Delphi Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Illustrated)

by Bierce, Ambrose

  There are strange things, indeed, in this world and it is within the range of probabilities that Mr. Wilkins’ story may be correct. But it sounds so absurd as to repel even a qualified acceptance. The first objection to the story is that Mr. Wilkins would fix the date of Bierce’s death at 1915. It seems unbelievable that Bierce could have been in Mexico for two years without having written a word to his daughter or Miss Christiansen. Moreover, it would have been virtually an impossibility for him to have been on Carranza’s staff for two years, particularly after the government had started its search, without being detected by American correspondents. Quite a considerable group of correspondents who were in Mexico at the time have been interviewed and none of them report having seen or heard of Bierce. Nor do any of Carranza’s aids recall the presence of such a man on the staff of the Constitutionalists’ Army.

  But even before Mr. Wilkins had reported the firing squad yarn, there was a widely circulated story to the effect that Bierce was in Europe with Lord Kitchener. This story, which had a most questionable origin, was sent all over the world by an excited and unreliable press as an authentic account of Bierce’s disappearance. Dr. B. F. Mason, a physician in San Leandro, California, had given an interview to a reporter on the Oakland Tribune, in which he said that he had just received a letter from a relative, Col. Henry Charles Mason, who claimed to have seen Bierce with Kitchener’s forces. This was the origin of the story. It was promptly reprinted throughout the country, but with the statement that Bierce’s daughter had confirmed the story at Bloomington, Illinois. She did nothing of the sort. All that she said, when interviewed, was that she had read the newspaper stories about her father. This casual statement was converted into the definite assertion that she had “received a letter from her father,” and that he was with Kitchener’s army. As a matter of fact, there was no basis for the story whatever, aside from this circumstantial confirmation: Bierce had corresponded with Lord Kitchener, after the Boer War, and England was the ultimate destination of his trip. But this version of the disappearance, if true, would fix the date at 1915, and it thus becomes immediately subject to the objection that Bierce would certainly have written to his daughter in that period of time. His daughter is convinced that he would have communicated with her, if alive, knowing her terrible anxiety and apprehension. This belief finds the strongest substantiation in his last letters, in which he had promised to write from time to time, as he journeyed south.

  Another story about Bierce’s disappearance, and a rather probable one, is that by George Weeks. Weeks was a correspondent attached to Villa’s forces during the days leading up to the capture of Juarez. He explains how difficult it would have been for Bierce to be on the staff of either Villa or Carranza and to have escaped unnoticed. Mr. Weeks even admitted that he had been unable, personally, to learn a word about Bierce, although he made inquiries at Villa’s headquarters. This is important, particularly when Dr. Danziger’s story is considered.

  After the Revolution, Mr. Weeks published a newspaper in Mexico City, and it was this newspaper of which Edmund Melero was associate editor. Weeks had, in fact, introduced Wilkins to Melero. But Weeks also stated that Melero did not remember much about Bierce. After talking with Mr. Weeks, however, Melero discovered an old Mexican Sergeant who had been with General Tomas Urbina, one of Villa’s corps commanders. This old fellow, over a bottle of wine, was induced to tell a story about seeing an American shot down by a firing squad, and, presumably after another bottle of wine, to identify Bierce by a picture that was shown him as the man who was shot. It thus becomes apparent that the Wilkins story was but the story of a story, and that Mr. Weeks, who was personally quite reliable, only stated the story upon the questionable hearsay of Melero, which was based in turn upon the unnamed sergeant’s evidence. Such stories surely do not commend themselves. Much publicity has been given to the Weeks-Wilkins story by stating it as an accepted version of what happened to Bierce, but it was never other than a questionable hypothesis. It is far more likely that Bierce was shot during the fighting that occurred at Torreon about the time he was last heard from. No effort whatever was made to identify the bodies of the dead during the Revolution and a disappearance in this manner would be forever veiled in mystery. It would seem that Bierce, if dead, was probably killed during the early days of the Revolution. This becomes apparent when one reads Mr. Weeks’ account of the manner in which the correspondents covered both the Villista and Constitutionalists’ armies.

  Another widespread story about Bierce’s disappearance is that circulated by Dr. Danziger. According to the Doctor’s version, Bierce went into Mexico with the express purpose of joining Villa’s army. Bierce, says Dr. Danziger, was jealous of General Harrison Gray Otis, formerly owner of the Los Angeles Times, because the latter, by flattering Diaz, had acquired large estates in Mexico. Hence Bierce wanted to assist Diaz. This is, of course, most characteristic of the Doctor, who, throughout his “Portrait of Ambrose Bierce,” goes to the utmost recesses of his fervent imagination to attribute a mean and personal motive to all of Bierce’s activities. Regardless of what may be proven or not proven in this controversy, one fact remains clear: Bierce did not go into Mexico with the thought in mind of assisting Villa or because he disliked General Otis.

  The Doctor would have us believe that he personally interviewed Villa, and was highly complimented for his courage, the compliment being noted along with several other flattering tributes to the self-narrated glory and heroism of the author of “A Portrait of Ambrose Bierce.” He then tells the most preposterous yarn, quoting Villa to the effect that Bierce, by drinking tequila, had become a drunkard. But he never directly states that Villa admitted that Bierce was dead, or that he knew who killed him. He does not offer a scintilla of proof, nor a single circumstance to buttress this flimsy and ridiculous story. Despite the widespread publicity given to Mr. Robert H. Davis’ interview with Dr. Danziger, published, let it be known, in 1928, there is scant evidence to support the Doctor’s story that he learned about the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce in 1923, but kept the matter a secret for five years. Villa was assassinated July 20, 1923. In 1923, Bierce would have been eighty-one, and in 1928, he would have been eighty-six. It was time for a brilliant revelation.

  It has previously been stated that in 1893, Bierce and Danziger had a serious quarrel. This state of affairs was not altered in later years. On July 19, 1902, Bierce wrote Dr.

  Danziger a note, — one of the mildest of several similar letters of this time — and a characteristic passage will be quoted:

  “If you come to Washington there will be a few things for you to explain. I have had to pay some bills of yours, for example. And I have reason to think that you have again been ‘working’ some of the persons whom you knew as my friends. In brief, it is up to you to show, if you can, that you are not an irreclaimable crook.”

  The Doctor was quite well aware of Mr. Bierce’s attitude, for he kept writing and begging for an interview. To quote from a letter of March 28, 1903: “I cannot conceive that you should so detest me that you would not grant my request. Much has happened since we were together that has strengthened my manhood and has raised me above the former level.” It is the story of this man that one is asked to believe as to what happened to Ambrose Bierce.

  The latest “Mexican” disappearance story is that related by one Edward S. O’Reilly, soldier of fortune. O’Reilly claims to have been an officer on the “staff” of Pancho Villa, in 1914. O’Reilly is firmly convinced that he found the grave of Ambrose Bierce near Sierra Mojada. While in Sierra Mojada in 1914 with General Torivo Ortega, he heard rumors of an old man who had drifted into the town searching for Villa, who had been shot by some local soldiers. Some “scraps” of an envelope were reported to have been found with an Oakland postmark. Of course, none of the circumstances of the story are in any way capable of verification. It is just another story.

  Several years after Bierce’s disappearance into Mexico, his devoted and faithful s
ecretary, Miss Christiansen, died at Napa, California. Before her death she turned over to Mrs. Isgrigg all her personal effects and the property which Mr. Bierce had given her prior to his departure into Mexico. There was nothing in her papers that throws any additional light upon the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce, other than the notebook to which reference has been made. But her death inspired several new “stories” about Bierce, one of which was quite ingenious. There is a state institution for the insane at Napa. Miss Christiansen lived in Napa several years prior to her death. Therefore, reasoned the inventor of this story, Bierce had been in Napa all the time and had never disappeared into Mexico. If in Napa, where could he be but in the State Insane Asylum! Of course, the simple fact that Napa, California, was Miss Christiansen’s home, would not be a sufficient explanation of her presence there.

  But the interest in Bierce’s disappearance has not been limited to the reporters and pseudo-reporters. Mr. Edward H. Smith wrote an article about the famous disappearance in a detective story magazine, and later reprinted it in a book devoted to “Mysteries of the Missing.” In this volume, with Charlie Ross, Archduke Salvator, and Theodosia Burr, Bierce joins the ranks of the mysterious army of the missing. He had written about these strange folk on many occasions, and now he was of their grisly company. Mr. Smith, trained in the lore of the detective, comes to some interesting conclusions. He rejects, as who would not, the stories by Weeks and Danziger, and makes this sensible observation: “My own guess is that Bierce started out to fight battles and shoulder hardships as he had done when a boy, somehow believing that a tough spirit would carry him through.” Indeed, it should be remembered that Bierce had led an inactive life in Washington for thirteen years. He was not a strong man at the time he went into Mexico, although he was well preserved for his age. He had been ill in New Orleans and again in El Paso, as shown by the notes Miss Christiansen made from his letters. He was surely not in condition to undertake the hardships of a correspondent in Mexico during the Revolution.

  The labors of Mr. Bierce’s bibliographers are incessant and eternal. Any one who has tried to follow all the stories about Bierce’s disappearance, will sympathize with Charles Willis Thompson’s mild satire on the stories about “the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce,” which have been as numerous and as colorful as the stories of Czar Nicholas’s death. The writers who have used the disappearance as an incident for pure fiction have been much more successful. Mariam Storm’s story “Discovery” which appeared in The Forum is much more convincing than most of the news stories. Benjamin De Casseres in “The Last Satire of a Famous Titan” indulges in some pyrotechnic prose, and seats Mr. Bierce in the Café Gambrinus in Mexico City. It would seem that Mr. De Casseres has given a careful attention to details, for in one paragraph Mr. Bierce “tosses off a couple of brandies,” and smacks his lips over a third a few lines later. Both the De Casseres and Storm stories are “brandy fiction”; even the few details, such as the old soldier comrade of Bierce and the set of books in Miss Storm’s story, are purely imaginary. Mr. Thomas Burke has even suggested a supernatural explanation of Bierce’s disappearance! Crystal gazers have been consulted and palmists interrogated, but the mystery remains and the farce continues.

  Jay House, writing in the New York Evening Post, raised the question as to whether or not there was ever such a man as Ambrose Bierce. Under the circumstances, the question was really quite pertinent. He received some thirty-seven wildly contradictory letters, purporting to tell all that was to be known about Bierce. One correspondent, however, rebelled; he insisted that no such person ever existed! The clipping bureaus have brought in some fantastic stories about Bierce during the last four or five years. He has been seen in out of the way places and has appeared at psychological moments with all Banquo’s sense of dramatic values. It is slight wonder that the skeptics ask whether or not such a man ever existed. Was he a salamander, a sadist-masochist, Francis of Assisi, a bat, or an ape? Was he as interesting as a kangaroo and did he have the kick of a zebra? Every semester during the college year some sophomore has discovered the twelve-volume set of Bierce and has written a laborious treatise for the local campus quarterly about this “lonely” figure in American Literature for the edification of the faculty and the bewilderment of the public. One man in San Francisco, who knew Bierce quite well, informs me that he was besieged by four biographers within a space of three months. And so it goes....

  Mrs. Isgrigg launched an investigation under the direction of Col. C. J. Velardi, to determine if any new facts could be unearthed as to her father’s disappearance. But the mission proved unsuccessful. Will these investigators ever succeed in unearthing genuine clews? The question is unanswerable. But should they succeed? Bierce wanted to find death when he went into Mexico, and his curiosity was justified by a sad experience in human affairs. It was, after all, a personal privilege. Whatever word he may have spoken has, thus far, most certainly been that “incommunicable news” of which Mr. Markham wrote, in Bierce’s favorite sonnet, “The Wharf of Dreams”:

  “Strange wares are handled on the wharves of sleep;

  Shadows of shadows pass, and many a light

  Flashes a signal fire across the night;

  Barges depart whose voiceless steersmen keep

  Their way without a star upon the deep;

  And from lost ships, homing with ghostly crews,

  Comes cries of incommunicable news,

  While cargoes pile the piers a moon-white heap —

  Budgets of dream-dust, merchandise of song,

  Wreckage of hope and packs of ancient wrong,

  Nepenthes gathered from a secret strand,

  Fardels of heartache, burdens of old sins,

  Luggage sent down from dim ancestral inns,

  And bales of fantasy from No-Man’s Land.”

  Events have a strange pattern when viewed by the mystic. On February 6, 1926, Emma Frances Dawson, one of Bierce’s most brilliant pupils, died of starvation at Palo Alto. George Sterling wrote me that it was “suicide” and closed his letter with a stricture to the effect that the only people who committed suicide were those without energy enough to live. On November 17, 1926, Sterling committed suicide at the Bohemian Qub in San Francisco. When his room was entered, it was found to be in a state of confusion and disorder. But there was a picture of Ambrose Bierce on the wall — austere and fine and handsome. In our last interview, Sterling had said that the final letter he had received from Bierce had the tone of “God talking to a gutter snipe.” A year later, almost to the day, Herman Scheffauer committed suicide in Berlin. Both had chided the “old Titan” about his sternness, but they died with his name on their lips.

  * * *

  So great has been the interest in Bierce of recent years that it is tempting to speculate as to just what his ultimate position will be in American letters. It is a question which time will settle in its own impartial manner. But the current discussion about Bierce has been so careless of the facts that his admirers may well fear that his name is in danger of being dropped in despair by the minority to whom it has always been a byword. Perhaps the ultimate judgment will be that he was more interesting as a man than he was important as a writer. If his name lives, it is within the range of probabilities that it will be as a tradition of wit, courage and decency. Whatever judgment may be passed on his work, it does not affect the important fact that Bierce was one of the most provocative figures of his generation. One cannot reflect upon the facts of his life without coming to entertain an admiration for his splendid courage and indomitable spirit. To those of us in the West who have watched the fate of his reputation with a peculiar and personal interest, it has always been a source of satisfaction to realize that dead, absent or unknown, he has survived his critics and that he has even bettered the enemies who pursued him into Mexico, “to feast on his bones.” To some of us, too, whose early enthusiasm for his work has somewhat waned, every light that has been thrown upon the facts of his life has brought a glowing
certainty that this man was of the immortals and that around his name has grown up a tradition that we will not willingly relinquish.

  Adios!

  THE END

  Sierra Mojada, Coahuila Cemetery, Mexico — believed to be Bierce’s final resting place

  Bierce’s likely grave in Sierra Mojada, Mexico. The translation reads: “Very trustworthy witnesses suppose that here lie the remains of 1842 Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce 1914 a famous American writer and journalist who on suspicion of being a spy was executed and buried at this place. 2004”