The Devil's Lexicographer
By Dennis Drabelle
Sunday, January 28, 1996; Page X04
AMBROSE BIERCE may be America's most interesting minor writer. A
master of the short story, the aphorism, the polemic and the insult, he
is remembered as much for his one-liners, his misanthropy and his
enigmatic death as for the dozen well-padded volumes of his Collected
Works. His wit and chiseled style and the flashes of genius glimpsed in
those tales and snippets are almost enough to support a verdict of
greatness. But to achieve real stature as a writer, you had better
parlay your gifts into at least one substantial and original book, and
this Bierce failed to do.
Yet what pleasure he can still give. Tired of pussyfooting
reviewers who shirk the hard calls? Try Bierce, who once dispensed with
a book in record time by judging its covers "too far apart." Fed up with
platitudes mouthed by smarmy statesmen and -women? See Bierce's
definition of peace in his Devil's Dictionary: "In international
affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting."
Disgusted with politicians jerking like puppets on strings pulled by
their contributors? Listen to one of Bierce's drolleries: "The personal
property of the late Anthony Chabot, of Oakland, has been ordered sold.
This is a noble opportunity to obtain Senator Vrooman." Interested in
reading some of literature's earliest unsweetened portraits of war as it
is actually waged? Start with the stories "Chickamauga" and "Parker
Adderson, Philosopher" and the sketch "What I Saw of Shiloh."
Although there is no dearth of good Bierce biographies, this new
one by Roy Morris Jr. has much to recommend it. Morris writes well,
occasionally getting off a witticism that might have pleased the master
himself. I particularly liked this slant on the demise of "Bull" Nelson,
a Union general who was shot after insulting a political enemy: " Tom, I
am murdered,' Nelson gasped to fellow general Thomas Crittenden and,
despite reassurances to the contrary, quickly proceeded to prove his
point."
Morris cannily assesses Bierce's work, providing, for example, a
trenchant analysis of "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," his
best-known story. Though "Occurrence" is often pigeonholed as a tour de
force of the trick ending, Morris makes a good case for its being shot
through with artistry. Altogether, he differs from other biographers in
his heavy emphasis on Bierce's Civil War days and the writings they
spawned.
Morris observes that America's reputedly great male writers in the
post-Civil War era -- Henry Adams, William Dean Howells, Henry James and
Mark Twain -- avoided service (with the exception of a very short stint
by Twain) and thus missed out on their generation's richest raw
material. The honor of evoking the war, Morris concludes, "ultimately
would fall to the less gifted, less learned, but physically braver
Ambrose Bierce, who, of all the Boys of '61, would be the only one to
make anything approaching great art of the looming national calamity."
Bierce placed himself in what turned out to be that art-making
position partly as a way of ditching his family. He was born in 1842 in
rural Indiana to a pair of religious fanatics with the tiresome habits
of having children (13 in all) and giving them names beginning with the
letter A. One of the mature Bierce's short stories opens with a slap at
the American family: "Early one morning in 1872 I murdered my father --
an act which made a deep impression on me at the time." But as a boy he
liked his mother even less: At least the old man kept a decent library,
which Ambrose made good use of while attending various schools.
He joined the Union Army and rose to become first lieutenant and a
valued aide to Brig. Gen. William Hazen. Bierce saw action at Shiloh and
Chickamauga and took a bullet in the head at Kennesaw Mountain. The
wound was grave but not fatal; later he wrote of having his head "broken
like a walnut." After recovering he went back into service but left the
army at war's end after failing to receive the peacetime rank he thought
he deserved.
He fetched up in San Francisco, where he lived and practiced attack
journalism for the next three decades. Even in an era noted for its
savage public discourse, his columns were famous for scathe -- it's a
wonder none of his victims gave him a Bull Nelson special. For years he
hounded the four "railrogues" -- Collis P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins,
Charles Crocker and Leland Stanford (whom Bierce dubbed "Stealand
Landford," with a pound sign in place of that capital L) -- who jointly
owned the California legislature, not to mention a sizable share of the
Gilded Age U.S. Congress.
On the other hand, Bierce got along well with another plutocrat,
newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, for whom he worked as a
columnist and reporter. Bierce's apotheosis came after Hearst sent him
to Washington, D.C., in the mid-1890s on special assignment: to defeat
Huntington's attempt to obtain congressional forgiveness of his
railroad's $75-million indebtedness to the United States. One day
Huntington stopped Bierce on the Capitol steps, told him everybody had a
price, and asked what Bierce's was. "My price," he replied, "is
seventy-five million dollars. If, when you are ready to pay, I happen to
be out of town, you may hand it over to my friend, the Treasurer of the
United States." This became a celebrated sally, and Congress had little
choice but to thwart Huntington's will.
In private life, Bierce cut a sorry figure. He was an imperious
husband who came and went as he pleased. (His Devil's definition of
marriage is "the state or condition of a community consisting of a
master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.") He walked out
on his wife after she allowed herself to receive and keep a letter from
an admirer. His older son committed suicide as a teenager while
embroiled in a sordid love triangle; his younger son drank himself to
death. The third child, a daughter, was the only family member who stood
by Bierce to the end. Which was more than could be said of most of his
friends. He alienated some of them by taking direct action --
"disintroducing" himself, a lightly ritualized way of saying "bugger
off."
With what seems typical gallows humor, Bierce died so as to leave
the world scratching its head. In 1913, age 71, he went on a last tour
of Civil War battlefields, told his remaining friends he was heading for
Mexico to observe the revolution-in-progress and disappeared. This was a
fitting denouement, inasmuch as Bierce's signal contribution to
literature had been stories portraying human behavior on the cusp of
death (see, for example, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," "Parker
Addison, Philosopher" and the short, shocking "One Summer Night").
Morris theorizes that Bierce never made it across the border -- he was
too well-known to have been overlooked, and no credible witness has ever
placed him there -- but took his own life somewhere in the American
Southwest.
The truth, it's safe to say, will never be known. What is clear is
that Roy Morris Jr. has written a rousingly good life of a lesser but
still captivating American figure.
Dennis Drabelle is a Washington writer and editor.
© 1997 The Washington Post Co.
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