CHAPTER CII

THE EMINENT TANKARD-MAN

Through the latter part of the nineteenth century there existed in the United States a peculiar literary phenomenon, the underground reputation of Ambrose Bierce. The fiction reading public did not know this man; the readers of “yellow” journalism knew him as a Hearst writer, even more brilliant and cynical than the average. But now and then you would come upon an expert in the literary craft, who would tell you that Ambrose Bierce was a short-story writer and satirist without equal in America, the greatest genius our literature had produced. You would set out to look for these obscure writings, and could not find them in the libraries or the book-stores. At last you might get someone to lend you a copy, and then you would join the campaign of whispering.

Now Bierce is coming into his own. The public is hearing about him. He is of especial interest to us here, because he spent his energy in attacking, with the utmost possible fury, the thesis of this book; while at the same time, both in his life and his writings, he vindicated that thesis to the last syllable.

Ambrose Bierce was bom in 1842, the son of a poor farmer in Ohio. At the age of nineteen he enlisted and fought through the Civil war, being twice wounded and brevetted major. Then he became a journalist, first in San Francisco, then in London, finally in Washington and New York.

He was one of the most ethical men that ever lived, a born preacher, as vehement and persistent as Carlyle. He fought for his beliefs, and shrank from no sacrifice in their behalf. He was no man’s man, but said what he thought, no matter how bitter and fierce it might be. He paid the penalty in a host of enemies and a lifetime of struggle.

That such a man should have taken up with art-for-art’s-sake theories is assuredly a quaint incongruity in the history of literature. But so it happened. He looked out upon America, and saw the grafters thriving, he saw corruption enthroned as a political system, and he gave up the human race in despair: “a world of fools and rogues, blind with superstition, tormented with envy, consumed with vanity, selfish, false, cruel, cursed with illusions--frothing mad.” These phrases occur in an article, “To Train a Writer”; and you can see what sort of writer it would train! A writer who renounces solidarity, and seeks refuge in his own talent, the one place where a man is master, where he can make beauty, order and dignity. So let us live in the world of art, let us consecrate ourselves to its service, and waste no love upon “the irreclaimable mass of brutality that we know as ‘mankind.’”

This conviction Bierce holds in the fashion of a religious zealot. He has reached the stage of knowing that the rest of the world doubts his faith; therefore he asserts it the more vehemently, and flies into a rage with all who question it. His letters have been published; and in the first one, addressed to a young girl who aspires to write, he storms at the viciousness of those who would use the writer’s craft in the service of human progress. “Such ends are a prostitution of art.” And later on in the letters this champion of the art-for-art’s-sake theory reveals the terror that gnaws at his soul. “If poets saw things as they are they would write no more poetry.”

Some twenty years ago Jack London sent me the first book of a San Francisco poet, and in an inscription he described the author: “I have a friend, the dearest in this world.” The book was “The Testimony of the Suns,” by George Sterling; and friendship being an unlimited thing, I also took over a share of it. For twenty years I have been puzzled at finding in this gracious companion and maker of exquisite verses certain qualities of bitterness and aching despair. When I read these letters of Ambrose Bierce I discovered a plausible explanation; for here is the young poet, submitting his first efforts; and here is the savage misanthropist using his power as a preacher and an elder, in an effort to set the poet’s feet in the paths of futility and waste.

Ambrose Bierce, among his host of antagonisms, had one which amounted to an insanity--his dislike of Socialists; and he saw both London and Sterling lending their influence to the hellish cult. Bierce was one of those subtle opponents who say that they have a certain amount of sympathy with the Socialist ideal, were it not for the fact that the

## partisans of the cause make themselves so objectionable. Yes; they would

truly be willing to see mankind delivered from poverty, crime, prostitution and war, were it not for creatures of the lunatic fringe, who wear their hair long and tie their neck-ties into a bow!

There is something pathological about the ravings of Bierce on this subject, and we are not surprised to learn that in his early days a prominent Socialist writer, Laurence Gronlund, took a girl away from him, and thus excited his animosity. We find him quarreling with one person after another who persists in dallying with Socialist ideas, and in the end he quarreled even with Sterling, and wrote him letters of harsh abuse, which Sterling out of kindness to his memory destroyed.

The published letters are full of literary criticism; it is always consistent--and in every case exactly the opposite of what you find in this book. Ibsen and Shaw are “very small men--pets of the drawing-room and gods of the hour.” Tolstoi is “not an artist,” and Burns is “gibberish”; Gorki is “not only a peasant, but an anarchist and an advocate of assassination.” Bierce was living in Washington, serving the Hearst newspapers, when Gorki came to America. Bierce had never met him, and really knew nothing about him, but he swallowed with greedy eagerness the propaganda emanating from the Russian embassy in Washington; he writes to Sterling mysterious hints from inside information: “It isn’t merely the woman matter. You’d understand if you were on this side of the country.”

All this has become familiar to us with the passage of the years; it is the thing known as hundred percent American boobery. The capitalist system sets up its colossal slander-mills, with a staff of secret agents, forgers and safe-crackers and confidence men, a devil’s crew. The people of course have no conception of this machinery for the manipulating of their minds; and how pitiful to find a haughty intellectual as credulous as the poorest clodhopper! It is one more demonstration of the fact that a modern man who does not understand revolutionary economics is a child wandering in a forest at midnight.

There were other factors in the making of Bierce’s irascibility. He describes himself as “an eminent tankard-man,” and he found in San Francisco plenty of people willing to practice art for art’s sake, not troubling themselves or him with hopes for the human race. There is a tale of a riotous crew, resolving to put an end to Christianity by pulling down a cross which stood upon the highway. They tied themselves to the cross with ropes and pulled their hardest, only to sink down exhausted in drunken slumber. I wonder that some Catholic poet does not take this for a piece of symbolism. Maybe it has been done--I admit there are gaps in my knowledge of Catholic poetry!

What had this man to give the world, if anything? The answer is: love of truth, and loathing of corruption and hypocrisy. He wrote all those things which Mark Twain knew, but suppressed. He was the only one of those who fought through the war to tell the truth about it. And therein lies his power and significance as an artist; he, the art-for-art’s-saker pure and simple, writes tales which make us hate mass-murder.

The formula of these tales is the one with which Maupassant has made us familiar. Men aspire, and fate knocks them down and tramples their faces into the mud. When we see in the chances of battle a son shoot his own father, we may draw the conclusion that all human life is futile, as Bierce wishes us to; or we may elect to draw a different conclusion, and join the League to Outlaw War.

Bierce’s verses were shafts of satire aimed at the social kites and buzzards of his time. They have a quality of personal ferocity seldom equalled in the world’s literature. There are two volumes of them, “Black Beetles in Amber” and “Shapes of Clay.” Readers of “The Brass Check” may remember a sample there quoted, dealing with Mike de Young, publisher of the San Francisco “Chronicle,” and concluding:

A dream of broken necks and swollen tongues-- A whole world’s gibbets loaded with de Youngs!

Here, as in so much of Bierce’s work, his ignorance of social forces rendered him impotent. He writes about individual scoundrels, but he does not understand what makes them, nor how to remedy them; so his writing is useless to himself, to his victims, and to us.

Once upon a time Ambrose Bierce went to sleep at night on a flat stone in a graveyard. We are not told whether his exploits as “an eminent tankard-man” had anything to do with this, but we are told that as a result he became a lifelong sufferer from rheumatism and asthma. So his old age was bitter, and he found insufficient consolation in producing literary masterpieces for a hypothetical posterity. He wandered off into Mexico and disappeared. “To be a gringo in Mexico at the present time is a cheap form of euthanasia,” he told his friends. So apparently it proved; and so this book has another vindication, provided by a leading opponent.

“Be careful,” says Mrs. Ogi; “the Mexican bandits may not have got him after all.”

“He has already had a few whacks at me. George Sterling sent him an article of mine, published twenty years ago, ‘Our Bourgeois Literature,’ and he ridiculed my thesis that the qualities of American literature are explained by American social conditions: ‘The political and economical situation has about as much to do with it as the direction of our rivers and the prevailing color of our hair.’ Also he read ‘The Journal of Arthur Stirling,’ and called my poor poet ‘the most disagreeable character in fiction.’”

Says Mrs. Ogi: “He did not even trouble to get the poor poet’s name right!”

Her husband answers: “The officers in the British army have a saying: ‘What is fame? To die in battle and have your name misspelled in the “Gazette”.’”

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