THE LETTERS OF AMBROSE BIERCE.

Otago Witness, Issue 3831, 16 August 1927, Page 74

THE LETTERS OF AMBROSE BIERCE.

By Van Wyck Biwoks, in Now and Then.

The Book Club of California has done a service to all lovers of good writing and fine printing in issuing- for their members a collection of the letters of Ambrose Bierce. “It is not the least pleasing of my reflections,” Bierce himself remarks, “ that my friends have always liked my work—or me—well enough to want to publish my books at their own expense.” His wonderful volume of tales, “In the Midst of Life,” was rejected by virtually every in the country: the list of sponsors of his other books is a catalogue of unknown names, and the collected edition of his writings might have been regarded as a secret among friends. “ Among- what I may term ‘ underground reputations,’ ” Mr Arnold Bennett once observed, “ that of Ambrose Bierce is perhaps the most striking example.’’ The taste, the skill and the devotion with which his letters have been edited indicate, however, that limited as his reputation is, it is destined for a long and healthy life.

It must be said at once that all letters in the volume were written after the author’s fiftieth year. They thus throw nc> light upon his early career, upon his development, or even upon the most active period of his creative life, for in 1893 he had already ceased to write stories. Moreover, virtually all these letters are addressed to his pupils, as he called them, young men and women who were interested in writing, and to whom he liked nothing better than to give advice. We never see him. among his equals, his intimates or his contemporaries ; he appears as the benevolent uncle of the gifted beginner, and we receive a perhaps quite erroneous impression that this, in his later life, was Bierce’s habitual role. Had he no companions of his own age, no ties, no society? A lonelier man, if we are to accept the testimony of this book, never existed. He speaks of having met Mark Twain, and he refers to two or three Californian writers of the older generation ; he lived for many years in Washington, chiefly, as one ga'thers, in the company of other old army men, few of whom had ever heard that'he had written a line; he mentions Percival Pollard. Otherwise he appears to have had no friends in the East, while with the West, with San Francisco, at least, he seems to.have been on the worst conceivable terms. San Francisco, his home for a quarter of a century, he describes as “ the paradise of ignorance, anarchy, and general yellowness. ... It needs,"” he remarks elsewhere, “ another ’quake, another whiff of fire, and—more than ali else —a steady trade wind of grapeshot.’’ It was this latter—grapeshot is just the word—that Bierce himself poured into that “ moral penal colony,” the worst, as he avers, “ of all the Sodoms and Gomorrahs in our modern world ” ; and his collection of satirical epigrams shows us how much he detested it. To him San Francisco was all that London was to Pope, the Pope of “ The Dunciad ”; but it was a London without any delectable Twickenham villas or learned Dr. Arbuthnots or guy visiting Voltaires.

To the barrenness of his environment is to be attributed, no doubt, the trivial and ephemeral character of so much of his work; for while his interests were parochial, his outlook, as these letters reveal it, was broadly human. With his air of somewhat dandified Strindberg, he combined what might be described as a temperament of the eighteenth century. It was natural to him to write in the manner of Pope: lucidity, precision, “ correctness ” were the qualities he adored. He was full of the pride of individuality; and the same man who spent so much of his energy “ exploring the ways of hate ” was, in his personal life, th© serenest of stoics. The son of an Ohio farmer, he had no formal education. How did he acquire such firmness and clarity of mind? He was a natural aristocrat, and he developed a rudimentary philosophy of aristocracy which, under happier circumstances, might have made him a great figure in the world of American thought. But the America of his day was too chaotic. It has remained for Mr Mencken to develop and popularise, with more learning but with less refinement, the views that Bierce expressed in “ The Shadow on the Dial.’’

Some of these views appear in his letters, enough to show us how complete was his antipathy to the dominant spirit of the age. He disliked humanitarianism as much as he liked humanism, or would have liked it if he had had the opportunity. “ The world does not wish to be, helped,” he says. “ The poor wish only to bo rich, which is impossible, not to be better. They would like to be rich in order to be worse, generally speaking.” His contempt for Socialism was unbounded. Of literary men holding Tolstoy’s views he remarks that they are not artists at all: “ They are ‘ missionaries,’ who, in their zeal to layabout them, do not scruple to seize any' weapon that they can lay hands on ; they would grab a crucifix to' beat a dog. The dog is well beaten, no doubt (which makes him a worse dog than he was before), but note the condition of the crucifix!’’ All this in defence of literature and what he regards as its properfunction.

Bierce was consistent: his comments on his own failure to achieve recognition are all in the spirit of this last contemptuous remark. “ I have pretty nearly ceased to be ‘ discovered,’ ” he writes to one of his friends, “ but my notoriety as an obscurian may be said to be worldwide and apparently everlasting-.” Elsewhere. however, he "says: “It has never seemed to me that the ‘ unappreciated genius has a good case to go into court with,- and I think he should be promptly non-suited. . . . Nobody compels us to make things that the world docs not want. Then where is our grievance? We get what w e prefer when we do good work; for the lesser wage we do easier work.” Sombre, and at times both angry and cynical, as Bierce’s writing may seem, no man was ever freer from personal bitterness. If he was out of sympathy- with the life of his time and with most of its literature, he adored literature itself, according to his lights. It is this dry and at the same lime whole-souled enthusiasm that makes his letters so charming. At seventy-one Bierce set- out for Mexico with a pretty definite purpose,” as he wrote, “'which, however is not at present disclosable.” From this, journey he never returned, nor since 1910 has any word ever been received from him. What was that definite purpose? What -prompted him to undertake so mysterious an expedition? Was it the hope of exchanging death by “ old a 00, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs ’’’ for the euthanasia ’’ of death in action? He had come to loathe the civilisation in which he lived, and his career had been a long tale of defeat. Of journalism be said that it is “a thing- so low that it cannot be mentioned in the same breath with literature ” ; nevertheless, to journalism he had given nine-tenths of his energy. It is impossible to read his letters without feeling that he was a starved man ; but certainly it can be said that, if his generation gave him very little, he succeeded in retaining i n his own life the poise of an Olympian.