The Letters of Ambrose Bierce, With a Memoir by George Sterling

I am passing well, but shall soon seek the mountains, though I hope to be here when Scheff points his prow this way. Would that you were sailing with him!

I've been hearing all about all of you, for Eva Crawford has been among you "takin' notes," and Eva's piquant comments on what and whom she sees are delicious reading. I should suppose that you would appreciate Eva – most persons don't. She is the best letter writer of her sex – who are all good letter writers – and she is much beside. I may venture to whisper that you'd find her estimate of your work and personality "not altogether displeasing."

Now that I'm about such matters, I shall enclose a note to my friend Dr. Robertson, who runs an insanery at Livermore and is an interesting fellow with a ditto family and a library that will make you pea-green with envy. Go out and see him some day and take Scheff, or any friend, along – he wants to know you. You won't mind the facts that he thinks all poetry the secretion of a diseased brain, and that the only reason he doesn't think all brains (except his own) diseased is the circumstance that not all secrete poetry.

* * *

Seriously, he is a good fellow and full of various knowledges that most of us wot not of.

Sincerely yours, Ambrose Bierce.

Washington, D. C.,

June 14,

1904.

My dear George,

I have a letter from * * *, who is in St. Louis, to which his progress has been more leisurely than I liked, considering that I am remaining away from my mountains only to meet him. However, he intimates an intention to come in a week. I wish you were with him.

I am sending the W. of W. to Scribner's, as you suggest, and if it is not taken shall try the other mags in the order of your preference. But it's funny that you —you– should prefer the "popular" magazines and wish the work "illustrated." Be assured the illustrations will shock you if you get them.

* * *

I understand what you say about being bored by the persons whom your work in letters brings about your feet. The most contented years of my life lately were the two or three that I passed here before Washington folk found out that I was an author. The fact has leaked out, and although not a soul of them buys and reads my books some of them bore me insupportably with their ignorant compliments and unwelcome attentions. I fancy I'll have to "move on."

Tell Maid Marian to use gloves when modeling, or the clay will enter into her soul through her fingers and she become herself a Shape of Clay. My notion is that she should work in a paste made of ashes-of-roses moistened with nectar.

* * *

Sincerely yours, Ambrose Bierce.

P.S. Does it bore you that I like you to know my friends? Professor * * *'s widow (and daughter) are very dear to me. She knows about you, and I've written her that I'd ask you to call on her. You'll like them all right, but I have another purpose. I want to know how they prosper; and they are a little reticent about that. Maybe you could ascertain indirectly by seeing how they live. I asked Grizzly to do this but of course he didn't, the shaggy brute that he is. A. B.

Haines' Falls,

Greene Co., N. Y.,

August 4,

1904.

Dear George,

I haven't written a letter, except on business, since leaving Washington, June 30 – no, not since Scheff's arrival there. I now return to earth, and my first call is on you.

You'll be glad to know that I'm having a good time here in the Catskills. I shall not go back so long as I can find an open hotel.

* * *

I should like to hear from you about our – or rather your – set in California, and especially about you. Do you still dally with the Muse? Enclosed you will find two damning evidences of additional incapacity. Harper's now have "A Wine of Wizardry," and they too will indubitably turn it down. I shall then try The Atlantic, where it should have gone in the first place; and I almost expect its acceptance.

I'm not working much – just loafing on my cottage porch; mixing an occasional cocktail; infesting the forests, knife in hand, in pursuit of the yellow-birch sapling that furnishes forth the walking stick like yours; and so forth. I knocked off work altogether for a month when Scheff came, and should like to do so for you. Are you never going to visit the scenes of your youth?

* * *

It is awfully sad – that latest visit of Death to the heart and home of poor Katie Peterson. Will you kindly assure her of my sympathy?

Love to all the Piedmontese. Sincerely yours, Ambrose Bierce.

Haines' Falls,

Greene Co., N. Y.,

August 27,

1904.

My dear George,

First, thank you for the knife and the distinction of membership in the Ancient and Honorable Order of Knifers. I have made little use of the blades and other appliances, but the corkscrew is in constant use.

I'm enclosing a little missive from the editor of Harper's. Please reserve these things awhile and sometime I may ask them of you to "point a moral or adorn a tale" about that poem. If we can't get it published I'd like to write for some friendly periodical a review of an unpublished poem, with copious extracts and a brief history of it. I think that would be unique.

I find the pictures of Marian interesting, but have the self-denial to keep only one of them – the prettiest one of course. Your own is rather solemn, but it will do for the title page of the Testimony, which is still my favorite reading.

Scheff showed me your verses on Katie's baby, and Katie has since sent them. They are very tender and beautiful. I would not willingly spare any of your "personal" poems – least of all, naturally, the one personal to me. Your success with them is exceptional. Yet the habit of writing them is perilous, as the many failures of great poets attest – Milton, for example, in his lines to Syriack Skinner, his lines to a baby that died a-bornin' and so forth. The reason is obvious, and you have yourself, with sure finger, pointed it out:

 
"Remiss the ministry they bear
Who serve her with divided heart;
She stands reluctant to impart
Her strength to purpose, end, or care."
 

When one is intent upon pleasing some mortal, one is less intent upon pleasing the immortal Muse. All this is said only by way of admonition for the future, not in criticism of the past. I'm a sinner myself in that way, but then I'm not a saint in any way, so my example doesn't count.

I don't mind * * * calling me a "dignified old gentleman" – indeed, that is what I have long aspired to be, but have succeeded only in the presence of strangers, and not always then. * * *

(I forgot to say that your poem is now in the hands of the editor of the Atlantic.)

Your determination to "boom" me almost frightens me. Great Scott! you've no notion of the magnitude of the task you undertake; the labors of Hercules were as nothing to it. Seriously, don't make any enemies that way; it is not worth while. And you don't know how comfortable I am in my obscurity. It is like being in "the shadow of a great rock in a weary land."

How goes the no sale of Shapes of Clay? I am slowly saving up a bit of money to recoup your friendly outlay. That's a new thing for me to do – the saving, I mean – and I rather enjoy the sensation. If it results in making a miser of me you will have to answer for it to many a worthy complainant.

Get thee behind me, Satan! – it is not possible for me to go to California yet. For one thing, my health is better here in the East; I have utterly escaped asthma this summer, and summer is my only "sickly season" here. In California I had the thing at any time o' year – even at Wright's. But it is my hope to end my days out there.

I don't think Millard was too hard on Kipling; it was no "unconscious" plagiarism; just a "straight steal."

About Prentice Mulford. I knew him but slightly and used to make mild fun of him as "Dismal Jimmy." That expressed my notion of his character and work, which was mostly prose platitudes. I saw him last in London, a member of the Joaquin Miller-Charles Warren Stoddard-Olive Harper outfit at 11 Museum Street, Bloomsbury Square. He married there a fool girl named Josie – forget her other name – with whom I think he lived awhile in hell, then freed himself, and some years afterward returned to this country and was found dead one morning in a boat at Sag Harbor. Peace to the soul of him. No, he was not a faker, but a conscientious fellow who mistook his vocation.

My friends have returned to Washington, but I expect to remain here a few weeks yet, infesting the woods, devastating the mountain larders, supervising the sunsets and guiding the stars in their courses. Then to New York, and finally to Washington. Please get busy with that fame o' yours so as to have the wealth to come and help me loaf.

I hope you don't mind the typewriter —I don't.

Convey my love to all the sweet ladies of your entourage and make my compliments also to the Gang. Sincerely yours, Ambrose Bierce.

Washington,

October 5,

1904.

Dear George,

Your latest was dated Sept. 10. I got it while alone in the mountains, but since then I have been in New York City and at West Point and – here. New York is too strenuous for me; it gets on my nerves.

* * *

Please don't persuade me to come to California – I mean don't try to, for I can't, and it hurts a little to say nay. There's a big bit of my heart there, but – O never mind the reasons; some of them would not look well on paper. One of them I don't mind telling; I would not live in a state under union labor rule. There is still one place where the honest American laboring man is not permitted to cut throats and strip bodies of women at his own sweet will. That is the District of Columbia.

I am anxious to read Lilith; please complete it.

I have another note of rejection for you. It is from * * *. Knowing that you will not bank on what he says about the Metropolitan, I enclose it. I've acted on his advising and sent the poem. It is about time for it to come back. Then I shall try the other magazines until the list is exhausted.

Did I return your Jinks verses? I know I read them and meant to send them back, but my correspondence and my papers are in such hopeless disorder that I'm all at sea on these matters. For aught I know I may have elaborately "answered" the letter that I think myself to be answering now. I liked the verses very temperately, not madly.

Of course you are right about the magazine editors not knowing poetry when they see it. But who does? I have not known more than a half-dozen persons in America that did, and none of them edited a magazine.

* * *

No, I did not write the "Urus-Agricola-Acetes stuff," though it was written for me and, I believe, at my suggestion. The author was "Jimmy" Bowman, of whose death I wrote a sonnet which is in Black Beetles. He and I used to have a lot of fun devising literary mischiefs, fighting sham battles with each other and so forth. He was a clever chap and a good judge of whiskey.

Yes, in The Cynic's Dictionary I did "jump from A to M." I had previously done the stuff in various papers as far as M, then lost the beginning. So in resuming I re-did that part (quite differently, of course) in order to have the thing complete if I should want to make a book of it. I guess the Examiner isn't running much of it, nor much of anything of mine.

* * *

I like your love of Keats and the early Coleridge.

Sincerely yours, Ambrose Bierce.

The N. Y.

American Office,

Washington, D. C.,

October 12,

1904.

My dear Davis,

The "bad eminence" of turning down Sterling's great poem is one that you will have to share with some of your esteemed fellow magazinists – for examples, the editors of the Atlantic, Harper's, Scribner's, The Century, and now the Metropolitan, all of the élite. All of these gentlemen, I believe, profess, as you do not, to know literature when they see it, and to deal in it.

Well I profess to deal in it in a small way, and if Sterling will let me I propose some day to ask judgment between them and me.

Even you ask for literature – if my stories are literature, as you are good enough to imply. (By the way, all the leading publishers of the country turned down that book until they saw it published without them by a merchant in San Francisco and another sort of publishers in London, Leipzig and Paris.) Well, you wouldn't do a thing to one of my stories!

No, thank you; if I have to write rot, I prefer to do it for the newspapers, which make no false pretences and are frankly rotten, and in which the badness of a bad thing escapes detection or is forgotten as soon as it is cold.

I know how to write a story (of the "happy ending" sort) for magazine readers for whom literature is too good, but I will not do so so long as stealing is more honorable and interesting.

I've offered you the best stuff to be had – Sterling's poem – and the best that I am able to make; and now you must excuse me. I do not doubt that you really think that you would take "the kind of fiction that made 'Soldiers and Civilians' the most readable book of its kind in this country," and it is nice of you to put it that way; but neither do I doubt that you would find the story sent a different kind of fiction and, like the satire which you return to me, "out of the question." An editor who has a preformed opinion of the kind of stuff that he is going to get will always be disappointed with the stuff that he does get.

I know this from my early experience as an editor – before I learned that what I needed was, not any particular kind of stuff, but just the stuff of a particular kind of writer.

All this without any feeling, and only by way of explaining why I must ask you to excuse me.

Sincerely yours, Ambrose Bierce.

Washington, D. C.,

December 6,

1904.

Dear George,

* * *

Yes, I got and read that fool thing in the August Critic. I found in it nothing worse than stupidity – no malice. Doubtless you have not sounded the deeper deeps of stupidity in critics, and so are driven to other motives to explain their unearthly errors. I know from my own experience of long ago how hard it is to accept abominable criticism, obviously (to the criticee) unfair, without attributing a personal mean motive; but the attribution is nearly always erroneous, even in the case of a writer with so many personal enemies as I. You will do well to avoid that weakness of the tyro. * * * has the infirmity in an apparently chronic form. Poets, by reason of the sensibilities that make them poets, are peculiarly liable to it. I can't see any evidence that the poor devil of the Critic knew better.

The Wine of Wizardry is at present at the Booklovers'. It should have come back ere this, but don't you draw any happy augury from that: I'm sure they'll turn it down, and am damning them in advance.

I had a postal from * * * a few days ago. He was in Paris. I've written him only once, explaining by drawing his attention to the fact that one's reluctance to write a letter increases in the ratio of the square of the distance it has to go. I don't know why that is so, but it is – at least in my case.

* * *

Yes, I'm in perfect health, barring a bit of insomnia at times, and enjoy life as much as I ever did – except when in love and the love prospering; that is to say, when it was new.

Sincerely yours, Ambrose Bierce.

Washington, D. C.,

December 8,

1904.

Dear George,

This is the worst yet! This jobbernowl seems to think "The Wine of Wizardry" a story. It should "arrive" and be "dramatic" – the denouement being, I suppose, a particularly exciting example of the "happy ending."

My dear fellow, I'm positively ashamed to throw your pearls before any more of these swine, and I humbly ask your pardon for having done it at all. I guess the "Wine" will have to await the publication of your next book.

But I'd like to keep this fellow's note if you will kindly let me have it. Sometime, when the poem is published, I shall paste it into a little scrap book, with all the notes of rejection, and then if I know a man or two capable of appreciating the humor of the thing I can make merry over it with them.

Sincerely yours, Ambrose Bierce.

The Army and

Navy Club,

Washington, D. C.,

My permanent

address,

February 18,

1905.

Dear George,

It's a long time since the date of your latest letter, but I've been doing two men's work for many weeks and have actually not found the leisure to write to my friends. As it is the first time that I've worked really hard for several years I ought not to complain, and don't. But I hope it will end with this session of Congress.

I think I did not thank you for the additional copies of your new book – the new edition. I wish it contained the new poem, "A Wine of Wizardry." I've given up trying to get it into anything. I related my failure to Mackay, of "Success," and he asked to be permitted to see it. "No," I replied, "you too would probably turn it down, and I will take no chances of losing the respect that I have for you." And I'd not show it to him. He declared his intention of getting it, though – which was just what I wanted him to do. But I dare say he didn't.

Yes, you sent me "The Sea Wolf." My opinion of it? Certainly – or a part of it. It is a most disagreeable book, as a whole. London has a pretty bad style and no sense of proportion. The story is a perfect welter of disagreeable incidents. Two or three (of the kind) would have sufficed to show the character of the man Larsen; and his own self-revealings by word of mouth would have "done the rest." Many of these incidents, too, are impossible – such as that of a man mounting a ladder with a dozen other men – more or less – hanging to his leg, and the hero's work of rerigging a wreck and getting it off a beach where it had stuck for weeks, and so forth. The "love" element, with its absurd suppressions and impossible proprieties, is awful. I confess to an overwhelming contempt for both the sexless lovers.

Now as to the merits. It is a rattling good story in one way; something is "going on" all the time – not always what one would wish, but something. One does not go to sleep over the book. But the great thing – and it is among the greatest of things – is that tremendous creation, Wolf Larsen. If that is not a permanent addition to literature, it is at least a permanent figure in the memory of the reader. You "can't lose" Wolf Larsen. He will be with you to the end. So it does not really matter how London has hammered him into you. You may quarrel with the methods, but the result is almost incomparable. The hewing out and setting up of such a figure is enough for a man to do in one life-time. I have hardly words to impart my good judgment of that work.

* * *

That is a pretty picture of Phyllis as Cleopatra – whom I think you used to call "the angel child" – as the Furies were called Eumenides.

* * *

I'm enclosing a review of your book in the St. Louis "Mirror," a paper always kindly disposed toward our little group of gifted obscurians. I thought you might not have seen it; and it is worth seeing. Percival Pollard sends it me; and to him we owe our recognition by the "Mirror."

I hope you prosper apace. I mean mentally and spiritually; all other prosperity is trash.

Sincerely yours, Ambrose Bierce.

Washington, D. C.,

April 17,

1905.

Dear George,

I've reached your letter on my file. I wonder that I did, for truly I'm doing a lot of work – mostly of the pot-boiler, newspaper sort, some compiling of future – probably very future – books and a little for posterity.

Valentine has not returned the "Wine of Wizardry," but I shall tell him to in a few days and will then try it on the magazines you mention. If that fails I can see no objection to offering it to the English periodicals.

I don't know about Mackay. He has a trifle of mine which he was going to run months ago. He didn't and I asked it back. He returned it and begged that it go back to him for immediate publication. It went back, but publication did not ensue. In many other ways he has been exceedingly kind. Guess he can't always have his way.

* * *

I read that other book to the bitter end – the "Arthur Sterling" thing. He is the most disagreeable character in fiction, though Marie Bashkirtseff and Mary McLean in real life could give him cards and spades. Fancy a poet, or any kind of writer, whom it hurts to think! What the devil are his agonies all about – his writhings and twistings and foaming at all his mouths? What would a poem by an intellectual epileptic like that be? Happily the author spares us quotation. I suppose there are Arthur Sterlings among the little fellows, but if genius is not serenity, fortitude and reasonableness I don't know what it is. One cannot even imagine Shakespeare or Goethe bleeding over his work and howling when "in the fell clutch of circumstance." The great ones are figured in my mind as ever smiling – a little sadly at times, perhaps, but always with conscious inaccessibility to the pinpricking little Titans that would storm their Olympus armed with ineffectual disasters and pop-gun misfortunes. Fancy a fellow wanting, like Arthur Sterling, to be supported by his fellows in order that he may write what they don't want to read! Even Jack London would gag at such Socialism as that.

* * *

I'm going to pass a summer month or two with the Pollards, at Saybrook, Conn. How I wish you could be of the party. But I suppose you'll be chicken-ranching then, and happy enough where you are. I wish you joy of the venture and, although I fear it means a meagre living, it will probably be more satisfactory than doubling over a desk in your uncle's office. The very name Carmel Bay is enchanting. I've a notion I shall see that ranch some day. I don't quite recognize the "filtered-through-the-emasculated-minds-of-about-six-fools" article from which you say I quote – don't remember it, nor remember quoting from it.

I don't wonder at your surprise at my high estimate of Longfellow in a certain article. It is higher than my permanent one. I was thinking (while writing for a newspaper, recollect) rather of his fame than of his genius – I had to have a literary equivalent to Washington or Lincoln. Still, we must not forget that Longfellow wrote "Chrysaor" and, in narrative poetry (which you don't care for) "Robert of Sicily." Must one be judged by his average, or may he be judged, on occasion, by his highest? He is strongest who can lift the greatest weight, not he who habitually lifts lesser ones.

As to your queries. So far as I know, Realf did write his great sonnets on the night of his death. Anyhow, they were found with the body. Your recollection that I said they were written before he came to the Coast is faulty. Some of his other things were in print when he submitted them to me (and took pay for them) as new; but not the "De Mortuis."

I got the lines about the echoes (I think they go this way:

 
"the loon
Laughed, and the echoes, huddling in affright,
Like Odin's hounds went baying down the night")
 

from a poem entitled, I think, "The Washers of the Shroud." I found it in the "Atlantic," in the summer of 1864, while at home from the war suffering from a wound, and – disgraceful fact! – have never seen nor heard of it since. If the magazine was a current number, as I suppose, it should be easy to find the poem. If you look it up tell me about it. I don't even know the author – had once a vague impression that it was Lowell but don't know.

The compound "mulolatry," which I made in "Ashes of the Beacon," would not, of course, be allowable in composition altogether serious. I used it because I could not at the moment think of the right word, "gyneolatry," or "gynecolatry," according as you make use of the nominative or the accusative. I once made "caniolatry" for a similar reason – just laziness. It's not nice to do things o' that kind, even in newspapers.

* * *

I had intended to write you something of "beesness," but time is up and it must wait. This letter is insupportably long already.

My love to Carrie and Katie. Sincerely yours, Ambrose Bierce.

Army and Navy Club,

Washington, D. C.,

May 16,

1905.

Dear George,

Bailey Millard is editor of "The Cosmopolitan Magazine," which Mr. Hearst has bought. I met him in New York two weeks ago. He had just arrived and learning from Hearst that I was in town looked me up. I had just recommended him to Hearst as editor. He had intended him for associate editor. I think that will give you a chance, such as it is. Millard dined with me and I told him the adventures of "A Wine of Wizardry." I shall send it to him as soon as he has warmed his seat, unless you would prefer to send it yourself. He already knows my whole good opinion of it, and he shares my good opinion of you.

I suppose you are at your new ranch, but I shall address this letter as usual.

* * *

If you hear of my drowning know that it is the natural (and desirable) result of the canoe habit. I've a dandy canoe and am tempting fate and alarming my friends by frequenting, not the margin of the upper river, but the broad reaches below town, where the wind has miles and miles of sweep and kicks up a most exhilarating combobbery. If I escape I'm going to send my boat up to Saybrook, Connecticut, and navigate Long Island Sound.

Are you near enough to the sea to do a bit of boating now and then? When I visit you I shall want to bring my canoe.

I've nearly given up my newspaper work, but shall do something each month for the Magazine. Have not done much yet – have not been in the mind. Death has been striking pretty close to me again, and you know how that upsets a fellow.

Sincerely yours, Ambrose Bierce.

Washington,

June 16,

1905.

Dear George,

I'm your debtor for two good long letters. You err in thinking your letters, of whatever length and frequency, can be otherwise than delightful to me.

No, you had not before sent me Upton Sinclair's article explaining why American literature is "bourgeois." It is amusingly grotesque. The political and economical situation has about as much to do with it as have the direction of our rivers and the prevailing color of our hair. But it is of the nature of the faddist (and of all faddists the ultra socialist is the most untamed by sense) to see in everything his hobby, with its name writ large. He is the humorist of observers. When Sinclair transiently forgets his gospel of the impossible he can see well enough.

I note what you say of * * * and know that he did not use to like me, though I doubt if he ever had any antipathy to you. Six or eight years ago I tackled him on a particularly mean fling that he had made at me while I was absent from California. (I think I had not met him before.) I told him, rather coarsely, what I thought of the matter. He candidly confessed himself in the wrong, expressed regret and has ever since, so far as I know, been just and even generous to me. I think him sincere now, and enclose a letter which seems to show it. You may return it if you will – I send it mainly because it concerns your poem. The trouble – our trouble – with * * * is that he has voluntarily entered into slavery to the traditions and theories of the magazine trade, which, like those of all trades, are the product of small men. The big man makes his success by ignoring them. Your estimate of * * * I'm not disposed to quarrel with, but do think him pretty square.

* * *

Bless you, don't take the trouble to go through the Iliad and Odyssey to pick out the poetical parts. I grant you they are brief and infrequent – I mean in the translation. I hold, with Poe, that there are no long poems – only bursts of poetry in long spinnings of metrical prose. But even the "recitativo" of the translated Grecian poets has a charm to one that it may not have to another. I doubt if anyone who has always loved "the glory that was Greece" – who has been always in love with its jocund deities, and so forth, can say accurately just how much of his joy in Homer (for example) is due to love of poetry, and how much to a renewal of mental youth and young illusions. Some part of the delight that we get from verse defies analysis and classification. Only a man without a memory (and memories) could say just what pleased him in poetry and be sure that it was the poetry only. For example, I never read the opening lines of the Pope Iliad – and I don't need the book for much of the first few hundred, I guess – without seeming to be on a sunny green hill on a cold windy day, with the bluest of skies above me and billows of pasture below, running to a clean-cut horizon. There's nothing in the text warranting that illusion, which is nevertheless to me a part of the Iliad; a most charming part, too. It all comes of my having first read the thing under such conditions at the age of about ten. I remember that; but how many times I must be powerfully affected by the poets without remembering why. If a fellow could cut out all that extrinsic interest he would be a fool to do so. But he would be a better critic.

You ought to be happy in the contemplation of a natural, wholesome life at Carmel Bay – the "prospect pleases," surely. But I fear, I fear. Maybe you can get a newspaper connection that will bring you in a small income without compelling you to do violence to your literary conscience. I doubt if you can get your living out of the ground. But I shall watch the experiment with sympathetic interest, for it "appeals" to me. I'm a trifle jaded with age and the urban life, and maybe if you can succeed in that other sort of thing I could.

* * *

As to * * * the Superb. Isn't Sag Harbor somewhere near Saybrook, Connecticut, at the mouth of the river of that name? I'm going there for a month with Percival Pollard. Shall leave here about the first of July. If Sag Harbor is easily accessible from there, and * * * would care to see me, I'll go and call on her. * * * But maybe I'd fall in love with her and, being now (alas) eligible, just marry her alive! – or be turned down by her, to the unspeakable wrecking of my peace! I'm only a youth – 63 on the 24th of this month – and it would be too bad if I got started wrong in life. But really I don't know about the good taste of being jocular about * * *. I'm sure she must be a serious enough maiden, with the sun of a declining race yellow on her hair. Eva Crawford thinks her most lovable – and Eva has a clear, considering eye upon you all.