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

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.

* * *