The Last Days of Ambrose Bierce: Revisiting the Mystery

Ambrose Bierce, 1892.. (Public domain)

This past week I read again "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" by Ambrose Bierce. The story is about a hanging that takes place during the Civil War. I remember reading it in English class at some point in high school, and it made an impression on me. I probably read it again in the 1980s when I was on a short story binge, aiming to produce stories of my own.

This past week I read it one more time, savoring the detail and the manner in which Bierce tells the story. The surprise ending would be no surprise, even after forty or fifty years, but the story remains a good read because Bierce is a keen storyteller.

Yesterday I happened upon an article called "The Mysterious Disappearance of Ambrose Bierce" and it brought to mind Carlos Fuentes' The Old Gringo, a novel about the last days of Ambrose Bierce. Fuentes is a powerful Mexican author in the same league as Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges, both of them masters of Magical Realism.

The Old Gringo is a novel that strives to shed light on the the Mexican Revolution  and last days of Bierce, which to this day have been shrouded in mystery. I found it a compelling read, in part because Fuentes is a superb writer and in part because of having spent a year in Mexico myself. The book is important because it provides a deeper understanding of Mexico's somewhat troubled history and the roots of the revolution of 1910-1920.

Bierce was a famously jaundiced and influential satirist, critic, short story writer, editor and journalist. A contemporary of Mark Twain, his incisive wit influenced writers like H.L. Mencken and Kurt Vonnegut.

Fuentes uses this tale not only to share what possibly happened to Ambrose Bierce, but also to show what happened to Mexico a century ago. The best way to understand Mexico before the Revolution is to think of the Plantation lifestyle in our United States. In Mexico, the people weren't "owned" the way plantation owners owned slaves, but the peasants and workers might as well have been. They had no rights, and the wealthy hacienda owners took advantage of the power they had over the peasants.

Gregory Peck and Jimmy Smits in Old Gringo

Hollywood went on to make a film based on Fuentes' book titled Old Gringo, starring Gregory Peck as the aging Ambrose Bierce and Jane Fonda as a naive young American woman who has gone to Mexico to teach English to a rich hacienda family. When she arrives the wealthy family has been run off by revolutionaries. The film, detailing their experiences in the midst of this civil war, got poor reviews from the critics and viewers alike, though it somehow connected with me due to my having read the book and lived there at one time. For whatever reason, I overlooked its shortcomings.

Bierce was a curmudgeon and an aging one at that when he slipped south of the border to flirt with his final destiny. The themes of the Fuentes book are dimly reflected in the film, but having the book inside you helps you better understand the significance of the story, what "the revolution" was really all about. It was a collision course: Bierce and the Revolution. But Bierce seems more akin to the Mexican tragic spirit than our American happy-go-lucky silliness and superficial fake depth.

In "The Mysterious Disappearance of Ambrose Bierce"author Chris Opfer presents alternative endings to the famous scribe's life. His demise in Mexico is but one story. Other possibilities put forth include death by his own hand in Texas or at the Grand Canyon. You can read Opfer's speculations here.

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I would be remiss not to include some quotes from one of Ambrose Bierce's most famous works, The Devil's Dictionary. The first half of the dictionary was published in 1906 as The Cynic's Word Book. Upon completion the A to Z volume was published in 1911 as The Devil's Dictionary.

Here are a handful of entries to give you the flavor of this work.

Abnormal, adj. Not conforming to standards in matters of thought and conduct. To be independent is to be abnormal, to be abnormal is to be detested.

Accord, n. Harmony.

Accordion, n. An instrument in harmony with the sentiments of an assassin.

Alone, adj. In bad company.

Bore, n. A person who talks when you wish him to listen.

Egotist, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.

Ocean, n. A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man — who has no gills.

Once, adj. Enough.

Twice, adv. Once too often.

Year, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.


Related Links
The Old Gringo
The Assassination of Ambrose Bierce: A Love Story
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

The Korean War Was More Brutal Than We Remember

Gregory Peck, Pork Chop Hill

I was seven when the movie Pork Chop Hill starring Gregory Peck was released. I probably saw it on Saturday Night at the Movies a year or two later. At the time, it seemed like a pretty good war movie. It was intense, had characters you could root for, and had heroes. I was too you, though to catch the real message of the film, that men are being asked to put their lives on the line for a meaningless objective.

U.S. howitzer position near the Kum River

There's a sense in which the Korean War is something of a forgotten war. The objectives in World War II seemed clear. The Axis powers had to be stopped. The Korean war was a different kind of war, the beginning of a series of conflicts that had fuzzier rationales.

At the end of World War II my father enlisted in the army and was sent first to the Philippines and then Korea. This was before the Korean conflict escalated to what it became several years later.

Combat in the streets of Seoul.

As I've been reading Don't Know Much About History the past ten days or so, I just finished Ken Davis's section on the Korean War. Last year I learned from Paul Thomas Chamberlin's The Cold War's Killing Fields that Korea was not some innocent escapade. Civilians suffered terribly in that conflict. It's hard to believe that we almost used atomic bombs in that war. In an interview published posthumously General Douglas MacArthur recommended dropping between 30 and 50 atomic bombs on targets across Manchuria. One shudders to consider the implications of this.

While pulling together some research for this blog post I came across another blog post that tied to my thoughts here. The title of this November 15, 2019 story by Darien Cavanaugh is The Korean War Was So Brutal That America's Most Hardened Soldiers Were Shaken.

Cavanaugh wrote, "On a per-capita basis, the Korean War was one of the deadliest wars in modern history, especially for the civilian population of North Korea. The scale of the devastation shocked and disgusted the American military personnel who witnessed it, including some who had fought in the most horrific battles of World War II."

It was Chamberlin's book that brought my attention to what Cavanaugh went on to say.

B-29 Superfortress

"Several factors contributed to the high casualty ratios. The Korean Peninsula is densely populated. Rapidly shifting front lines often left civilians trapped in combat zones. Both sides committed numerous massacres and carried out mass executions of political prisoners. Modern aircraft carried out a vast bombing campaign, dropping massive loads of napalm along with standard bombs."

The U.S. dropped 20% more bombs on North Korea than were dropped in the Pacific during the entire World War II. In addition we dropped over 32,000 tons of napalm, which has to be one of the most inhuman weapons ever conceived by humans.

By the war's end North Korea lost ten percent of its population, chiefly due to this scorched earth bombing campaign.

But the worst of this conflict was what Paul Thomas Chamberlin draws attention to in his book, which is a devastating indictment of our post WWII behavior in the various theaters beginning with Korea. This is what we never heard about before, that we openly massacred civilians. Writes Cavanaugh:

It wasn’t until 1999 that the United States acknowledged—after a lengthy investigation by the Associated Press—that a 1950 letter from U.S. Ambassador John J. Muccio authorized commanders in the field to adopt a policy of openly massacring civilians.

USS Missouri firing 16-inch guns.

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Related Links
Interview with Paul Thomas Chamberlin, author of The Cold War's Killing Fields
Photo of Gregory Peck, source: imdb.com
All other photos on page: GoodFreePhotos.com
If you're a blogger looking for Free Historical Photos, here is a website you may wish to consider bookmarking:
https://www.goodfreephotos.com/historical-battles/korean-war/column-of-the-us-1st-marine-division-move-through-chinese-lines-battle-of-chosin-reservoir.jpg.php

Brownsville Girl and the Old Gringo

For a time in the 90's I went through a Latin American authors phase that include Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Carlos Fuentes. Fuentes, a Mexican novelist, essayist and playwright, achieved international recognition for his work. I'd lived in Mexico a year and enjoyed stories that took place there, especially those that would give new insights into how the country came to be what it was. Michener's Mexico falls into this category. And Fuentes' The Old Gringo is especially so.

The setting is a hacienda in Northern Mexico during the revolution of 1910-20. If "Occupy Wall Street" is about revolting against the one-percenters, in Mexico the hacienda system was the real we/they world. Picture plantations with the haves being the one-percenters who could do as they pleased, the rest being indentured servants with no rights.

Into this setting bring a naive young American woman who has been hired to come south to teach the landowner's children English. Also bring a an cynical old writer whose reaching the end of his trail. Add to this mix the revolutionaries who have taken over the compound... and what happens next?

The novel was insightful, providing an understanding as to why Mexico became a socialist country and why the revolution occurred. Like other epic novels this was a vehicle for addressing many larger issues, and human issues about meaning and life that Hollywood films can seldom penetrate effectively because it is a different medium. That is why reading novels can never be replaced by just watching movies, as the film only hints at things written words can explore in depth.

The film got weak reviews, but I would suggest this is because without the book as a foundation its superficial telling of the story had no pedestal to stand on. In the film Jane Fonda is the schoolteacher who has been transplanted in Mexico. Gregory Peck is the Old Gringo.  

All this (above) is preface to a brief look at Dylan's Brownsville Girl which first appeared on his Knocked Out Loaded album and was later selected for his Greatest Hits, Volume 3.

Well, there was this movie I seen one time
About a man riding ’cross the desert and it starred Gregory Peck
He was shot down by a hungry kid trying to make a name for himself
The townspeople wanted to crush that kid down and string him up by the neck

Gregory Peck has had a rich career on the silver screen. Dylan is not the only person to draw attention to Peck in his writing. Elmore Leonard on more than one occasion has characters that reference Peck's role as a gunfighter, especially the scene where the kid comes in with guns drawn and Johnny Ringo (Peck) has to cool the hothead down by stating coldly that he has a gun pointed at the kid's belly. It's only his hand under the table, but the kid backs off. Great scene, the kind that makes for great movies.

The next verse deftly sums up the point of bringing this story to us in song.

Well, the marshal, now he beat that kid to a bloody pulp
As the dying gunfighter lay in the sun and gasped for his last breath 
“Turn him loose, let him go, let him say he outdrew me fair and square
I want him to feel what it’s like to every moment face his death”

Like many of Dylan's songs they start broader in scope and then narrow down to focus on personal relationships or experiences. In this case it his relationship with a Brownsville girl. Brownsville is a border town on the Rio Grande, the eastern part of an area called "the valley."

Lee Marshall, in his book Bob Dylan: The Never Ending Star, spends three pages dissecting this song, noting how Dylan inserts himself into the story of Johnny Ringo, a gunfighter wrestling the the burden of fame.

Something about that movie though, 
well I just can’t get it out of my head 
But I can’t remember why I was in it 
or what part I was supposed to play...

What's going on here?  You have to ask because as the story movies along, Dylan is still identifying with Gregory Peck, but now it's in a different film, one about the last days of Ambrose Bierce, the Old Gringo. Things in upheaval, and Dylan slinging off very personal observations in that veiled way he does, lines that speak with ambiguity yet seem specific. Lines like,

You know, it’s funny how things never turn out the way you had ’em planned

and

Strange how people who suffer together have stronger connections 
than people who are most content 
 
Dylan's fascination for Peck is evident ("I'll see him in anything,") and Marshall's exploration of the song focuses on Dylan's role reversal, becoming a "fan" of another "star." He also states most directly that there is "no way this song cannot be about Dylan."

Hence, I invite you -- against the backdrop above -- to revisit the lyrics and hope you'll take away another shard of insight that you hadn't had before the next time you give this song a good listening to.

Meantime, life goes on all around you.