* * *
DURING the first years of his newly acquired fame as the Sir Oracle of journalism on the coast, he lived for the most part at Auburn, although he made frequent trips to visit his wife and family at St. Helena. He entertained quite a number of guests at Auburn. Jeremiah Lynch came to visit him; as did E. L. G. Steele; and “Charley” Kauffman, one of his closest personal friends. It was at Auburn, too, that a committee from San Francisco asked him to write a “Fourth of July” poem. He disliked the idea, but finally accepted, as he said that he did not always want to be regarded as a “refuser.” He spent considerable time over the “Invocation” and read stanzas of it to a friend who owned and published a newspaper at Auburn. Bierce would drop into this man’s office in the afternoon and would read a few stanzas that he had written that day, and they would discuss them. The matter is important only in the light of Dr. Danziger’s statement that he saw Bierce sit down and write the ode, just as he might write out a check, or sign his name. The poem was the product of quite a period of effort and thought. Much of its tone of dire foreboding and its prescience of dark times ahead may be attributed to the fact that the famous anarchist bombing in Chicago occurred in 1886, and the excitement engendered by the episode had stirred many minds. The poem was read at a mass meeting in the Grand Opera House in San Francisco on the evening of July 4th, 1888, — and was reprinted in The Examiner the next day with this note: “The poem is not one of the made to order kind. It is not perfunctorily written up to the occasion. It is appropriate, but not with the ephemeral appropriateness that loses its flavor when immediate occasion is past.”
The poem was written for the occasion and it has lost something of its flavor because the government was not overthrown by the anarchists. This poem had an interesting history. One of Bierce’s great admirers in later years was Louis Dupont Syle, of the department of English at Berkeley. Bierce showed him this poem and Syle hung a copy of it on a bulletin board in the university, with a note attached in which he said: “Several years before Mr. Kipling wrote the Recessional there was published ‘The Invocation’ by Mr. Ambrose Bierce, on a subject no less worthy than Kipling’s and a treatment no less superior.” This was in 1899, ten years after the poem was published. Immediately the word went out around the world, from a bulletin board at the University of California, that Kipling had stolen his poem from Bierce. The story, by heaven knows what mysterious channels, was printed and reprinted for years. It is apparently without the slightest foundation in fact. The list of those who have plagiarized Bierce is not as voluminous as some of his admirers would have us believe. In fact, James Huneker in his “Steeple-jack” intimates that Bierce once appropriated an idea himself. But this same idea (“The Man and the Snake”), of a man who dies of fright inspired by a snake with buttons for eyes, if not original with Bierce, was appropriated from his work by Harris Merton Lyon, in a short story called “An Unused Rattlesnake.”
Along with these regular friends that came to Auburn, followed the usual stream of visitors. It was at Auburn that Bierce met one of the first of his “pupils.” Ina Peterson, niece of Ina Coolbrith, was in Auburn on a vacation with her brother and happened to show Bierce some of her work. He was enthusiastic and instructed her in writing for quite a period of years. Her work began to appear in The Wave, a publication edited by two of Bierce’s young friends, Hugh Hume and J. O’Hara Cosgrave, and in collaboration with Mr. Bierce she wrote “An Occurrence at Brownsville.” A poem that she wrote about him at about this time is indicative of the manner in which he was revered by his many “pupils” who were constantly writing poems to him, such as this:
“Almost has ceased the royal reign of sun;
Low on his gilded bier the Monarch lies,
Leaving to Shadow Earth’s vain panoplies,
And the long patient Day is nearly done.
Into the West there creepeth, one by one,
A band of glittering stars, their steadfast eyes
Filled with the light of a new Paradise,
And of a consecration fairly won.
So will thy Soul, thou glorious, grandly shine
When the long day hath deepened into night;
And as thy spirit threads the roseate bars
Of Heaven, midst God’s supernal hosts, be mine
The boon to view thee: Thou wilt wing thy flight
Crowned with a halo radiant with stars.”
One can only imagine what Bierce thought of this poem, particularly about walking the “roseate bars of Heaven” — which he so despised — and being one of “God’s supernal hosts.” He once wrote: “Heaven is a prophecy uttered by the lips of despair, but hell is an inference from analogy.” Nevertheless he was secretly much pleased by such pathetic adoration, and being quite romantic, treasured these many mementos.
At Auburn there were few places to take his guests to visit. About the most attractive spot was the cemetery, and there he would repair with his friends to converse about the matter of ghosts, wines and whatnot. He would invariably take his guest to one tombstone, in a far end of the graveyard, on which was inscribed just the single word: “Eulalie.” Such an inscription was Poe-esque and “romantic” and he speculated much about the mysterious “Eulalie,” until some local historian informed him that she had been a servant girl of a German family; large, bony and unattractive. It was probably this disillusioning experience that provoked him to write of the Auburn cemetery in his story “The Realm of the Unreal”: “It was a dishonor to the living, a calumny on the dead, a blasphemy against God.”
He was in Auburn on the eve of the election of Benjamin Harrison as President. A celebration was planned at the Putnam House, and through the lobby that evening a miniature parade was led by young Bouthwell Dunlap, later to become quite well known as an historian. Bierce was amused with the shouting, high spirits and nonsense. During the course of the “parade,” he was conducted across the lobby and introduced to a beautiful lady in widow’s weeds. She was handsome, and stately, and most charming. It was his “Mona Lisa” lady; the beautiful widow who never ceased wearing black because she had worn it when she first met Ambrose Bierce. She was known in San Francisco as the “widow who never ceased mourning,” and years later, when Benjamin Harrison was just a name for school boys to mumble, she was sometimes seen on the streets of San Francisco, in widow’s weeds, but worn they were, and dusty, and wrinkled, as though her grief had grown old.
It was during this period that he began the group of war stories which first brought his name into national fame as an artist. The stories appeared in the Sunday Supplement, sometimes taking the place of his column of “Prattle” and sometimes being in addition to this work. Some of the stories also appeared in The Wave. “One of the Missing” appeared in The Examiner early in 1888, and the others followed in succession, nearly all of the “Tales of Soldiers and Civilians” having appeared in print in The Examiner before they were published in book form. When Bierce thus set about the task of writing a book of short stories he was forty-six years old, and had acquired some little fame as a journalist — a craft in which he had been actively engaged for sixteen years. His achievement is all the more remarkable in view of these facts. But the war was only a memory when he began writing the stories, and when he did finally write them he romanticized the situations and warped the facts to fit his highly artificial theory of aesthetics derived from Poe. As will be shown more in detail in a future chapter, Bierce set down deliberately to write these stories according to a previously worked out formula. He thought that the world was separated into neat, compact departments, such as Art, Satire, Law, and whatnot, that clicked precisely into place, and that were operated according to the principles of immutable law. Bierce never identified his art with life or with the vital creative impulses in himself. Art had nothing to do with reality; ergo, the more unreal a story was the better story it must be. He was always on the edge of experience; he never penetrated to the essence of things. His failure as an artist was his t
ragic inability to work out a problem that balanced his enormous energy. He shot all his force and vitality into the obsolete, arbitrary pattern of the short story and toppled it over with the force of the blow. The only form that his expression could take was to make his stories unreal and dramatic, which he did in the extreme. But the worthy protagonist never appeared: he could not envisage a problem that measured up to his power. He was like a giant playing with a toy and generally he broke the toy. The short story form with Bierce was a bracelet on the wrist of a Cyclops. He could get more adequate expression in his satire, but even there he went wide of the mark and became merely abusive in his impetuosity.
Several shrewd observers noticed this quality about Bierce’s stories, but jumped to the too hasty conclusion that he was creatively impotent and that his satire was a result of his failure as an artist. This, of course, does not fit the facts, for he was a satirist before he thought of writing stories and his first writings were sardonic. Mary Austin, wrote of Bierce:
“Never having seen Bierce but once, at Sterling’s house, and having known him only through young people who had passed under his hand, I judged him to be a man secretly embittered by failure to achieve direct creation, to which he never confessed; a man of immense provocative power, seeking to make good in other’s gifts what he himself had missed, always able to forgive any shortcoming in his protégés more easily than a failure to turn out according to his prescription. I thought him something of a posturer, tending to overweigh a slender inspiration with apocalyptic gesture.”
And she further amplified this thought in a letter to me, in the course of which she says:
“I do think that he was to a certain extent conscious of lack and failure in his own life which he was never willing to admit. Much of his venom grew out of this secret disappointment. He kept forcing the note of savage irony because what he really wanted would not come. In fact the whole flavor of the man to me was one of alternate high confidence in himself and puzzled bewilderment over the failure of his genius.”
Now this is fine comment, and it is accurate enough from the standpoint of those who approach Bierce’s work from a late date without knowledge of his early life and experience. The “bitterness” or the “idealism,” because I insist that with Bierce the ideas cannot properly be dissociated, existed from the moment that he began to write. There could have been no disappointment over the failure of his artistic ambitions at that date, for he had none. There was a failure of his genius as a writer of fiction, but the cause was more obscure. While he was amazingly sensitive in his reactions and had a fine appreciation of values, when he went to weld these elements into a work of art, he found himself in a state of chaos. To extricate himself, he reversed the process, thought out a formula, and then wrote stories to fit the pattern previously devised. Naturally the stories were not superlatively great. That they were excellent for their time, cannot be doubted, and that they have survived this long is proof enough of his power. Whether he was a great artist or not, he was indubitably a great man. He once wrote Scheffauer: “Maybe, as you say, my work lacks ‘soul,’ but my life does not, as a man’s life is the man.” And he spoke truthfully.
* * *
Meantime, Mr. Hearst was making progress with The Examiner, and had moved it into new quarters. He was so excited about the pretty new habitat for his latest toy that he wrote his elderly critic:
“I will come up this next Saturday, if agreeable to you. Thanks for the fables last Saturday. They were particularly bully.
“We are in the new building at last and Gosh! I wish you could see my room. It has a blue ceiling striped with red, gilded windows and yellow marble decorations ‘till your eyes are on edge. I won’t tell you any more about it or you will be down before I can get up to see you.”
Bully fables and a blue ceiling striped with red! “Gosh!”
CHAPTER XI. “NOTHING MATTERS”
DURING these middle years when Bierce was traveling from Auburn to Angwins in search of a “breathing place,” his family continued to live in St. Helena, a small white bungalow on “Main Street.” As Bierce was quite famous on the coast by this time, the presence of his family in such a small town provoked an inordinate amount of comment and discussion. For the most part, this talk centered about Day Bierce. He was a remarkably handsome youngster, with the head of an Apollo. With all his father’s pride and energy, he was naturally arrogant and rather contemptuous of mediocrity. He would write and draw with facility. As early as 1883, his father’s letters would return certain sketches and poems which had been submitted for approval. Bierce once remarked that his son “seemed to know things intuitively” and this was his definition of genius, for he once said: “Genius knows what it has not learned and apprehends before it has examined.” The villagers at St. Helena would stare at Day as he walked about the town; the perfection of his features was that of art rather than nature. To quote these old neighbors, they “marveled” at his beauty. He was a blond, with his father’s piercing blue eyes, but his features were much finer. Fifty years after his tragic death, friends and neighbors in St. Helena still retain a vivid impression of his beauty and charm.
One summer Day announced to his father and mother that he was going to be a “newspaperman” and that he was “sick of school.” A quarrel ensued. But there was as much determination about Day as there was about his father and neither would yield an inch. It was a case of steel upon steel, and the tears of Mrs.
Bierce were as nought. As a result of this quarrel, Day packed his bag one night and left home. Bierce did not attempt to pursue the runaway, as he thought the experience would prove to be of value. Mrs. Bierce continued to write to her son and once sent him some money, which he returned promptly, with elaborate disdain. It was the prelude to a series of tragedies in Bierce’s life.
The first had to do with his wife. Prior to this time, that is, about 1888, there had been considerable disharmony between Mr and Mrs. Bierce. This friction can be traced, in most instances, to unfortunate circumstances, such as, the Black Hills mining episode, the failure of The Wasp, and other misfortunes which made Bierce subject to the criticism of his wife’s family. He had not accomplished all that he expected to accomplish, or all that he was expected by others to accomplish, and his intolerable pride resented the slightest criticism. Marriage to such a man as Bierce could not be other than an irksome experience at times. That he realized this clearly is shown by his insistence in later years that adults be frank about marriage. He once wrote: “We shall continue to have marriage, and its dead-sea fruits will grow no riper and sweeter with time. But the lie which describes them as luscious and gratifying is needless.” In fact, his entire review of “The Kreutzer Sonata,” written in August of 1890, is a rather sharp and acrimonious attack on marriage as an institution.
But despite these minor disharmonies, Bierce lived quite happily with his wife until their separation. If their marriage had not been entirely a “success,” they were far from unhappiness or incompatibility. Their friends knew that a great tragedy had occurred, for only a tragedy could have parted a couple otherwise so attached to each other. Bierce was not the type of man who would have permitted a trifling irritation, a merely selfish annoyance, to disrupt his family life. The cause of their separation was a bitter and tragic misunderstanding, the details of which are unimportant. But the matter was the subject of such protracted discussion in San Francisco, and so many conflicting and discreditable stories have been told, that in fairness to both Mr and Mrs. Bierce some explanation is necessary.
The great tragedies are those of misunderstanding, in which it seems that an unrelenting fate has determined to baffle all the characters and to send them broken from the stage. In such dramas “misunderstanding” is the impalpable marplot at work putting evil potions in every glass, so that all the puppets are left with the fall of the curtain in disconsolate agony. Mr. Bierce once wrote, in the course of a letter: “I don’t take part in competitions — not even in love.”
That he meant what he so casually had written cannot be doubted by those familiar with the facts of his life. A more proud or sensitive man than Bierce never lived. By chance he learned that a man, whom he did not know personally, was enamored of his wife. This man had written Mrs. Bierce letters, couched in the rather ornate and egregious manner of a foreigner, for such he was, and the letters had been discovered. To Bierce these facts were an insurmountable barrier: he would not, he could not, forget.
But the tragedy was two-fold for Mrs. Bierce. To the tragedy of separation was added the torturing realization that she was, strictly speaking, responsible for this misunderstanding. For such it was, without doubt. Mrs. Bierce was guilty of no serious impropriety and her subsequent conduct was a beautiful, eloquent and passionate demonstration of her affection and fidelity. She passed through some harrowing experiences, but always with the most admirable grace and courage. She never whimpered or sniffled or bowed her head. To the day of her death, she would not murmur a word of complaint against her husband, nor would she permit others to do so. It might appear to some that he had acted harshly and unreasonably, but she would never permit such comment to be made in her presence. Her devotion was so whole-hearted that, in later years, when she heard that her husband secretly wanted a divorce, she filed an action so that he might have his liberty. As a matter of fact, nothing was further from his desires, and again was misunderstanding fraught with fatality, for Mrs. Bierce died within three months after the decree was granted. Those who knew them both differ in their opinions of Bierce, but there is a convincing unanimity of views about Mrs. Bierce. You may make the circle of their acquaintances and never hear an unkind word about the life which she so splendidly devoted to her husband and family.
Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics) Page 357