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 last days of Ambrose 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

Throwback Thursday: Thinking Like A Curmudgeon

I read somewhere that a blog entry should be no longer than 400 words. Says who?

Someone once said that we should be like children. What if we discovered that the reason children are the way they are is that they were trying to be like old people.*

Who says New York has to be the cultural Capitol of the World? Why can't it be Superior, Wisconsin? Didn't Arnold Schwarzenegger go to school here? Besides, when you read the two names, it's self-evident which one is Superior.

Who says haiku poems have to be seventeen syllables? Why can't we make a haiku with nine syllables? Or twenty-three?

And what's the point of...

I'd best just stop right here lest I start to sound like a cranky old man.

Speaking of crankiness... here are a few cantankerous quotes from an entertaining diversion, The Portable Curmudgeon, compiled and edited by Jon Winokur.

"Golf is a good walk spoiled." ~Mark Twain

"She got her good looks from her father. He's a plastic surgeon." ~Groucho Marx

"I don't drink; I don't like it--it makes me feel good." ~Oscar Levant

"An optimist is a man who has never had much experience." ~Don Marquis

"The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple." ~Oscar Wilde

"The average dog is a nicer person than the average person." ~Andy Rooney

"You can fool too many of the people too much of the time." ~James Thurber

"Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable." ~John Kenneth Galbraith

* Cool website of the day: Aging and Creativity.

The Scathing Pen of That Ol' Curmudgeon H.L. Mencken

He was born Henry Louis Mencken on September 12, 1880 in Baltimore, though most of us know him as H.L. Mencken. He wrote such bristling prose that if you look up the word "curmudgeon" in the dictionary it would have a picture of Mencken.

The Encyclopedia Britannica has this to say about him:
Mencken was probably the most influential American literary critic in the 1920s, and he often used his criticism as a point of departure to jab at various American social and cultural weaknesses. His reviews and miscellaneous essays filled six volumes aptly titled Prejudices (1919–27). In literature he fought against what he regarded as fraudulently successful writers and worked for the recognition of such outstanding newcomers as Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis. He jeered at American sham, pretension, provincialism, and prudery, and he ridiculed the nation’s organized religion, business, and middle class (or “booboisie”). 

Two recent references to Mencken in a short period of time instilled in me a desire to share a few of his quotes today. The first was an extremely well-written review of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. The reviewer demonstrates (a) that he has a point-of-view, and (b) that he is more than familiar with the arc of Fitzgerald's career, shining fresh light on the work he's done up to this point in time. I have included a link at the end of this blog post and--if you are a writer or critic--would encourage you to check it out.

The second was this quote that Ken Burns cited in his documentary on Prohibition, reproduced here:

"Five years of Prohibition have had, at least, this one benign effect: they have completely disposed of all the favorite arguments of the Prohibitionists. None of the great boons and usufructs that were to follow the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has come to pass. There is not less drunkenness in the Republic, but more. There is not less crime, but more. There is not less insanity, but more. The cost of government is not smaller, but vastly greater. Respect for law has not increased, but diminished." --H.L. Mencken

If his barbed wit reminds you of Nietzsche or Twain, there's good reason. Both of these writers were among his influences. What follows are quotes from the pointed pen of this prickly purveyor of perspicacious sagacity.

* * * *

"Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood."

"All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it."

"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under."

"I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time."

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary."

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

"The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else."

"A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar."

"The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth."

"The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it."

"An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup."

"The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians."

"Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

"The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom."

"Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking."

"It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf."


Related Links
Superb review of Fitzgerald's Gatsby. Don't stop at the beginning which is harsh. Read it to the end. It's rich.
Britannica entry on Mencken 

Meantime life goes on all around you. Get into it.

Curmudgeon

Russell V. Gran

The Merriam-Webster definition of a curmudgeon is "a crusty, ill-tempered, and usually old man."And Curmudgeon is the name Russell V. Gran has selected as the title of his upcoming art exhibition at Washington Gallery. The opening, featuring new paintings and commentary, will be this coming Friday evening from 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.

In honor of the event I ramdomly selected a handful of quotes from Jon Winokur's The Portable Curmudgeon.

On Democracy: “The bludgeoning of the people, by the people, for the people.”
Oscar Wilde

On Golf: “I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.”
G.K. Chesterton

On Love: “A temporary insanity curable by marriage.”
Ambrose Bierce

On Mankind: “I love mankind; it’s people I can’t stand.”
Charles Schulz

On Optimism: “An optimist is a man who has never had much experience.”
Don Marquis

On Art: "Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable."
George Bernard Shaw

According to the announcement regarding this show, these are his "latest and possibly final paintings." Gran is 76, an age in which folks might more easily get away with being curmudgeonly.

The old man "has many opinions and strong judgments about the most basic aspects of being human. These basics, such as sickness, death, family, home, cats, communication and education, are what his work is about. Accompanying each painting will be a paragraph of commentary supporting the work."

"Gran's paintings are modest yet eye-catching, showing the artist's belief in the craft of art making. The work juxtaposes ordinary experience with rough-edged commentary and is not poetry in technicolor, but enquiry about the real. Gran was born in Duluth, educated at Irving, West Junior High, Denfeld and UMD."

Two years ago Ryan Tischer, who currently serves as Gallery Committee Chair at Washington Galleries, posted an article about Gran's 1974 summer show in the community blog Perfect Duluth Day. It's a nice "whet your appetite" type of read to perhaps help set up your visit to his show. If you can't make the opening, the exhibit will then be open each Saturday and Sunday, from 1:00 to 5:00 p.m. or by appointment through November 25th (723-1308).

And since it's Voting Day, we might as well include one more curmudgeonly comment, this one by H.L. Mencken: "Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage."

Guess it's time to head to the polls.

Says Who?

I read somewhere that a blog entry should be no longer than 400 words. Says who?

Someone once said that we should be like children. What if we discovered that the reason children are the way they are is that they were trying to be like old people.*

Who says New York has to be the cultural Capitol of the World? Why can't it be Superior, Wisconsin? Didn't Arnold Schwarzenegger go to school here? Besides, when you read the two names, it's self-evident which one is Superior.

Who says haiku poems have to be seventeen syllables? Why can't we make a haiku with nine syllables? Or twenty-three?

And what's the point of... I'd best just stop right here lest I start to sound like a cranky old man.

Speaking of crankiness... here are a few cantankerous quotes from an entertaining diversion, The Portable Curmudgeon, compiled and edited by Jon Winokur.

"Golf is a good walk spoiled." ~Mark Twain

"She got her good looks from her father. He's a plastic surgeon." ~Groucho Marx

"I don't drink; I don't like it--it makes me feel good." ~Oscar Levant

"An optimist is a man who has never had much experience." ~Don Marquis

"The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple." ~Oscar Wilde

"The average dog is a nicer person than the average person." ~Andy Rooney

"You can fool too many of the people too much of the time." ~James Thurber

"Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable." ~John Kenneth Galbraith

*Cool website of the day: Aging and Creativity.