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Ambrose Bierce and the Joy of Outrage
An essay by Jack Matthews
Reprinted from the Fall 2004 Ohioana Quarterly
I can’t remember when I first learned about Ambrose Bierce. That long ago
discovery belongs to the class of things whose origins are lost in time,
like learning to walk or read or ride a bicycle - which, so far as remembrance
can testify, seemed to exist without a beginning, let alone an epiphany. My
acquaintance with Bierce and his writing is like that - part of the weather,
part of the environment.
Some of this has to do with our shared absorption in place, for we both
have roots in southeastern Ohio, and geography is always an essential part
of what we are. Bierce was born in 1842, at Horse Creek Cave in Meigs
County, Ohio, where he spent the first four years of his life - the most
consequential years of all. I live next door in Athens County, next to Meigs
on the north, and my family’s roots are deep in Gallia County, to the south.
To acknowledge one’s heritage is not necessarily to approve of it; its
depths are beyond approval or disapproval. Bierce knew this ambivalently,
often showing contempt for his humble origins in Meigs County and
erasing most of the details of his early years. Although in a poem published
in the November 3, 1883, edition of The Wasp, he describes his childhood in
terms of “the malarious farm, the wet, fungus-grown wildwood . . . the scumcovered
duck pond, the pigstye . . .the ditch where the soursmelling house drainage fell . . . .”
This is not a lyrical
evocation of arcadian
enchantment, and yet
it is not the whole
truth - assuming that
such an animal has
ever existed. Walter
Neale was a close
acquaintance of Bierce, and in his 1927 biography,1 he gave considerable
attention to Bierce’s histrionic gifts, displayed in his capacity for inventing
his past. Neale claimed that Bierce had even lied to him about his birthplace,
claiming it was in Ohio’s Western Reserve, giving emphasis to his
proud New England ancestry, but in doing so, missing his actual birthplace
by 200 miles. This is only one of many indications that Bierce was obsessed
with making the facts fit his self-image,
thereby creating some of his most
inspired fiction where one expects
nothing but the sober truth.
As for Bierce’s career as a writer, he
seemed to have had no apprenticeship to
the craft - no writerly past before he
began to publish. Like my acquaintance
with him, his maturity as both man and
writer came into existence with no
evident beginning, and there is very little
Biercean juvenilia. Of course, it could be
that he edited out all that in his maturity
he considered unworthy, just as he was
capable of changing his birthplace to suit
his fancy. He sought perfection in
whatever his name was attached to,
being far more fastidious in his use of language than most writers, many of
whom seem to think that one can write well without bothering to think
about words and their intricate capacities for precision.
It seems to me that Bierce’s reputation has never been equal to his singular
gifts. In the general view, he is something of a grotesque, an exotic growth,
a specimen. Edmund Wilson’s judgment is in tune with much twentieth
century criticism, for he found in Bierce’s writing “a familiar fascistic ring...[an]
insistence on law and order and on the need for the control of the disorderly
mob by an enlightened and well-washed minority.” While there is some slight
merit in Wilson’s judgment, most of it is old-fashioned Liberal gargling.
Fascistic or not, Bierce’s stories are possessed of a ponderous Victorian
commitment to melodrama. And yet, in everything he wrote, one can sense
an exceptional cast of mind, a way of taking in experience that was and
remains unique. Furthermore, in defense of the melodrama, one might cite
the profound influence of the American Civil War, which was the very
essence of melodrama, reflecting simplified moral design and emotional
excess - two of its essential ingredients.
The third ingredient is a fatal attraction to the “grand gesture,” splendidly
manifest by the major of an OVI Regiment, when he stood up before his
men in the midst of heavy fire and recited in its entirety this stanza from
Macauley’s Lays of Ancient Rome:
And up spoke brave Horatius,
The Captain of the gate,
“To every man upon this earth
Death cometh, soon or late!
And how can one die better
Than in facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers
And the temples of his gods?”2
Without doubt, Bierce would have reacted to this with characteristically
savage mockery; and yet, underneath the mockery, he would have fully
understood that gesture, understanding it in such a way as to
dimensionalize and enrich his bitterness in rejecting it. This paradox is
hardly astonishing, for as humans we are all of us cloven - provided with
two eyes, two ears, and two selves. No wonder that there is no hatred like
the hatred for our own rejected passions.3
The trumpets of melodrama notwithstanding, one can still sense the real
power in some of Bierce’s Civil War fiction. “On a Mountain” is a firstperson
story whose action takes place in western Virginia, in 1861. In pursuit
of a Rebel contingent, a company of soldiers from Ohio and Indiana come
upon the unburied corpses of Union soldiers. Not wanting to take time to
bury them, they hurry on...only to return the next day, “a beaten, dispirited
and exhausted force, feeble from fatigue and savage from defeat....”
Here they once again come upon the corpses, finding them still unburied,
although now the bodies lie grotesquely disturbed in their twisted and
tangled uniforms. But there is a greater, more horrible difference: their faces
have been eaten by wild hogs. After the soldiers shoot the hogs, the narrator
says: “They had eaten our fallen, but - touching magnanimity - we did not
eat theirs.”4
Beyond question, the horrors Bierce witnessed as a soldier stayed with
him - part of the reason that his life was a raw wound that would never
heal. Another reason was the bloody head injury he received at the Battle of
Kennesaw Mountain, north of Atlanta. So there were physical as well as
psychological reasons for his seeming to spend the remainder of his life in a
trance of bitterness and cynicism.
Far less known than his stories are Bierce’s poems, which are often a
clearer reflection of his intellectual gifts than his stories. In his essay, “The
Matter of Manner,” he wrote something that is central to all his writing:
“My design is to show in the lucidest way that I can the supreme importance
of words, their domination of thought, their mastery of character.”
The fact that some of his poems also served as definitions in The Devil’s
Dictionary is evidence of their epigrammatic character - as in this short
poem (which is not in The Devil’s Dictionary, but suitably apophthegmatic):
The Lacking Factor
“You acted unwisely,” I cried, “as you see
By the outcome.” He calmly eyed me:
“When choosing the course of my action,” said he,
I had not the outcome to guide me.”
But it was this superlatively witty writer’s conviction that poetry should
not consist of such small games of wit; rather, it should be primarily an
expression of feeling. And, indeed, a few of Bierce’s poems are just that,
one of them seemingly autobiographical:
Oneiromancy
I fell asleep and dreamed that I
Was flung, like Vulcan, from the sky
Like him was lamed - another part:
His leg was crippled, and my heart.
I woke in time to see my love
Conceal a letter in her glove.
The personal reference would be to his wife. According to one version, he
divorced her after finding what he considered a compromising letter from
another man; but there are other versions, and I do not know enough either
to choose among them or patch them together into a coherent scenario, so
it would be futile to speculate. But the discrepancies are typical of a man
whose great capacity for invention was as manifest in creating his own past
as in his more ostensible fictions.
Consistent with his Jovian posture in judging others, Bierce was severe
regarding his own poetry, and he could be touchingly self-effacing. He
idealized poetry as the highest art attainable, therefore beyond his reach.
Humility
Great poets fire the world with fagots big
That make a crackling racket,
But I’m content with but a whispering twig
To warm some single jacket.
One’s admiration for Bierce does not require agreement with his judgment
of his own abilities any more than agreement with his aesthetic
judgments; there are no final conclusions about such matters, and while
humility in confronting the demands of one’s art is an amiable quality, in the
final analysis, it is possessed of no more authority than arrogance.
That being said, however, no one is likely to judge Bierce’s poetry as
“great” - whatever one might mean by a label that usually signifies little
more than heavy breathing. Not only that, poetry is not intrinsically superior
to prose, for it is one of the cardinal principles of true artistry that it
cannot be confined in the cages provided by our labels.
Most popular of all Bierceiana are the definitions in The Devil’s Dictionary. Its
pages are filled with these nuggets, which
according to H.L. Mencken comprise “some of the most gorgeous witticisms
in the English language.” Consider this brief sampling:
Novel, n. A short story padded.
Mausoleum, n. The final and funniest folly of the rich.
Liberty, n. One of imagination’s most precious possessions.
Craft, n. A fool’s substitute for brains.
Truce, n. Friendship.
Twice, adv. Once too many.
It is perhaps only natural that Bierce’s satire should be celebrated chiefly
for its muzzle blast, and yet, the muzzle blast is often eclipsed by the flash of
wit, as in the three elegant demonstrations of wordplay in his definition of
an otherwise innocent word:
Die, n. The singular of “dice.” We seldom hear the word because there is
a prohibitory proverb, “Never say die.” At long intervals, however,
someone says, “The die is cast,” which is not true, for it is cut. The word
is found in an immortal couplet by that eminent poet and domestic
economist, Senator Depew:
A cube of cheese no larger than a die
May bait the trap to catch a nibbling mie.5
Bierce is as famous for his death as for anything he wrote; indeed, his exit
from the theatre of life was splendidly melodramatic. In 1913, he went to
Mexico to cover the Pancho Villa uprising and was not heard from again. It
was a triumphantly theatrical exit, and it has been the inspiration for films
and books, along with much speculation.
Two years before that grand departure, however, in his seventieth year, he
collaborated with Neale in publishing the twelve-volume edition of his
Collected Works, the eleventh volume of which is appropriately titled Antepenultima.
If I had to choose one volume to represent Bierce’s “genius” (to use
an old-fashioned label now suspect, but still fashionable in his generation),
I would probably settle on this volume, or perhaps The Shadow on the Dial and
Other Essays, where many of the pieces in Antepenultima first appeared.
A small sampling will serve. In reading his essay, “The Death Penalty,” one
is not surprised to find him defending it and doing so with sass, showing
nothing but contempt for those “illogicians” who “define murder as disease
and hanging as murder.” Indeed, his arguments for executing a reprobate
remain unanswerable, if one has any faith in “free will,” a necessary fiction
for all that is civilized. “Men are not drafted for the death penalty,” he says;
“they volunteer for it.” And facing the predictable objection that “hanging
an assassin does not restore the life of the victim,” he asks, “And incarceration
does?” No, according to Bierce, “A man’s first murder is his crime; his
second is ours.”
“The new woman,” he wrote, “is against the death penalty, naturally, for
she is hot and hardy in the conviction that whatever is is wrong. She has
visited this world in order to straighten things about a bit, and is in distress
lest the number of things be insufficient to her need.” Substitute “rabid
feminist” for “the new woman,” and half of you who are reading this essay
will be irritated, but you will have been irritated with a defiance that is
nothing less than democratic.
Angry or not, agreeing or disagreeing, one must concede the sharpness
of Bierce’s analysis and the vividness and precision of his language. Beyond
question, his intellectuality is vividly manifest in his essays, and that intellectuality
is focused upon an understanding of language and the ways in which
it can, and cannot, achieve precision.
Much of his acuity is rooted in a profound distrust of abstractions, which
are possessed of a special efficacy in their capacity to infatuate both the
unwashed and those who should know better. In “Crime and Its
Correctives,” Bierce writes that, “‘Principles, not men,’ is a rogue’s cry;
rascality’s counsel to stupidity, the noise of the duper duping on his dupe.”
Needless to say, the target of his scorn is as fat today as it was then; and it
will be the cause of much, if not most, human cussedness and confusion as
long as we construct our realities with language and people are incapable of
understanding how to use words instead of being used by them. Being a
poseur in much of his personal life did not prevent Ambrose Bierce from
being masterfully honest in his use of language.
One naturally wonders how Bierce might have responded to the great
challenge of 9/11. A brief passage in his essay, “Natura Benigna,” provides a clue:
In all the world there is no city of refuge - no temple in which to
take sanctuary, clinging to the horns of the altar - no ‘place apart’
where, like hunted deer, we can hope to elude the baying pack of
Nature’s malevolences. The dead-line is drawn at the gate of life:
Man crosses it at birth. His advent is a challenge to the entire
pack - earthquake, storm, fire, flood, drought, heat, cold, sects,
bacilli spectacular plague and velvet-footed household disease - all
are fierce and tireless in pursuit. Dodge, turn and double how he
can, there’s no eluding them; soon or late some of them have him
by the throat and his spirit returns to the God who gave it - and
gave them.
This grim sermon taps into a vat of dark truths that we seemed to have
forgotten in the opulence, vulgarity, and decadence of late twentieth-century
America. Perhaps it is good that we now have to confront variations upon
the old horrors that have always been part of humanity. Maybe courage
cannot exist without danger, and maybe courage is an absolute good. Maybe
the challenge of that awful awakening can inspire us with a bravery that
would be otherwise impossible, providing the occasion for a flinty wisdom.
There are voices from the Past that can help us in our travail, and eloquent
among them is that of the courageous despair of Ambrose Bierce. Behind all
the bitterness and the thunderous nay-saying, one can detect a profound
interest in, and fascination with, the human adventure. One of the surest
signs of this is the vigour and precision of Bierce’s language; he could not
have created such excellences out of despair, no matter how vividly that
despair served as his subject, for the language of despair is silence.
There is a secret joyousness in such hatred, and it’s part of what appeals to
me in all that I’ve read of Ambrose Bierce. He is one of three writers whose
profound pessimism I find fascinating, in spite of the fact that I am a
congenital optimist. One of those other writers is Roy Campbell, the South
African poet, who in his poem, “To My Pet Cobra,” wrote: “I, too, can hiss
the hair of men erect/because my lips are venomous with truth!”
Another is the philosopher, Schopenhauer, a subject of enormous interest
to me. He once wrote that a human being is a coin, on one side of which
NOTHING is stamped, and on the other side, EVERYTHING. And so it
is that we are indeed cloven, compounded of contrasting realities. This
radical dividedness is intrinsic to virtually all we know as true; and it is
present as the latent text and bright underside of all the dark surfaces of
Schopenhauerian philosophy.
And so it is that Bierce belongs to that triumvirate, whose deepest secret is
their joyousness in articulating how much there is in the human experience
that is hateful and desperate, but in that articulation revealing the delight
and affirmation that are implicit in the power of language to convey the
nastiness and imperfection of our human species and the world we live in.
Footnotes
Jack Matthews is
the winner of the 2005 Ohioana Career Award for outstanding professional accomplishments in the
arts and humanities.
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