears some such title as ‘The Middle Toe of the Right Foot’ — unfortunately not included here — shows remarkable ingenuity in compounding all the elements of horror possible in Southwestern lawlessness and a ghostly setting. The story of the weary pioneer who sat at night in his solitary cabin with his dead wife, and, worn by days of nursing, fell asleep till he was awakened by a panther which had entered to carry the body off, might have been written by Poe. But the breadth of Poe’s imagination, and its finer delicacy, is in general wanting.”
In his war stories, writes “A. Non” (Cowley Brown) in the Chicago Musical Leader, Bierce blazed a path where few may follow. “The fact that Stephen Crane, attempting that path, reached a sort of passing notoriety, has bearing only on the history of our amateurish, ludicrous crowd of American criticasters, not of literature.” Bierce’s fame, this critic writes, will rest Gibraltar-like upon the nineteen stories included in “In the Midst of Life.” He explains why:
“The grimmest of subjects combined with psychologic analysis of the clearest, the method of realism, a style crystal-clear, went with imaginative vision of the most searching and the most radiant. Death, in warfare and in the horrid guise of the supernatural, was painted over and over. Man’s terror in the face of each death gave the artist the cue for his wonderful physical and psychologic microscopies. You could not pin this work down as realism, or as romance; it was the greatest human drama — the conflict between life and death — fused through genius. Not Zola in the endless pages of his ‘Debacle,’ not the great Tolstoi in his great ‘War and Peace,’ had ever painted war, horrid war, more faithfully than any of the war stories in this book; not Maupassant had invented out of war’s terrible truths more dramatically imagined plots. The very color and note of war itself are in those pages. There painted an artist who had seen the thing itself, and, being a genius, had made of it art still greater.
“Death of the young, the beautiful, the brave, was the closing note of every one of the ten stories of war in this book. The brilliant, spectacular death that came to such senseless bravery as Tennyson hymned for the music-hall intelligence in his ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’; the vision-starting, slow, soul-drugging death by hanging; the multiplied, comprehensible death that makes rivers near battle-fields run red; the death that conies from sheer terror — death actual and imagined — every sort of death was in these pages, so painted as to make Pierre Loti’s ‘Book of Pity and of Death’ seem but feeble fumbling.”
In the field of satire, Bierce can be compared only with the most daring of the ages. Edwin Markham once described him as “a blending of Hafiz the Persian, Swift, Poe, Thoreau, with sometimes a gleam of the Galilean.” His literary career in London, where, under the pseudonym of “Dod Grile,” his astonishing power of invective was revealed, stirred London as no writer had done since Swift. But this satire was too savage, too relentless, for the politer tastes. It would be impossible to-day for anyone to express the misanthropic thought Bierce gave vent to in his “column” in the San Francisco Examiner. As the Evening Post reviewer notes:
“Bierce’s satirical work will not catch the taste of the moment as his Civil War tales may; he was too fierce a hater of our democratic society, and declared too insistently that repu
blican government does not govern. A characteristic contribution to thought on international questions is his cynical comment that ‘International arbitration may be defined as the substitution of many burning questions for a smouldering one.’ He remarked even before the first Balkan war that ‘All languages are spoken in hell, but chiefly those of Southeastern Europe.’ The volume entitled ‘The Shadow on the Dial’ — the well-phrased title is typical — was a labored but not very coherent Or thoughtful contention that the shadow on the dial of civilization is receding. ‘The men and women of “principle,” he declared, ‘are a pretty dangerous class, generally speaking — and they are generally speaking.’”
It was Ambrose Bierce’s misfortune, Wilson Follett writes in the Dial, to be a satirist alone. His wit was perhaps the most brilliant of its kind since Voltaire, but it coruscates in vacuo. Unlike the first Samuel Butler, he found no sharp social contrast to draw; all he could see in America was a perfect homogeneity of smugness, and, like the second Samuel Butler, he was forced to create fictitious worlds to be the media of his criticism of the real one. “If in one sense he is unmodern, it is because, with Lucian and Juvenal, Dryden and Pope, Swift and Voltaire, he chose to explore the possibilities of hate as a form of creative energy.”
His savagery, as exemplified in such overwhelming satire as “My Favorite Murder,” is every bit as devastating as that of the Frenchman Octave Mirbeau. And Bierce had the same power as Leon Bloy to kill a reputation or to destroy a “masterpiece” in a few vitriolic words. This type of literary power is never conducive to popularity. And yet Bierce was not only one of the best - known litterateurs of California in his own time but the object almost of what one critic rather unjustly terms “provincial adulation.” It cannot be said of Bierce that he was without honor in his own country. At a certain period California children were almost “brought up” on Bierce and Biercisms. He was the critic and dynamic inspiration of scores of California writers, many of a wider popularity than he ever himself attained. He was the literary “pope” for a period out there; his faults may have been pontifical. As a journalist he was too soon forgotten; but with the new wave of permanent recognition now coming to him and the example France is giving us in the naming of streets, there may yet be an Ambrose Bierce Avenue in San Francisco!
The mystery of Ambrose Bierce’s final disappearance in 1912-13, at the age of 70, has never been adequately cleared up. He was reported in Texas, on his way to Mexico. It is believed that, despite a severe illness, he did go into Mexico, where he may have been killed in the revolutionary fighting of the Villistas. He never returned.
THE UNDERGROUND REPUTATION OF AMBROSE BIERCE
From: Current Literature, September 1909, pages 279-281
THE UNDERGROUND REPUTATION OF AMBROSE BIERCE
AMBROSE BIERCE, whose collected works have recently been recently issued in a luxurious edition, occupies a unique position in the literature of the world, being apparently both a cult and an author. California, mother of many eminent authors, regards him as one who enjoys “the full wide world’s testimony of his worth.” His fellow writers nurtured in the same soil speak of him in terms of hyperbolic laudation. Says Edwin Markham: “Bierce is our-literary Atlas. His is a composite mind — a blending of Hafiz, the Persian; Swift, Poe, Thoreau, with sometimes a gleam of the Galilean.” Gertrude Atherton affirms that Bierce has “the best brutal imagination of any man in the English-speaking race.” J. O’Hara Cosgrove, formerly editor of The Wave, now editor of Everybody’s, speaks in awestruck tones of Mr. Bierce’s stylistic attainments. “Here,” he says, “is a literary quality that is a consecration. A perfect arrangement of words expressing an idea, an attitude, a form as imperishable as stone.” The Hearst papers idolize Bierce; he is the oracle of Hearst’s monthly, The Cosmopolitan. Promising young Californians like George Sterling dedicate their books to him as one lays precious offerings at the feet of some idol. His publishers’ literary notes are apotheoses; they are honestly convinced that in the history of American literature no more important announcement has been made than that the collected works of Ambrose Bierce, edited and arranged by himself, and representing the best of his life’s work, have been published by them in ten gorgeous volumes.
Yet, in spite of all these distinguished spokesmen, the literary reputation of Ambrose Bierce is confined to a narrow circle. America, as well as England, has turned a deaf ear to his verbal cascades. The complete edition of Mr. Bierce’s works, significantly enough, is limited to 250 expensive sets.
Mr. Bierce has been writing for a good many years; he is no longer a young man; he has addressed through his journalism a vast number of people. And yet, Jacob Tonson remarks in The Mew Age (London), the question that starts to the lips of ninety nine readers out of a hundred, even the best informed, will assuredly be: Who is Ambrose Bierce? “I scarcely know,” Mr. Tonson admits, “but I will say that among what I may term ‘underground reputations’ that of Ambrose Bierce is perhaps the most striking modern example. You may wander for years through literary circles and never meet anybody who has ever heard of Ambrose Bierce, and then you may hear some erudite student whisper in awed voice: ‘Ambrose Bierce is the greatest living imaginative prose writer.’ I have heard such an opinion expressed. I think I am in a position to deny it. Altho I have read little of Ambrose Bierce, I have read what is probably his best work, to wit, his short stories. After I had read the first I was almost ready to arise and cry with that erudite student: ‘This is terrific’ But after I had read a dozen I had grown calmer. For they were all composed according to the same recipe, and they all went off at the end like the report of the same pistol. Nevertheless,” Mr. Tonson goes on to say, “he is a remarkable writer. His aim, in his short stories, is to fell you with a single blow. And one may admit that he succeeds. In the line of the startling — half Poe, half Merimee — he cannot have many superiors.” To quote further:
“A story like ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ — Well, Edgar Allan Poe might have deigned to sign it! And that is something. If Mr. Bierce had had the wit to write only that tale and ‘A Horseman in the Sky,’ he might have secured for himself the sort of everlasting reputation that, say, Blanco White enjoys. But, unfortunately, he has gone and imitated himself, and, vulgarly, given the show away. He possesses a remarkable style — what Kipling’s would have been had Kipling been born with any understanding of the significance of the word ‘art’ — and a quite strangely remarkable perception of beauty. There is a feeling for landscape in ‘A Horseman in the Sky’ which recalls the exquisite opening of that indifferent novel ‘Les Freres Zemganno’ of Edmond de Goncourt, and which no English novelist except Thomas Hardy, and possibly Charles Marriott, could match. It is worthy of W. H. Hudson (whose new book of English travel I urge upon you). Were Ambrose Bierce temperamentally less violent — less journalistic — and had he acquired the wisdom of a wider culture, he might have become the great creative artist that a handful of admirers believe him to be. As it is he is simply astonishing. It occurs to me that Stephen Crane must have read him. If you demand why Ambrose Bierce is practically unknown in England, and why an expensive edition of him should suddenly appear as a bolt from the blue of the United States, I can offer no reply. I do not even know if he is living or dead, or where he was born, or if any of his books are published in England.”
This article called forth a letter from Mr. William Purvis, from which it appears that Bierce never attained the distinction of book publication in England, altho Robert Barr and James Payne have praised him. In vain, Mrs. Atherton, years ago, tried to work up a London interest in Bierce. Ml. Cowley Brown coupled Bierce with Bret Harte, Joaquin Miller and Mark Twain as the pride of the Golden Gate, and, to the best of his power, blew the Bierce trumpet across the sea. Nevertheless, Bierce failed not only of recognition but even of a livelihood in London, where some of his earlier stories were written.
The comparative obscurity of the Californian seems all the more surprising if we c
onsider the range of his work. He is a poet and an essayist, a short-story writer, a critic, a political writer, and, above all, a powerful satirist. Like Poe, he has dwelt with the occult and the terrible; like Poe also, he has been fascinated by science, and, again like Poe, he has depicted in a grotesque satirical tale the downfall of the American republic. He has tried his hand at everything that Poe has tried, but, unlike Poe, he always seems to fall short of finality. As some English critic has pointed out, there is a journalistic streak| even in his most ambitious productions. In “Bits of Autobiography” he tells of his experiences as a soldier in the Civil War, as a treasury official in the South, and as a journalist in London in the early seventies. “Mr. Bierce,” remarks the London Athenaeum, in connection with his residence in London, “seems to have taken very seriously the somewhat raffish celebrities of Fleet Street to the honor of whose acquaintance and orgies he was admitted; and would have us think that not Jamshyd himself gloried and drank deep as he and they. As a fact, we do not believe that they did his morals any material harm, but we suspect that they influenced his literary standards for life, and that, conscious of it or no, his aim ever since has been to write what any one of these judges would have declared to be ‘damned good stuff.’ The commodity which can be justly so described contains many elements admired in literature; but it is doubtful whether it ever ceases to be journalism.”
The admirers of Mr. Bierce are no doubt prepared to crucify the reviewer of the English periodical; they seem to clothe the figure of their idol with glory even when it is hardly deserved. Thus Mr. S. O. Howes, in his introduction to Bierce’s essays, recently published, hails Mr. Bierce as a prophet. “The note of prophecy,” he boldly exclaims, “sounds sharp and clear in many a vibrant line, in many a sonorous sentence of the essays herein collected for the first time.” President Hadley, we are told, attracted wide-spread attention to himself by his recommendation of social ostracism for „ malefactors of great wealth; Edwin Markham made a stir by advancing the application of the Golden Rule to temporal affairs as a cure for evils arising from industrial discontent; and Mr. Sheldon, it will be remembered, created a nine days’ wonder by undertaking to conduct for a week a newspaper as Christ would have conducted it; — but all these things, it seems, have been foreshadowed by Mr. Bierce. “I am sure,” concludes Mr. S. O. Howes, “that Mr. Bierce does not begrudge any of these gentlemen the acclaim they have received by enunciating his ideas, and I mention this instance here merely to forestall the folly of any other claim to priority.” The introducer’s attitude and his hero worship strike one as distinctly provincial.
Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics) Page 331