It seems that, unknown to Bierce, The Wasp was really owned by Charles Webb Howard, an official of the Spring Valley Water Company, a large public utility corporation operating in the Bay District. To keep Bierce, and others, in ignorance of the true ownership of the paper, a dummy was employed to play the role of “publisher.” So far as Bierce knew, the paper was owned by one Harry Dam. But Mr. Howard was at all times the real owner, and he made a nice profit by forcing the Spring Valley Water Company to buy about all the advertising space that the paper sold. This condition existed for quite a number of years, even after Bierce became editor, and until he learned the facts as to its ownership. When he discovered the deception that had been practiced upon him, he was furious and could not be placated. “I was more obstinate than ever; and now when I remember the lofty scorn with which I greeted every overture of my employer, I am filled with admiration and convinced afresh that I was born to be Rear-Admiral of a trade-union.” He threatened a public exposé of the fraud, and in order to prevent this calamity Howard was forced to sell the paper to E. C. MacFarlane, an old friend of Bierce’s.
From the first issue to which he contributed until he resigned, Bierce was The Wasp. He wrote the editorials; conducted his page of “Prattle”; edited all contributions; wrote many poems; and began the publication of “The Devil’s Dictionary,” perhaps the sharpest and most readable wit that he ever wrote. With the first issue of The Wasp, he began the publication of this dictionary of wit, beginning with the letter “P,” and continued down the alphabet until March 5th, 1881, when he started the dictionary all over again, apparently with the thought in mind of rewriting and enlarging the original plan. The idea of such a dictionary was, of course, old with Voltaire, but it owed its immediate origin to some work that Bierce had done for The News-Letter in December of 1875, after his return from London, called “The Demon’s Dictionary” and which ran for only a few issues. It was a convenient frame for a professional wit to use, as it gave him a constant pattern, and all that was needed was to select new words on which to direct his satire. Much of his wit was the result of a formula, a mere verbal juggling with ideas. In the early issues of the magazine appeared, also, “The Wasp’s Book of Wisdom,” containing many epigrams and aphorisms rather suggestive of the “Smart Set Birthday Book” that Mencken and Nathan published several years ago. Bierce reprinted in The Wasp a great deal of his London work; many of the fables from Fun and a few stories first used in Tom Hood’s Comic Annual.
“Prattle” was the same sprightly page that it was in 1869. There were no exceptions to Bierce’s scorn; his abuse was universal and lovely. It was sharpest when directed at a local poet or novelist, as though he resented even the thought of a San Franciscan attempting to write. In many instances his satire abruptly terminated the creative impulse. During the time that Bierce edited The Wasp, a fellow journalist, Harr Wagner, was editor of Vanity Fair, a continuation of Joe Lawrence’s famous magazine The Golden Era. Mr. Wagner is an optimistic fellow, and he was even more cheerful and sentimental in 1881. He once published a novel called “The Street and the Flower,” which tells the story of a young boy of the streets and the sweet, flower-like maiden who redeemed him. Bierce pounced upon this book hungrily and with joy. For weeks on end he poured abuse into Wagner that would have shamed a Turk. Mr. Wagner was good-natured about the matter, and was shrewd enough to reprint some of Bierce’s unkind gibes. They immediately provoked a reaction in favor of the novel and its author, for it was quite obvious that Mr. Bierce was unfair. But, good-natured as he was, Mr. Wagner never wrote another novel. Lillian Ferguson contributed occasional verse to the press during the eighties under the name of Lillian Plunkett. Bierce seized upon this name with sadistic glee and made endless sport of her verse by puns on the word “Plunkett.” The recollection of these early burlesques still rankles in the memory of several writers who survived his satire. Charlotte Perkins Gilman remembers him very vividly, as is revealed in this statement: “He was the Public Executioner and Tormentor, daily exhibiting his skill in grilling helpless victims for the entertainment of the public, — for wages. He was an early master in the art of blackening long-established reputations of the great dead, of such living persons as were unable to hit back effectively, and at his best in scurrilous abuse of hard-working women writers. He never lost an opportunity to refer to the cotton-stuffed bosoms of the women writers.” But Mrs. Gilman errs in saying that he struck only those who could not hit back effectively. As a matter of fact, there was no reputation, living or dead, that he was afraid to attack, although his blasts have the unmistakable indication of bravura about them at times.
In a single page of “Prattle” he would excoriate as many as fifteen prominent San Franciscans. Some he never wearied of flaying. General W. H. L. Barnes could not walk abroad but that Bierce would snip at his heels; Loring Pickering never split an infinitive or mixed a metaphor but that Bierce hit him with a longshoreman’s swing. Mr. W. C. Bartlett must have hesitated to write his art criticism, for Bierce would wait until he had reviewed an exhibition and then make some such comment as this:
“The old he-hen who makes the Bulletin’s art criticism has been in full cackle ever since the opening of the Spring exhibition — Everything about the Exhibition is, to Mr. Bartlett, great and excellent. Furthermore, he has executed this identical prostration of his spirit every spring since Californian art began to defy the law against indecent exposure — Doubtless the senile and unhaired wretch can now show as many little notes of gratitude from the ladies (weirdly malographic and uncannily mispencilled) as he has mentioned names which will visibly enhance the superiority of his smile and endow him with fat sleep and free dreams.”
It was an amusing page of malice and the number of victims preserved in its yellowing pages is startling, for it reads like a directory of San Francisco! Poor Pixley was ever and anon made immortal in some epitaph starting, as one did, with the line: “Here lies Frank Pixley as usual.” A wretched druggist was once a candidate for Supervisor. He had cards printed with the words: “William J. Bryan, Druggist, for Supervisor 12th Ward.” Bierce quoted the card in his “Prattle” and then wrote:
“Oh! William, such a thrifty trick,
Closely on genius verges;
Your candidacy makes men sick
So to your pill-shop double quick
They fly for pukes and purges.”
The collapse of the seventies had given the railroads a magnificent opportunity to gain control of the state, and by 1881 they were so bold about their dominance that it seems incredible that the citizenry could have endured the situation. But they did, and the universal corruption became really laughable; every one was a kept lobbyist for the railroad. The legislatures at Sacramento were a disgrace even for the State of California. Such political corruption and bribery were perhaps never witnessed in an American commonwealth as occurred in California during these years. The supremacy of “Boss” Tweed was localized and trifling when compared with the state-wide control of the Southern Pacific Railroad in California. The railroad took no chances: it owned both major political parties: it controlled the press with scarcely an exception. Bierce became so annoyed with the apathy of his fellow-citizens that his abuse grew shrill and hysterical. “If nonsense were black, Sacramento would need gas lamps on Monday.... So scurvy a crew I do not remember to have discerned in vermiculose conspiracy outside the carcass of a dead horse, — at least not since they adjourned.” The national scene did not seem much more inspiring: “The frosty truth of the situation is that we are a nation of benighted and boasting vulgarians, in whom the moral sense is as dead as Queen Anne, at her deadest; that we are hopelessly floundering and helplessly foundering in a sea of public and private corruption as offensive as that upon which the Ancient Mariner saw the shiny things that ‘did crawl with legs’; that we are a laughing stock to Europe and a menace to civilization.”
Not only was Bierce frantically annoyed with the stupidity of the people of a great common
wealth who permitted thick-browed gentlemen like “Uncle Colis” Huntington to loot them blind, but his feeling of resentment was deeper and more personal. He was lonely for the society of civilized people. The society of San Francisco, at the time, was slightly grandiose and ornate. Some French architects in the sixties imported a psuedo-classic type of design that quickly became a grotesque pattern in the hands of the natives. Greek porticos with Corinthian columns led up flights of wooden steps, and inevitably a “bay window” bulged out over the street. The type gradually became even more pretentious. There were conical towers, eccentric steps, Queen Anne flourishes cheek-by-jowl with some one’s idea of Renaissance style. This uneven, quixotic society ranging from Nob Hill to the Barbary Coast, was shot through and through with barbarous hatreds and currents of greed that annihilated even the possibility of good work in the arts. A satirist could survive, if he were willing to lend his pen to verbal butchery; but the life did not permit of the same work that was just coming to flower at the end of the fifties with Joe Goodman, Bret Harte, and Mark Twain.
It would be impossible to trace the pattern of all the rancorous hatreds and scandals that were a part of the life of those days. The Rev. Isaac S. Kalloch, politician and preacher, called Charles DeYoung, founder of The Chronicle, a bastard. Threats were made, and a Kalloch killed Charles DeYoung. Crowds surged in the streets; the saloons were rife with loud pronunciations of vengeance; and for sixty-five days San Francisco milled around the court room until Kalloch was acquitted. Judge Terry, who began to “knife” people back in the Vigilante Days and who killed David Broderick in a duel, fell in state and became the pawn of the dramatic Sarah Hill. Majestic Stephen Field, once alcalde of a village in Spanish-California days, but on his way to the U. S. Supreme Court, offended Sarah during the course of a trial. Terry made threats. Later he tried to kill Judge Field and was shot down by United States Marshal Nagel, who became a famous precedent in In Re Nagel, but was saved by the reasoning of the future associates of Judge Field. The railroad sent armed thugs into Mussel Slough to oust settlers, and their pet gunman, Walter Crowe, slaughtered farmers from ten in the morning until the last hours of the afternoon, when he was shot dead. Sharon sued Sharon through forty volumes of California decisions, and Mr. Colton’s widow still complained of Leland Stanford. The heirs of James G. Fair, of Virginia City fame, quarreled about a trust. The case was appealed to the Supreme Court. The first decision of the higher court was in favor of the trust’s validity by a four to three decision, Henshaw voting with the four. Judge Henshaw wavered. After all, he mused, amidst a dusty stack of reports, “man lives but once,” and the next decision found Henshaw voting the other way. The final opinion shattered the trust, and Judge Henshaw received $400,000, as shown by the affidavit of a co-conspirator who saw the light of divine revelation from a “fake-healer” and rushed to Fremont Older to confess. Hate and lust and abuse... It was a furnace of anger which affected all classes in the commonwealth. In such a society, Bierce was kept at a boiling temperature for years; naturally when the hates ran their course, his white fury crystallized in adamant prejudice and opinion.
It is not surprising to find that during this time Mr. Bierce was still offering to give satisfaction to the offended. There was one occasion when two army officers had given affront in crossing the bay one evening. The next morning he addressed this note to the two unknown culprits:
“That you are cowards I have not the dimmest doubt, but you can hardly afford to prove it to one another by withholding from me the power to call you so by name, — which I engage to do; my name, Ambrose Bierce, being, I hope, a sufficient warrant that the purpose will be executed in good faith and to the letter.”
The eighties was not only the era of the false front in architecture, but it was the age of just as studied an avoidance of simplicity in the other arts. The literary gentlemen such as T. H. Reardon, wrote essays about Petrarch, or brought out editions of Heredia’s poem, as did E. H. Taylor, or wrote Byronesque poetry, as did the sad-eyed Richard Realf. “On the Verge,” the favorite novel of the period, abounds in French quotations in every other paragraph. And when stories were written at all, they were generally of the highly artificial ghost-type that R. H. Milne and E. H. Cloud wrote. They did not look at life; Mark Twain and Bret Harte had done so thirty years previously, but these latter-day fellows were too elegant for this earth. Bierce, during these first years on The Wasp, was too busy to write much besides his regular journalism. “What I saw of Shiloh,” appeared in the Christmas number, 1881, and there were reprinted stories from his London days, but the time had not yet arrived for him to write the stories which have since become so celebrated.
But whether the society was charming or not, and however boldly the rascals looted the money-bags at Sacramento, one thing remained to console Bierce: the untrammeled, gloriously independent American saloon. If he was poorly paid, middle-aged, ambitionless and weary of the scene, he could always quit work and sojourn along the cocktail route, that commenced on the southwestern corner of Kearney and Bush and proceeded along Kearney to Market, and continued on the northern side of Market west as far as Powell, and “return or not, as the devotee wished or could daily afford,” as Major Ben C. Truman once phrased it. As early as 1880 there were nine drinking places between the two ends, not counting Joe Parker’s place on the northwestern corner of Bush and Kearney, or the bar at the Baldwin Theater. Business adjourned at about 4 o’clock, and the Latin holiday spirit that ruled in San Francisco in those days was released. There was a stream of men following this cocktail route, ending up at the point of beginning about 8 o’clock in time for dinner. It was not a raucous scene: Hacquette & Hageman’s Crystal Palace was conducted as a high-class club. Along this route Bierce would journey, and when he, too, was ready for dinner, the lights of the city were gleaming and San Francisco was not the putrid, foul-smelling den of vulgarity that it had been before he commenced the journey. Booze was a great consolation, a spiritual solace, amidst such scenes. Mr. Upton Sinclair, who, for reasons that it is difficult to understand, called George Sterling foul names because he got drunk at a Ruskin Club banquet (who wouldn’t?), has also berated Bierce as “an eminent tankard man.” Of course Bierce drank. “Water,” he once remarked, “has one merit — it is cheap; and one disadvantage — it is not good.”
With the cocktail route, Chinatown and the Barbary Coast, San Francisco had its faith charlatans, and religious intolerance was not unknown. In 1881 Sarah Cooper was tried for heresy. Her chief persecutor was Rev. J. B. Roberts. Of this man Bierce wrote:
“Dim-pinnacled in the intense shame of his theological environment, he sits astride his evil eminence of personal malignity, breaking the seals that close that pestilence, his mind, and its insupportable rain of red ruin falls alike upon the just and the unjust, the while he cackles his unholy glee till the lute-strings of his larynx are aweary of their work. Look at him — the hideous apparition perched between the world and the light, flinging his ugly shadow athwart the scene to fray the souls of babes and sucklings. O, but he is a bright and beautiful bird-of-paradise, a-ripening for the gun. Some Christian sportsman fill him a tempest of shot and compile him a bag. He is game by God’s unwritten law — and he shall take himself away from Sarah Cooper’s burrow, or I, for one, will make him wish he were another and better dog.”
Finally Bierce wearied of the entire collection of holy idiots that were constantly creating disturbances and prosecuting the weak, and in tones of exasperation wrote of them:
“What a procession of holy idiots we have had in San Francisco — hot gospellers and devil-pelters of all degrees! Thick-necked Moody with Sankey of the nasal name; Hallenbeck, Earle, Knops and all their he-harlotry of horribles. And now this grease eating and salt-crusted Harrison from the pork regions of the northeast, thinking holy hog-and-hominy and talking his teeth loose for the dissuasion of sinners from their natural diet of sin, without which they would be sick! Can we do nothing to rid us of the periodical
incursions of these scale-bugs — these leaf-worms — these phylloxera of the moral vineyard? May the devil smite them with a tempest of sulphuric acid from his Babcock extinguisher!”
During these early years after his return, Bierce lived in a flat at 1428 Broadway, San Francisco. He lived with his family when his health permitted, but there were long intervals when he would be absent, away in the hills seeking relief from his asthma. Nicassio was his favorite retreat during this period. It was then quite a pretty resort in Marin County, near San Rafael. But, in a few years, it became apparent that he could no longer live in San Francisco or make a pretense of keeping a residence there. His absences from his family were increasing in frequency and duration. Contrary to his legendary cruelty, he was almost sentimental about these trips away into the hills. He would write his daughter, Helen, charming letters about the pines where he lived, the rumble in the storm clouds which was like the “roar of great cannons,” tell her in a wistful manner that he missed her very much, and then always end his letters, as he did with all his children, “Your Father, A. G. Bierce.”
But, before the family moved away from San Francisco, he determined to try one further resort for his health, and this time he went to Auburn, in Placer County, in 1883, where he lived for a number of years.
Prior to leaving for Auburn, however, there had been considerable trouble between Bierce and his wife. It was a rather subtle antagonism. He complained rather bitterly of the “Holy Trinity,” meaning his wife, Mrs. Day and James Day, his brother-in-law. These three were always of the same opinion on every question, and the two Days would sometimes succeed in swinging Mrs. Bierce into line with them against her husband. As already mentioned, Bierce had disliked Mrs. Day since his return from London, and his sharp antipathy to his brother-in-law dated from about the same period. The circumstances of this quarrel were well known to members of the family at the time. James Day had fallen in love with the daughter of an aged clergyman, who, strangely enough, was a good friend of Bierce and, for that matter, of the Day family. The affair was a rather sordid one, and the old clergyman was so humiliated and chagrined by the experience that shortly afterwards he committed suicide. It was the breach of friendship that nettled Bierce. The revulsion which he experienced against James Day could never be overcome. He froze into an attitude of contempt. Hence he never forgave him. But, although he was estranged after a fashion from his wife while living at Auburn, there had been as yet no separation. The cause of their ultimate and final separation had not occurred. Many people who knew Bierce at Auburn strenuously insist that he was separated from his wife at that time, but such is not the case. They lived apart a great deal, because of Bierce’s health, and there did exist considerable misunderstanding, but they were not separated in any legal sense of the term, nor for that matter, in the sense that they had agreed not to live together.
Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics) Page 354