“Hotten, Rotten, Forgotten.”
And Bierce attended the funeral, where he felt more than he cared to express.
While in London, Bierce wrote a series of humorous essays on zoology, and published two books, one entitled “Cobwebs from an Empty Skull.” Gladstone discovered one of these books some years later at a secondhand shop. It was signed “Dod Grile,” and was a collection of weird occult tales, written in a fine style; for whatever faults critics may find in Bierce’s works, they admit the literary quality of his style. Gladstone praised the book, and London was interested for a space.
Meanwhile the warrior writer returned to California. This was in 1880. He soon experienced enough adventures to fill several books. Most of the time he lived in San Francisco, but he also did some mining near Deadwood, South Dakota. Here he met plenty of unique characters, including “bad men,” whose favorite weapon was the six-shooter, an arm in which Bierce himself became an expert.
One night, accompanied by an armed guard, Bierce set out in a wagon to deliver $30,000 in gold which belonged to the mining company, of which he was the manager. A highwayman’s shout “Hands up!” startled them in the darkness. The guard, who was armed with a rifle, was equal to the sudden dramatic situation, for he promptly threw himself over the seat, shot and put the bad man out of commission.
In San Francisco Bierce became the master of a group of young writers, who fairly worshiped him, being attracted by his powerful personality, his robust originality, and his clear-cut style and artistic craftsmanship. He originated a kind of occult cult, and it is in the psychic phenomena that he made some of his most daring and interesting excursions. From musings in this mystic realm came the unique story, “The Damned Thing,” which belongs to the category of such mystery stories as Fitz-James O’Brien’s “What Was It?” and Maupassant’s “Le Horla.”
Bierce always took a unique point of view of things, and declared that the horrors of peace were more terrible than the carnage of war, a view, enpassant, which seems to be popular in Europe just now! However, no one knew better than Bierce the pathos growing out of the inexorable irony of war, and for pure shudder-producing and sickening effect and hopeless protest, nothing outside of Poe can equal that grisly, blood-dripping tale, “Chickamauga.” It is about a little boy who strays into the woods, plays soldier with a wooden sword, and is lost. Becoming weary, he falls asleep. Meanwhile, all unheard by the sleeping child, the terrible battle of Chickamauga is fought in the neighborhood. When the boy awakes he is surprised to see a number of grewsome things — for they are humans no longer — creeping, dragging themselves on hands and knees, through the woods. On and on they come, a seemingly endless procession of weird beings, many mortally wounded, many with their faces shot away. In their delirium they are prompted by thirst to go on and on, and so they drag themselves to a stream in the woods. Some drink, but many others are so weak from loss of blood that they fall in and drown. The boy, not understanding the meaning of war, thinks the wounded men would play horse with him. He leaps upon the back of a soldier, and is rudely thrown off. Finally the child returns home. He finds that his mother has been shot dead.
In many of his stories Bierce has achieved that impersonal attitude toward his characters that is so characteristic of Maupassant. However, this is rather an artistic and not a personal trait. Though seemingly cold and hard, Bierce was generous and sympathetic. In another powerful story, “A Son of the Gods,” in describing the dead on a battlefield, he cries out: “Oh, those many needless dead!”
Though Bierce wrote many books, he is generally only known as the author of a novel, “The Monk and the Hangman’s Daughter.” As a poet, his verse is clever and satirical, and he wrote at least one good poem, “An Invocation,” which is said to have inspired Kipling’s “Recessional.” It is an address to the Goddess of Liberty. The most representative stanza runs:
“Let man salute the rising day
Of Liberty, but not adore.
‘Tis opportunity, no more,
A useful, not a sacred, ray.”
Bierce has been misunderstood, because of his intense and paradoxical nature. He was a great satirist, and an original artist. He has been characterized as a human devil, but like all cynics, he sometimes revealed a warm heart. Doubtless he concealed much concerning himself, and wrote and spoke and acted often with perverse superficiality.
He was vain as well as egotistical, and liked to create a stir. His writings have not attained anything like the popularity that their literary merits warrant. He had been bitterly criticised, because he was fearless in his own opinion, and dearly loved a good fight for itself. He acted, in an unique way, a valiant part, being consistently inconsistent. He was not so cold and hard as he would have the world believe. In fact, there are some people living who can attest that Ambrose Bierce could be generous, and then promptly forget the assistance that he had rendered.
The Mexican Review. I.
From: The Mexican Review, September 1917, page 12
Then there is the still unsolved mystery of the fate of Ambrose Bierce, the well-known California writer. Every little while some admirer or friend asks as to his fate. Circumstantial accounts have been published purporting to give the details of his death, but they have had no foundation. The last seen of Bierce was in one of the El Paso hotels in the winter of 1913-14, when he announced to a number of newspaper correspondents that he was going across the river into Mexico, where he intended to join Villa, not caring whether he lost his life or not, but in the event of not being able to carry out that plan he intended to “crawl into some quiet hole somewhere in the mountains and pass his last days in peace and quiet.”
He never joined Villa, for if he had, the newspaper men with that army would surely have been cognizant of the fact, as it would have been impossible for him to have concealed his identity.
It is true, an unknown American supposed to be a newspaper man was reliably reported to have been killed in the trenches before Torreon in the ten days’ fighting in the spring of 1914, but the body was never found, while the description given by a negro officer of Villa’s army did not answer to that of Bierce in any way. It is probable that he passed away in some remote spot without his identity being known, but there is always the possibility that he may still be living in some out-of-the-way spot in the Sierra Madre, a region which he seemed to fancy.
The Mexican Review. II.
From: The Mexican Review, March 1918, page 12
The friends of Ambrose Bierce, the well-known American author and correspondent, are very desirous of securing some definite information regarding his present whereabouts, or his fate. Mr. Bierce had lived in California for many years. He was an ardent sympathizer with the Madero revolution, and afterwards with the movement under President Carranza against the traitor Huerta. He went to El Paso in the latter part of 1913, with the intention of joining the Constitutional forces. The last that was heard from him was in a letter mailed at Chihuahua in October of that year, in which he stated that he was then sojourning at a point some eight or ten miles from the City of Chihuahua. He did not specify the locality, however. Since that time nothing has been heard from him, although many efforts have been made to secure some definite information. The accompanying photograph was taken not long before he went to Mexico and it is published in the hope that some one may recognize it and send the information which is so much desired by his multitude of friends. If any one recognizing the portrait, or knowing anything of Mr. Bierce will communicate with the Mexican News Bureau, 613 Riggs Bldg., Washington, D. C, it will be a very great favor.
Ambrose Bierce’s Death Charged to Villa Band
From: The Publisher’s Weekly, April 3, 1920, page 1103
Ambrose Bierce’s Death Charged to Villa Band
SAN FRANCISCO, March 24. — A signed statement that he has evidence that Ambrose Bierce. noted writer, who disappeared in 1915, was put to death by a Villista firing squad near the village of Icamoli, on the trail to M
onterey, was made in The San Francisco Bulletin, dated March 24 by J. H. Wilkins, a special writer, who has returned from Mexico after a search for evidence as to Bierce’s fate.
Wilkin’s informant, he said, was a member of the band that executed Bierce and showed the writer a picture of Bierce, taken from his clothing after the execution.
After the split between Villa and Carranza. Bierce was attached to the Carranza forces as a military expert, Wilkins said, and was captured while directing a mule train bearing a shipment of arms out of Torreon and shot.
The Biography
The last known photograph of Ambrose Bierce, taken in June 1913, before disappearing in Mexico
AMBROSE BIERCE: A BIOGRAPHY by Carey McWilliams
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION. THE BIERCE MYTH
CHAPTER I. MOSTLY GENEALOGICAL
CHAPTER II. WAR DAYS 1861
CHAPTER III. WAR DAYS 1862-1865
CHAPTER IV. NEW SCENES
CHAPTER V. SAN FRANCISCO
CHAPTER VI. LONDON
CHAPTER VII. “THE TERRIBLE SEVENTIES”
CHAPTER VIII. THE BLACK HILLS
CHAPTER IX. THE WASP
CHAPTER X. “SIR ORACLE, INDEED!”
CHAPTER XI. “NOTHING MATTERS”
CHAPTER XII. THE MASTER
CHAPTER XIII. BIERCE AND THE CHARNEL HOUSE
CHAPTER XIV. “DAVID AND GOLIATH”
CHAPTER XV. “THE SHADOW MAKER”
CHAPTER XVI. “ALAS, MY DREADFUL INERTIA!”
CHAPTER XVII. “A MAGNIFICENT CRYSTALLIZATION”
CHAPTER XVIII. HOLIDAY
CHAPTER XIX. “THE GOOD, GOOD DARKNESS”
CHAPTER XX. “INCOMMUNICABLE NEWS”
INTRODUCTION. THE BIERCE MYTH
IT was the unique distinction of Ambrose Bierce to be referred to as dead when he was living, and to be mentioned as living when he was indubitably dead. His reputation is based on a series of elaborately interwoven paradoxes. Even to attempt a biographical study of his life requires a preliminary analysis of this critical confusion. His name is already a legend and his reputation is almost mythical so far has it been divorced from the central values of his work. Time has crystallized the mistaken opinions of his contemporaries into a generally accepted theory of his work. Such is the fate that befalls the “obscure” type in letters. Myth becomes imposed on myth, legend is interlaced with legend, so that in the course of time it becomes necessary to remove one layer of misunderstanding after another until at least the outline of the original may be traced over the pattern of errors that time has somewhat erased. Perhaps the “myth” is already a tradition and that a dissociation of ideas is impossible. It is a doubt which has often troubled me.
Some men are predestined to be the subject of misunderstanding, as though some quality about their lives invited absurd comment and irrelevant observation. Such a man was Ambrose Bierce. It is seriously to be doubted if there exists another figure in American literature about whom as much irregular and unreliable critical comment has been written. He has been characterized as great, bitter, idealistic, cynical, morose, frustrated, cheerful, bad, sadistic, obscure, perverted, famous, brutal, kind, a fiend, a God, a misanthrope, a poet, a realist who wrote romances, a fine satirist and something of a charlatan. Surely such misunderstanding is not an inevitable condition of fame. There exists no such wildness about the literature on Emerson, on Melville, or on Twain. If his admirers had realized that Bierce was a complex figure and that only by the use of paradox could they make any progress in definition, much confusion might have been avoided. Had his critics been able to move in both directions, first into his work and then back to the facts of his life, they might have succeeded in arriving at a more intelligent appreciation of his work.
To suggest the quality of this bulky literature devoted to a consideration of Bierce’s writings, a few illustrations will suffice. J. S. Cowley-Brown wrote that “Bierce is as interesting as a kangaroo”; while Mr. Laurence Stallings has announced that “he has the kick of a zebra mule.” Franklin H. Lane spoke of him as “a hideous monster, so like the mixture of dragon, lizard, bat, and snake as to be unnameable,” but to William Marion Reedy he was “a man of silent generosities, a fellow of tenderness.” One journalist in San Francisco always referred to him as “that rascal of the sorrel hair,” but to Mrs. Ruth Guthrie Harding, who perhaps may be pardoned a sentimental tear or two, “Mr. Boythorn-Bierce” was always “a childlike person.” Bierce has been listed by such critics as Alfred C. Ward and Harold Williams exclusively as a writer of the short story; others have considered him solely as a satirist. He has been named as a propagandist against war and as a friend of war; as an aristocrat with principles that were fundamentally democratic; as a satirist of great powers who was at the same time a hired libelist. To some his political views are impossibly trite while others think he was a philosopher of great acumen.
It is amazing to find even such an able journalist as George West writing in The American Mercury, July, 1926, that “Bierce, a veteran of the Civil War, came to California with his bent fixed and his talent developed.... With his negative answers he was a death-man, a denier of life, of a genuine but slight talent, and hence the last writer in the world to inspire others.” Bierce had not written a line for print when he came to California; he actually learned to write in San Francisco, and as to inspiring others, he was the direct inspiration for many of the men Mr. West proceeds to list in his catalogue of California literati. How account for such writing? Bierce seems to have always inspired such inaccuracy, even from writers with such fine opportunities for observation as Mr. West.
In an effort to prove that the motivation for his short stories was subconscious, Dr. Isaac Goldberg has spoken of Bierce as “sadistic-masochistic!” Dr. Louis J. Bragman finds indications of the abnormal in all his work and sums him up as “a purveyor of morbidities.” Mr. Walter Neale, with malicious ingenuity, discusses at length the possibility that Bierce may have been a sexual pervert! Of course, with elaborate precaution against criticism, Mr. Neale comes to the conclusion, as well he might, that there was no basis whatever for such a thought. But the list of absurdities does not cease here. Perversion and sadism are rather fashionable nowadays and Mr. Neale was probably clever to spice his book with such hypothetical misdemeanors. The suggestion has even been made that Bierce was a lunatic! Whispers to this effect circulate in the west to-day, because Bierce was known to visit a sanitarium at Livermore, California, and it has actually been rumored that he never went into Mexico at all but died in an asylum at Napa. What, one may well inquire, inspired all this nonsense, this pyramiding of misinformation, this repetition of error, this maze of conjecture and hearsay?
In attempting an explanation one must be patient and begin as far back as 1868 and gradually work forward through the veils of comment to 1913, and then a coroner’s inquest must be conducted on the even more ludicrous situation since that date. In 1868 a young writer who conducted a page called “The Town Crier” on The San Francisco News Letter and California Advertiser began to acquire considerable fame in the west. He was, of course, quite a character in San Francisco. But in the east the New York journals began to quote his comments and to speculate as to his identity. Finally it became known that the Town Crier was a young fellow whose name was A. G. Bierce. At this early date there was little misunderstanding. Bierce was just a witty young journalist who wrote original copy. Some shrewd newspaper men began to note that his journalism was occasionally great satire, possessing peculiarly personal qualities and animated by great force and energy. But just when his reputation was beginning to be established on an understandable basis, the Town Crier left San Francisco and went to London.
It is of the first importance in dealing with the Myth to keep in mind the interruption in Bierce’s career occasioned by this early change of residence. While Bierce was in England he was forgotten in this country and only a few journalists, such as James Watkins and Mr. Laffan, kept in
touch with his work and knew that the Passing Showman of Figaro was the former Town Crier of the News-Letter.
But during these years, Bierce was making a reputation for himself in England. He published three books during his residence in London and became a well-known literary figure. His fame was considerable and he was remembered by many writers and critics who were able, in 1892, to associate Ambrose Bierce, the author of “Tales of Soldiers and Civilians,” with the immensely interesting and provocative A. G. Bierce who was a friend of James Mortimer, Tom Hood, and Henry Sampson. Robert Barr, of The Idler, made this association very quickly and his comments stirred the recollections of his countrymen. But it was a long span of years from 1872 to 1892, so that England had to rediscover Bierce, and in the process many errors of perception occurred. This slight blur began to color the otherwise shrewd comment of the English critics. During Bierce’s entire career, he was constantly being the subject of little flurries of critical comment in the English press, at intervals of from ten to fifteen years. Mr. Gladstone picked up a copy of “Cobwebs from an Empty Skull” one day and announced in an interview that he remembered the sensation the book had made on its first appearance and the pleasure its reading had given him. Such incidents, occurring at irregular intervals through the years, kept Bierce’s reputation alive but imperfectly understood. Then, too, he wrote under the name of “Dod Grile” in England and this came to cause no little confusion and error. Every time he published a book in this country, the press of England would dig back into old files and there would be another series of reminiscent paragraphs and letters to the editor about this fellow who had once lived in London. The American press would occasionally notice these comments in the English papers and would only become more confused as to who Bierce really was and what he had written. The situation was an international complication and was the beginning of a Myth.
Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics) Page 336
