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”.’”