THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 7, 1996 TAG: 9604050675
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY BARRETT R. RICHARDSON
LENGTH: Medium: 94 lines
AMBROSE BIERCE
Alone in Bad Company
ROY MORRIS JR.
Crown. 306 pp. $30 ``When 71-year-old Ambrose Bierce disappeared without a trace into the smoke and dust of revolutionary Mexico in late December 1913, he probably had more enemies than any man alive.''
Or so author Roy Morris Jr. provocatively introduces the controversial and cranky journalist in his sweeping new biography, Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company.
Morris delightfully documents the reasons for antipathy toward Bierce. Like other historians, however, he offers a number of convincing theories, then fails to solve the riddle of Bierce's disappearance.
Though few people outside of American literary scholarship recognize Bierce's name today, Bierce's imprint on his contemporaries was strong, his writings sowing a bitter harvest of hate that has been obscured with the passage of time. As a writer of war stories, this 19th century creative genius was the literary godfather of Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer and a host of others.
Morris, the author of an outstanding biography of Union General Phil Sheridan, uses extensive quotes from Bierce's writings to capture the full flavor of his vitriol as a literary critic and provides extensive summaries of his short stories on war. His was a dark soul.
A native of Horse Creek Cave, Ohio, Bierce was the only significant American writer to serve in the Civil War and later write about it. His most noteworthy short story, ``An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,'' survives as a classic war tale. He also authored perhaps the shortest - and most biting - book review on record: ``The covers of this book are too far apart.''
Enlisting in the Union cause in the Ninth Indiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment April 19, 1861, Bierce was in the thick of the fighting at the grisly Tennessee blood bath, which he described in ``What I Saw at Shiloh,'' considered by Morris to be ``the working prototype of all war literature.''
Written three decades after the battle, Bierce's powerful short story, ``Chickamauga,'' details the blind forces of violence he saw searing young lives in the bloodiest two-day encounter of the Civil War.
Bierce was shot in the head by a Confederate sharpshooter while leading a skirmish line at Kennesaw Mountain in Georgia on June 23, 1864. After a period of recuperation, he returned to the front, staying in the service until January. Morris' biography thus reads as a documentary of the Civil War highlighted by particularly grisly details emerging from a soldier's accounts.
Bierce's gloomy outlook on life traced back to a troubled childhood in a family of 10 children headed by an intellectually active but vocationally unsuccessful father and a sternly pious, unloving mother. Bierce's alienation from and antagonism toward his parents found their way into his fiction. He brought death to the printed page ``in a succession of gory, macabre, and heartless stories in which more or less innocent people are variously hanged, strangled, shot, roasted, toasted, and boiled in oil,'' Morris notes.
But it was as a newspaper columnist and critic that Bierce's bitterness and rage found full flower. After the war, he settled in San Francisco and began writing for the Californian and the News Letter, honing his splenetic skills by targeting organized religion and school prayer, mothers, babies, Christmas, senior citizens, baseball and dogs.
After a stint in London, Bierce took a job in San Francisco as editor of the satirical journal Wasp and churned out a weekly column waging verbal war on railroad tycoons he called ``public enemies and indictable criminals.''
It was at the Wasp that he launched a column called ``The Devil's Dictionary,'' a lexicon of ironic definitions of common words. For example: ``PEACE, n. In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.''
``Politics'' was defined as ``A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.'' One of his shorter aphorisms defined ``alone'' as an adjective meaning ``In bad company.''
In 1887 Bierce was recruited by William Randolph Hearst to be a weekly columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, which he eventually served for 20 years. Summed up in the publisher's own words as ``alarmingly enterprising'' and ``startingly original,'' the Hearst newspaper sought stories that would elicit a ``gee-whiz'' reaction among readers.
Ironically, in the twilight of his writing career, Bierce's Collected Works brought critical devastation of the kind that he had wrought on other authors. Contemporaries labeled the 12 volumes ``potatoes set in platinum,'' ``turnips in Tiffany's window,'' ``and pure piffle in plush pants.''
Morris has done a masterful job in profiling a bizarre but brilliant commentator of another century, a man who enclosed kernels of truth in shocking sarcasm.
KEYWORDS: BARRETT R. RICHARDSON IS A RETIRED STAFF EDITOR. HE LIVES IN
PORTSMOUTH. by CNB