Ambrose Bierce

49 Pages·1964·2.227 MB·English

by  Robert A. Wiggins

PAMPHLETS ON AMERICAN WRITERS • NUMBER 37
Ambrose Bierce
BY ROBERT A. WIGGINS
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS • MINNEAPOLIS
) Copyright 1964 by the University of Minnesota
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Printed in the United States of America at
Jones Press, Inc., Minneapolis
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 64-63342
Distributed to high schools in the United States by
McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc.
New York Chicago Corte Madera, Calif. Dallas
PUBLISHED IN GREAT BRITAIN, INDIA, AND PAKISTAN BY THE OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS, LONDON, BOMBAY, AND KARACHI
AMBROSE BIERCE
ROBERT A. WIGGINS writes fiction and criticism. He is
a member of the department of English at the
University of California, Davis.
Ambrose Bierce
M
.ANY know him, but no one knows very much about
him. This might have been said of Ambrose Bierce in his own
time, and it can be said with as much justice today. Bierce re-
mains an enigmatic figure; most of what has been recorded about
the man mingles fact and legend. Very little has been written
about his work, though his stories are frequently carried in an-
thologies. Most critical judgment has dealt in easy generalities
that fit only a handful of his stories and perpetuate the hasty
opinions formulated by his usually hostile fellow journalists.
The legends that circulated in his lifetime, abetted by his own
reticence, add up to a portrait of a satyr organizing midnight
graveyard revels, a misanthrope pessimistically at odds with all
mankind, a bitter adversary of social progress, a demanding friend
and a deadly enemy. In his writing, the legend would have it, he
added his own sardonic flavor to the Gothic brew he inherited
from Edgar Allan Poe.
The legends and myths persist, and in them there is a portion
of truth. He was a writer of his time, sharing similar formative
experiences with such a figure as Mark Twain. But he set himself
stubbornly against the literary currents of local color and realism.
He remained outside the mainstream of American letters and
cultivated an eccentric taste for the bizarre. His reputation after
his death seemed about to be submerged by the rising tide of nat-
uralism in fiction. Literary developments since then have taken
such a turn, however, that Bierce now seems a prophetic writer.
Many of the techniques developed by Bierce anticipate those em-
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ROBERT A. WIGGINS
ployed by such writers as Conrad Aiken, Ernest Hemingway,
Nathanael West, and William Faulkner, to name only the major
ones. Even more contemporary writers like Flannery O'Connor,
Robert Penn Warren, and Carson McCullers reflect similarities
that bring Bierce closer to the mainstream of American letters
than was thought in his own time. We must assign him a minor
role in literary history, but that role grows larger as the tradition
of the grotesque develops in the twentieth century. It is now
possible to see Bierce as a writer who has had some influence
upon the course of American literature.
Ambrose Gwinett Bierce was born June 24, 1842, in Meigs
County, Ohio, the tenth child of Marcus and Laura Bierce. Four
years later the family moved to Walnut Creek Settlement, three
miles south of Warsaw, Indiana, where Ambrose grew up. One
is tempted to say that he passed an uneventful childhood within
an undistinguished family, very much like their neighbors on that
rural frontier. But no childhood is really uneventful. And no one
can quite call a family ordinary that gave each of thirteen chil-
dren a name beginning with the letter "A."
The Western Reserve was an outpost of puritanism, and Bierce's
parents were piously given to much Bible reading and attendance
at revivals. The shade of Calvin had been brought from New
England and hovered over the household. It was undoubtedly this
heritage Bierce recalled in one of his satiric parodies:
My country, 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of felony,
Of thee I sing —
Land where my father fried
Young witches and applied
Whips to the Quaker's hide
And made him spring.
The father, Marcus Aurelius Bierce, was a shadowy, retiring
figure who preferred books to plowing. His chief claim to local
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Ambrose Bierce
fame seems to have been owning the largest library thereabouts.
To earn this distinction, only a modest collection was needed. He
appears to have had considerable native intelligence and rather
cultivated tastes, but lacked the ambition and application to do
more than scrape a poor living from eighty acres. It was Laura,
the mother, who, with a Bible in one hand and a switch in the
other, ruled the household.
An uncle, General Lucius Verus Bierce, a year or two younger
than Marcus, was the family hero. The two brothers had gone
from Connecticut to Ohio together as young men. Marcus Aurelius
went equipped with a somber disposition and soon acquired hos-
tages to fortune in the form of a bride and the beginning of a
large family. Lucius went equipped with a flamboyant personality
and a fifth of a quarter of a dollar in the "cut" money of the
day. Marcus dragged his expanding brood from farm to farm,
each a little less prosperous than the last. Lucius promoted his
way through Ohio University, studied law, and became the lead-
ing citizen and mayor of Akron. When Ambrose was growing up
in Indiana the family from time to time appealed to Uncle Lucius
for help; it was he who staked the seventeen-year-old boy to a year
at the Kentucky Military Institute to "straighten him out."
Ambrose left home when he was fifteen. From then on he re-
turned only to visit. His first removal was three miles to the town
of Warsaw, where he roomed and boarded with the editor of a
newly established paper, the Northern Indianan. Ambrose re-
mained there as a printer's devil for two years. Legend has it that
he left in an argument over an unjust accusation of theft. What-
ever the circumstances, the family was concerned enough to accept
Uncle Lucius' solution, a term at military school. The discipline
and training gave Ambrose an advantage in his later army career.
At the end of this schooling he went to Elkhart and worked for a
year in a combination store and cafd, waiting on table, clerking,
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ROBERT A. WIGGINS
and sweeping floors. During this period he seems first to have
shown a little sociability — by courting a young lady named Bernie
Wright. When the Civil War broke out, he was among the first
to enlist as a private in the Ninth Regiment, Indiana Volunteers.
Bierce rarely discussed his early years in Indiana, and when he
did he shuddered in remembering the grinding poverty, squalor,
insularity, and ignorance. He apparently had no affection for any
members of his family except Albert, his next older brother, who
followed him to California. Bierce's attitude toward the scenes of
his early years seems best summed up in lines he eventually wrote
in the Wasp as a Bierce-bucolic parody of "The Old Oaken
Bucket":
With what anguish of mind I remember my childhood,
Recalled in the light of a knowledge since gained;
The malarious farm, the wet, fungus grown wildwood,
The chills then contracted that since have remained.
The scum-covered duck pond, the pigstye close by it,
The ditch where the sour-smelling house drainage fell,
The damp, shaded dwelling, the foul barnyard nigh it ...
Apart from a little formal schooling, Bierce's education pro-
ceeded from an early taste for reading first acquired in his father's
library. The habit remained with him all his life. Equally impor-
tant was his experience as a printer. The printshop and the country
newspaper were the Yale and Harvard of many a nineteenth-
century writer. Like William Dean Howells and Samuel Clemens,
Bierce developed his love of words, accurately and effectively used,
while setting type. And undoubtedly this early experience led to
his long career as a journalist.
Bierce was precocious in his rebellion against the oppressive
intellectual atmosphere of the community. Biographers with a
Freudian bias might speculate upon the extent to which boyhood
hostilities were acted out in the writer's numerous stories involv-
ing patricide and matricide. Such speculation is fruitless; we do
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Ambrose Bierce
not have enough reliable evidence to support a detailed psycho-
logical portrait. For example, Bierce supposedly told his publisher
Walter Neale that his first real love affair, though not his first
"passage at arms," was at the age of fifteen. This would have been
during his apprentice years in Warsaw. His clandestine affair was
with "a woman of broad culture . . . well past seventy . . . still
physically attractive, even at her great age." The relationship
lasted for some time and with her he frequently talked about
literature and the arts. One hardly knows how to evaluate such
testimony. Bierce was not a liar and discreetly managed his con-
quests, but we have no corroboration of this alleged confidence.
At any rate, this "evidence" is typical of the bits that make up the
Bierce legend.
The Civil War opened another chapter important in Bierce's
early experiences. He was proud of his service in the Union Army,
though he seems not to have chosen sides on the basis of issues or
principle. He served with distinction and was profoundly im-
pressed by what he saw, for the theme of war runs throughout his
life and writing up to his death in 1914 during the revolution in
Mexico.
His first enlistment ended after a brief summer of campaigning
in West Virginia. The Ninth returned to muster out and reor-
ganize. Bierce, who had just passed his nineteenth birthday, re-
enlisted and became a sergeant. By the time his unit returned to
action that winter, he was sergeant-major. His outfit was assigned
to General W. B. Hazen's brigade. He wrote home admiringly
about his commander, a regular army officer with a testy, caloric
temper. Hazen was a fearless and brilliant tactical leader, con-
stantly at odds with higher authority. Upon this commander's
conduct Bierce doubtless modeled much of his own. In the winter
of 1862-63 he received a battlefield commission, and soon after-
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