Neither Light Nor Darkness, Darkness Nor Light;
The Essential Ambrose Bierce
©Kirby Sanders 2011
All Rights Reserved
What constitutes horror?
There seems to be an opinion in contemporary literature and cinema that slathering a page with ersatz gore or gallons strawberry syrup splashed against a lens is the paramount of “horror”. Perhaps it is great beasts or gargantuan insects and teens with turned ankles? Shaky camera-work and unarticulated dangers? Is horror merely disgust in disguise or is there a deeper touch that rends the heart?
From the life and pen of a master, Ambrose Bierce, the essential and overlooked requisites of horror would be mystery, empathy, irony and human characters engulfed in inhuman circumstances. Bloody death and a violent end may finish the story, but the emotional impact of the end grows from our empathy and identification with the victims and those around them. Even with the fact that have developed a fictive relationship with them
While Edgar Alan Poe (1809-1849) is certainly the father of the American Horror Story, Ambrose Bierce (1842-1913) must be considered First Son of the genre.
There is no doubt that the horror stories of Ambrose Bierce were drawn from what he saw in the real world and from his ability to share the souls and hearts of his protagonists and antagonists.
Born on June 24, 1842 in Horse Cave Creek (Meigs County), Ohio, Ambrose Gwinnet Bierce was the tenth of thirteen children. He was the product of pious parents and an extremely religious community. His parents, Marcus Aurelius Bierce and Laura Sherwood (Bierce), were devout members of the fundamentalist First Congregational Church of Christ -- and bestowed all of their children with surnames beginning with the letter “A.” From his writings, Ambrose rejected his fire-and-brimstone upbringing early-on and his pious parents and early neighbors were sometimes held to ridicule in his later stories.
Marcus Aurelius Bierce, named for the Philosopher King and 14th Caesar of Rome, was never a prosperous man -- but he was a well-read man. Young Ambrose grew up in a home surrounded by books that apparently gave him respite from piety and an indisputable love of the written word.
By 1846, the Bierce family had moved to Indiana and by age 15 (1857) Ambrose Bierce was employed as a printer’s assistant at the Northern Indianan (an abolitionist newspaper in Warsaw, Indiana). Still as a teen, Ambrose Bierce moved to Akron, Ohio, where he lived with his uncle (father’s brother), Lucius Verus Bierce. Lucius Verus Bierce (named for the scholarly co-emperor of Rome who served alongside Marcus Aurelius) was more successful in life than his brother Marcus Aurelius. Lucius Verus, an attorney, had been the mayor of Akron -- he also had experience in the military and urged young Ambrose to follow in that path.
Encouraged by the uncle whom he respected, Ambrose Bierce enrolled in the Kentucky Military Institute at age 17 (1859). After a year of classical studies including architecture, history, Latin, and political science, Ambrose quit the institute and spent a nomadic two years taking odd jobs as he could find them.
In 1861, as the American Civil War broke into full combat, Ambrose Bierce enlisted in the Union Army Ninth Indiana Infantry and served as a topographical engineer during many of the more famous and horrendous battles of the early war.
Ambrose Bierce’s early service has been documented in the Western Virginia Campaign, including the First Battle of Phillippi (VA / West VA) and the Battle of Rich Mountain (Randolph County VA / West VA).
By February of 1862, he was commissioned as a First Lieutenant and served as a topographical engineer on the staff of General William Babcock Hazen. Thereafter, he served during the battles of Shiloh, Pickett's Mill and Chickamauga.
In June of 1864, Bierce received a bullet wound to the head at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain (near Marietta GA) that left him with frequent bouts of dizziness and blackouts. He was furloughed for medical reasons and returned to service in September. He was discharged from the Union Army in January of 1865.
Being in the service as a strategic mapper and scout, he was able to observe the horrors of those battles from the front and the rear. His charge was to scout the lines and then retire to the rear where he would draw maps of terrain and fortifications or sketch battlements and buildings he had viewed in his forays. He was able to observe both the horrific events on the frontlines and the vanities and personal ambitions in the rear.
One cannot readily pigeonhole Bierce’s war stories as pro-war, antiwar, patriotic or unpatriotic. These remembrances and early tales are merely descriptions -- journeys into the minds and souls of the dead and living who fought the horrific battles. They are descriptions of ordinary men in extraordinary circumstances replete with the graveyard humor and stress-ridden irony of survivors. They are the stories any frontline veteran would tell in moments of unguarded sincerity – in the times when they dare to face and release the horrors they recall. There are recountings of heroism and cowardice; honor and treachery; lower achievment and higher good. They are the raw tales of men at war, not tales of manufactured glory.
They are also the source of the “pure” horror stories that Bierce would create from the lives of civilians. What he witnessed in real life may also have been the horrors that most effected his later writings. It appears as well, however, that he drew from local tales of hauntings, mysterious events and the often grotesque local lore of the South and the West.
Bierce worked for a brief time as a Treasury Agent in Alabama. In 1866, he rejoined the military and worked on an inspection and surveying team under the command of General Hazen. That expedition inspected and mapped the route and military installations from Omaha NB to San Francisco CA. Upon their reaching San Francisco, Bierce was elevated to the rank of Brevet Major, but resigned shortly thereafter and took employment at the United States Mint in San Francisco.
Bierce found the job at the Mint to be tedious and unfulfilling, but it was there that he found his true calling as a writer. In the tedious times, he began writing his descriptions and details of the war, contributing articles, reviews, essays, poems, short stories and criticisms to various publications. In 1868 he met and befriended Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens 1835-1910).
During his time in San Francisco, Bierce contribute to several publications including The San Francisco News Letter, The Argonaut, the Overland Monthly, The Californian and The Wasp.
Bierce’s observations and criticisms in the News Letter’s column The Town Crier soon won him accolades and enemies for their harsh, sarcastic and often cynical criticisms and observations. On balance -- with a friend the caliber of Mark Twain, Bierce also eventually earned a severe critic in the person of writer Oscar Wilde (1854-1900).
Bierce married in 1871 at the age of 22. His bride, Mary “Mollie” Ellen Day, was a society girl and daughter of a wealthy mining family in California. In 1872, Bierce resigned his position at the News Letter and the couple removed to England for a time. While living in Bristol, Bierce contributed a number of articles and stories to the humor journal Fun as well as the popular journals Figaro and London Sketch Book. During this period, Bierce’s biting comedies and satires came to the fore with publication of the novels and collections The Fiend's Delight (1873), Nuggets and Dust (1873), and Cobwebs From an Empty Skull (1874).
Like his literary forebear, Poe, fortune and sorrow follow Bierce hand-in-glove. For every success a disaster seemed to accompany. During the 1870s, Ambrose and Mollie parented three children; Day (a son born in 1872); Leigh (a son born in 1874) and Helen (a daughter born in 1875). During this period, however, Ambrose Bierce also suffered severe bouts of asthma as well as the recurrent blackouts and dizziness from his civil-war head wound. In 1875, the Bierce family returned to California, perhaps seeking familiar surroundings and relatively healthier climes.
Upon their return to San Francisco, Bierce joined the Bohemian Club -- then a celebrated enclave for journalists and freethinkers. He also reestablished his friendship with Mark Twain and began a celebrated column known as Prattle in his capacity as editor of the journal Argonaut.
Still a nomad (free spirit, perhaps) Bierce left San Francisco again in 1880 -- this time headed for the gold fields of South Dakota. While there, he published in The Wasp under the title of his Prattle column. Here again he used his column to satirize the greed and hypocrisy of government and social institutions. It was these notations that would lead to his catalog of cynical truths known as the Devil’s Dictionary in 1906.
Heaven and hell combined for Bierce in 1886. Publisher William Randolph Hearst contacted Bierce and brought him to work at the San Francisco Examiner. While Hearst offered Bierce wide creative license, the two men’s basic philosophies were far from compatible. Whilst Bierce spared venom on none -- preachers and politicos; lawyers and liars, bigots and bankers; racists and religionists -- some of Bierce’s critical salvoes hit close to the Hearst philosophy and world view.
The return to San Francisco did little to chase Bierce’s personal demons. In 1888, he separated from his wife Mollie -- reportedly over “indiscretions” on her part during their time in England. In 1889, beloved first-son Day Bierce died. As Bierce’s career approached its apex with the Hearst organization, he continued to suffer the effects of his war-wound, the ravages of severe asthma and an existential crisis between career success and personal belief.
In 1899, Bierce moved to Washington DC, where he continued to work for Hearst as a contributor to the San Francisco Examiner and Cosmopolitan Magazine. In 1901, second-son Leigh (also a journalist) died of pneumonia.
By the turn of the 20th Century, in the midst of society excesses and popular sentimentality during America’s “Gilded Age”, Bierce continued to write tales of real and imagined horror as well as caustic social and political commentaries.
Bierce was devastated by the death of his two sons. Perhaps a reversion to nomadic solace, perhaps as a reassessment of his life, Bierce took to the road again. He made several trips from Washington D.C. to California. In 1906, he resigned from Hearst’s employ at Cosmopolitan Magazine and set out upon a tour of the Civil War battlefields upon which he had fought and been wounded.
He revisited the horrors to which he had been witness and then headed west. Moving through Texas, he made his way to Mexico. Having become intrigued by Pancho Villa and the Mexican Revolution (a movement William Randolph Hearst strongly opposed), Bierce wrote friends and relatives that he was headed to Mexico in search of Villa. Another war and more horror -- but horror again in the name of higher cause perhaps?
Scratch the soul of a cynic and beneath you will find a wounded romantic. Collected here are the tales of a man who saw the best of his fellows reflected in a dark glass. A man who saw angels in graveyards and the light of life tested by darkness. Perhaps if we look closely enough we will find the effect upon genius of post-traumatic stresses. Without over-analysis, it is easy to see how a man bedeviled by realities chronicled facts in his fiction.
Bierce’s writing style is conversational, sometimes wandering. His written word reads as though he were sitting with you in the parlor -- telling tales in the familiar formality of the Victorian Age. In many cases he uses archaic words that may be unfamiliar to the modern reader. A handy dictionary as companion to the stories may be a good idea. For the purposes of this volume, archaic spellings have been rendered into their modern equivalents.
His words reflect a Victorian erudition – but his style foreshadows the “journalism” of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. He writes in short sentences. Sometimes clauses only. Bierce also had the courage to write his characters in their colloquial language. His characters are often “skeered” rather than “scared” or “frightened.” A character who stutters is written to mimic the stutter.
When he questions the “eternal plan” or the presence of God in the horror, he doesn’t preach. He asks the reader a question. Unlike his “Gothic” predecessors, he does not paint every leaf on ever tree and every blade of grass in the field. He leaves it to the mind of his reader to create the story he tells – a place conceivably darker than his own descriptions might render.
One can easily discover that Bierce may have rendered the power of a sentence such as Faulkner’s “My mother is a fish” or beat Hemingway to the punch by understanding Donne’s short admonition to “ask not for whom the bell tolls – it tolls for thee” a generation or two earlier than Hemingway.
For this who know Ambrose Bierce, is it any wonder that Kurt Vonnegut said in 2005 “...I consider anybody a twerp who hasn’t read the greatest American short story, which is ‘Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,’ by Ambrose Bierce. It isn’t remotely political. It is a flawless example of American genius, like ‘Sophisticated Lady’ by Duke Ellington or the Franklin stove.”
Officially, Ambrose Bierce disappeared in late 1913 - early 1914. Little is documented of his death or final resting place.
What is known is that Ambrose Bierce left Washington D.C. on October 2, 1913, with the expressed purpose of visiting Mexico. "I want to be where something worthwhile is going on, or where nothing whatever is going on," he told his secretary (Carrie Christiansen). On December 16, 1913 he penned a letter to Christiansen stating that he was seeking press credentials in El Paso, Texas. Bierce’s intention was to meet with Pancho Villa in the vicinity of Ojinaga, Mexico.
From there, Bierce disappears without a trace at the age of 71 years. Villa goes on to fight a memorable battle at Ojinaga (on the Texas-Mexico border at Presidio, TX) in January of 1914.
Recent research has uncovered empirical reports of an “Old Gringo” executed by Mexican federal troops as a Villista spy in Sierra Mojada near Ojinaga, Mexico in December 1913 - January 1914. Cited is a 1928 memoir, Born to Raise Hell, by Texas cowboy and writer Edward Synott O'Reilly. In that memoir, O’Reilly reports:
I began to inquire about the American, and several Mexicans told me about him. They said he was an old man who had come riding in there on horseback, alone. He spoke only a little broken Spanish. ... He asked questions about the trails and made notes and maps, and they thought he was a spy. When the Federals heard that he was asking how to reach Villa's army they decided to kill him. One afternoon he was drinking in a cantina with three Federal volunteers, and they decided to kill him then. They borrowed his pistol, and when he left they walked out there to the edge of town. I talked with two eyewitnesses who had seen the whole thing. Apparently he suspected nothing until the three men turned on him and began shooting. The first shot must have struck him in the leg or belly, because he dropped down, squatting on his heels. ... He squatted there in the dust of the road and began to laugh heartily. The Mexicans were amazed because he was laughing as though it were a tremendous joke that he was being killed.
The Old Gringo was shot and killed -- reportedly buried without marker or ceremony next to the wall -- outside of the hallowed ground. Sierra Mojada still exists. The cemetery still exists and the wall still exists -- but to date the fate of Ambrose Bierce -- reporter of fact, master of horror and mirror of the soul -- remains unproven.
The life of Ambrose Bierce ends (date undetermined) in mystery, violence, irony and empathy -- in and of itself according to the formula of classical horror.
And apparently he laughed.
This book, a collection of Bierce’s masterwork stories, is sectioned according to Tales of War and the Other Horrors. Which section one reads first is irrelevant.
kirby sanders
August 2011
