“I had supposed that when Carlyle died his dyspepsia would die with him, but his death seems to have rather aggravated the disease. His disobedient gastric fluid formerly disordered only his own literary work; it now tinges with ghastlier green the work of those who write about him.... Carlyle — more Carlyle — toujours Carlyle! I fall poisonously indisposed of too much Carlyle. The man is dead; shall he not be permitted to enjoy the rotting? Has the long-waiting grave-worm no rights, that we balk his mandible till we have had our will of the corpse? Let there be surcease of Carlyle. I hate him.”
But, examining Bierce’s work closely, it is apparent that one does not need to chart his life to come to the conclusion that he was not abnormal. The same conclusion is warranted by close critical attention to his style, by a knowledge of the origin of many of his stories, and by a study of his theory of aesthetics. These considerations will be discussed in order.
His style itself throws considerable light on the problem, as becomes immediately apparent when it is contrasted with that of Edgar Allan Poe. Mr. Thomas Beer has written that “Bierce erected his mortuary filigrees with traceries from the style of Poe.” Bierce denied this charge in his lifetime with a vehemence with which one can sympathize. The one thing he did not derive from Poe was his style. As will be shown, the terror-romance tradition was old with Poe, who contributed little to its technique. This Bierce realized and he did not hesitate to adopt many of the devices used by Poe, but he was always careful to safeguard his position on the charge of having aped Poe’s style. If Mr. Beer had compared, let us say, “A Son of the Gods” with “The Fall of the House of Usher,” he would have noticed the sharp difference in style. The method, in so far as it attempted to produce a “dominant impression,” might be the same, but the styles were of two worlds. Bierce’s style has nothing of the sonorous, rhythmic sweep of Poe’s best prose. On the contrary, Bierce aimed at clarity, precision, and simplicity.
This difference in style represents the difference in men. Dr. Krutch clearly recognized this fact in his book about Poe. To quote an illuminating passage: “Even Ambrose Bierce, who seems, at first glance, more nearly related than any other writer to Poe, will be found upon analysis to be different in an essential particular. He too depended largely upon horror. But unlike Poe he would often base that horror upon the exaggeration of a normal emotion.... His bitterness, unlike Poe’s, is the result of a sense of the world’s cruelty and is thus essentially social as Poe’s is essentially individualistic.” Poe, as Mr. Brownell observed years ago, was sui generis. He was a “case” for the psychiatrist from the start. The same can be said of the work of M. G. (‘Monk’) Lewis and Charles Maturin. There is a feverish quality about the work of these men that is unmistakable evidence of neurotic temperaments. But even in the most “awful” of Bierce’s stories, he marred their effect by his “unpardonable facetiousness,” which always snickered at his own grisly yarns.
In a previous chapter the origin of several of Bierce’s famous war stories has been traced to actual occurrences. When he used an actual incident in a story, however, he invariably warped the facts to fit his theory of the elements of a short story. In every instance, he treated the story in a romantic manner. He once rode forward at the head of a brigade brandishing a sword. It suggested a story and he wrote “A Son of the Gods” about the heroic young soldier who is killed under the gaze of two armies drawn up in line of battle. The story can be seen to be pure romance. Other instances of a similar transposition, from real to unreal, have been previously observed. The matter of “Mysterious Disappearances” is also illuminating. Bierce was always interested in such cases and, in fact, he made a fine disappearance himself in later years. But his method of writing the stories grouped under that phrase was to collect newspaper clippings and then rewrite them in story form. It can thus be observed that the process was entirely conscious and deliberate. He was not dominated, as was Poe, by an inexorable personal necessity.
As a matter of fact, the genuine moments in his stories are the moments of tenderness and the “horrible” situations are used merely as counterpoint for his own feelings. As Mr. Alfred C. Ward has written: “His war stories frequently represent a cry from the heart, such as should inspire us to veil pained ears and eyes, rather than to hide grinning mouths.” This is true even of the stories that cannot be traced to actual occurrences. Bierce invariably used a horrible incident for a dramatic purpose, which, of itself, shows the clearest deliberation. He placed severed legs, slashed heads, and broken bones about his canvases in a manner bordering on the melodramatic.
It would be difficult to compute the number of times that it has been suggested that Bierce’s war stories are so “grimly realistic” that they should be compared with Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” There is nothing in common between the methods of the two men. This should have been immediately apparent by the examination of a single story by Bierce. Take, for illustration, “The Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Technically it is one of the best of his stories, but it is not a war story. He wrote it as a psychological experiment and discussed his method very frankly with Dr. J. M. Robertson. It was pure romance and had no relation to the war, except incidentally. The same is true of many of his war stories. When, as in his sketch “What! Saw of Shiloh,” he did come to grips with war, it was in an admittedly personal vein. If he had been a genuine realist, he would never have permitted the dead to die so dramatically. A realist, Mr. Harold Frederic, wrote a collection of stories about the Civil War: “Marsena and Other Stories of the Wartime.” In one of these stories, he told all that there was to tell of war in a simple picture of a group of country people behind the lines standing about a bulletin board reading the casualty lists.
One has only to image the many war incidents that Bierce might have used, and then to examine a few of the situations he selected, in order to understand the essential character of his work. Captain Graffenreid, a brave man who has been used in drill work behind the lines, is suddenly shifted to the front and terror besets him. He jabs a saber through his body and an officer in the rear notices, with calm interest, the sharp point of the sword coming through Graffenreid’s coat as he sinks to the ground. It develops that the attack which so frightened Graffenreid was just a false alarm. In a word, a man was killed by terror, the oldest trick of the terror romance. The manner of Graffenreid’s taking off rather irritates one: it is unnecessarily dramatic. One hears offstage the clanking of the chains as the technician pulls his events into a dramatic order. It should be obvious, too, that the incident was purely imaginary. Outwardly, all of Bierce’s stories are objective, as though he had mistaken the origin of the creative impulse.
Take, again, the story of George Thurston, a brave man because he is a coward. He fears his cowardice to such an extent that he is unnecessarily heroic to beat down his terror. But he meets death in a swing. The swing soars too high and he is thrown out and his body crashes to the ground. “Then there is an indescribable sound — the sound of an impact that shakes the earth, and these men, familiar with death in its most awful aspects, turn sick. Many walk unsteadily away from the spot; others support themselves against the trunks of trees or sit at the roots.” It will be observed that the objective act of falling from the swing is deliberately used with the purpose in mind of inspiring horror. It is another ancient trick, old with Horace Walpole. The story was clearly manufactured. Deeply imbued with this theory of his art, which failed to identify appearances with an inner reality, Bierce was forever in quest of some “strange” or “unusual” incident to use as a story. This accounts for the meagerness of his stories and their essential uniformity. He was a romantic figure himself and he carried over into art some of the strangeness which he felt inhered in his own experience. He would write only of the “unusual” or the “strange,” because art had nothing whatever to do with reality, and where could he find the “unusual” save in the realm of the unreal in which horror exists solely for the reason that it cannot be explained. M
anfred parades his melancholy; Poe announces that loveliness is sad; Mr. Bierce speaks tenderly of the dead.
If further argument were needed to demonstrate the real nature of Bierce’s fiction, one has only to refer to the incidents he used in his stories of the supernatural. Some of the details of these stories have greatly perturbed Dr. Louis J. Bragman. Writing in the Welfare Magazine of the Illinois State Reformatory (June, 1928), he said: “Other chilling and unnerving topics Bierce develops in his mad search for the macabre are ghosts, the return of the dead, spirits, and spirit-rappings, haunted houses, mysterious disappearances, visual hallucinations, amnesia and delirium tremens. On what strange philosophic food did he nourish himself to produce such gloomy creations?” The answer is not as difficult as it might appear. Dr. Bragman must realize that the details, which have so horrified him, have been the common property of romantic terrorists for centuries.
To understand Bierce’s theory, one must keep constantly in mind the fact that there has always been a definite tradition of the terror-romance. The tradition dated, to be arbitrary and therefore inaccurate, with “The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story” by Horace Walpole in 1764. The terror-romance from this early romance to the present date has always been a romantic outburst. The Romantic Movement, so-called, has been traced to the work of Walpole, Ann Radcliffe and M. G. Lewis, I am informed by the academicians. Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie in his series of lectures on “Romance,” denies that the Lake poets had much to do with the movement, and, specifically, that Wadsworth was ever a part of it.
It would require a volume to summarize the methods by means of which Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe succeeded in achieving their aim, which was to suggest a spirit of place that would dominate their romances. They deliberately set out to make the scene other than it was in fact. In other words, they used purely objective tricks to attain a mood that satisfied some secret yen in their own natures. To attain this end they invented the “haunted house” and so typical did the castle or house become in the work of such writers that Mr. Eino Railo entitled his capital study of English Romanticism, “The Haunted Castle.” This type of romance released the imagination from the commonplace; it was an efflorescence of the romantic temperament. The most interesting of the early terrorists was M.
G. — Lewis. He was well read in German romanticism and, under its influence, wrote a book the title of which has an ironic ring in connection with this study: “Ambrosio, or The Monk.” It appeared in 1795 and was an enormous success. The title was shortened to “The Monk” and Lewis quickly became “Monk” Lewis. It is well known that Byron was deeply influenced by this book, just as Shelley was under the spell of similar romantic terrorism for a time. Poe, with his inventive intelligence, liberated the terror-romance from its fixed locale. He also added certain details of his own, such as old manuscripts, miniature portraits, and similar devices, which he used as objects upon which to liberate his romantic rhapsodies. Then, too, Poe used pseudo-scientific data to bolster up his work, just as he used the first person.
It was this tradition of the terror-romance, softened by the poetry of Southey and Coleridge, made fanciful by Hawthorne, and broadened by Poe, that Bierce inherited. Bierce became familiar with the tradition as early as 1874. It was a tradition characterized by its fanatical avoidance of the commonplace and its yearning for the strange, which is in effect a form of disgust with the obvious. It was a flight away from life. Naturally the tradition had much to offer Bierce. He became familiar with it at an early period in his life and he was inducted into its mysteries by his first and only mentor, James Watkins. It must be remembered that an adventurous and independent American, coming into the world of art in 1869, would inevitably fall into the tradition of Poe. Bierce had not passed through many phases of experience at the time and he assumed that Poe’s principles were true. All his life he labored under this misapprehension and frittered away his splendid energy and ability accommodating himself to a set of principles which did not align with his own feelings. He was basically ironic and quickly outgrew the tradition, but he never abandoned its principles in his work in the short story.
That he worked in the tradition of the terror-romance may be proven with ease. All the clichés of the tradition were used by him time and again in his stories. Like Poe he used the pseudo-scientific to bolster up his tales and to give them a ring of probability that they would otherwise lack, thus avoiding the errors of Mrs. Radcliffe. He read queer books in an effort to get this data. He quoted Denneker’s “Meditations” in “A Psychological Shipwreck,” in “Stanley Fleming’s Hallucination” and in “Charles Ashmore’s Trail.” He quoted from Dr. Hern’s “Verschwinder und Seine Theorie.” He speculated with Hegel’s doctrine of Non-Euclidian space, suggesting Poe and his Eureka talk. Bierce’s “Moxon’s Master” is suggestive, too, of Poe and his automatic chess player, which in turn relates back to the frequent appearance of the Frankenstein monster in German and English fiction. Then, too, Bierce used the incident of a severed part of the body to inspire terror, a trick which is at least two hundred years old. He wrote a group of stories about “haunted houses” and “mysterious disappearances” which were favorite subjects with all the terrorists. It will be noticed that Bierce contributed nothing to this type of story save, perhaps, his style. Practically every incident he used as the framework for a story had been used before. His was not the febrile intelligence to invent such schemes in the first instance. He was personally at antipodes from Poe, whose theory of aesthetics he adopted because it was more adaptable to his purposes than any other. The greatness of Bierce’s best stories is that they transcend this very tradition; that they break the bonds that his mind placed upon them.
But, to prove his alliance with the terrorists of fiction, one need only quote his own words. Writing of the tradition in his “Collected Works,” he said: “Tapping, as they do, two of the three great mother-lodes of human interest, these tales are a constant phenomenon — the most permanent, because the most fascinating, element in letters. Great Scott! has the patrol never heard of The Thousand and One Nights, of The Three Spaniards, of Horace Walpole, of ‘Monk’ Lewis, of DeQuincey, of Maturin, Ingemann, Blicher, Balzac, Hoffman, Fitz James O’Brien?” As a boy he read The Three Spaniards and was fascinated with the story. Years later, in 1910, he asked Mr. Roosevelt Johnson if he might borrow the book, as he had not examined it since childhood and the memory of it still pleased his fancy.
Writing of the work of Emma Frances Dawson, he said, of a certain “light” about her work, that “it is a light such as falls at sunset upon desolate marches, tingeing the plumage of the tall heron and prophesying the joyless laugh of the loon. That selfsame light shines somewhere through and under Doré’s long parallel cloudbanks along his horizons, and I have seen it, with added bleakness, backgrounding the tall rood in the Lone Mountain cemetery in San Francisco.” How Mrs. Radcliffe would have applauded that outburst!
Bierce was interested in the supernatural just as he was interested in the dead. He specialized in cadavers. He used to prowl about the old Yerba Buena cemetery in San Francisco, particularly during the time when it was being removed to make way for the new city hall. But he wrote of these incidents only to shock the readers of his “Prattle.” He would write such stuff as this: “I love the dead and their companionship is infinitely agreeable. It was one of those half-dark nights of the wintertime. There was a moon somewhere — I am uncertain if I saw it or heard it.” (Examiner, June 26, 1887.) If the legion critics who every now and again lift their voices to proclaim that Bierce liked the macabre because he lost his wife and boys, will reflect upon this statement, from The News-Letter, (April 22, 1871), months before his marriage, it might arrest their fine psycho-analysis before its full flowering in puerile fancy. Bierce was writing of the Yerba Buena cemetery: “Some rare old corpses have been turned out; among others one which had been bottled up in spirits and seemed as sweet and clean as a pig naked for the oven. One of these fellows was stuck into th
e dirt twenty years ago and his immortal part hasn’t done moving out yet: it still rises ‘like the strain of a rich-distilled perfume.’ No man with a normal nose can stand above that carcass and doubt the solemn mystery of a spiritual existence.” But it is important to observe that he was always mildly ironic about such matters and never wrote of death in the excited manner that was Poe’s.
He once summarized his aesthetics in a note on painters in the Examiner (May 15, 1887) in this manner: “The great artist makes everything alive; he gives to death itself and desolation a personality and a breathing soul.... We are not all equally sensitive to the joyous aspect of a tree, and the sulking of a rock, the menace of the benediction that may speak from a hillside, and the reticence of one building and the garrulity of another, the pathos of a blank window, the tenderness and the terrors that smile and glower everywhere about us. These are not fancies. True, they are but the outward and visible signs of an inner mood; but the objects that bear them beget the mood. No true artist but feels it; and all feel it alike. To discern, to feel, to seize upon the dominant expression “and make it predominant in his picture, — this is the artists’ function.” (Italics mine.) This, of course, is romantic theory. It shows how deliberately Bierce selected and stressed objective facts on the theory that they created the mood. He sensed a relationship between fact and fancy but he looked outward instead of communing with the Holy Ghost within.
Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics) Page 362