The skirmishers return, gathering up their dead.
Ah, those many needless dead! That great soul whose body is lying over yonder, so conspicuous against the sere hillside — could it not have been spared the bitter consciousness of a vain devotion? Would one exception have marred too much the pitiless perfection of the divine, eternal plan?
Such tales as this, from In the Midst of Life and those stories of the occult in Can Such Things Be? were enough to establish any author’s reputation, and it seems strange that Bierce, as a writer of fiction, did not sooner find his public. A San Francisco merchant, E. L. G. Steele, who was a great admirer of his work, finally defrayed the expenses of the publication of Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, afterward republished in England and America as In the Midst of Life. The book, though it awed and compelled the Biercean cult, enjoyed nothing that might be termed vogue. Reviewers shook their heads over such stories as “The Affair at Coulter’s Notch,” in which an officer of artillery feels it his duty to train his guns upon a house that shelters his own wife and children, and the debacle of “Chickamauga” challenged resentment for its bloody detail. Even when Can Such Things Be? and The Monk and the Hangman’s Daughter made their appearance in book form the critics were slow to give their approval. But where a reviewer dared to let himself become a champion he generally was a fierce one. Never was an author more discussed in a private way than Bierce, and yet it is hardly fair to say, as has been averred, that his was simply an “underground” reputation. As the years went by the cognoscenti came to know him very well and to say good words of him. This counted by way of publicity, but he never had a popular audience. That he was “unknown” even up to his death, as many writers will tell you, is a statement not to be seriously accepted. In his latter years he took exception to this curious manner of reference to him, and wound up a breezy journalistic jingle about himself with the satirical line:
Five thousand critics crying “He’s unknown!”
To him his trunkful of clippings established the fact that he was not only not unknown, but very well known and recognised. In truth it was easy for him to assume the character of a celebrated literary personage. Once he accepted an invitation from a wealthy New Yorker, who received him very hospitably in his Fifth Avenue home. After dinner, when Bierce was told that he was expected to go with his host and a number of others to the theatre where a box had been engaged for them, he declared hotly:
“Do you think I’ll let you show me about like a monkey in a cage? No, sir! I’m going home.”
And home he went in high dudgeon, leaving his friend the most amazed man in New York that night.
Perhaps he enjoyed making a scene, as this story tends to show: At a large gathering in a Washington drawing-room the host presented Bierce to a street railway magnate, who extended his hand cordially.
“No!” thundered Johnson the Second, drawing back 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.”
The black hand was speedily withdrawn.
For over thirty years Bierce enjoyed an income of five thousand dollars a year, besides which he received a pension of thirty dollars a month from the Government—”cigar money” as he termed it. He was a good liver. About twenty years ago he told the writer that in his old age he wanted to look like “one of those red-faced, full-blooded English squires.” In this he had his wish. He was liberal with those who made demands upon him for charity. Several outworn hack writers in Washington where he lived during the fifteen years preceding his fateful campaign in Mexico, knew where to go to “borrow” five dollars or so when their pockets were empty. They knew, too, that Bierce would promptly forget the indebtedness. Although he was rather inclined to prodigality, Bierce was possessed of a goodly estate. Before going to Mexico he made his will and left nearly all of his property, which consisted of stocks, money and real estate, in the hands of a trustee. It is said that the bulk of his estate will go to his daughter, who lives in Ohio.
There are those who believe that General Villa and the Constitutionalists owe much of their military success to Bierce, who was well skilled in the art of war. He was much stirred by the cause of the Constitutionalists, and on leaving Washington for Mexico to join them in the fray, he said he could not understand why thousands of liberty-loving Americans did not take up arms against the tyrannical Huerta.
Yes, this strange and seemingly hard and cold philosopher loved liberty, and his greatest poem, “An Invocation,” from which Kipling is said to have received inspiration for his “Recessional,” was addressed to that benign goddess. But he fulminated against the American idea of freedom, which he called “blind idolatry.” The most illustrative though by no means the best stanza of his “Invocation” is this:
Let man salute the rising day
Of Liberty, but not adore.
‘Tis Opportunity — no more —
A useful, not a sacred ray.
That despite all his scoffings at churchly folk and despite all that they regarded as his heterodoxy, he should still have made profession of a profound Christian faith seems paradoxical, and yet he made such profession. And this paper can have no fitter or more significant finale than the following exalted tribute to Jesus of Nazareth from his pen:
This is my ultimate and determinate sense of right—”What under the circumstances would Christ have done?” — the Christ of the New Testament, not the Christ of the commentators, theologians, priests and parsons.
The orthodox will frown at this, but in any scale of logic it seems clear that no man holding such a view of Christ could have been the hopelessly agnostic and altogether Mephistophelean being which some of the critics of Ambrose Bierce have pictured him.
Ambrose Bierce by R. F. Dibble
From: Overland Monthly, November 1919, pages 418-422
Ambrose Bierce
By R. F. Dibble
SOMEWHERE, probably on the tawny, cactus-covered sands of Mexico, the bones of Ambrose Bierce are blanching under the torrid rays of the sun, while the ominous vulture flaps lazily along glimmering dully beneath the coppery moon as the gaunt, gray wolf, “whose howl’s his watch,” glides silently, intent on some murderous design, and the skulking coyote yelps his plaintive cry upon the slumbrous, nocturnal air. Or, if by chance some uncouth though kindly hand afforded his body the final service of pickaxe and spade, even so, but little consolation would result therefrom to his friends, for of Bierce, as of Moses, it can be said that “no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.” Prom the time of the battle of Torreon in 1914, when Bierce was on the staff of Villa, his fate has been clouded in mystery, and since he had then already exceeded the limit of days which the Psalmist set for man’s mortal pilgrimage, there can be but little question that he has passed into the uncharted regions of the everlasting silence. If his immortality might put on mortality for a brief space of time so that he could return from that undiscovered country, it is probable that he would assure his friends that nothing in his life became him more than the mysterious manner in which he left it; for mystery in a thousand diverse shapes meant more than anything else to him while he lived. So, possibly, Hawthorne, too, might say that fate was very gracious in permitting him to glide softly from the gentle embrace of dreams into that spirit world which was always so much more real to him than mere sensuous existence.
And to Ambrose Bierce, as to Hawthorne, the life of the senses meant comparatively little. His imagination was forever roving through the boundless, untrammeled stretches of an unearthly, super-sensuous country —
“A wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of Space, out of Time.”
His critical writings were indeed pungent and pitiless; he preferred to open wounds rather than to cauterize them; he was an iconoclast, not a constructive reformer; his searing satire, aimed at a multitude of hostile contemporari
es, at the fidelity of woman, at church and State, and in general at what he believed to be the many sins of modern society, never admitted of let or hindrance. But because of their very nature, those portions of his writings which were concerned distinctively with social matters of his day are bound to have less and less appeal, and whatever his final rank may be, after the tribulations of several decades have winnowed out all that was strictly ephemeral in his works, he is quite certain to be remembered primarily as an artist who dealt with the uncanny forces that lie outside of life rather than with life itself. He will live, if he lives at all, not as one who had some moral message, some doctrinaire preachment, for his generation, but rather as one who, largely unconcerned with theories of amelioration of any kind whatever, beguiled his life’s day by constructing a world almost wholly out of his own fantastic imagination.
Since this world is to a large extent singularly his own, it is fitting that its composition, even though in some degree shapeless and indeterminate, should be subjected to as definite an analysing process as is possible. Right here is where inveterate lovers of literary influences and of the general heritage of the past as it affects our modern writers may have their fling, and dally with such matters to their hearts’ desires. With commendable accuracy they may point out that Gothic Romance, initiated in England more than a century and a half ago by Horace Walpole in his crudely supernatural and bloody “Castle of Otranto,” which innocently fathered a host of bawling English, Continental and American children during the next few decades, is the literary pigeon-hole in which the works of Ambrose Bierce may be filed for the benefit of gaping college classes forced to endure the pangs of despised required courses in the history of literature. And these critics would be perfectly right in so doing; as right, that is, as are physicists who explain the rainbow to their own satisfaction by affirming that it is merely the result of the refraction of rays of light passing through drops of water. But, though the product of explicable scientific laws, the rainbow is still essentially as much a thing of baffling, poetic splendor as it was when first it leaped across the clouds that covered the vaporous, inchoate mass we now call earth; and the writings of Bierce, indubitably the product of a definite tendency in literature, would still hold the mind in a fascinating grip even if their literary parentage were unknown.
There is, to be sure, some reason for thinking that in Poe and Hawthorne the art of Gothic Romance reached its highest possibilities and that little or nothing of novelty in method or subject matter remains. Certainly the number of present-day pseudo-scientific romanticists, almost all of whom have knelt before the throne of Poe, have given us practically nothing more than countless variations of themes first introduced by him; the great advance in scientific knowledge since Poe’s time has surely been accompanied by no similar increase in artistic ability to utilize this new material for fiction. Nor have Hawthorne’s tales of the Puritanic conscience working usually amid direful situations been surpassed, and probably not equalled; though it is quite certain that only a very bold person would claim that the morality of the world has advanced, since Hawthorne’s time, equally with scientific discovery. But it is just here that Ambrose Bierce must be reckoned with as one who accomplished something that Hawthorne and Poe each did in part, though seldom or never wholly: he took the omnipresent but rarely appalling supernaturalism of Hawthorne, combined with it the almost purely physical horrors of Poe, and thus produced what is virtually a new type of fiction — a type which others have occasionally used, but which perhaps no one previously has made specifically his own. In his best stories he created a world whose beings are absolutely dominated by unreasoning, aboriginal, cosmic fear.
This fear, which constitutes the warp and woof of Bierce’s most significant tales, grips the reader almost, if not quite, as powerfully as do Poe’s ghastly creations, but it springs from as unearthly sources as do the milder terrors of Hawthorne. At times it manifests itself in at least partially tangible form, but it is most effective when strictly impalpable. It is the fear that twisted the hearts of our most primitive progenitors when first they realized that there were phenomenal forces far more to be shunned and fled from than the ponderous foot of the mammoth or the scimitar-like claws of the cave-lion. It is the fear that left their bodies unscathed, but clutched their minds with paralyzing force. It leaped upon them infinitely swifter than their arboreal enemies. They may have scorned the arrow that flieth by day, but of the terror by night they were woefully afraid. Brute strength and cunning availed them nothing, for it was not a part of the sensuous world. It is the fear and trembling that came upon Eliphaz, the Temanite, in the visions of the night when deep sleep falls upon men, and made all his bones to shake; for a spirit passed before his face. It is the penalty which all mankind must pay for being elevated above the brute world into a sphere where intellectual and emotional processes usurp the place of mere thews and sinews of physical strength. It is a part of the primal curse which, according to the fable, fell upon man because he inquisitively tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Neither adamantine barriers of imponderable granite or marble, nor any “unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time” can fortify man against it, for it is the fear of the unseen.
The art of Bierce may be seen at its best in the two volumes entitled “Can Such Things Be?” and “In the Midst of Life (Tales of Soldiers and Civilians”, the latter book having been “denied existence by the chief publishing houses in the country” — a significant commentary on the financial wisdom our publishers show in catering to our deeply ingrained, Anglo-Saxon antipathy to literature or other work done for art’s sake only, and our immaculately chaste delight in witnessing the triumphant victory of vapidly orthodox virtues over the sinister forces of iniquity. The works of Bierce, like those of Poe and Whitman, have been read far more sedulously in Europe than in America — another testimonial to the wiser charity of peoples who care less for esoteric morality than they care for eclectic art. It needs no connoisseur of literature to see, in these two books, plenteous traces of ideas garnered from many modern writers. Thus in “A Psychological Shipwreck” the theme is prescience granted in a dream; in “The Realm of the Unreal” it is hypnotism; “One Summer Night,” a story less than four pages long, captivates by reason of the horror aroused by premature burial, grave-robbing and murder; and reincarnation is the motif of several tales. Bierce apparently followed De Maupassant, though independently as to subject matter, in the employment of deliberately unconventional beginnings, extremely bizarre situations and smashing climaxes. Thus, “A Jug of Sirup” opens with the laconic statement, “This narrative begins with the death of the hero;” “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” details, with a minuteness worthy of Henry James, the introspections of a criminal on the scaffold during the short interval between the adjusting of the noose and the springing of the trap; in “Chickamauga” a child, deaf and mute, wanders through a battlefield splotched with decaying corpses; in “One of the Missing” a soldier, imprisoned by fallen timbers, finds himself staring into the muzzle of his own cocked rifle, and, unable to release himself finally dies because of the hypnotic fear inspired by the “menacing stare of the gun barrel,” which actually is empty and harmless; in “The Man and the Snake” a man is literally frightened to death by the “unspeakable malignant” eyes of a snake which, as the closing sentence pithily states, was “a stuffed snake; its eyes were two shoe buttons.” In “The Boarded Window” a man, alone at night with his supposedly dead wife, suddenly hears a panther trying to drag away the body, but it fails, and the terse ending sentence suggests why, for “between the teeth was a fragment of the animal’s ear.” Best of all, perhaps, is that superb tour de force in staggering situation, “The Eyes of the Panther,” in which prenatal influence, as well as “the menace of those awful eyes,” plays a ghastly part. Moreover, the drab realism of Flaubert, and perhaps of the Russian school, is to be seen in such a sentence as this, taken from “Chickamauga”: “The greater part of the forehead
was torn away, and from the jagged hole the brain protruded, overflowing the temple, a frothy mass of gray, crowned with clusters of crimson bubbles — the work of a shell.” There are crudities in these tales, even in the best of them: Bierce is too fond of the emotion mechanically stirred by the exclamation point, he often strives for shocks at the expense of even remote plausibility; he takes a ghoulish delight in dishing up carrion banquets for his readers; he piles horror on horror, after the manner of those Elizabethan masters of diablerie, Tourneur, Webster, and Ford; but at his best he has an austere reserve and a power of creating an atmosphere of all-enveloping ill unsurpassed, probably, by any writer who has specialized in these two particular literary devices. Furthermore, his stories are commonly interspersed with bursts of humor which, grimly sardonic as it is, still furnishes the emotional relief that the exponents of Gothic art have quite generally failed to give.
It is, however, in those tales which portray the workings of wholly immaterial powers of darkness and evil that Bierce is most original and thrilling, tales in which the usual theme is the return of menacing wraiths for venegeance denied them in the flesh. In these stories there is practically no use made of sensuous terrors that palsy the senses only; rather, the motivation springs from the infinitely more dreadful horror that arises from the presence of “supernatural malevolences,” which far excel the pigmy forces of mere material fright. Bierce is, of course, compelled to use physical metaphors in describing these “invisible existences” — for he regards them as such, and far more powerful than are matter and energy. He portrays a universe shadowed by “one primeval mystery of darkness, without form or void,” in which there is “a portentous conspiracy of night and solitude.” In “A Watcher By the Dead” and “The Suitable Surroundings,” death comes solely from fear of these “supernatural malevolences.” In “The Damned Thing,” “The Moonlit Road,” “Stanley Fleming’s Hallucination,” “The Secret of Macarger’s Gulch,” and in “The Death of Halpin Prayser,” however, the “accursed beings” work their will by temporarily using physical force. “The Death of Halpin Frayser” is perhaps the best of all Bierce’s stories in creating an impression of the incarnate verisimilitude of those “invisible existences that swarm” about the earth. The following poem, taken from this story, is possibly as powerful a piece of unalloyed morbidity as poetic pen ever produced:
Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics) Page 334