Ambrose Bierce by Bruce Watson

Author:Bruce Watson [Bruce Watson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / General
ISBN: 9781612303444
Publisher: New Word City, Inc.
Published: 2014-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

Bierce grew so bitter that he could even wax nostalgic about the Civil War. A few essays set the mood for his first concerted attempts at fiction. His grim stories were rejected by East Coast publishers, leading Bierce to imagine vendettas against him by editors who “drank wine from authors’ skulls while authors are busy writing applications for admittance to the Poor House.” But a friend collected the tales from local journals and, in 1891, published them as Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. A second volume, Can Such Things Be?, appeared a few years later. The collections were praised for their realism, panned for their heartlessness. No less a personage than William Dean Howells said, “[He] is among our three greatest writers,” to which Bierce replied, “I am sure Mr. Howells is the other two.”

A typical Bierce mise-en-scene is “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” The story, later dramatized on Rod Serling’s television series The Twilight Zone, tells of a Confederate spy condemned to hang. When the rope snaps at the fatal moment, he swims to freedom, dodging bullets, and slashing through the underbrush. Winded, gasping, he sees the gates of his plantation, his wife reaching for him. Inches from her arms he feels a blow on his neck and, his dream over, his body sways “gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek Bridge.” The lone struggle, fatalism, and purple detail are pure Bierce.

Other Bierce characters succumb to the claws of the supernatural. The superstitious writer was haunted by recurring dreams and claimed to have met the ghost of an old friend on the street. His horror stories, owing something to Edgar Allan Poe but still radically different from those of their time, are infested with apparitions, invisible monsters, predestination and an endless array of gruesome demises. Having narrowly escaped death, Bierce saw the Grim Reaper was a prankster, and mortality, the final joke. “Having murdered my mother under circumstances of singular atrocity . . .” begins one story. Another opens: “Early one June morning in 1872 I murdered my father - an act which made a deep impression on me at the time . . .” Bierce at his bitterest is an acquired taste.

Critics were divided, but with the publication of his stories, aspiring writers on the West Coast flocked to him. He tolerated few human foibles, but he was generous of his time with young talent, reading hundreds of manuscripts and welcoming literary pilgrims to his hillside home. Many called him “Dear Master,” and those he praised in his columns gained sudden, if temporary, fame.

In various San Francisco newspapers, Bierce continued his carefully crafted attacks, among them the shortest book review on record: “The covers of this book are too far apart.” He might have continued modestly employed had not an ambitious Harvard dropout appeared on his doorstep in the spring of 1887. Opening the door, Bierce found “a young man, the youngest young man, it seemed to me, that I had ever confronted.

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