Ambrose Bierce

“ If you desert Carmel I shall destroy my Jorgensen picture, build a bungalow in the Catskills and cut out California forever. (Those are the footprints of my damned canary, who will neither write himself nor let me write. Just now he is perched on my shoulder, awaiting the command to sing—then he will deafen me with a song without sense. O he's a poet all right.)
I entirely approve your allegiance to Mammon. If I'd had brains enough to make a decision like that I could now, at 65, have the leisure to make a good book or two before I go to the waste-dump. ”

“ That will be the fate of Edwin Markham if he does not come out o' that, and it will be the fate of George Sterling if he will not be warned.
You think that "the main product of that system" (the "competitive") "is the love of money." What a case of the cart before the horse! The love of money is not the product, but the root, of the system—not the effect, but the cause. When one man desires to be better off than another he competes with him. You can abolish the system when you can abolish the desire—when you can make man as Nature did not make him, content to be as poor as the poorest. ”

“ Meantime, run after your false fool gods until you are tired; I shall not believe that your hearts are really in the chase, for they are pretty good hearts, and those of your gods are nests of nastiness and heavens of hate.
Now I feel better, and shall drink a toddy to the tardy time when those whom I love shall not think me a perverted intelligence; when they shall not affirm my intellect and despise its work—confess my superior understanding and condemn all its fundamental conclusions. Then we will be a happy family—you and Carlt in the flesh and Sloots and I in our bones. ”

“ The grave has closed over accuser and accused, and the only thing that matters is that a great mind was permitted to function. One may smile or sigh over the satire, but one must also realize that even the satirist had his own weaknesses, and could have been as savagely attacked by a mentality as keen as his own. Men as a whole will never greatly care for satire, each recognizing, true enough, glimpses of himself in the invective, but sensing as well its fundamental bias and cruelty. However, Bierce thought best of himself as a satirist. ”

“ The sedentary life and abstracted contemplation of one's own navel are good for Oriental gods only. We spirits of a purer fire need sunlight and the hills. My own recent wanderings afoot and horseback in the mountains did me more good than a sermon. And you have "the hills back of Oakland"! God, what would I not give to help you range them, the dear old things! Why, I know every square foot of them from Walnut Creek to Niles Cañon. Of course they swarm with ghosts, as do all places out there, even the streets of San Francisco; but I and my ghosts always get on well together. ”

“ It is impossible to imagine a magazine editor rejecting that amazing poem. I have read it at least twenty times with ever increasing admiration.
Your book, by the way, is still my constant companion—I carry it in my pocket and read it over and over, in the street cars and everywhere. All the poems are good, though the "Testimony" and "Memorial Day" are supreme—the one in grandeur, the other in feeling.
I send you a criticism in a manuscript letter from a friend who complains of your "obscurity," as many have the candor to do. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I did not suppose that you had joined the innumerable caravan of those who find something sarcastic or malicious in my good natured raillery in careless controversy. If I choose to smile in ink at your inconsistency in weeping for the woes of individual "others"—meaning other humans—while you, of course, don't give a damn for the thousands of lives that you crush out every time you set down your foot, or eat a berry, why shouldn't I do so? One can't always remember to stick to trifles, even in writing a letter. ”

“ It is so low a thing that it may be legitimately used as a means of reform or a means of anything deemed worth accomplishing. It is not an art; art, except in the greatest moderation, is damaging to it. The man who can write well must not write as well as he can; the others may, of course. Journalism has many purposes, and the people's welfare may be one of them; though that is not the purpose-in-chief, by much.
I don't mind your irony about my looking upon the unfortunate as merely "literary material." It is true in so far as I consider them with reference to literature. ”

“ For the first time I am thoroughly disgusted and half-minded to stay in California when I go—a land where every prospect pleases, and only labor unions, progressives, suffragettes (and socialists) are vile. No, I don't think I could stand California, though I'm still in the mind to visit it in June. I shall be sorry to miss Carrie at Carmel, but hope to have the two of you on some excursion or camping trip. We want to go to Yosemite, which the girls have not seen, but if there's no water there it may not be advisable. ”

“ It is your work that I want to see, not anybody's else. I've a profound respect for your father's talent: as a litérateur, he is the best physician that I know; but he must not be coaching my pupil, or he and I (as Mark Twain said of Mrs. Astor) "will have a falling out."
The story is not a story. It is not narrative, and nothing occurs. It is a record of mental mutations—of spiritual vicissitudes—states of mind. That is the most difficult thing that you could have attempted. It can be done acceptably by genius and the skill that comes of practice, as can anything. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Above all writers Bierce can present—brilliantly present—startling fragments of life, carved out from attendant circumstance; isolated problems of character and action; sharply bitten etchings of individual men under momentary stresses and in bizarre situations. Through his prodigious emotional perceptivity he has the power of feeling and making us feel some strange, perverse accident of fate, destructive of the individual—of making us feel it to be real and terrible. ”

“ Doubtless you have read many—perhaps most—of these things, but to read them with a view to profit as a writer may be different. If I could get to San Francisco I could dig out of those artificial memories, the catalogues of the libraries, a lot of titles additional—and get you the books, too. But I've a bad memory, and am out of the Book Belt.
I wish you would write some little thing and send it me for examination. I shall not judge it harshly, for this I know: the good writer (supposing him to be born to the trade) is not made by reading, but by observing and experiencing. ”

“ No, Leigh has not infected me with the exploring fad. I exhausted my capacity in that way years before I had the advantage of his acquaintance and the contagion of his example. But I don't like to think of that miserable mountain sitting there and grinning in the consciousness of having beaten the Bierce family.
So—apropos of my brother—I am "odd" after a certain fashion! My child, that is blasphemy. You grow hardier every day of your life, and you'll end as a full colonel yet, and challenge Man to mortal combat in true Stetsonian style. Know thy place, thou atom! ”

“ We get what we prefer when we do good work; for the lesser wage we do easier work. It has never seemed to me that the "unappreciated genius" had a good case to go into court with, and I think he should be promptly non-suited. Inspiration from Heaven is all very fine—the mandate of an attitude or an instinct is good; but when A works for B, yet insists on taking his orders from C, what can he expect? So don't distress your good little heart with compassion—not for me, at least; whenever I tire of pot-boiling, wood-chopping is open to me, and a thousand other honest and profitable employments. ”

“ Literature and art are about all that the world really cares for in the end; those who make them are not without justification in regarding themselves as masters in the House of Life and all others as their servitors. ”

“ All men could do as they please, without reproof or dissent. I wish you would take your heart out of your head, old man. The best heart makes a bad head if housed there.
The friends that warned you against the precarious nature of my friendship were right. To hold my regard one must fulfil hard conditions—hard if one is not what one should be; easy if one is. I have, indeed, a habit of calmly considering the character of a man with whom I have fallen into any intimacy and, whether I have any grievance against him or not, informing him by letter that I no longer desire his acquaintance. ”

“ But surely, my child—as surely as anything in mathematics—Art will laurel no brow having a divided allegiance. Love the world as much as you will, but serve it otherwise. The best service you can perform by writing is to write well with no care for anything but that. ”

“ About the only good quality that a magazine editor commonly has is his firm reliance on the infallibility of his own judgment. It is an honest error, and it enables him to mull through somehow with a certain kind of consistency. The only way to get a footing with him is to send him what you think he wants, not what you think he ought to want—and keep sending. ”

“ Happiness should disclose itself to his enlarging intelligence as the end and purpose of life; art and love as the only means to happiness. He should free himself of all doctrines, theories, etiquettes, politics, simplifying his life and mind, attaining clarity with breadth and unity with height. ”

“ If this letter is a little disconnected and incoherent know, O King, that I have just returned from a dinner in Atlantic City, N. J. I saw Markham there, also Bob Davis, Sam Moffett, Homer Davenport, Bob Mackay and other San Franciscans. (Can there be a San Franciscan when there is no San Francisco? I don't want to go back. Doubtless the new San Francisco—while it lasts—will be a finer town than the old, but it will not be my San Francisco and I don't want to see it. It has for many years been, to me, full of ghosts. Now it is itself a ghost.) ”

“ Bierce himself shows his recognition of the "underground" quality of his reputation in a letter to George Sterling: "How many times, and during a period of how many years must one's unexplainable obscurity be pointed out to constitute fame? Not knowing, I am almost disposed to consider myself the most famous of authors. I have pretty nearly ceased to be 'discovered,' but my notoriety as an obscurian may be said to be worldwide and everlasting." ”

“ The love of truth is good enough motive for me when I write of my fellowmen. I like many things in this world and a few persons—I like you, for example; but after they are served I have no love to waste upon the irreclaimable mass of brutality that we know as "mankind." ”

“ And let me tell you that if you are going through life as a mere thinking machine, ignoring the generous promptings of the heart, sacrificing it to the brain, you will have a hard row to hoe, and the outcome, when you survey it from the vantage ground of age, will not please you. ”

“ Fancy a poet, or107 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." ”

“ It is not freedom of act—not freedom of living, for which I contend, but freedom of thought, of mind, of spirit; the freedom to see in the horrible laws, prejudices, custom, conventionalities of the multitude, something good for them, but of no value to you in your art. ”

“ Each year of darkness but makes the star of his fame increase and brighten, but we have, I think, no full conception as yet of his greatness, no adequate realization of how wide and permanent a fame he has won. ”

“ You are right too—dead right about the poetry of Socialism; and you might have added the poetry of wailing about the woes of the poor generally. Only the second- and the third-raters write it—except "incidentally." You don't find the big fellows sniveling over that particular shadow-side of Nature. Yet not only are the poor always with us, they always were with us, and their state was worse in the times of Homer, Virgil, Shakspeare, Milton and the others than in the days of Morris and Markham. ”

“ My love to all good Californians of the Sag Harbor colony.
Sincerely yours, Ambrose Bierce.
Washington, D. C.,
November 16,
1911. Dear George,
It is good to know that you are again happy—that is to say, you are in Carmel. For your future happiness (if success and a certain rounding off of your corners would bring it, as I think) I could wish you in New York or thereabout. As the Scripture hath it: "It is not good for a man to be in Carmel"—Revised Inversion. I note that at the late election California damned herself to a still lower degradation and is now unfit for a white man to live in. ”

“ Imagination is nine parts of the writing trade. With enough of that all things are possible; but it is the other things that require the hard work, the incessant study, the tireless seeking, the indomitable will. ”

“ No, thank you; if I have to write rot, I prefer to do it for the newspapers, which make no false pretences and are frankly rotten, and in which the badness of a bad thing escapes detection or is forgotten as soon as it is cold.
I know how to write a story (of the "happy ending" sort) for magazine readers for whom literature is too good, but I will not do so so long as stealing is more honorable and interesting.
I've offered you the best stuff to be had—Sterling's poem—and the best that I am able to make ”

“ The feeling for landscape which Bennett notes is but one part of a greater power—the power to make concrete and visible, action, person, place. Bierce's descriptions of Civil War battles in his Bits of Autobiography are the best descriptions of battle ever written. He lays out the field with map-like clearness, marshals men and events with precision and economy, but his account never becomes exposition—it is drama. Real battles move swiftly; accounts make them seem labored and slow. ”

“ Not one of them cares a rap for the good of the service or the country—as we soldiers used to do on thirteen dollars a month (with starvation, disease and death thrown in) . Their grievance is that the Government does not undertake to maintain them in the style to which they choose to accustom themselves. They fix their standard of living just a little higher than they can afford, and would do so no matter what salary they got, as all salary-persons invariably do. Then they damn their employer for not enabling them to live up to it. ”