AMBROSE BIERCE, the brilliant author of “Tales of Soldiers and Civilians,” which was published last year by the United States Book Company, and in London by Chatto & Windus under the title of “Stories of Life and Death,” is just beginning to take his proper rank in contemporary American literature, as the master of all American short story writers. “Tales of Soldiers and Civilians” was not so widely read in the Eat last year as it should have been, because it was not sufficiently extant, and because the Eastern press failed to recognize the genius in these stories. But in London, where after all, every reputation is confirmed, the cliques have dissolved in the face of merit, and “Stories of Life and Death” is the talk of the town. Bierce’s London career some twenty years ago is recalled, and the critics, who usually review without reading have been cajoled into reading this wonderful book, and the result is, that in London Bierce, almost unknown in Eastern literary circles here, is given his true status as one of the few significant artists in his line in either England or America. The London Chronicle, a journal whose critical judgments are in striking contrast to those of the Saturday Review and other organs of the cliques, for their impartiality and justice, devotes several columns of careful analysis and praise to the “Stories of Life and Death,” and the book is receiving quite a “boom.” This ought to give an impetus to the sale in this country of “Tales of Soldiers and Civilians,” which is the same book with a different title. It is strange if one of the greatest of American short story writers since Poe and Hawthorne can only obtain proper recognition in England. Ambrose Bierce is really the only man of true genius in America who is writing short stories — except Rudyard Kipling who seems to have settled down here — and yet we have to read a London paper to find a true estimate of his genius; and his name never appears in our current literature.
Personal Memories of Ambrose Bierce by Bailey Millard
From: The Bookman, February 1915, pages 653-658
PERSONAL MEMORIES OF AMBROSE BIERCE
Great poets fire the world with faggots big
That make a crackling racket,
But I’m content with but a whispering twig
To warm some single jacket.
Thus sang Ambrose Bierce in his old San Francisco days when, as the licensed lampooner of everybody that happened to displease him, he made his Examiner “Prattle” the most wickedly clever, the most audaciously personal and the most eagerly devoured column of causerie that probably ever was printed in this country. “Prattle,” the sub-title of which was “A Transient Record of Individual Opinion,” bristled with cynical sallies against the great and the small in public and private life, ridiculed nearly every pretension to morality, particularly of a churchly sort, and made ducks and drakes of all the popular idols. And this railing against people who upheld the established order of things he continued in one paper or another during the rest of his career on earth.
It seems strange to one who knew Bierce so well during his restless, red-corpuscled life to be writing of him in the past tense, and yet any other is hardly admissible, for after nine months of anxious waiting for any sort of word from him his friends and relations have given him up as lost. He was serving upon the staff of General Villa in the Mexican insurrection and has been missing since the terrible battle of Torreon, so the daily journals have recorded. He was ever a fighter — in the Civil War, where he was brevetted major for gallantry in action, as in civic life — so this “one fight more” was naturally sought by him, and he went into it with all the fierce joy of the old soldier who loves war for war’s sake.
Cavalierly handsome of face, Bierce’s singularly expressive, keen, grey eyes, his visage so full of vigour, freshness and refined power, his strong, erect, military figure, which revealed no sign of decrepitude, even at seventy-two — the age of his passing — marked him for a man of power — a power amply exhibited in his writings, especially in his critical essays and stories.
It was Bierce the satirist that we Californians first knew, not Bierce the poet or Bierce the story-teller, as he is more generally recognised, wherever he is recognised, though the limits to the recognition of him, once merely parochial, are widening with the years. He came to us from London, where he had gone from his Ohio home after the war. In his anecdotage, as he used to term his later period of table-talk, he used to tell of his adventures among the London literati, by whom, because of his caustic satires, he was known as “Bitter Bierce.” He frequented a certain tap-room in Ludgate Station, where regularly gathered such rare spirits as George Augustus Sala, young Tom Hood and Captain Mayne Reid. When Joaquin Miller went to England in the early ‘seventies he joined this convivial set, which was greatly addicted, as Bierce expressed it, “to shedding the blood of the grape.” “We worked too hard,” he confessed, “dined too well, frequented too many clubs and went to bed too late in the forenoon. In short, we diligently, conscientiously and with a perverse satisfaction burned the candle of life at both ends and in the middle.” As the fact that he afterward enjoyed robust health would seem to indicate, this life did Bierce no permanent injury, but once it resulted in his financial downfall. There was a certain London publisher named John Camden Hotten, who for a long time had owed Bierce a considerable sum, and, being without tangible assets, the young satirist hounded Hotten day and night for his due. Finally the implacable creditor got the publisher at a disadvantage and Bierce was sent to negotiate with Hotten’s manager, Mr. Chatto, who afterward, as a member of the publishing firm of Chatto and Windus, succeeded to his business. After two mortal hours of “Bitter Bierce” in his most acidulated mood, Chatto pulled out a cheque for the full amount, ready signed by Hotten in anticipation of defeat. The cheque bore date of the following Saturday.
“Before Saturday came,” said Bierce in telling the story, “Hotten proceeded to die of a pork pie in order to beat me out of my money. Knowing nothing of this, I strolled out to his house in Highgate, hoping to get an advance, as I was in great need of cash. On being told of his demise I was inexpressibly shocked, for my cheque was worthless. There was a hope, however, that the bank had not heard. So I called a cab and drove furiously bank-ward. Unfortunately my gondolier steered me past Ludgate Station, in the bar whereof our Fleet Street gang of writers had a private table. I disembarked for a mug of bitter. Unfortunately, too, Sala, Hood and others of the gang were in their accustomed places. I sat at board and related the sad event. The deceased had not in life enjoyed our favour, and I blush to say we all fell to making questionable epitaphs to him. I recall one by Sala which ran thus:
Hotten,
Rotten,
Forgotten.
At the close of the rites, several hours later, I resumed my movements against the bank. Too late — the old story of the hare and the tortoise was told again! The heavy news had overtaken and passed me as I loitered by the wayside.
“I attended the funeral, at which I felt more than I cared to express.”
In London Bierce wrote over the signature of “Dod Grile,” and that name appeared on the cover of two books of his published in the ‘seventies. One of these books was called Cobwebs from an Empty Skull. Years later Gladstone fished up one of the “Dod Grile” books from the table of a second-hand dealer, read it through, was delighted with it and helped to revive in England the identity of Ambrose Bierce. Gladstone, the maker of literary reputations, also assisted the author not a little by sounding the praises of his stories of the occult — tales that were, however, a trifle too strong for the tea-drinking bourgeoisie of modern Britain.
While Bierce was in London the Empress Eugenie, then in exile in England, employed him to write for her several numbers of the Lantern, a journal she began to publish there to forestall her bitter enemy, Henri de Rochefort, who, like herself, had been banished from France after the Prussian conquest of 1870. Rochefort, who had persistently attacked the Emperor and Empress in La Lanterne, of Paris, going to the length of denying the legitimacy of the Prince Imperial, was outwitted by Eugenie when h
e announced his intention of reviving his paper in London. Before he could do so she had copyrighted the title, the Lantern, and herself proceeded to publish a paper bearing that name, though at the time she was not known to be connected with it in any way. Not only did she thus win a great triumph over her enemy, but she employed Bierce to flagellate him. This he did in number after number. And as he afterward said, he never was employed in so pleasant and congenial a pursuit. But the Lantern did not last long and there were times when Bierce, for lack of employment, was destitute of funds. His “Little Johnny” essays on zoology which a London journal “featured” as rare bits of humour, were the means by which he refilled his purse. These essays contained amazing descriptions of actual as well as inconceivable animals and afforded an attractive vehicle for his satire.
He went from London to San Francisco for no particular reason save that he thought he would like the Far West. And he did like it — liked it so well thathe lived there twenty-five years, save for a brief period during which he was mining near Deadwood, South Dakota, where he had some hair-raising adventures with road-agents and other bad men. One night in 1880 he was driving in a light wagon through the wildest part of the Black Hills. In the wagon was thirty thousand dollars in gold belonging to the mining company of which he was manager. Beside him on the wagon scat was Boone May, a famous gunman of those days, who was under indictment for murder, but had been paroled from jail on Bierce’s promise that he would see him into custody again. May sat doubled up in rubber poncho, his rifle between his knees. Bierce thought him a trifle off guard, but said nothing. Suddenly they heard a shout, “Throw up your hands!” Bierce reached for his revolver, but it was quite needless. Quick as a cat, almost before the words were out of the highwayman’s mouth, May had thrown himself backward over the seat, face upward, and with the muzzle of his rifle within a yard of the robber’s throat, had fired a shot that put an end to his usefulness as a highwayman.
Bierce had many adventures with bad men in the West, and his assaults in print upon citizens who were inclined to underscore their resentment by a flourish of firearms, occasionally got him into trouble, but the fact that he was famous as a dead shot generally acted as a damper upon the ambition of those* who harboured the fancy of effacing him. In San Francisco he made the News Letter and the Wasp conspicuous examples of personal journalism, some of his philippics against prominent men and women being of the most biting nature. It is safe to say that his vocabulary of acrimonious invective exceeded in volume that of any other modern journalist. You stood aghast at his bold characterisations and yet, being human, you read on with a grim smile. He was particularly happy in his poetic quips, though some of these were of the most contumelous nature. His idea of attack was to fell you at a single blow. One must apologise for quoting some of them, as in the case of the following quatrain aimed at a gentle popular poet of national reputation whom it pleased Bierce to hold in contempt:
His poems says that he indites
Upon an empty stomach. Heavenly
Powers,
Feed him throat-full, for what he writes
Upon his empty stomach empties ours!
And mind you, the name was not a blank in the original stanza.
Once when a great English novelist visited San Francisco and ran afoul of Bierce who proceeded to show in “Prattle” that the man’s reputation was based upon utterly false claims, the surprised and indignant Briton, heedless of the advice of his friends, replied in print. The delighted Bierce, affecting to disdain the retort, slapped the great man in the face with this:
Dispute with such a thing as you,
Twin show to the two-headed calf?
Why, sir, if I repress my laugh,
‘Tis more than half the world can do.
In his serious essays Bierce always took the most unconventional and often the most cynical views of life. He revered nobody’s opinion but his own, and in this idea of his greatness he was upheld by a flattering literary coterie who acknowledged him as master. These constituted an esoteric cult whose adulation Bierce accepted as a matter of course. They laid their literary work before him, rejoiced in his praise, however stinted, and received his harshest criticism without murmur. He dominated many young literary lives, but if by his criticism he smothered whatever tenderness they sought to convey in their writings and thereby restricted and hardened them, he also helped them to clarity of expression and to more nearly perfect diction. For technically his pencraft was of the purest, as is shown on nearly every page. He prided himself upon being ruled wholly by intellect, never by emotion. But being, after all, human, he could not successfully live up to his vaunt, and occasionally we see him lapsing into tender passages in spite of himself. On the whole, however, his philosophy worked itself out according to his own hard rule. Of civilisation, for example, he was the sternest critic. He declared that it made the race no better and that the cant of it was boresome.
“We have,” he said, “hardly the rudiments of a true civilisation. Compared with the splendours of which we catch dim glimpses in the fading past, ours are as an illumination tallow candles. We know no more than the ancients; we only know other things, but nothing in which is an assurance of perpetuity and little that is truly wisdom.”
When a disciple of Bierce broke his leading-strings and dared to declare his independence the wrath of the master was terrible to see and the loyal ones would echo it and help to put down the apostate. And yet as the years passed nearly all of the cult deserted him or were deserted by him. The reason for this is plain. No dominant factor in literature ever gave himself such liberty of expression as Bierce. This expression extended even to the personal conduct of the members of his flock, and in some cases concerned itself with their most sacred family affairs. In time this came to rankle. Here and there an insurgent spirit manifested itself and there was a cleavage of the cult. But while his primacy lasted — and it lasted a long time — his ego made itself felt not only in the inner circle, but throughout a nebular outer ring which included many who were not under his personal influence. Whatever of import came up for discussion the question invariably would be asked, “What does Bierce think of it?”
When literary California rang with the bugle note of “The Man with the Hoe,” the literati turned to Bierce as to one who should say whether the poem should be permitted to live or die. Probably for no other reason in the world than that the Markhamic strain was tremendously popular Bierce turned down his thumbs. He admitted that Markham previously had written good poetry, but now he had become an anarchist and no true work might be expected of him. He hammered hard and long with his journalistic gavel to drown the chorus of approval of “The Man with the Hoe,” and his thunder strokes of condemnation convinced his disciples; but the poem went abroad into a field where his words could not follow. Once Markham was told to his face by this modern Dr. Johnson that his famous poem was merely a cheap bid for popularity and that as a poet he had killed himself by publishing it.
“The mistake you make is a common one,” observed Bierce. “You let your heart get into your head. No great artist ever did that.”
“Well,” said the urbane Markham, “I do not profess to be a great artist; but to me it seems that the heart always should rule rather than the intellect, and what confirms me in the belief are the finer passages of Keats, Shelley, Tennyson and other true poets.”
But Bierce would not be convinced, and ever after in print made sport of “The Man with the Hoe.”
Intense and inexorable were his literary prejudices, extending even to the most venerated of authors. Once when the present writer mentioned to him the fact that French scholars considered Poe and Whitman our greatest voices, he said: “Poe, yes; but Whitman never. There isn’t a line of poetry in The Leaves of Grass.
“Not in ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking?’ “ he was asked.
“Sentimental twaddle of the worst order,” he replied with Johnsonian curtness.
One thing that tended to emb
itter . Bierce was his neglect at the hands of the publishers. Beginning in the early ‘eighties he wrote story after story, but nearly all were considered by magazine editors to be impossible for their pages; and when he sent a lot of manuscript tales to book publishers they would have none of them. These men admitted the purity of his diction and the magic of his haunting power, but the stories were regarded as “revolting.” Bierce revelled in the horrible. His tales of war make the reader see red for weeks. His stories of the occult freeze the spinal marrow and set the flesh a-shiver. With his fetching method of realism went a crystal-pure style in which words were chosen as a jeweller chooses diamonds for the necklace of an empress. His imagination was of the most riotous, nay, of the most brutal order. His psychological effects did not fall short of Maupassant’s. His surprise of climax always was complete.
Bierce, as has been said, loved war, and often dilated upon “the horrors of peace,” which, he held, were more terrible than the carnage of battle. Such army tales as “Chickamauga,” “A Son of the Gods,” “A Horseman in the Sky” and “An Affair of Outposts” afford a feast in which one may sup full of horrors. But let us not look altogether upon the gory and grisly side of his fiction. His tales of war celebrated such heroism as thrills the pulses and makes the reader forget that he is a mere reader; he feels himself an onlooker, if not a participant. Death, death, death! is the note sung over and over in a deep, compelling, almost pitiless cadence. Knowing war so well and the art of depicting it even better Bierce could give the colour and tone of it with the terrible effect of a Verestchagin. And yet, in spite of that cold aloofness which he contended to be the true attitude of the artist, occasionally he would give a glimpse of the compassion he really felt for war’s victims. Take this finale of that amazing exploit described in “A Son of the Gods,” where a single officer charges a whole battalion of the enemy:
Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics) Page 333