Delphi Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Illustrated)

by Bierce, Ambrose

  For the next twenty years Ambrose Bierce was a prolific writer but, whatever the reason, no further volumes of stories from his pen were presented to the world. Black Beetles in Amber, a collection of satiric verse, had appeared the same year as The Monk and the Hangman’s Daughter; then for seven years, with the exception of a republication by G. P. Putnam’s Sons of Tales of Soldiers and Civilians under the title, In the Midst of Life, no books by Bierce. In 1899 appeared Fantastic Fables; in 1903 Shapes of Clay, more satiric verse; in 1906 The Cynic’s Word Book, a dictionary of wicked epigrams; in 1909 Write it Right, a blacklist of literary faults, and The Shadow on the Dial, a collection of essays covering, to quote from the preface of S. O. Howes, “a wide range of subjects, embracing among other things, government, dreams, writers of dialect and dogs” — Mr. Howes might have heightened his crescendo by adding “emancipated woman”; and finally — 1909 to 1912 — The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, containing all his work previously published in book form, save the two last mentioned, and much more besides, all collected and edited by Bierce himself.

  On October 2, 1913, Ambrose Bierce, having settled his business affairs, left Washington for a trip through the southern states, declaring in letters his purpose of going into Mexico and later on to South America. The fullest account of his trip and his plans is afforded by a newspaper clipping he sent his niece in a letter dated November 6, 1913; through the commonplaceness of the reportorial vocabulary shines out the vivid personality that was making its final exit:

  “Traveling over the same ground that he had covered with General Hazen’s brigade during the Civil War, Ambrose Bierce, famed writer and noted critic, has arrived in New Orleans. Not that this city was one of the places figuring in his campaigns, for he was here after and not during the war. He has come to New Orleans in a haphazard, fancy-free way, making a trip toward Mexico. The places that he has visited on the way down have become famous in song and story — places where the greatest battles were fought, where the moon shone at night on the burial corps, and where in day the sun shone bright on polished bayonets and the smoke drifted upward from the cannon mouths.

  “For Mr. Bierce was at Chickamauga; he was at Shiloh; at Murfreesboro; Kenesaw Mountain, Franklin and Nashville. And then when wounded during the Atlanta campaign he was invalided home. He ‘has never amounted to much since then,’ he said Saturday. But his stories of the great struggle, living as deathless characterizations of the bloody episodes, stand for what he ‘has amounted to since then.’

  “Perhaps it was in mourning for the dead over whose battlefields he has been wending his way toward New Orleans that Mr. Bierce was dressed in black. From head to foot he was attired in this color, except where the white cuffs and collar and shirt front showed through. He even carried a walking cane, black as ebony and unrelieved by gold or silver. But his eyes, blue and piercing as when they strove to see through the smoke at Chickamauga, retained all the fire of the indomitable fighter.

  “‘I’m on my way to Mexico, because I like the game,’ he said, ‘I like the fighting; I want to see it. And then I don’t think Americans are as oppressed there as they say they are, and I want to get at the true facts of the case. Of course, I’m not going into the country if I find it unsafe for Americans to be there, but I want to take a trip diagonally across from northeast to southwest by horseback, and then take ship for South America, go over the Andes and across that continent, if possible, and come back to America again.

  “‘There is no family that I have to take care of; I’ve retired from writing and I’m going to take a rest. No, my trip isn’t for local color. I’ve retired just the same as a merchant or business man retires. I’m leaving the field for the younger authors.’

  “An inquisitive question was interjected as to whether Mr. Bierce had acquired a competency only from his writings, but he did not take offense.

  “‘My wants are few, and modest,’ he said, ‘and my royalties give me quite enough to live on. There isn’t much that I need, and I spend my time in quiet travel. For the last five years I haven’t done any writing. Don’t you think that after a man has worked as long as I have that he deserves a rest? But perhaps after I have rested I might work some more — I can’t tell, there are so many things—’ and the straightforward blue eyes took on a faraway look, ‘there are so many things that might happen between now and when I come back. My trip might take several years, and I’m an old man now.’

  “Except for the thick, snow-white hair no one would think him old. His hands are steady, and he stands up straight and tall — perhaps six feet.”

  In December of that same year the last letter he is known to have written was received by his daughter. It is dated from Chihuahua, and mentions casually that he has attached himself unofficially to a division of Villa’s army, and speaks of a prospective advance on Ojinaga. No further word has ever come from or of Ambrose Bierce. Whether illness overtook him, then an old man of seventy-one, and death suddenly, or whether, preferring to go foaming over a precipice rather than to straggle out in sandy deltas, he deliberately went where he knew death was, no one can say. His last letters, dauntless, grave, tender, do not say, though they suggest much. “You must try to forgive my obstinacy in not ‘perishing’ where I am,” he wrote as he left Washington. “I want to be where something worth while is going on, or where nothing whatever is going on.” “Good-bye — if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico — ah, that is euthanasia!” Whatever end Ambrose Bierce found in Mexico, the lines of George Sterling well express what must have been his attitude in meeting it:

  “Dream you he was afraid to live?

  Dream you he was afraid to die?

  Or that, a suppliant of the sky,

  He begged the gods to keep or give?

  Not thus the shadow-maker stood,

  Whose scrutiny dissolved so well

  Our thin mirage of Heaven or Hell —

  The doubtful evil, dubious good....

  “If now his name be with the dead,

  And where the gaunt agaves flow’r,

  The vulture and the wolf devour

  The lion-heart, the lion-head,

  Be sure that heart and head were laid

  In wisdom down, content to die;

  Be sure he faced the Starless Sky

  Unduped, unmurmuring, unafraid.”

  In any consideration of the work of Ambrose Bierce, a central question must be why it contains so much that is trivial or ephemeral. Another question facing every critic of Bierce, is why the fundamentally original point of view, the clarity of workmanship of his best things — mainly stories — did not win him immediate and general recognition.

  A partial answer to both questions is to be found in a certain discord between Bierce and his setting. Bierce, paradoxically, combined the bizarre in substance, the severely restrained and compressed in form. An ironic mask covered a deep-seated sensibility; but sensibility and irony were alike subject to an uncompromising truthfulness; he would have given deep-throated acclaim to Clough’s

  “But play no tricks upon thy soul, O man,

  Let truth be truth, and life the thing it can.”

  He had the aristocrat’s contempt for mass feeling, a selectiveness carried so far that he instinctively chose for themes the picked person and experience, the one decisive moment of crisis. He viewed his characters not in relation to other men and in normal activities; he isolated them — often amid abnormalities.

  All this was in sharp contrast to the literary fashion obtaining when he dipped his pen to try his luck as a creative artist. The most popular novelist of the day was Dickens; the most popular poet, Tennyson. Neither looked straight at life; both veiled it: one in benevolence, the other in beauty. Direct and painful verities were best tolerated by the reading public when exhibited as instan
ces of the workings of natural law. The spectator of the macrocosm in action could stomach the wanton destruction of a given human atom; one so privileged could and did excuse the Creator for small mistakes like harrying Hetty Sorrell to the gallow’s foot, because of the conviction that, taking the Universe by and large, “He was a good fellow, and ‘twould all be well.” This benevolent optimism was the offspring of a strange pair, evangelicism and evolution; and in the minds of the great public whom Bierce, under other circumstances and with a slightly different mixture of qualities in himself, might have conquered, it became a large, soft insincerity that demanded “happy endings,” a profuse broadness of treatment prohibitive of harsh simplicity, a swathing of elemental emotion in gentility or moral edification.

  But to Bierce’s mind, “noble and nude and antique,” this mid-Victorian draping and bedecking of “unpleasant truths” was abhorrent. Absolutely direct and unafraid — not only in his personal relations but, what is more rare, in his thinking — he regarded easy optimism, sure that God is in his heaven with consequently good effects upon the world, as blindness, and the hopefulness that demanded always the “happy ending,” as silly. In many significant passages Bierce’s attitude is the ironic one of Voltaire: “‘Had not Pangloss got himself hanged,’ replied Candide, ‘he would have given us most excellent advice in this emergency; for he was a profound philosopher.’” Bierce did not fear to bring in disconcerting evidence that a priori reasoning may prove a not infallible guide, that causes do not always produce the effects complacently pre-argued, and that the notion of this as the best of all possible worlds is sometimes beside the point.

  The themes permitted by such an attitude were certain to displease the readers of that period. In Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, his first book of stories, he looks squarely and grimly at one much bedecked subject of the time — war; not the fine gay gallantry of war, the music and the marching and the romantic episodes; but the ghastly horror of it; through his vivid, dramatic passages beats a hatred of war, not merely “unrighteous” war, but all war, the more disquieting because never allowed to become articulate. With bitter but beautiful truth he brings each tale to its tragic close, always with one last turn of the screw, one unexpected horror more. And in this book — note the solemn implication of the title he later gave it, In the Midst of Life — as well as in the next, Can Such Things Be, is still another subject which Bierce alone in his generation seemed unafraid to consider curiously: “Death, in warfare and in the horrid guise of the supernatural, was painted over and over. Man’s terror in the face of death gave the artist his cue for his wonderful physical and psychologic microscopics. You could not pin this work down as realism, or as romance; it was the greatest human drama — the conflict between life and death — fused through genius. Not Zola, in the endless pages of his Debâcle, not the great Tolstoi in his great War and Peace had ever painted war, horrid war, more faithfully than any of the stories of this book; not Maupassant had invented out of war’s terrible truths more dramatically imagined plots.... There painted an artist who had seen the thing itself, and being a genius, had made it an art still greater.

  Death of the young, the beautiful, the brave, was the closing note of every line of the ten stories of war in this book. The brilliant, spectacular death that came to such senseless bravery as Tennyson hymned for the music-hall intelligence in his Charge of the Light Brigade; the vision-starting, slow, soul-drugging death by hanging; the multiplied, comprehensible death that makes rivers near battlefields run red; the death that comes by sheer terror; death actual and imagined — every sort of death was on these pages, so painted as to make Pierre Loti’s Book of Pity and Death seem but feeble fumbling.”

  Now death by the mid-Victorian was considered almost as undesirable an element in society as sex itself. Both must be passed over in silence or presented decently draped. In the eighties any writer who dealt unabashed with death was regarded as an unpleasant person. “Revolting!” cried the critics when they read Bierce’s Chickamauga and The Affair at Coulter’s Notch.

  Bierce’s style, too, by its very fineness, alienated his public. Superior, keen, perfect in detail, finite, compressed — such was his manner in the free and easy, prolix, rambling, multitudinous nineteenth century.

  Bierce himself knew that although it is always the fashion to jeer at fashion, its rule is absolute for all that, whether it be fashion in boots or books.

  “A correspondent of mine,” he wrote in 1887 in his EXAMINER column, “a well-known and clever writer, appears surprised because I do not like the work of Robert Louis Stevenson. I am equally hurt to know that he does. If he was ever a boy he knows that the year is divided, not into seasons and months, as is vulgarly supposed, but into ‘top time,’ ‘marble time,’ ‘kite time,’ et cetera, and woe to the boy who ignores the unwritten calendar, amusing himself according to the dictates of an irresponsible conscience. I venture to remind my correspondent that a somewhat similar system obtains in matters of literature — a word which I beg him to observe means fiction. There are, for illustration — or rather, there were — James time, Howells time, Crawford time, Russell time and Conway time, each epoch — named for the immortal novelist of the time being — lasting, generally speaking, as much as a year.... All the more rigorous is the law of observance. It is not permitted to admire Jones in Smith time. I must point out to my heedless correspondent that this is not Stevenson time — that was last year.” It was decidedly not Bierce time when Bierce’s stories appeared.

  And there was in him no compromise — or so he thought. “A great artist,” he wrote to George Sterling, “is superior to his world and his time, or at least to his parish and his day.” His practical application of that belief is shown in a letter to a magazine editor who had just rejected a satire he had submitted:

  “Even you ask for literature — if my stories are literature, as you are good enough to imply. (By the way, all the leading publishers of the country turned down that book until they saw it published without them by a merchant in San Francisco and another sort of publishers in London, Leipsig and Paris.) Well, you wouldn’t do a thing to one of my stories!

  “No, thank you; if I have to write rot, I prefer to do it for the newspapers, which make no false pretenses and are frankly rotten, and in which the badness of a bad thing escapes detection or is forgotten as soon as it is cold.

  “I know how to write a story (of ‘happy ending’ sort) for magazine readers for whom literature is too good, but I will not do so, so long as stealing is more honorable and interesting. I have offered you ... the best that I am able to make; and now you must excuse me.” In these two utterances we have some clue to the secret of his having ceased, in 1893, to publish stories. Vigorously refusing to yield in the slightest degree to the public so far as his stories were concerned, he abandoned his best field of creative effort and became almost exclusively a “columnist” and a satirist; he put his world to rout, and left his “parish and his day” resplendently the victors.

  All this must not be taken to mean that the “form and pressure of the time” put into Bierce what was not there. Even in his creative work he had a satiric bent; his early training and associations, too, had been in journalistic satire. Under any circumstances he undoubtedly would have written satire — columns of it for his daily bread, books of it for self-expression; but under more favorable circumstances he would have kept on writing other sort of books as well. Lovers of literature may well lament that Bierce’s insistence on going his way and the demands of his “parish” forced him to overdevelop one power to the almost complete paralysis of another and a perhaps finer.

  As a satirist Bierce was the best America has produced, perhaps the best since Voltaire. But when he confined himself to “exploring the ways of hate as a form of creative energy,” it was with a hurt in his soul, and with some intellectual and spiritual confusion. There resulted a kink in his nature, a contradiction that appears repeatedly, not only in his life, but in his writin
gs. A striking instance is found in his article To Train a Writer:

  “He should, for example, forget that he is an American and remember that he is a man. He should be neither Christian nor Jew, nor Buddhist, nor Mahometan, nor Snake Worshiper. To local standards of right and wrong he should be civilly indifferent. In the virtues, so-called, he should discern only the rough notes of a general expediency; in fixed moral principles only time-saving predecisions of cases not yet before the court of conscience. Happiness should disclose itself to his enlarging intelligence as the end and purpose of life; art and love as the only means to happiness. He should free himself of all doctrines, theories, etiquettes, politics, simplifying his life and mind, attaining clarity with breadth and unity with height. To him a continent should not seem wide nor a century long. And it would be needful that he know and have an ever-present consciousness that this is a world of fools and rogues, blind with superstition, tormented with envy, consumed with vanity, selfish, false, cruel, cursed with illusions — frothing mad!”

  Up to that last sentence Ambrose Bierce beholds this world as one where tolerance, breadth of view, simplicity of life and mind, clear thinking, are at most attainable, at least worthy of the effort to attain; he regards life as purposive, as having happiness for its end, and art and love as the means to that good end. But suddenly the string from which he has been evoking these broad harmonies snaps with a snarl. All is evil and hopeless—”frothing mad.” Both views cannot be held simultaneously by the same mind. Which was the real belief of Ambrose Bierce? The former, it seems clear. But he has been hired to be a satirist.

  On the original fabric of Bierce’s mind the satiric strand has encroached more than the design allows. There results not only considerable obliteration of the main design, but confusion in the substituted one. For it is significant that much of the work of Bierce seems to be that of what he would have called a futilitarian, that he seldom seems able to find a suitable field for his satire, a foeman worthy of such perfect steel as he brings to the encounter; he fights on all fields, on both sides, against all comers; ubiquitous, indiscriminate, he is as one who screams in pain at his own futility, one who “might be heard,” as he says of our civilization, “from afar in space as a scolding and a riot.” That Bierce would have spent so much of his superb power on the trivial and the ephemeral, breaking magnificent vials of wrath on Oakland nobodies, preserving insignificant black beetles in the amber of his art, is not merely, as it has long been, cause of amazement to the critics; it is cause of laughter to the gods, and of weeping among Bierce’s true admirers.