Quote of the Day (Ambrose Bierce, on a ‘Theater of War’)

“No country is so wild and difficult but men will make it a theater of war.”— Journalist, Union Civil War soldier, and satirist Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?), “A Horseman in the Sky,” originally published in 1889 in the San Francisco Examiner, revised as part of Bierce’s short-story collection Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891)

The story of the last days of Bierce may be most familiar to readers and film fans through the 1985 Carlos Fuentes novel Old Gringo, as well as the movie adaptation four years later starring Gregory Peck, Jane Fonda and Jimmy Smits. Fuentes said he became interested in the cynical Bierce when he read Tales of Soldiers and Civilians as a teen.

I chose the above quote for my Memorial Day post. Readers desiring more information about the impact of the Civil War on Bierce-- a decorated Civil War veteran, forced out of the fighting because of a head wound—and how it left him with a belief in war’s absurdity and the determination to convey its “rattle and roar” in unsparing, exact detail, might want to read this post of mine from nine years ago.

Quote of the Day (Ambrose Bierce, Defining the People Who Define Words)

“Lexicographer, n. A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in the development of a language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods.”— American journalist and satirist Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?), The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary, edited by David E Schultz and S. T. Joshi (2002)

As soon as I saw this quote, it struck my fancy: The satirist making fun of himself. And that was before I realized that I would be using it on the 180^th birthday of Ambrose Bierce today.

Bierce might be best known for the last act of his life: his disappearing act in the Mexican Revolution, an event depicted in the film adaptation of Carlos Fuentes’ novel The Old Gringo, with Gregory Peck in one of his last big-screen roles as the writer.

But, unlike many authors, his life (including the most dramatic parts, such as his service as a Union soldier in several Civil War battles) does not distract attention from his writing.

In particular, The Devil’s Dictionary stands as his great achievement in biting cynicism. It is, as the title suggests, hardly the stuff of traditional dictionaries. Its mockery does not age in the slightest after all these years.

His insults could be something to behold, as in this description of Oscar Wilde when the young writer came to lecture in San Francisco in 1882:

“That sovereign of insufferables, Oscar Wilde has ensued with his opulence of twaddle and his penury of sense. He has mounted his hind legs and blown crass vapidities through the bowel of his neck, to the capital edification of circumjacent fools and foolesses, fooling with their foolers. He has tossed off the top of his head and uttered himself in copious overflows of ghastly bosh. The ineffable dunce has nothing to say and says it—says it with a liberal embellishment of bad delivery, embroidering it with reasonless vulgarities of attitude, gesture and attire. There never was an impostor so hateful, a blockhead so stupid, a crank so variously and offensively daft. Therefore is the she fool enamored of the feel of his tongue in her ear to tickle her understanding.”

Such invective derived from Bierce's wide-ranging misanthropy, as explained by historian Kevin Starr in Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915:

“He hated democracy and he hated Walt Whitman. He hated ministers. If dogs harassed him as he pedaled his bicycle along country roads, he would dismount, draw his pistol and shoot the offending animal, sometimes before an astonished owner's eyes.”

Quote of the Day (Ambrose Bierce, on Dying Civil War Soldiers Reaching for a Last Drink of Water)

“Possibly his impressionable mind was half conscious of something familiar in its [an unfamiliar form] shambling, awkward gait. Before it had approached near enough to resolve his doubts he saw that it was followed by another and another. To right and to left were many more; the whole open space about him were alive with them--all moving toward the brook.

“They were men. They crept upon their hands and knees. They used their hands only, dragging their legs. They used their knees only, their arms hanging idle at their sides. They strove to rise to their feet, but fell prone in the attempt. They did nothing naturally, and nothing alike, save only to advance foot by foot in the same direction. Singly, in pairs and in little groups, they came on through the gloom, some halting now and again while others crept slowly past them, then resuming their movement. They came by dozens and by hundreds; as far on either hand as one could see in the deepening gloom they extended and the black wood behind them appeared to be inexhaustible. The very ground seemed in motion toward the creek. Occasionally one who had paused did not again go on, but lay motionless. He was dead. Some, pausing, made strange gestures with their hands, erected their arms and lowered them again, clasped their heads; spread their palms upward, as men are sometimes seen to do in public prayer.”—Civil war soldier (and later journalist-satirist) Ambrose Bierce (1842-1913?), “Chickamauga,” in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians: And Other Stories (1891)

Memorial Day originated in the wake of the Civil War. Just how harrowing the conflict was can be glimpsed through the life and work of a Union soldier who went on to win considerable fame—and, because of his mysterious disappearance a half-century later, just as much notoriety—as a writer: Ambrose Bierce.

Bierce felt that a noncombatant simply couldn’t understand what a veteran had experienced on the battlefront. Nevertheless, whether through a sense that he ought to bridge this gulf in comprehension or as an exorcism of the torment he had experienced, he wrote a collection of stories based on what he’d seen, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians.

Trained as a topographical engineer, Bierce missed few if any details about landscapes and spaces, as seen here. I have not been able to find as many photographs in the “Western theater” of the conflict (where Chickamauga—the second-bloodiest battle of the whole war—took place) as battles in the East such as Antietam and Gettysburg. Bierce’s verbal account, then, will have to stand for the images that never were visually recorded and sold, but continued to haunt survivors for the rest of their lives.

Quote of the Day (Ambrose Bierce, on Partisan Strife)

“The partisan strife in which the people of the country are permitted to periodically engage does not tend to the development of ugly traits of character, but merely discloses those that preexist.”— American short story writer and journalist Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), on election campaigns, in his “Prattle” column, Nov. 8, 1884

No truer demonstration of Bierce’s observation exists than the controversy over the Brett Kavanaugh nomination to the Supreme Court. The only thing that both sides seem to agree on is that his confirmation today by the Senate has opened a new vein of ugliness in American politics.

Each side might insist that it did what it had to do, but neither really covered itself in glory. It will be impossible for the Democrats to escape the suspicion that it waited until the last minute to introduce Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation against him, after they saw taking his nomination apart on the basis of ideology, as with Robert Bork, was gaining no traction. At the same time, the GOP showed, by not even bringing to a vote the nomination of Merrick Garland, that it had no scruples at all when it came to power politics—quite simply, they blocked any action at all on him because they could.

For the foreseeable future, I think we are going to see confirmation votes almost as razor-thin as this one. The whole process has become consumed by “partisan strife”—and strife over single issues, at that. I’m afraid that it will take a disaster for the two sides in Congress to talk to each other again.

We are not a better nation after all of this.

Quote of the Day (Ambrose Bierce, Defining ‘Admiration’)

“Admiration, n.: Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.”— U.S. journalist, satirist and short-story writer Ambrose Bierce (1842 – 1914?), The Devil's Dictionary (1906)

Quote of the Day (Ambrose Bierce, on Death in Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign)

“Successive scores of rifles spat at him [Lieutenant Herman Brayle of the Union Army] viciously as he came within range, and our line in the edge of the timber broke out in visible and audible defense. No longer regardful of themselves or their orders, our fellows sprang to their feet, and swarming into the open sent broad sheets of bullets against the blazing crest of the offending works, which poured an answering fire into their unprotected groups with deadly effect. The artillery on both sides joined the battle, punctuating the rattle and roar with deep, earth-shaking explosions and tearing the air with storms of screaming grape, which from the enemy's side splintered the trees and spattered them with blood, and from ours defiled the smoke of his arms with banks and clouds of dust from his parapet.”—Ambrose Bierce, “Killed at Resaca,” in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891)

Today marks the 150^th anniversary of the opening battle in Union General William T. Sherman’s campaign for Atlanta: the Battle of Resaca, Ga. The clash between Federal and Confederate forces mirrored what was happening hundreds of miles north in Virginia, where Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee’s game of probing, parry, and continual maneuver was yielding startling losses. The duel between Sherman and rebel commander Joseph E. Johnston was not quite as deadly, but at least initially, it seemed just as dispiriting to Federal troops, with seemingly little appreciable ground gained. Ambrose Bierce, a Union veteran of this Western theater of operations, is best known to readers for his cynical Devil's Dictionary and his mysterious disappearance in 1914. But he recorded decidedly modern, disillusioned impressions of the madness of the Atlanta campaign in particular and all wars in general, in this classic war story.

When the butcher’s bill came due from the 48 hours of fighting, the Union and Confederate armies had lost about 2,800 men each, with the latter showing that they could slow, but not stop, their foes’ advance upon the Rebel industrial center of the Deep South. The fighting was marked by the usual incompetence and folly even on this first day of battle, when the Federals lost precious time coordinating assaults because a commander was drunk.

The results of the battle might have been inconclusive for Sherman and Johnston, but they confirmed Bierce in what critic Edmund Wilson has called his “obsession with death.” The young man saw all the war he could ever want at Shiloh, Corinth, Stones River, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, and Franklin. Like the narrator of “Killed at Resaca,” Bierce was a topographical engineer who knew better than to make insinuations about any spots that afforded protection.

Not so with the force behind “the best soldier of our staff”: Lieutenant Herman Brayle, who takes constant chances with his life in the face of the enemy: “He would sit his horse like an equestrian statue, in a storm of bullets and grape, in the most exposed places--wherever, in fact, duty, requiring him to go, permitted him to remain--when, without trouble and with distinct advantage to his reputation for common sense, he might have been in such security as is possible on a battlefield in the brief intervals of personal inaction.”

Inevitably, Brayle is shot by the enemy. In going through the effects of the bravest man he ever knew, the narrator discovers a motive for his complete disregard for safety: a letter from the dead man’s sweetheart, advising him of a “rumor” she had heard that “at some battle in Virginia…you were seen crouching behind a tree….I could bear to hear of my soldier lover's death, but not of his cowardice."

In the story’s stunning conclusion, Bierce—a decorated veteran himself, forced out of the fighting because of a head wound—vents his frustration with the vast incomprehension of soldiers’ experiences, as well as his pronounced misogyny. His narrator visits Brayle’s girlfriend, a remarkable beauty who, upon receiving her stained letter to the dead man, tosses it on the fire because she can’t stand the sight of blood. Then, trying to overcome this impression of her callousness, she asks how Brayle died.

The short, bitter reply that ends the story evokes far more than it can begin to suggest: “Bitten by a snake.” It implies everything about the faithlessness of women—something in which Bierce believed in wholeheartedly in his personal life. (His marriage collapsed because he wrongly believed his wife was guilty of adultery. Then, as if to confirm that he was not completely crazy about female perfidy, his son Day’s fiancée left him for another man, leading Day to shoot both before his own suicide.)

The story’s ending brings the reader up short, in the same manner as Ernest Hemingway’s famous final line of The Sun Also Rises: “Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?” In fact, the relation between the two authors’ war fiction and lives is instructive.

As Roy Morris notes in his biography of Bierce, both men (Bierce, of course, in the Civil War, and Hemingway, as an ambulance driver, in WWI) carried wounded soldiers, at enormous risk to their own safety, back to their own lines, only to see the men die anyway. It only seemed to confirm their belief in war’s absurdity.

I don’t know why Hemingway praised Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage as "the first great American war story" while ignoring Bierce’s contribution. Crane had not witnessed a minute of combat before he wrote his masterpiece; in fact, he was born six years after the Civil War ended, so he had no firsthand knowledge of the conflict. In contrast, Bierce’s work was informed by what he saw, and he made no attempt to make it less ugly for readers.

If Bierce’s work was every bit as realistic as Crane’s, then how could Hemingway have ignored it? I think it has to do with two factors: Bierce’s frequent resort to supernatural or fantastic fiction, and his lack of a consistent, compelling single figure.

Whether it’s called horror, supernatural or fantastic fiction, this genre deals overwhelmingly with altered interior states, the breakdown of the self. And few phenomena on earth accelerate such psychic disorientation and disintegration as much as war.

Thus, the experience of battle might have confirmed Bierce’s disbelief in a rational God, the increasingly thin line between life and death in war led him to write eerie pieces in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, including the much-anthologized “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” In contrast, Hemingway might have felt haunted by a world without God, but he desperately tried to believe in a deity—just as tenaciously, in fact, as Lt. Frederic Henry struggles to hold onto reality after his convulsive wound gives him what feels like an out-of-body experience in A Farewell to Arms. He felt greater affinity for Crane’s naturalistic style than for Bierce’s occasional resort to ghosts and vague life-after-life in his stories.

Second, with Henry Fleming, Crane found a single youthful figure whose struggles would parallel the novel and short-story characters who served as stand-ins for himself: Lt. Henry, Jake Barnes of The Sun Also Rises, Robert Jordan of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Paul Krebs of “Soldier’s Home” and Nick Adams in a whole slew of stories. Lt. Brayle and other characters in Bierce’s stories might be easy to visualize, but the author offers little about their thinking. The greatness of his short fiction rests not on psychological exploration, but on unsparing, exact descriptions of “the rattle and roar” of war.

Quote of the Day (Ambrose Bierce, on Conservatives and Liberals)

“Conservative, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.”—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (1906)