To find this Indian in a city of a million souls was no trick for Wilkins, and the discovered eyewitness repeated the story I have already quoted, with unimportant variations. The convenient Indian then produced a photograph of Ambrose Bierce, which had been among the effects taken from the “body.” Wilkins identified it at once. But the Indian would not part with it; he preferred to destroy the photograph, believing it had served its purpose, and fearing consequences to himself when the Wilkins revelation was published. This photograph was the sensation of the Wilkins story, which otherwise was the same story as formerly told.
A friend of mine in California fairly rushed this article to me, saying, “Wilkins is an old and reliable journalist.” I shall not attempt to deny either his age or his reliability, but I will casually suggest that if he is reliable he is extraordinarily gullible, whatever his age.
One remarkable story came privately to me, and was to the positive effect that Ambrose Bierce had been alive and well in San Luis Potosi, as late as December of 1918, five years after his disappearance and after his last letter to his friends. The narrator of that tale believed him to be still living (May, 1920), and ready to come back and astound the world when his “death” had been sufficiently advertised. There were many details to the story, and another Mexican figured. This Mexican had seen a portrait of Bierce in the story-teller’s office, had exclaimed at sight of it, and had told of knowing the original; Bierce and this Indian, it developed, had parted company in San Luis Potosi in December of 1918! The Major was known to the Mexican as “Don Ambrosio.” But this Mexican was murdered in Los Angeles, in a triangular love scrape, as was attested surely enough by a newspaper account of his murder, so the narrator’s chief witness had vanished. This investigator, too, was, at least, too credible; although he was shrewd enough to see through the Weeks and Wilkins stories, and to tear them to pieces. Certainly he knew better than to accuse Bierce of seeking morbid publicity.
Other extraordinary tales there have been, and a dispatch to the New York World of April 3, 1915, dated from Bloomington, Illinois, soberly recited that Mrs. H. D. Cowden of that city, Bierce’s daughter, had received a letter from her father which entirely cleared the mystery of his disappearance. He was even then in France, it seemed, an officer on Lord Kitchener’s staff, had escaped injury, and was in good health. Yet from Mrs. Cowden’s own lips I have had it that no such letter, no such information conveyed in whatever manner, had ever reached her. A later story reported that Bierce had perished with Kitchener, when the great soldier was drowned.
This is all sensational journalism. There is every reason to doubt that Bierce ever left Mexico; that he long survived his last bit of letter-writing — the brief communication to his daughter, in December of 1913. The manner of his passing probably never will be known, but it is to be recalled that he suffered from asthma, and that he was more than seventy-one years of age when he went away. Were he alive in the year 1920 he would be 78 years old.
There is one further consideration: Did Bierce, when he went into Mexico, expect to return? Did he go, calmly and deliberately, to his death? Did he, indeed, seek death? The question has been raised, and so it must be answered. In support of the contention, two highly significant letters have been offered. These were received by Mrs. Josephine Clifford McCrackin of San José, California, long a warm friend of the vanished author, and there is not the slightest doubt of their authenticity. The first, chronologically, is dated from Washington, September 10, 1913, and is as follows: Dear Joe: The reason that I did not answer your letter sooner is — I have been away (in New York) and did not have it with me. I suppose I shall not see your book for a long time, for I am going away and have no notion when I shall return. I expect to go to, perhaps across, South America — possibly via Mexico, if I can get through without being stood up against a wall and shot as a gringo. But that is better than dying in bed, is it not? If Dune did not need you so badly I’d ask you to get your hat and come along. God bless and keep you.
The faint suggestion in this letter is more clearly defined in the second and last letter received by Mrs. McCrackin, three days later:
Dear Joe: Thank you for the book. I thank you for your friendship — and much besides. This is to say good-by at the end of a pleasant correspondence in which your woman’s prerogative of having the last word is denied to you. Before I could receive it I shall be gone. But some time, somewhere, I hope to hear from you again. Yes, I shall go into Mexico with a pretty definite purpose, which, however, is not at present disclosable. You must try to forgive my obstinacy in not “perishing” where I am.
I want to be where something worth while is going on, or where nothing whatever is going on. Most of what is going on in your own country is exceedingly distasteful to me.
Pray for me? Why, yes, dear — that will not harm either of us. I loathe religions, a Christian gives me qualms and a Catholic sets my teeth on edge, but pray for me just the same, for with all those faults upon your head (it’s a nice head, too), I am pretty fond of you, I guess. May you live as long as you want to, and then pass smilingly into the darkness — the good, good darkness. Devotedly your friend. He goes “with a pretty definite purpose;” his “obstinacy” will not allow him to perish in Washington, and death at the hands of the Mexicans is “better than dying in bed.” He wishes to be where something worth while is going on, or “where nothing whatever is going on;” and, finally, there is the reference to the “good, good darkness.”
Yet also he had announced his intention, if possible, to cross South America.
It is difficult to get away from the hints in those two letters; and the assumption that Bierce knew he would not return is inescapable. But to assume that he cordially sought death is another matter. He would be ready for it when it came, he would pass smilingly into the “good, good darkness,” but does anyone who knows Ambrose Bierce or his work suppose that he would encourage, let us say, his own murder? That he would rush into battle, let us say, hoping for a friendly bullet through his heart?
That his passing was, in effect, a suicide, although the hand may have been another than his own? Ambrose Bierce’s friends do not think so, and they are right. His “good-by” to his friends was real enough, but all he certainly knew was that somewhere, some time, perhaps in a few months, perhaps in a year or two, death would overtake him, and that he would not have returned to his home. That death did come to him, not long after he wrote the last letter received by his daughter, we must believe.
If he was murdered by bandits, and had a chance for life, it is safe to assume that there was a fight. If he died of disease, which is not at all improbable, he regretted his inability to write. Bierce was not cruel to his friends.
It is likely that the disappearance is complete, that the mystery never will be solved. The United States government’s investigation has come to nothing, and indeed it has been lax enough.
Ambrose Bierce was born in Meiggs County, Ohio, June 24, 1842, son of Marcus Aurelius and Laura (Sherwood) Bierce. He died — where? And when? Or is he dead? The time for hope would seem to have passed. One thinks of that grim prophecy, years ago; and there has been no wireless.
Setting aside the grief of friends and relatives, there is something terribly beautiful and fitting in the manner of the passing of Ambrose Bierce; a tragically appropriate conclusion to a life of erratic adventure and high endeavor. Soldier-fighter and soldier-writer. Scotson Clark’s well-known caricature of Bierce dragging a pen from a scabbard is the undying portrait of the man.
AMBROSE BIERCE: AN APPRAISAL by Frederic Tabor Cooper
From: The Bookman, July 1911, pages 471-480
In the preface to the fourth volume of his collected works, the volume containing under the title of Shapes of Clay the major portion of purely satirical personal verse, Mr. Ambrose Bierce emphatically expresses his belief in the right of any author “to have his fugitive work in newspapers and periodicals put into a more permanent form during his lifetime if he ca
n.” No one is likely to dispute Mr. Bierce’s contention; but it is often a grave question as to what extent it is wise for the individual to exercise his inalienable rights. And in the question of authors the question comes down to this: How far is it to their own best interests to dilute their finer and more enduring work with that which is mediocre and ephemeral? For it is unfortunately true that no author is measured by his high lights alone, but by the resultant impression of blended light and shade; and there is many a writer among the recognised classics who to-day would take a higher rank had a kindly and discriminating fate assigned three-quarters of his life work to a merciful oblivion.
To the student of American letters, however, the comprehensive edition of Ambrose Bierce’s writings now being issued in ten portly and well-made volumes cannot fail to be welcome. It places at once within convenient reach a great mass of material which, good, bad or indifferent, as the case may be, all helps to throw suggestive side lights upon the author, his methods, and his outlook upon life. It forces the reader who perchance has hitherto known Mr. Bierce solely as a master of the short story, to realise that this part of his work has been, throughout a long and busy life, a sort of side issue and that the great measure of his activities has been expended upon social and political satire. And similarly, those who have known him best as the fluent producer of stinging satiric verse suddenly recognise how versatile and many sided are his literary gifts. The ten volumes are divided as follows: three volumes of prose fiction; two volumes of satiric verse; two volumes of literary and miscellaneous essays; and three volumes consisting mainly of satiric prose, including a greatly amplified edition of that curiously caustic piece of irony, The Cynic’s Word Book, now for the first time published under the title of Mr. Bierce’s own choosing, The Devil’s Dictionary. It seems, therefore, most convenient to consider Mr. Bierce, the Man of Letters, under three separate aspects: the Critic, the Satirist and the Master of the Short Story.
I. THE CRITIC
Regarding literary criticism, Mr. Bierce says quite frankly “the saddest thing about the trade of writing is that the writer can never know, nor hope to know, if he is a good workman. In literary criticism, there are no criteria, no accepted standards of excellence by which to test the work.” Now there is just enough truth in this attitude of mind to make it a rather dangerous one. If there were literally no accepted standards in any of the arts, no principles to which a certain influential majority of critical minds had given their adhesion, then literature and all the arts would be in a state of perennial anarchy. But of course any writer who believes in his heart that there are no criteria will necessarily remain in lifelong ignorance regarding his own worth; for it is only through learning how to criticise others sanely and justly that one acquires even the rudiments of self-criticism.
And incidently, it may be observed that no better proof of Mr. Bierce’s fundamental lack of this valuable asset could be asked than the retention in these ten volumes of a considerable amount of journalistic rubbish side by side with flashes of undoubted genius. Mr. Bierce’s entire essay on the subject of criticism is a sort of literary agnosticism, a gloomy denial of faith. He has no confidence in the judgment of the general public nor in that of the professional critic. He admits that “in a few centuries, more orless, there may arrive a critic that we call ‘Posterity;’ “ but Posterity, he complains, is a trifle slow. Accordingly, since the worth of any contemporary writer is reduced to mere guess work, he, Ambrose Bierce, has scant use for his contemporaries. He has very definite ideas regarding the training of young writers and tells us at some length the course through which he would like to put an imaginary pupil, but he adds:
If I caught him reading a newly published book, save by way of penance, it would go hard with him. Of our modern education he should have enough to read the ancients: Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and that lot – custodians of most of what is worth knowing.
A CARICATURE OF A PAINTING BY THE LATE J. H. E. PART1NGTON
In spite of the pains to which Mr. Bierce goes to deny that he is a laudator temporis acti, the term fits him admirably — and nowhere is this attitude of mind more conspicuous than in his treatment of the modern novel. It is important, however, to get clearly in mind the arbitrary sense in which he uses the word novel as distinguished from what he chooses to call romance. His occasional half definitions are somewhat confusing; but apparently by the novel he means realistic fiction as distinguished from romantic fiction — a distinction complicated by the further idiosyncrasy that by realism he understands almost exclusively the commonplaces of actuality and by romanticism any happening which is out of the ordinary. The novel, then, in his sense of the word is “a snow plant; it has no root in the permanent soil of literature, and does not long hold its place; it is of the lowest form of imagination.” And again: “The novel bears the same relation to literature that the panorama bears to painting; with whatever skill and feeling the panorama is painted, it must lack that basic quality in all art, unity, totality of effect.” He seems utterly unaware that the great gain in modern fiction, the one indisputable factor that separates it from the fiction of half a century ago, is precisely the basic quality of unity. The modern novel whose technique most nearly approaches perfection is the one which when read rapidly with “a virgin attention at a single sitting” — to borrow Mr. Bierce’s own phrase — gives an impression of as single-hearted a purpose as one finds in the most faultless of Maupassant’s three-thousand word masterpieces. It is quite possible for any well-trained reader to go through even the longest of novels at a single sitting. The present writer would feel himself grievously at fault if he interrupted his first reading of any novel that had been given him for the purpose of review; and he well remembers that in only two recent cases did he become conscious of the prolonged strain: namely, Mr. Kipling’s Kim, which required an uninterrupted attention of eight and one-half hours, and The Golden Bowl, of Mr. James, which required somewhat more than eleven. Mr. Bierce’s attitude, however, is partly explained by his obiter dictum that “no man who has anything else to do can critically read more than two or three books in a month” — and of course, if you make your way through books at the snail’s pace of one in ten days, the most perfect unity of purpose is inevitably going to drop out of sight. All of this helps us to understand how it happens that Mr. Bierce, otherwise a man of intelligence, can say in all seriousness that “in England and America the art of novel writing is as dead as Queen Anne.” Listen also to the following literary blasphemy:
So far as I am able to judge, no good novels are now “made in Germany,” nor in France, nor in any European country except Russia. The Russians are writing novels which so far as one may venture to judge ... are in their way admirable; full of fire and light, like an opal . . . ; in their hands the novel grew great — as it did in those of Richardson and Fielding, and as it would have done in those of Thackeray and Pater if greatness in that form of fiction had been longer possible in England.
Or again:
Not only is the novel ... a faulty form of art, but because of its faultiness it has no permanent place in literature. In England it flourished less than a century and a half, beginning with Richardson and ending with Thackeray, sines whose death no novels, probably, have been written that are worth attention.
Think for a moment what this means. Here is a man who has ventured to speak seriously about the modern novel, and who confessedly is unaware of the importance of Trollope and Meredith and Hardy, of Henry James and Rudyard Kipling and Maurice Hewlett — and who deliberately ignores the existence of Flaubert and Maupassant and Zola, Galdos and Valdes, Verga and d’Annunzio! It is not astonishing after that to find Mr. Bierce seriously questioning the value of epic poetry: “What more than they gave,” he asks, “might we not have had from Virgil (sic), Dante, Tasso, Camoens and- Milton if they had not found the epic poem ready to their misguided hands?”
The fact is that Mr. Bierce as a critic is of the iconoclastic vari
ety. He breaks down but does not build up. He has no patience with the historical form of criticism that traces the intellectual genealogy of authorship showing, for instance, Maupassant’s debt to Poe or Bourget’s debt to Stendhal. He is equally intolerant of that analytical method — the fairest of them all — that judges every written work by its author’s purpose as nearly as this may be read between the lines. Nothing is more certain, he says, than if a writer of genius should bring to his task the purposes which the critics trace in the completed work “the book would remain forever unwritten, to the unspeakable advantage of letters and morals.” Yes, he tears down the recognised methods of criticsm but suggests nothing better in their place. And when he himself undertakes to criticise, it is hardly ever for the purpose of paying tribute to excellence – with the noteworthy exception, mirabile dictu, of his extraordinary praise of George Stirling’s poetic orgy of words, “The Wine of Wizardry.” Tolstoy, for instance, he defines as a literary giant: “He has a giant’s strength and has unfortunately learned to use it like a giant – which means not necessarily with conscious cruelty, but with stupidity.” The journal of Marie Bashkirtseff — the last book on earth that one would expect Mr. Bierce to discuss — he sums up as “morbid, hysterical and unpleasant beyond anything of its kind in literature.” Among modern critics he pronounces Mr. Howells “the most mischievous, because the ablest, of all this sycophantic crew.”
AMBROSE BIERCE (in 1869)
The truth is that the value of Mr. Bierce as a critic lies solely in his fearlessness and downright sincerity, his unswerving conviction that he is right. He has to a rather greater extent than many a better critic the quality of consistency; and no matter how widely we are forced to disagree with his conclusions there is not one of them that does not throw an interesting side light upon Mr. Bierce, the man.
Delphi Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Illustrated) Page 329