Delphi Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Illustrated)

by Bierce, Ambrose

  With love to Carlt and Sloots, I am affectionately yours,

  AMBROSE.

  P.S. You need not believe all that these newspapers say of me and my purposes. I had to tell them something.

  [Laredo, Texas, November 6, 1913.]

  DEAR LORA,

  I wrote you yesterday at San Antonio, but dated the letter here and today, expecting to bring the letter and mail it here. That’s because I did not know if I would have time to write it here. Unfortunately, I forgot and posted it, with other letters, where it was written. Thus does man’s guile come to naught!

  Well, I’m here, anyhow, and have time to explain.

  Laredo was a Mexican city before it was an American. It is Mexican now, five to one. Nuevo Laredo, opposite, is held by the Huertistas and Americans don’t go over there. In fact a guard on the bridge will not let them. So those that sneak across have to wade (which can be done almost anywhere) and go at night.

  I shall not be here long enough to hear from you, and don’t know where I shall be next. Guess it doesn’t matter much.

  Adios,

  AMBROSE.

  Extracts from Letters

  You are right too — dead right about the poetry of Socialism; and you might have added the poetry of wailing about the woes of the poor generally. Only the second- and the third-raters write it — except “incidentally.” You don’t find the big fellows sniveling over that particular shadow-side of Nature. Yet not only are the poor always with us, they always were with us, and their state was worse in the times of Homer, Virgil, Shakspeare, Milton and the others than in the days of Morris and Markham.

  But what’s the use? I have long despaired of convincing poets and artists of anything, even that white is not black. I’m convinced that all you chaps ought to have a world to yourselves, where two and two make whatever you prefer that it should make, and cause and effect are remoulded “more nearly to the heart’s desire.” And then I suppose I’d want to go and live there too.

  Did you ever know so poor satire to make so great a row as that of Watson? Compared with certain other verses against particular women — Byron’s “Born in a garret, in a kitchen bred”; even my own skit entitled “Mad” (pardon my modesty) it is infantile. What an interesting book might be made of such “attacks” on women! But Watson is the only one of us, so far as I remember, who has had the caddishness to name the victim.

  Have you seen Percival Pollard’s “Their Day in Court”? It is amusing, clever — and more. He has a whole chapter on me, “a lot” about Gertrude Atherton, and much else that is interesting. And he skins alive certain popular gods and goddesses of the day, and is “monstrous naughty.”

  As to * * *’s own character I do not see what that has to do with his criticism of London. If only the impeccable delivered judgment no judgment would ever be delivered. All men could do as they please, without reproof or dissent. I wish you would take your heart out of your head, old man. The best heart makes a bad head if housed there.

  The friends that warned you against the precarious nature of my friendship were right. To hold my regard one must fulfil hard conditions — hard if one is not what one should be; easy if one is. I have, indeed, a habit of calmly considering the character of a man with whom I have fallen into any intimacy and, whether I have any grievance against him or not, informing him by letter that I no longer desire his acquaintance. This, I do after deciding that he is not truthful, candid, without conceit, and so forth — in brief, honorable. If any one is conscious that he is not in all respects worthy of my friendship he would better not cultivate it, for assuredly no one can long conceal his true character from an observant student of it. Yes, my friendship is a precarious possession. It grows more so the longer I live, and the less I feel the need of a multitude of friends. So, if in your heart you are conscious of being any of the things which you accuse me of being, or anything else equally objectionable (to me) I can only advise you to drop me before I drop you.

  Certainly you have an undoubted right to your opinion of my ability, my attainments and my standing. If you choose to publish a censorious judgment of these matters, do so by all means: I don’t think I ever cared a cent for what was printed about me, except as it supplied me with welcome material for my pen. One may presumably have a “sense of duty to the public,” and the like. But convincing one person (one at a time) of one’s friend’s deficiencies is hardly worth while, and is to be judged differently. It comes under another rule. * * *

  Maybe, as you say, my work lacks “soul,” but my life does not, as a man’s life is the man. Personally, I hold that sentiment has a place in this world, and that loyalty to a friend is not inferior as a characteristic to correctness of literary judgment. If there is a heaven I think it is more valued there. If Mr. * * * (your publisher as well as mine) had considered you a Homer, a Goethe or a Shakspeare a team of horses could not have drawn from me the expression of a lower estimate. And let me tell you that if you are going through life as a mere thinking machine, ignoring the generous promptings of the heart, sacrificing it to the brain, you will have a hard row to hoe, and the outcome, when you survey it from the vantage ground of age, will not please you. You seem to me to be beginning rather badly, as regards both your fortune and your peace of mind.

  * * * * *

  I saw * * * every day while in New York, and he does not know that I feel the slightest resentment toward you, nor do I know it myself. So far as he knows, or is likely to know (unless you will have it otherwise) you and I are the best of friends, or rather, I am the best of friends to you. And I guess that is so. I could no more hate you for your disposition and character than I could for your hump if you had one. You are as Nature has made you, and your defects, whether they are great or small, are your misfortunes. I would remove them if I could, but I know that I cannot, for one of them is inability to discern the others, even when they are pointed out.

  I must commend your candor in one thing. You confirm * * * words in saying that you commented on “my seeming lack of sympathy with certain modern masters,” which you attribute to my not having read them. That is a conclusion to which a low order of mind in sympathy with the “modern masters” naturally jumps, but it is hardly worthy of a man of your brains. It is like your former lofty assumption that I had not read some ten or twelve philosophers, naming them, nearly all of whom I had read, and laughed at, before you were born. In fact, one of your most conspicuous characteristics is the assumption that what a man who does not care to “talk shop” does not speak of, and vaunt his knowledge of, he does not know. I once thought this a boyish fault, but you are no longer a boy. Your “modern masters” are Ibsen and Shaw, with both of whose works and ways I am thoroughly familiar, and both of whom I think very small men — pets of the drawing-room and gods of the hour. No, I am not an “up to date” critic, thank God. I am not a literary critic at all, and never, or very seldom, have gone into that field except in pursuance of a personal object — to help a good writer (who is commonly a friend) — maybe you can recall such instances — or laugh at a fool. Surely you do not consider my work in the Cosmopolitan (mere badinage and chaff, the only kind of stuff that the magazine wants from me, or will print) essays in literary criticism. It has never occurred to me to look upon myself as a literary critic; if you must prick my bubble please to observe that it contains more of your breath than of mine. Yet you have sometimes seemed to value, I thought, some of my notions about even poetry. * * *

  Perhaps I am unfortunate in the matter of keeping friends; I know, and have abundant reason to know, that you are at least equally luckless in the matter of making them. I could put my finger on the very qualities in you that make you so, and the best service that I could do you would be to point them out and take the consequences. That is to say, it would serve you many years hence; at present you are like Carlyle’s “Mankind”; you “refuse to be served.” You only consent to be enraged.

  I bear you no ill will, shall watch your career in letters wi
th friendly solicitude — have, in fact, just sent to the * * * a most appreciative paragraph about your book, which may or may not commend itself to the editor; most of what I write does not. I hope to do a little, now and then, to further your success in letters. I wish you were different (and that is the harshest criticism that I ever uttered of you except to yourself) and wish it for your sake more than for mine. I am older than you and probably more “acquainted with grief” — the grief of disappointment and disillusion. If in the future you are convinced that you have become different, and I am still living, my welcoming hand awaits you. And when I forgive I forgive all over, even the new offence.

  Miller undoubtedly is sincere in his praise of you, for with all his faults and follies he is always generous and usually over generous to other poets. There’s nothing little and mean in him. Sing ho for Joaquin!

  If I “made you famous” please remember that you were guilty of contributory negligence by meriting the fame. “Eternal vigilance” is the price of its permanence. Don’t loaf on your job.

  I have told her of a certain “enchanted forest” hereabout to which I feel myself sometimes strongly drawn as a fitting place to lay down “my weary body and my head.” (Perhaps you remember your Swinburne:

  “Ah yet, would God this flesh of mine might be

  Where air might wash and long leaves cover me!

  Ah yet, would God that roots and stems were bred

  Out of my weary body and my head.”)

  The element of enchantment in that forest is supplied by my wandering and dreaming in it forty-one years ago when I was a-soldiering and there were new things under a new sun. It is miles away, but from a near-by summit I can overlook the entire region — ridge beyond ridge, parted by purple valleys full of sleep. Unlike me, it has not visibly altered in all these years, except that I miss, here and there, a thin blue ghost of smoke from an enemy’s camp. Can you guess my feelings when I view this Dream-land — my Realm of Adventure, inhabited by memories that beckon me from every valley? I shall go; I shall retrace my old routes and lines of march; stand in my old camps; inspect my battlefields to see that all is right and undisturbed. I shall go to the Enchanted Forest.

  The Criticism

  AMBROSE BIERCE by Vincent Starrett

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

  NOTE

  I. THE MAN

  II. THE MASTER

  III. THE MYSTERY

  Bierce, c.1900

  TO

  W. C. MORROW

  AMBROSE BIERCE’S FRIEND AND MINE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

  For valuable reminiscences and suggestions, extremely helpful in the preparation of this volume and its contents, I am indebted to many persons; particularly to W. C. Morrow, to Miss Carrie Christiansen, to Mrs. Josephine Clifford McCrackin, to Helen Bierce Isgrigg, and to Walter Neale, Major Bierce’s publisher. I am happy here to give public utterance to my gratitude. A number of characteristic anecdotes are quoted from Bierce’s autobiographic vignettes, in his “Collected Works.”

  V. S.

  NOTE

  More than six years of speculation and apprehension have passed since the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce. Sanguine hopes long have dwindled, and only the frailest possibility survives that he yet lives in some green recess of the Mexican mountains, or some tropical Arcadia in South America. Assuming that he is dead, as we must assume who do not look for a miracle, he has fulfilled a prophecy made years ago by a writing man of his acquaintance:

  “Some day he will go up on Mount Horeb and forget to come down. No man will see his death-struggle, for he’ll cover his face with his cloak of motley, and if he sends a wireless it will be this: ‘‘Tis a grave subject.’”

  There has been no wireless.

  In the circumstances, it is perhaps presumptuously early to attempt an estimate of the man and his work; but already both fools and angels have rushed in, and the atmosphere is thick with rumor and legend. The present appraisal, at least is not fortuitous, and its stated facts have the merit of sobriety and authority.

  I. THE MAN

  There are many persons who do not care for the writings of Ambrose Bierce, and thousands — it is shocking to reflect — who never have heard of him. The Hon. Franklin K. Lane, erstwhile Secretary of the Interior, has gone on record as thinking him “a hideous monster, so like the mixture of dragon, lizard, bat, and snake as to be unnameable,” a characterization almost Biercian in its cumulative invective. When Mr. Lane made this remark, or wrote it down (whichever may have been the case), he said it with pious horror and intense dislike; but when Gertrude Atherton asserted that Bierce had the most brutal imagination she had encountered in print, she was paying him a compliment, and she intended to. Out of those two appraisals we may extract the truth — that Bierce was a mighty artist in his field, with little or no concern for the reactions of weaker vessels to his art.

  A great many persons knew Ambrose Bierce, and some loved him, and some hated and feared him. All, from their own point of view, had excellent reason for their quality of regard. Save for those who made up this catholic and vari-minded assemblage, few persons can speak of Ambrose Bierce, the man. The story of Ambrose Bierce the novelist, the satirist, the humorist, and the poet, is to a large degree the story of Ambrose Bierce the man; but to a larger degree is the story of Ambrose Bierce the man the story of Ambrose Bierce the novelist, satirist, humorist, and poet.

  It is generally known that he served throughout the Civil War. He emerged a Major, brevetted for distinguished services, and with an honorable scar upon his body. Twice he had rescued wounded comrades from the battlefield, at the risk of his life; at Kenesaw Mountain he was severely wounded in the head. He came out of the conflict a soldier, with a decided leaning toward literature, and the story goes that he tossed up a coin to determine his career. Instead of “head” or “tail” he may have called “sword” or “pen,” but the story does not so inform us. Whatever the deciding influence may have been, Bierce commenced journalist and author in San Francisco, in 1866, as editor of the News Letter. Then, in 1872, he went to London, where, for four years, or until 1876, he was on the staff of Fun, edited by the younger, Tom Hood.

  In London, the editors of Fun, amazed at the young man’s fertile ability, conceived the notion that he could write anything, and accordingly piled his desk with a weird assortment of old woodcuts, minus their captions; they requested that he “write things” to fit them. The “things” Bierce wrote astonished England, and Pharisees squirmed beneath his lash as they had not done since the days of Swift. A cruel finger was on secret ulcers, and the American’s satires quickly gained for him, among his colleagues, the name of “Bitter Bierce.” The stinging tales and fables he produced to order are those found in the volume called Cobwebs From an Empty Skull, reputed to be by Dod Grile, and published in 1874. A year previously, he had published The Fiend’s Delight, and Nuggets and Dust, caustic little volumes largely made up of earlier diabolisms from California journals. His intimates of the period included such joyous spirits as Hood, George Augustus Sala, and Capt. Mayne Reid, the boys’ novelist; this quartette, with others, frequented a taproom in Ludgate Station, and gave itself over, as Bierce humorously confesses, “to shedding the blood of the grape.”

  Thus Bierce:

  We worked too hard, dined too well, frequented too many clubs and went to bed too late in the forenoon. In short, we diligently, conscientiously and with a perverse satisfaction burned the candle of life at both ends and in the middle.

  He relates some delightful episodes of the period in his Bits of Autobiography, the first volume in his Collected Works; the funniest and one of the most typical, perhaps, is that concerning his difficulties with John Camden Hotten, a publisher with whom Mark Twain was having trouble of his own at about the same time — although at a greater distance. Hotten owed Bierce money for certain work, and Bierce, usually financially embarrassed, hounded Hotten for it until the publisher, in despair, sent th
e implacable creditor to negotiate with his (Hotten’s) manager. Bierce talked vividly for two hours, at the end of which time the crestfallen manager capitulated and produced a check already made out and signed. It bore date of the following Saturday. The rest of the story belongs to Bierce: Before Saturday came, Hotten proceeded to die of a pork pie in order to beat me out of my money. Knowing nothing of this, I strolled out to his house in Highgate, hoping to get an advance, as I was in great need of cash. On being told of his demise I was inexpressibly shocked, for my cheque was worthless. There was a hope, however, that the bank had not heard. So I called a cab and drove furiously bank-ward. Unfortunately my gondolier steered me past Ludgate Station, in the bar whereof our Fleet Street gang of writers had a private table. I disembarked for a mug of bitter. Unfortunately, too, Sala, Hood, and others of the gang were in their accustomed places. I sat, at board and related the sad event. The deceased had not in life enjoyed our favour, and I blush to say we all fell to making questionable epitaphs to him. I recall one by Sala which ran thus:

  Hotten,

  Rotten,

  Forgotten.

  At the close of the rites, several hours later, I resumed my movements against the bank. Too late — the old story of the hare and the tortoise was told again! The heavy news had overtaken and passed me as I loitered by the wayside. I attended the funeral, at which I felt more than I cared to express.

  The appearance of his Cobwebs From an Empty Skull made Bierce for a time the chief wit and humorist of England, and, combined with his satirical work on Fun, brought about his engagement by friends of the exiled Empress Eugenie to conduct a journal against her enemies, who purposed to make her refuge in England untenable by newspaper attacks. It appeared that James Mortimer, who was later to found and edit the Figaro, was in the habit of visiting the exiled Empress at Chislehurst, and he it was who learned of a threat by M. Henri Rochefort to start his paper, La Lanterne, in England; Rochefort, who had persistently attacked the Empress in Paris. Mortimer suggested the founding and registering in London of a paper called The Lantern, which was done and Bierce was made its editor. But the struggle never came; Rochefort, outwitted, knew the game was up, and did not put his threat into execution, although Bierce, for a few numbers, had the delight of abusing the Frenchman to his heart’s content, a pursuit he found extremely congenial.