Sterling came east for a visit, and he was with Bierce at Sag Harbor for a few weeks one summer. With the publication of “A Wine of Wizardy” in The Cosmopolitan, Sterling came into national fame. Bierce had sent the poem to a dozen or so magazines before inducing the editor of The Cosmopolitan to accept it. It seems that Sam Chamberlain had read Lord Bryce’s remark about the scarcity of poets in America, and had accepted the poem so that he might make it the basis of an editorial devoted to Lord Bryce’s shortcomings as a critic of American life. Bierce was furious when he discovered that his “pupil’s” poem was accepted only that it might be put to such an inglorious use.
With this notoriety and fame, Sterling began to act in accordance with the best poetic traditions and Bierce was, at first, very tolerant. Writing to Howes, Bierce had occasion to remark: “George Sterling has written twenty-two love sonnets; so he says, but he has sent me only one of them and says that none of them can be printed. Guess he’s afraid — he has a wife. Why can’t a fellow content himself (as I have learned to do) with a bird and a squirrel? — or (as you do) with a book and a julep? The irrationality of our race is beyond belief.” The group of sonnets swelled in the course of time to a bulk sufficient for publication as “Sonnets to Craig,” although the wife of a drummer at Carmel received twice as many sonnets as did “Craig.” These escapades came to annoy Bierce excessively. He never could tolerate mere “Bohemianism.” It impressed him as tawdry, vulgar and unnecessary. Here again Bierce could not overcome his swift apprehension of unworth. He might, conceivably, have been more tolerant. Sterling, in later years, came to realize the truth of much that Bierce had told him. In an essay in The Overland Monthly (November, 1926) he echoed the philosophy of “nothing matters” in terms that might have been written by Bierce himself. “Poor dancer on the flints and shards in the temple porches, turn home,” so one is moved to cry when contemplating the pain and suffering that Sterling underwent. If Bierce had been able to foresee the future, he might possibly have been less censorious.
While Howes was working on the book of essays, Bierce and Percival Pollard decided to pay him a visit at Galveston. They left Washington in October of 1907, and stopped off at Chattanooga. It was a memorable trip for Bierce. He paraded Pollard around the battlefields with a proprietary interest, pointing out monuments and delighting his guest with the quality of his reminiscences. Bierce was actually excited and the boredom of many idle and fruitless months in Washington was forgotten in this luxurious reveling in the romantic vistas which he conjured up out of memory. The experience had the same satisfactory sadness of that former summer in the Cheat Mountains, only it was more moving and the emotions it engendered were more profound. And what memories flouted his soul! Men had died here, on these sun-illuminated hillcrests, and he had shot some of them. Had it actually happened? Or was it a dream of his youth? Battle cries and death yells, and murderous volleys of shot had once torn all this loveliness into a mad medley of hell and the skies had bled with man’s incurable folly. And all for what? They had not even known precisely what they were fighting for! Years later he could stroll through these grounds, with Percival Pollard, and chat casually of divers things! There was something uncannily light and unreal and shifting about these masks of appearance. “A persistent hallucination” goes with romanticism, and Bierce was forever conjuring up seductive dreams of lost glamour and glory.
At Galveston, Bierce had a delightful visit. He met a number of Howes’ friends and found them congenial, admiring and flattering. Rabbi Cohen took Bierce through his library and Bierce presented to him a copy of “Write It Right,” with the inscription:
“As one who does not hunger is oft bidden to the feast
The author gives this little book to one who needs it least.”
Mrs. Schoolfield,—”that dear woman,” — entertained him. He fought over Chickamauga with Mr. Brown, who had been in the Southern army. And he shared Howes’ enthusiasm for Anatole France. They were pleasant, idle, days. He spent some time in New Orleans with Pollard, and then left alone, coming back on the Lampasas and stopping off at Key West.
While he had been in the South, he had talked with Howes of South America. It fanned an old enthusiasm and the thought kept suggesting itself that some day he would journey south again, with finality and dramatic dignity. This first journey had been quite pleasant, and it suggested another trip, for Bierce kept repeating phases of experience like a true romantic, always seeking some unique quality describable as “adventure” and thinking that states of mind can be regained, as though they were purely objective. Howes had suggested a trip to Yucatan and it had met with Bierce’s prompt approval. A correspondent, H. A. Moss, who was connected with the American consulate in Brazil, wrote alluring letters about South America. James Watkins and Ralph Smith, two of his dearest friends, had gone to Tepic in 1881 on a mining expedition and had written glorious accounts of the west coast. Roberto Andrade, the Ecuadorian anarchist, had made a translation of some of his stories into Spanish, and their publication had provoked considerable interest in his work in Central America. Then, too, there came enthusiastic letters from Benjamin de Casseres, who was writing for El Diario in Mexico City. All these incidents tended to fix his attention on the south. He sorely wished he had gone into Mexico, for on his return he found Washington more dreary and uninteresting than ever.
He began to quarrel incessantly with the various Hearst editors: Chamberlain, Norcross and Rudolph Bloch. Mr. Hearst tried to sick his pet bulldog on Pulitzer but found that Bierce was stubborn. “I don’t like the job of chained bulldog to be let loose only to tear the panties off the boys who throw rocks at you. You wouldn’t like it yourself in my place. Henceforth I won’t bite anybody, a quiet life for mine. I’m going to be a literary gent, thank you, — it is nicer, and there is nobody to say me nay.” So Bierce wrote under date of July 8, 1907. It followed a quarrel that was soon forgotten, but others came in rapid succession. Finally when Bierce began to compile his “Collected Works” for Mr. Neale, he quit the Hearst papers altogether and his copy ceased to appear in The Cosmopolitan after 1909.
The quarrels were really farcical. Since 1887 they had invariably run the same course: heated words, resignation, reconciliation. A characteristic expression is this to Howes: “I’m off Mr. Hearst’s payroll — by voluntary resignation. Couldn’t stand the monkeying of his editors with my stuff, and had tired of appealing to him. He always decides in my favor, but never enforces his decisions by ‘appropriate penalties.’ So I’m without any income, but retain my self-respect, which is not a bad substitute. Anything that comes so high ought to be good.” He would follow these grand notes with such weak words as: “My emancipation from Mr. Hearst’s service was, alas, brief. He did not want it that way, and I can’t resist him, for he has been, on the whole, mighty good to me.” In another note, this time to Robert Mackay, Bierce wrote: “I’m a wage-slave for Hearst. But then the negro quarters are fairly comfortable, the corn and bacon tolerable and the overseer’s whip can’t reach me here in Washington. Sometimes I think I should like to be a free nigger, but I dunno’.”
Hearst was always good humored in his replies. In one note he said: “If you will kindly excuse me for saying so, you have devoted so much of your letter to soaking Mr. Chamberlain and proving that I am wrong in everything that I ever said or did, that the details of the arrangement have not received much attention. The Hon. William Randolph Hearst is quite as anxious to do what is right and what is agreeable to all as Will Hearst ever was and I wish I could get you to believe that.” Bierce met Hearst one day in New York and announced that inasmuch as he did no work for the newspapers and little for The Cosmopolitan, that his pay should be adjusted. Mr. Hearst said: “You haven’t heard me shrieking about that, have you?” and Bierce was compelled to admit that he hadn’t. Mr. Hearst’s tether of a liberal salary account bound Bierce far more tightly than any other means that could have been employed. Bierce was decent and loyal, and always realized th
at Mr. Hearst had been kind, although he was skeptical of the motives behind this kindness.
But, if Bierce had not desired to write for Mr. Hearst’s periodicals, there were certainly other opportunities. His papers contain any number of requests for copy from prominent magazines, offering attractive rates for any stories that he might submit. Hampton’s, The Delineator, Town Topics, McClure’s, and many other magazines wrote Bierce for copy. Willard Huntington Wright, as editor of The Smart Set, wrote for material and offered five cents a word. Bierce commented upon the offer to a friend and said: “One hates to be caught with a magazine having so hateful a title. It is to be read secretly, as we commit adultery and murder.”
It is quite apparent that he had no new plans whatever during the period of his Washington residence. He was merely revising and correcting, preparing for the “Collected Works.” Even the “curmudgeon philosopher” had lost interest in current happenings. He was musing about the troubling nature of quietness and even “art” seemed trivial and unimportant. His hours in the apartment were broken with amusement over the antics of “John Henry Legs,” a pet squirrel, and walks in the park with “my girls.” He jotted down in his letters such an event as a canoeing expedition as though it were of the utmost importance. He would often visit Pollard at Lyme, Connecticut and got to be quite a fearless canoeist, causing his friends no end of worry and alarm by his intrepid expeditions. It was indeed a dreary existence. He would flee for a week or so, visit Mr and Mrs. Martin at West Point and spend long hours on the verandah of the Officers’ Club talking about everything under the sun. He read the verse of Ezra Pound, Samuel Loveman and James Elroy Flecker, with interest, when it was sent him in manuscript. But it seemed so useless, trivial and inconsequential when compared with his own sense of despair and boredom. He was so conscious of death that life seemed a dreary and insignificant buzzing. Why was he so destitute of certainty, so fatigued and weary of existence?
In later years his cynicism sounded off key; it had unquestionably a false note. Bierce learned the trick of paradox early in his career as a professional wit. He could twist expressions about in such a manner that the reader would jump with amazement and call this experiment in the dissociation of ideas “wit.” But the process with Bierce was more a trick of expression than it was a quest for information. For, as Mr. Eliot has observed, “true cynicism is a fault of the temperament of the observer, not a conclusion arising naturally from the contemplation of the object; it is quite the reverse of ‘facing facts.’” And so it was with Bierce. He had really outgrown his cynicism but he did not seem at all aware of the fact. His was the loneliness of the man whose ideas far outran the information of his time. Just as his cynicism had pre-dated modern cynicism by the span of a generation, just so his later reactions found no strengthening verification in the thought of his contemporaries. He always had to trust his “hunches” and “prejudices” against the showy and pretentious information of the period. Naturally he was forced to carry over his early cynicism as a convenient mechanism of protection.
In these last years he worked feverishly on the “Collected Works” edition in twelve volumes. His letters to Mr. Neale reveal how deeply concerned he was with this enterprise into which he was putting money, time, the efforts of his secretary, and the money of his friends who were circularized for subscriptions. He had to have the feeling that all those newspaper clippings were to be converted into neat pages in a handsome edition. His letters of the period are replete with references to the enterprise, discussions of publishing details, plans for prospectuses, and proofs, proofs, proofs. The last four years of his life were taken up with proofreading and little else, correcting proof after proof, and even paying for the privilege of correction. Mr. Neale’s chief typesetter annoyed him to the point of exasperation and he wrote long letters of remonstrance, complaining of the “peculiar” variety of such ignorance which was “dark, profound and general.” He was determined to have a collected edition of his work. This feeling was indicative of his sense of misspent time and effort. A letter of praise which he received from Theodore Bonnet actually made him sad! After reading the elaborate prospectus which Mr. Neale had arranged, he wrote: “The only thing that saddens me in reading the prospectus is the thought of how I might have merited the praise if I had applied myself more to my art and less to pleasure.” This is a strange note, indeed, for the Bierce of legend. His life had been too much an affair of fiery and impulsive battling, jostlings and tournaments, — Sancho Panza and the Windmill.
He was pleasantly contemptuous of the life about him. Mr. Roosevelt’s “charlatanism” disgusted him. Moreover, “Washington is now lousy with statesmen, and I stay indoors a good deal to watch my pocketbook.” Everywhere about him he noticed mediocrity, sentimental and brummagem thinking. He began to suspect even his friend Percival Pollard who, in truth, was always something of the dilettante. “Elinor Glyn is here being loudly entertained and uttering the most bombastic nonsense, proving herself a vulgarian of singularly cheap distinction. By the way, Pollard thinks her book fine. I begin to despair of Pollard.” And, then, came Mr. Taft. “We had a most disgusting inauguration — with blackguardy rampant and to-day the newspapers print page after page of lickspittle adulation of Taft, Mrs. Taft, the cub Tafts, and everybody connected with the administration. I wish I could get the smell of my country out of my nose and clothing.” He was no longer young enough to be amused by such nonsense, it weighed heavily upon him, and he longed for a surcease from the monotony of mediocrity. “Compared with the Congress of our forefathers, the Congress of to-day is as a flock of angels to an executive body of the Western Federation of Miners.”
An occasional “champagne week end” in New York, with a dinner party for Blanche Bates at Delmonico’s, helped to break the tedium of being famous but bored. He was not even reading much. “It requires a regiment of Infantry and two field pieces to get me to read a novel. — We have autumnal weather at last and I have resumed canoeing, to the manifest advantage of my temper. Get a canoe and Fate cannot harm you — though you may drown.” So he wrote to Howes. He did read one book with which he was in hearty accord; in fact, he thought that its author might have used some of his own newspaper articles in writing the volume. It was “Janus in Modern Life,” by Dr. Flinders Petries, a book of reactionary ideas, tracing the parallel between the rise of the Roman rabble and the agitation of labor unions in modern times. Then, too, he was amused by a book on “The So-Called Christopher Columbus,” by Goodrich, and his old friend, Col. Willis Brewer, of Haynesville, Alabama, had in “Egypt and Israel” destroyed another myth. To question the histories of Christ and Christopher Columbus was a noble enterprise in America, savoring of unspeakable heroism. He had read John Galsworthy’s “In Motley,” and when he selected a title for Volume XII of his “Collected Works” he apparently carried the title over unthinkingly. He read many war texts, notably Sergeant’s heavy tome on the Santiago Campaign. He had assisted Archibald Gracie somewhat in writing “The Truth about Chickamauga.” At the request of General W. W. Witherspoon, Bierce addressed The Army War College faculty and class on October 3, 1908, on the subject of uniform orders and commands in the military service, which he had devised. He took rambles in the park where he made pets of the squirrels and had his picture taken with them in his hands. He wrote Howes: “The squirrel of the picture lives in a public park, but he loves me just the same — rather better with pecans than without.” It was a period of Coventry. Squirrels, walks in the park, idle hours, proofreading, and an occasional book. Would something ever happen? Was he to die in Washington of acute lumbago or be stricken by that old “adversary of souls,” his asthma?
Despite a few minor interests, the general tone of his letters is that of unbearable boredom. I refer to the unpublished letters. A few phrases are significant: “Nothing goes on here but the talk in Congress”—”I’m weak and will-less”—”I’m older than the iron hills.” Even the praise which his work was beginning to inspire in ma
ny quarters, did not interest him. He was pushing rapidly forward; the currents were quickening; it would not be long until he was one of the initiated. In contemplation of death, he began to get an accurate perspective on his life and career. His “Little Johnny” stories suddenly became “rot”; his ironic romance, “The Monk and the Hangman’s Daughter,” was merely a “yarn”—”simple, sentimental, religious and sensational.” What did it all matter compared with the oppressing sense of futility that belittled every activity and made vanity seem the most laughable folly. And what was this writing but “vanity”? He did not go as far as Anatole France and call it a “lying pretense,” but its ultimate importance was negligible.
He was convinced afresh of the unreality of appearances. While he was preparing himself for a swift and shocking ducking in the Styx, the most inconsequential and ridiculous talk imaginable droned in lassitude about him: woman’s rights, labor unions, the whisper of anti-booze propaganda, the “problem” novel, Spiritualism, Marie Corelli, Elbert Hubbard and the poetry of Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Why write anything? If he did, one of Mr. Hearst’s ingenious young men would deck it out with barbaric banners and streamers, and convert it into an apocryphal revelation. His protests seem futile and almost pathetic. No one paid any attention to his demands. He wrote an article called “The Historian of the Future” and Mr. Hearst had written him: “I thought we might have a sky-line of New York across the top, and at the bottom your group of skin-clad savages gnawing a raw bone; or else we might have merely an imaginative illustration of the Historian of 3940 writing his history. Do you like either of these, or would you prefer some sort of mystic cartoon à la Vedder of greed destroying civilization? I suppose you would rather not have anything, but as we have got to spoil the article in some way, will you not indicate what would be the least objectionable?” So far as Mr. Hearst and his men were concerned, Bierce was just an eccentric old gentleman whose whims must be humored if possible, although there was no penalty if he was treated with disrespect. He was, indeed, “a magnificent crystallization.”
Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics) Page 370