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MR. BOYTHORN-BIERCE

By Ruth Guthrie Harding

[NDER one title, many times used,

UND

"Ambrose Bierce, Man of Mystery", or under another, "Ambrose Bierce, Little Known Genius", I have read a number of stuffy small essays in the past twelve years. On analysis, these essays invariably establish the following thrilling facts, and almost no others: Ambrose Bierce was an exceedingly handsome man, and wore in his later life a challenging mustache; he was called by his enemies Bitter Bierce, and confessed no great love for dogs or his fellow men; he had military bearing; and he once spoke rude truths to Collis P. Huntington!

My attention has recently been directed to a paper by Corey McWilliams, printed in "The Argonaut". He left out the dogs. Also he showed dashing originality in making Major Bierce three years older than the Lord made him: he avoided quite obvious information as to the time when and the place where Bierce was born, and refused to avail himself of the hitherto undisputed names, Marcus Aurelius Bierce and Laura Sherwood Bierce, as those of the parents of the subject of his sketch. He rather cautiously admitted that he himself believed that Bierce was born, sometime, somewhere but hinted darkly that nobody known to him had ever taken pains to corroborate that vague, depressing rumor. "Nothing", says this plaintive biographer, "is known about his family or early life. In fact, the man's whole life is a mystery; the fog that conceals him is broken only here and there by a chance ray of

light"; and, again, "Bierce's friends report that they know little about the man, and that he was an eternal enigma who defied study."

As many early biographical facts are known of Ambrose Bierce as are usually known of any man. He was born in Meigs County, Ohio, on June 24, 1842. He was one of several children in the Bierce family. He was brought up on a farm; he ran away to get into the Union army, and was taken on as drummer boy. Of the interesting career of Bierce as soldier, journalist, topographical engineer, ranch superintendent, man of letters, many an able person has written authentically. There is a monograph by the late Walter Harte, of "The New England Magazine" of the old days; an essay by the late Percival Pollard; a paper by Frederic Taber Cooper, printed originally in THE BOOKMAN; the arresting biography by Vincent Starrett; the brilliant article by Edward H. Smith, with its several hypotheses; the journalistic bright chatter of Bailey Millard; the proverbial hundred and one sketches that tell of a hundred and one Bierces; and (if these mystery loving folk can be made to admit it, thus clearing a little that cherished "fog that conceals him") a great deal of autobiography scattered through Bierce's work. Those of us who could write or speak fully of Bierc on the personal and intimate side ?', restrained somewhat by our knowle of his dislike of publicity of the rus but it will be necessary to take out the that any "friend" of his who "r

knowing little about the man", or calls him an "enigma who" defies study, would probably not in the lifetime of Bierce have gone about talking of that friendship. Fewer details of his later quiet life in Washington have been printed than is usually the case with the later life of a distinguished man of letters, simply because Bierce, perhaps more than any other distinguished man of letters, wished to keep his affairs his own and knew how to do so. I have not been able to see why the 'mystery" is so deep, unless it be that the very simplicity and dignity of a writing man who lives quietly and comfortably alone in his apartment, who does not make his writing a ground for approach, on the part of strangers, to his personal affairs, is something that sets him apart from his kind; possibly unwillingness to broadcast private items belongs in the area of the supernatural?

The truth is that there are a few of us quite unmindful of any "fog that conceals him": we have warmth in the memory of the simple friendliness, kindness, humor, charm of him as a human being. We know more than strangers can know of the sorrows and shocks that made him shrink from contacts with people who were likely to stress the personal in writing or talking of him. He never recovered from the anguish of seeing his son meet a sudden and violent death; from that bitter moment he was never again to be friendly with this world nor happy in it. Few people will accept this tragedy as holding possibilities for full explanation of his withdrawal from public appearance, and of the seeming grim solitude of those last years; but I accept it... knowing how deep was that mark upon him. We can leave it to the imagination and conjecture of unsympathetic aliens, who will keep on writing smart, shallow sketches of

Bierce, to suggest things more sinister in his own living. God knows he needed nothing more, who had known so great agony. That lonely figure will hardly lose its grandeur through efforts of little men: those efforts must be ephemeral; the glory of Ambrose Bierce remains. Surely reserve and aloofness was his right, as it must now be the right of his few relatives and his close friends when approached by outsiders in pursuit of details which do not concern the public. It is to be regretted that when he is no longer here, old differences and dislikes should come to the fore, and new half representations arise.

I know of a man whose work Bierce generously praised; this man he met personally only a few times, and at the other's seeking. Something happened. Without delay, and in terms quite his own, Bierce requested this man not to approach him again, not to write him. The man, more concerned with his own loss than with the fact that he had given deep offense to Bierce, besought Bierce not to change the tone of his expressed opinion of work the man had published or might publish. Bierce said to me, "As if I could change an honest opinion of the good work of even the most detestable of men which he is!" Lately I have heard that this man will print Bierce's earlier letters to him, as covering the period of their correspondence. In reality that correspondence ended abruptly on a note which, I feel certain, is not included among the epistles offered for print. And there is a biographer who, having succeeded not at all in making headway with the sister and daughter of Bierce in the matter of information in respect of certain chapters of Bierce's life, is about to publish an ill natured and spiteful work on Bierce which may give brief pleasure to some persons with

old wordy scores to settle, and surely lasting pain to others who cherish the memory of a sensitive, idealistic, poetic man forced by circumstance to bear silently many blows. It will be necessary again to take the word of us who know, that Bierce never, as has been said of him, "enjoyed whetting public curiosity" nor "assumed an exaggerated pose of mystery".

"Do

A bystander, hearing an order given a mail clerk at a desk in a hotel, hurried across the lobby. "I heard the name 'Bierce'", he said, catching up at last with the man he was following. you know Ambrose Bierce?" Ambrose turned and looked down at him for a steady solemn instant; and in a gentle voice replied, "No." When he told me this, he lifted one eyebrow and chuckled. "You ought", I said, "to be ashamed of yourself!" "Well", he answered, "I don't know me, do I?"

There were as many Bierces as there were people to be acquainted with him. This is true of any of us, since we all have paradoxical qualities, but the extremes in Bierce were farther separated, his arc being so much larger than that of other people: out of the very grandeur and glory of his being, distance was established and contradictions were made. One Ambrose Bierce I knew. There are some Ambrose Bierces that I do not recognize. It has not been my way to deny the existence of these strangers - evidence has come to me from too many sources. It would be a foolish mistake to attempt to contradict such evidence, or to ignore the possibility of likeness in such portraits as have been drawn for me by others. I am willing to leave untouched whatever mental record or picture any of Ambrose Bierce's other acquaintances, his friends or his enemies, may have preserved through association with him. He himself said of me that I "had the

best truth" of him. Whether any person can grasp the whole truth of another is a question. Those who knew Bierce as cruel, intemperate, blasphemous I have heard him called all these things could hardly have known him as gentle, pitying, and reverent; yet I so knew him. I knew even a childlike Bierce, who had great pathos, unguessed by himself. On many days when men took time to fear and hate him, he was probably on a park bench with squirrels running into his sleeves and pockets, or birds standing on his wrists, gripping his cuffs with their thin little feet, turning their perky heads to look at him, and now and then uttering an inquiring friendly cheep. I used to feel as if I were strolling with Francis of Assisi. One of my dear possessions is a snapshot of Bitter Bierce (who has been limned unsheathing his sword-pen in more than one drawing) sitting on the grass, smiling, his splendid massive head outlined against the curve of a flowering bush, with a fussy and impatient but flirty squirrel on his knee, arguing with him a little about the nuts in his hand. . .

There is in "Bleak House" many a passage about Lawrence Boythorn in which it is amusing to read "Bierce" for "Boythorn": I wonder if such substitution has ever given other friends of Bierce's that larkish joy that it gives

me:

He showed himself exactly as he was incapable of anything on a limited scale, and firing away with those great guns because he carried no small arms whatever.

"You have brought your bird with you, I suppose?" said Mr. Jarndyce. "By heaven, he is the most astonishing bird in Europe!" replied the other. . "I have left an annuity for his sole support, in case he should outlive me. He is, in sense and attachment, a phenomenon and his father before him was one of the most astonishing birds that ever lived!". . . The subject of this laudation was a very little canary. To hear Mr. Boythorn presently express the most implacable and passionate

sentiments, with this fragile mite of a creature perched on his forehead, was to have a good illustration of his character, I thought.

"By my soul, Jarndyce," he said, gently holding up a piece of bread for the bird to pick at, "if I were in your place I should seize every Master in Chancery by the throat tomorrow morning and shake him until the money rolled out of his pockets

and his bones rattled in his skin . . . there never was such an infernal cauldron as that Chancery on the face of the earth", said Mr. Boythorn. "Nothing but a mine below it on a busy day... with all its records, rules, and precedents collected in it, and every functionary belonging to it also, high and low, upward and downward, from its son the Accountant-General to its father the Devil, and the whole blown to atoms with ten thousand hundred-weight of gunpowder, would reform it in the least!'

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eyes, "I hope we can find some other damn fool to admit it!"

So far as I know, I am the only person whose verse manuscripts were ever carried around by Ambrose Bierce to editors. (He knew few; and truth impels me to assert that he succeeded in battering down only a meagre number of these.) Mr. Mencken he did not know; but once he said, "Send that man Mencken this poem: a mean cuss like Mencken or me likes tears in lyric verse!" It was not until much later, when Bierce had been a long time gone, that I did send that poem to Mencken: and he took it for "Smart Set". But after that one acceptance Mr. Mencken, most unfortunately for me, must have become less mean, or something; or perhaps I ceased to weep convincingly before him by post. I have always regretted that he did fire back at me my succeeding lachrymose offerings (thus failing to admit "the born poet"), for he cheated me out of a fine old chance to say somewhere among the raffish intelligentsia that Ambrose Bierce had called H. L. Mencken a damn fool in my presence. (Is it not by having such esoteric bits to hand out in a careless manner that one is invited around Sunday evenings by the literati?)

One day Major Bierce and I were crossing Main Street in Paterson when a car bore down on us at terrific speed, in charge of a motorman apparently suffering from a Paul Revere complex. I squealed and made for the curb. Turning to clutch my companion, I beheld him standing in the middle of the trolley track, with hand upraised under the very nose of the motorman, who had brought the car to a dead stop and was leaning out and looking at Bierce with the dazed expression and the droop of one suddenly roused from

a dream of kingdoms and principalities. To him, then, Ambrose bowed, with a beautiful dip from the waist, to the great joy of several other pedestrians who, like me, had fled at sound of the gong and at first swoosh of a high wind from between the wheels. As we walked on, I cast a furtive eye toward that motorHe seemed to be crushed beyond gesture or expletive; he just stood there and waited for a heap of prominent citizens of Paterson to get up off the car floor, and take their hats out of their eyes, and collect their belongings.

man.

In the mail, on a certain morning, I received a photograph of Bierce. On the back he had written: "Butchered to make a Roman nose." He was brimming with things like that; he was always sending me detached penciled bits. At another time I had a note from him, with a newspaper clipping attached to the sheet. (I had until that moment forgotten that I had earlier told him of somebody who had tracked him to Guernsey County, Ohio, instead of Meigs.) The priggish clipping: "In Guernsey County, Ohio, more than half a century ago, there is said to have been a heavy shower of stones that caused many to believe the world was coming to an end." The note below: "I fancy that this is what gave your friend the impression that I once lived in Guernsey County, Ohio. He assumed that when God was throwing stones I would be the natural target. A. B."

There was a newspaper man from Passaic named Bremner, who had an enthusiastic admiration for Bierce's work as a journalist. When Bremner was elected to Congress from our district, the first thing he did after being settled in Washington was to write Bierce and ask for an interview. Now

Bierce was never one to grant interviews; and an interview, one pet aver

sion, combined with a Congressman, another pet aversion, would strike any friend of his as having sulphurous possibilities from the very first suggestion. (It was a good thing that nobody had deemed it expedient to invite a "minister of the gospel" to sit in at the conference.) On a visit here, he remarked ominously that Bremner had approached him. I said quietly that Bremner had been making a game fight with death; that for some time he had had cancer of the throat and had known frightful agony, but had gone right on pluckily to accomplish what he had planned in the way of work and had never flinched under pressure of that which was closing in on him. Bierce said nothing further. It was not until long afterward that he let it slip that Bremner had been asked to his apartment immediately on his return to Washington. "A nice chap", he said, "and I was grateful to him for liking me."

He was paying a few Boythornish tributes to asthma in one conversation. He told me that in California he had an acquaintance who lived far up in the hills. Whenever this man was laid low by asthma he had to come down, while Bierce himself under a like seizure had to go up. It seems that on one occasion asthma swooped down on them both at the same time. According to Bierce's tale, his friend loaded a mule by the rays of the moon and started down the mountain, to visit his misery on Bierce, at about the hour when Bierce, also with a mule, started to ascend, to claim his friend's hospitality. "We met", said he, in that lovely drawling voice, "about halfway, along toward morning, in a trail deserted for miles, and recognized each other. Neither spoke; but the mules turned their heads in passing, and my mule pointed down the mountain with one ear and

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