Bierce on Bowman: groping in the night

James F. Bowman (pictured) was at the center of California's burgeoning literary culture, and was one of the main figures in founding the Bohemian Club. That organization was made up of several men who frequently crossed between literature and journalism, including Ambrose Bierce. When Bowman died of stomach cancer in April 1882, Bierce wrote a sonnet to his friend, published in the May 5, 1882 issue of the San Francisco Wasp, and given the title "J.F.B.":

How well this man unfolded to our view
    The world's beliefs of Death and Heaven and Hell—
    This man whose own convictions none could tell,
Nor if his maze of reason had a clew.
Dogmas he wrote for daily bread, but knew
    The fair philosophies of doubt so well
    That while we listened to his words there fell
Some that were strangely comforting if true.
Marking how wise we grew upon his doubt,
    We said: "If so, by groping in the night,
    He can proclaim some certain paths of trust,
How great our profit if he saw about
His feet the highways leading to the light."
    Now he sees all. Ah, Christ! his mouth is dust!

Bowman had been known for his kind and genial nature. Years earlier, as editor of the Californian, Bowman included the first poem Bierce ever published, "Basilica." He had also assisted in collecting and published the works of California poet Edward Pollock after his death. As the above sonnet attests, Bowman was a bit of an armchair philosopher and was particularly a religious skeptic. The poem concludes with the irony that Bowman was, at least among this circle of friends, the first to know the truth of the afterlife.

Bowman was also a writer and poet himself. It was reported that his poem "Nature's Paraclete" was written only a few days before his death. The poem concludes:

And oft at midnight's solemn time,
   Waking, I know a presence near,
And feel my spirit's altered clime,
   And breathe a rarer atmosphere.
And, lo! the thoughts I thought by day
Have changed and vanished quite away.
   In this new light, so wondrous clear,
   All things transfigured do appear

Ambrose Bierce: The devil's purveyor

Though The Devil's Dictionary eventually became one of Ambrose Bierce's most well-known works, the book had a difficult beginning. The first "complete" version of the devilishly humorous reference work did not appear until 1911, sandwiched in volume 7 of a collection of the author's writings. The first half of the book, up through the entries for "L," had been published in the mid to late 1880s under the title The Cynic's  Dictionary. Bierce did not appreciate the watered-down title. As he wrote in 1906: "They (the publishers) won't have 'The Devil's Dictionary.' Here in the East the Devil is a sacred personage (the Fourth Person of the Trinity, as an Irishman might say) and his name must not be taken in vain."

The earliest published appearance of the book, however, came on December 11, 1875, when the San Francisco News Letter published a few "A" definitions under the heading "The Demon's Dictionary." 
That humble article, attributed to "Theophilus Smallbeer," included definitions through "accoucheur," though the later version of the Dictionary did not include any of these entries. He later explained he lost most of his early entries and re-wrote many of them; in a later preface, he denied the 1875 attempt and his first attempts began in 1881. A few entries from the "A" section of the later Devil's Dictionary:

Accoucheur, n. The devil's purveyor.

Acquit, v.t. To render judgment in a murder case in San Francisco.

Adam's Apple, n. A protuberance on the throat of a man, thoughtfully provided by Nature to keep the rope in place.

Admiration, n. Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.

Alone, adj. In bad company.

Ambition, n. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead.

Apologize, v.i. To lay the foundation for a future offence.

One can only imagine how Bierce might define "blog" or "internet" today. For more from The Devil's Dictionary, see this site.

*For the dates and details above, I am indebted to Robert F. Gale's An Ambrose Bierce Companion (Greenwood Publishing, 2001).

Bierce: a selfish motive and a real benevolence

Tom Hood, editor of the British humor magazine Fun, asked Ambrose Bierce to contribute something appropriate for that publication. The commission was specifically to match a series of engraved illustrations already prepared for the weekly. The first of a series of "Fables of Zambri the Parsee" was published on July 13, 1872 under the curious byline "Dod Grile."

The fables Bierce produced were short, often featuring anthropomorphic animals, and usually ended with a tongue-in-cheek moral. The first fable included a letter to the editor from "Grile," revealing that these were merely translations and that the best of them were "quite equal to the worst of those written by the late Mr. Aesop." The series continued until March of 1873.

The first was "The Nobleman and the Oyster" and featured a man purchasing an oyster from a gypsy. "You must try to forgive me for what I am about to do," the man said to the oyster, preparing to eat it. "Opportunity is the strongest of all temptations," he says, and admits that he is a hungry orphan. Hearing this, the oyster replies that he is genuinely pleased to comfort him, considering his previous owner (the gypsy woman) would not eat him, knowing "we couldn't agree."

"I think, said the nobleman, rising and laying down the oyster, "I ought to know something more definite about your antecedents before succouring you. If you couldn't agree with your mistress, you are probably no better than you should be."

People who begin doing something from a selfish motive frequently drop it when they learn that it is a real benevolence.

Bierce: Storm of bullets and grape

Ambrose Bierce's short story "Killed at Resaca" was first published on June 5, 1887 in the San Francisco Examiner. The narrator describes a lieutenant character named Herman Brayle, "the best soldier of our staff." A tall man whose eyes displayed "a high order of courage," Brayle is admired and respected as a having "gentleman's manners, a scholar's head, and a lion's heart."

His courage, however, is also a concern for Brayle's fellow soldiers. Brayle was so brave that he did not take cover in battle. Whether mounted on his horse or on foot, he exposed himself openly to the "storm of bullets and grape." This was unusual, Bierce described, as most soldiers crawled low to the ground as they approached (they "hug the earth as closely as if they loved it"). Brayle did not always go without injury in this practice but it was hard not to respect his actions as heroic, as he was "always returning to duty about as good as new."

Brayle's luck, however, would not last forever. Sent to deliver a message, he casually galloped his steed onto the field of battle at Resaca, Georgia. "Stop that damned fool!" shouted the general. One stepped forward to do exactly that but he and his horse were shot dead instantly. Brayle continued on:

My attention had been for a moment drawn to the general combat, but now, glancing down the unobscured avenue between these two thunderclouds, I saw Brayle, the cause of the carnage. Invisible now from either side, and equally doomed by friend and foe, he stood in the shot-swept space, motionless, his face toward the enemy. At some little distance lay his horse. I instantly saw what had stopped him.

As topographical engineer I had, early in the day, made a hasty examination of the ground, and now remembered that at that point was a deep and sinuous gully, crossing half the field from the enemy's line, its general course at right angles to it. From where we now were it was invisible, and Brayle had evidently not known about it. Clearly, it was impassable. Its salient angles would have afforded him absolute security if he had chosen to be satisfied with the miracle already wrought in his favor and leapt into it. He could not go forward, he would not turn back; he stood awaiting death. It did not keep him long waiting.

Later examining Brayle's body, the narrator discovers the motivation behind the man's blind heroism: a love letter from a woman, warning him not to be a coward. He takes it upon himself to meet the woman in person and let her know of Brayle's death. When she asks how he died, however, he offers a very different answer from the truth...

Bierce: that is a law of nature

Ambrose Bierce had a lifelong fascination, perhaps even an obsession, with war. "Every generation must have its war; that is a law of nature," as he wrote in the January 23, 1886 issue of the Wasp, a publication for which he was editor-in-chief. Bierce had served in the Union Army during the Civil War (he fought at Shiloh, among other places) and,at the end of his life, went to Mexico to observe battles there before disappearing forever.

For Bierce, however, glorification of war through stories from old soldiers was inappropriate and misleading. The genre of war memoirs, both in long and short form, had become a dominant part of literary culture, though Bierce distrusted these accounts, noting that "hardly one has been free from lying." By that, he did not mean merely exaggerating the truth for dramatic effect. As he wrote: "most of them talk pretty well, [but] many didn't fight." The growth of these stories, he wrote, "threatens to swallow up every other industry in the country."

These battle yarns, indeed, are nursing a bably [i.e. babbly] war, which now lies mouthing its fat knuckles and marking time with its pinky feet, in a cradle of young imaginations, but in another decade it will be striding through the land in seven-league boots, chewing soap.

Bierce's own writings also reflect on war, most notably his short story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and "Killed at Resaca." Perhaps, more tellingly, he including the following definition of "war" in his tongue-in-cheek Devil's Dictionary:

WAR, n. A by-product of the arts of peace. The most menacing political condition is a period of international amity. The student of history who has not been taught to expect the unexpected may justly boast himself inaccessible to the light. "In time of peace prepare for war" has a deeper meaning than is commonly discerned; it means, not merely that all things earthly have an end — that change is the one immutable and eternal law — but that the soil of peace is thickly sown with the seeds of war and singularly suited to their germination and growth... Let us have a little less of "hands across the sea," and a little more of that elemental distrust that is the security of nations. War loves to come like a thief in the night; professions of eternal amity provide the night.

*This post was inspired in part by Donald T. Blume's Ambrose Bierce's Civilians and Soldiers in Context: A Critical Study (Kent State University Press, 2004).

Bierce: No trace of him was ever discovered

According to legend, a man named James Burne Worson of Warwickshire, England got a little tipsy one day and, in his usual bravado, accepted a strange bet in his drunken state: he agreed to run all the way to Coventry and back (a distance of some 40 miles). The race, however, was never finished.

In Ambrose Bierce's story "An Unfinished Race," Worson sets off on his run on on the third day of September  in 1873 along with a few witnesses following in a wagon. According to these witnesses, the man took off at a good pace and all seemed well — until he suddenly fell forward and disappeared: "the man seemed to stumble, pitched headlong forward, uttered a terrible cry and vanished! He did not fall to the earth — he vanished before touching it. No trace of him was ever discovered."

This tale was one of many very short articles Bierce collected in an updated edition of his 1893 book Can Such Things Be? The book included  several similar examples of local lore or legend, allegedly based on true stories. "An Unfinished Race" was the among the shortest at only three paragraphs. It was also at the very end of the book, filed under a heading of "Mysterious Disappearances" added specifically for the 1910 edition of his collected works.

That particular multi-volume complete edition of Bierce's writings was, ultimately, a failure. Even so, when the final volume of the 12-book set appeared in 1912, Bierce wrote: "The completion of my 'collected works' finishes (I hope) my life's work. I am definitely 'out of it,' unless some irresistible impulse comes to me, which is not likely." Ironically, Bierce would later become a mysterious disappearance story of his own.

*Some information from this post comes from Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company (1999) by Roy Morris, Jr.

Two accounts of Shiloh

The two-day Battle of Shiloh, which ended April 7, 1862, saw an overwhelming number of Confederate soldiers overtake a Union Army line in western Tennessee. The Union (overseen by future best-selling author Ulysses S. Grant) held the line near a church, despite heavy casualties. Fighting continued through the night. By the second day, they were reinforced and were able to push back the Confederate forces. By the end, 23,000 had died, making it the bloodiest battle on American soil up to that point.

The Civil War turned a man now remembered for his prose into a poet; Herman Melville offered his version of the battle, though he did not witness it, in his poem "Shiloh: A Requiem":

Skimming lightly, wheeling still,
The swallows fly low
Over the field in clouded days,
The forest-field of Shiloh —
Over the field where April rain
Solaced the parched one stretched in pain
Through the pause of night
That followed the Sunday fight
Around the church of Shiloh —
The church so lone, the log-built one,
That echoed to many a parting groan
And natural prayer
Of dying foemen mingled there —
Foemen at morn, but friends at eve —
Fame or country least their care
(What like a bullet can undeceive!)
But now they lie low,
While over them the swallows skim,
And all is hushed at Shiloh.

"Shiloh" comes from a Hebrew word for "place of peace" and Melville knew of its irony, as well as the strangeness of so many men dying next to a church. The parenthetical aside "What like a bullet can undeceive!" remains a shockingly powerful yet simple phrase.

Ambrose Bierce was a veteran of the battle and offered his memories in prose as "What I Saw at Shiloh." His remembrances also undeceived the glories of battle and patriotism. To him, battle was not a fairy tale, but a dirty, rank, and fearsome place of butchery. His account is honest and undeceiving: "This is a simple story of a battle," the sketch begins, "such a tale as may be told by a soldier who is no writer to a reader who is no soldier." He focuses on visual imagery and sound in recounting his story, but he ultimately shows how he himself was changed:

And this was, O so long ago! How they come back to me — dimly and brokenly, but with what a magic spell — those years of youth when I was soldiering! Again I hear the far warble of blown bugles. Again I see the tall, blue smoke of camp-fires ascending from the dim valleys of Wonderland. There steals upon my sense the ghost of an odor from pines that canopy the ambuscade. I feel upon my cheek the morning mist that shrouds the hostile camp unaware of its doom, and my blood stirs at the ringing rifle-shot of the solitary sentinel. Unfamiliar landscapes, glittering with sunshine or sullen with rain, come to me demanding recognition, pass, vanish and give place to others. Here in the night stretches a wide and blasted field studded with half-extinct fires burning redly with I know not what presage of evil. Again I shudder as I note its desolation and its awful silence. Where was it? To what monstrous inharmony of death was it the visible prelude?

O days when all the world was beautiful and strange; when unfamiliar constellations burned in the Southern midnights, and the mocking-bird poured out his heart in the moon-gilded magnolia; when there was something new under a new sun; will your fine, far memories ever cease to lay contrasting pictures athwart the harsher features of this later world, accentuating the ugliness of the longer and tamer life? Is it not strange that the phantoms of a blood-stained period have so airy a grace and look with so tender eyes? — that I recall with difficulty the danger and death and horrors of the time, and without effort all that was gracious and picturesque? Ah, Youth, there is no such wizard as thou! Give me but one touch of thine artist hand upon the dull canvas of the Present; gild for but one moment the drear and somber scenes of to-day, and I will willingly surrender an other life than the one that I should have thrown away at Shiloh.

Bierce: A Cargo of Cats

Ambrose Bierce was editor-in-chief of Wasp when the San Francisco magazine's January 3, 1885 issue published his short story "A Cargo of Cat." Presented as a true story (its original subtitle was "A True Story of the Mediterranean"), the tale follows a ship leaving Malta with a cargo of 127,000 cats — a cargo which resulted in "a good deal of trouble." Rather than tied in bundles, however, the felines are left loose in the hold. The first mate, worried they would be thirsty, hoses a supply of water with them. This decision caused the death by drowning of several thousand of them.

The gruesome tale is supposed to turn comical when the waterlogged cats begin to swell up. This "feline expansion" puts pressure on the body of the ship until planks begin to break free. Captain Doble, informed by the first-person narrator of this development, shows no concern. Then, suddenly, the surviving cats burst up like a volcano and clutch one another with their claws, making a huge column of cats pointing upwards like the ship's mast. No longer able to steer the ship, crew members fear the worst (and, further, have lost access to their food supplies below). The chaplain leads the crew in prayer — until the cats join in with their own hymn:

Each had a pretty fair voice, but no ear. Nearly all their notes in the upper register were more or less cracked and disobedient. The remarkable thing about the voices was their range. In that crowd were cats of seventeen octaves, and the average could not have been less than twelve... It was a great concert. It lasted three days and nights.

The cat calamity is ended when the ship passes the southern part of Italy. Seeing the boot shape, the cats fear they are about to be collectively kicked, and abandon ship.

The story reflects Bierce's own dislike of cats, but it also shows his dark humor. At the time he was editing The Wasp, he was also serializing bitingly witty definitions in a series he called The Devil's Dictionary.

Bierce and Sterling: ignorant asses

Both Ambrose Bierce and George Sterling became strongly associated with California, though they were born elsewhere (Ohio and New York, respectively). They were good friends and Bierce was a particularly strong supporter of the much younger Sterling. However, Bierce was not known for idly ignoring his annoyances. On September 7, 1906, he wrote to Sterling to set the record straight about the latter's recent poem, "A Wine of Wizardry":

Note the deliberate and repeated lying of [Arthur] Brisbane in quoting me as saying the "Wine" is "the greatest poem ever written in America". Note his dishonesty in confessing that he has commendatory letters, yet not publishing a single one of them. [The editor] promises me a free hand in replying to these ignorant asses. If he does not give it me I quit.

It is not entirely certain if the San Franciscan editorial in question was really by Arthur Brisbane but, more importantly, Bierce did not believe "A Wine of Wizardry" was the greatest poem in America. He had written of Sterling as "a very great poet - incomparably the greatest we have on this side of the Atlantic." As for "A Wine of Wizardry," he wrote, "I hold that not in a lifetime has our literature had any new thing of equal length containing so much poetry and so little else." For the record, he actually preferred Sterling's "The Testimony of the Suns" (incidentally, both poems include an epigraph from  Bierce's writings). From "A Wine of Wizardry":

Without, the battlements of sunset shine,
'Mid domes the sea-winds rear and overwhelm.
Into a crystal cup the dusky wine
I pour, and, musing at so rich a shrine,
I watch the star that haunts its ruddy gloom.
Now Fancy, empress of a purpled realm,
Awakes with brow caressed by poppy-bloom,
And wings in sudden dalliance her flight
To strands where opals of the shattered light
Gleam in the wind-strewn foam, and maidens flee
A little past the striving billows' reach,
Or seek the russet mosses of the sea,
And wrinkled shells that lure along the beach,
And please the heart of Fancy; yet she turns,
Tho' trembling, to a grotto rosy-sparred,
Where wattled monsters redly gape, that guard
A cowled magician peering on the damned
Thro' vials wherein a splendid poison burns,
Sifting Satanic gules athwart his brow.
So Fancy will not gaze with him, and now
She wanders to an iceberg oriflammed
With rayed, auroral guidons of the North—
Wherein hath winter hidden ardent gems
And treasuries of frozen anadems,
Alight with timid sapphires of the snow.
But she would dream of warmer gems, and so
Ere long her eyes in fastnesses look forth
O'er blue profounds mysterious whence glow
The coals of Tartarus on the moonless air,
As Titans plan to storm Olympus' throne,
'Mid pulse of dungeoned forges down the stunned,
Undominated firmament, and glare
Of Cyclopean furnaces unsunned.

*This letter is collected in A Much Misunderstood Man: Selected Letters of Ambrose Bierce (2003) edited by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz.

Bierce: Its author's main and best ambition

Despite already publishing several prose works and even poetry, Ambrose Bierce had difficulty finding a publisher for his book Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. So, he turned to a San Francisco merchant named E. L. G. Steele. In his preface, dated September 4, 1891, Bierce explained:

Denied existence by the chief publishing houses of the country, this book owes itself to Mr. E. L. G. Steele, merchant, of this city. In attesting Mr. Steele's faith in his judgment and his friend, it will serve its author's main and best ambition.

The book of 19 short tales was nearly evenly divided between "Soldiers" and "Civilians." It was soon compared to Stephen Crane's Civil War novel Red Badge of Courage though, unlike Crane, Bierce was actually a veteran. Further, Bierce's stories are often ironic, if not sardonic. California poet George Sterling noted that, "His heroes, or rather victims, are lonely men, passing to unpredictable dooms, and hearing, from inaccessible crypts of space, the voices of unseen malevolencies." A review in the New York Tribune claimed the book was "so original as to defy comparison... weird and curious... There's nothing like it in fiction."

The most famous in the collection, number two under "Soldiers," had already been published about a year earlier. "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" features a man named Peyton Farquhar, a Confederate sympathizer who seeks to sabotage the Union army in Alabama. Caught in the act, he is to be executed by hanging. With the noose around his neck, his mind wanders:

He unclosed his eyes and saw again the water below him. "If I could free my hands," he thought, "I might throw off the noose and spring into the stream. By diving I could evade the bullets and, swimming vigorously, reach the bank, take to the woods and get away home. My home, thank God, is as yet outside their lines; my wife and little ones are still beyond the invader's farthest advance."

Sure enough, the rope snaps, and he attempts a daring escape with an entire battalion at his back, narrowly avoiding bullets and even cannon fire. Miraculously, he finally finds his way home to his wife, when...

Bierce: found to be a hole

The New York World reported exclusive news on April 4, 1915: Ambrose Bierce was alive.

Bierce had vanished mysteriously in Mexico while observing a revolution there, presumably as a source for writing inspiration. According to the New York World, however, Bierce's daughter had recently sent him a letter indicating that he had moved to France, where he had joined the staff of Lord Kitchener. Bierce's daughter, however, claimed that no such letter ever existed.

The report is an example of the speculation that became rampant after Bierce's disappearance. Some suggested that the author and poet knew he was going to die in Mexico, that he hoped to die in battle or, perhaps, that he killed himself there. In one letter to a friend, about two months before his final known letter, he told a friend he intended to travel to South America "if I can get through [Mexico] without being stood up against a wall and shot as a gringo. But that is better than dying in bed, is it not?"

In another letter, Bierce told a female friend:

I thank you for your friendship — and much besides. This is to say good-by at the end of a pleasant correspondence in which your woman's prerogative of having the last word is denied to you. Before I could receive it I shall be gone... I shall go into Mexico with a pretty definite purpose, which, however, is not at present disclosable. You must try to forgive my obstinacy in not "perishing" where I am. I want to be where something worth while is going on, or where nothing whatever is going on. Most of what is going on in your own country is exceedingly distasteful to me... May you live as long as you want to, and then pass smilingly into the darkness — the good, good darkness.

Either way, in his well-known work of humor, The Devil's Dictionary, Bierce defined "dead" (adj.) with a poem:

Done with the work of breathing; done
With all the world; the mad race run
Through to the end; the golden goal
Attained and found to be a hole!

Bierce: Very cheerfully yours

Ambrose Bierce contributed a series of "Grizzly Papers" under the name "Ursus," published in the Overland Monthly in California. To anyone who has ever had an editor, no explanation is necessary. The following is a letter from Bierce, dated March 15, 1871:

Dear Sir; If the "proofs" I had yesterday represent the amount of my copy which is accepted, I think I will quit. Everything I send you is constructed with the utmost care; most of it being written three times over, and all of it twice. This involves too much labor to be undertaken without some reasonable hope that it will not be wasted. You told me the character of the mag[azine] was not to be changed when [Bret] Harte left. Harte never suppressed, nor altered, a line of my composition—nor, I may say, did anybody else ever do so, to any great extent.

Of course, I cannot hope to remain incog[nito]; some of the Eastern papers are even now publishing the "Grizzlies" over my real name. I cannot therefore concede the right of any editor to make any alterations or excisions in what he accepts—it is unfair and unprofessional. Whatever a writer (if he is known—especially if he have already some reputation) is permitted to say, he should be allowed to say in his own way. I have myself some editorial experience, and this rule I never dared to disregard. The suppression of entire articles is perfectly proper, but has in my case been carried too far to be endurable. Besides it changes the tone of the papers as a series—a tone which I carefully decided upon giving them, and in accordance with each separate article or paragraph is written. But I cannot complain of the principle of suppression—only its excessive application.

...This scissors business is quite unprecedented, and I don't like it.

Very cheerfully yours,
A. G. Bierce

*Special thanks to editors S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz for including this letter in A Much Misunderstood Man: Selected Letters of Ambrose Bierce (2003).

Bierce: for an unknown destination

At 71 years old, Ambrose Bierce began a tour of Civil War battlefields. Making his way through Louisiana and Texas, Bierce went further south into Mexico, a country then undergoing a revolution. He predicted he would visit Mexico as early as April, when he mentioned as much in a letter to friend H. L. Mencken (he noted "thank god, there is something doing [there]"). A veteran himself and a some time journalist, Bierce probably saw a good opportunity and followed the army of Pancho Villa as an observer.

On December 26, 1913, Bierce wrote a letter to friend and journalist (and possible lover) Blanche Partington. Her husband painted a portrait of Bierce, above, before his death in 1899. The letter closed with the words, "As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination."

Bierce was never heard from again.

Speculation is rampant, fueled in part by Bierce's settling of personal affairs before leaving for his travels south, implying he knew of his impending death (suicide?). He may have been executed or killed in battle; some claim he was working as a spy the whole time. Many claimed to have found his grave. The Ambrose Bierce Appreciation Society has an article on the mystery here.

Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary defines "kill": "To create a vacancy without nominating a successor." And, "epitaph" is defined as: "An inscription on a tomb, showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect."

Jupiter Doke: I think him a fool

"It is the proudest moment of my life," wrote Jupiter Doke to the Secretary of War on November 9, 1861. "The office is one which should be neither sought nor denied... I accept the great trust confided in me." Doke was given the title Brigadier-General during the Civil War, overseeing the Illinois Brigade at Distilleryville, Kentucky. Of course, Jupiter Doke is not a real person, but a fictional character created by Ambrose Bierce in the 1885 story "Jupiter Doke, Brigadier-General" (also known as "Materials for History").

At first glance, the satirical story seems innocent enough. Told through letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles, it follows the career of the recently-promoted Doke. Something is suspicious here, however. The Secretary of War confirms with another officer that a certain route in Kentucky is infested with Confederate troops — and sends Doke there, emphasizing he must be in full uniform. Doke, unaware of the pretense, appoints a distant relation to command a small troupe down that route; when he's not heard from again, Doke assumes the worst and asks the Secretary of War to wear "the usual band of mourning for thirty days."

Besides depictions of military incompetence (not to mention Doke's attempts at nepotistic political appointments for his family), the story is full of humorous political posturing and long-winded rhetoric. For example, Doke offers this report:

In the camp of treason opposite here there are supposed to be three thousand misguided men laying the ax at the root of the tree of liberty. They have a clear majority, many of our men having returned without leave to their constituents. We could probably not poll more than two thousand votes.

Doke's brigade is sent to a nearby town to pick up Union supplies but is fired upon by Confederate troops (who they originally assumed were fellow Union soldiers, guarding their supplies). They retreat and learn that while they were gone their camp had been ransacked. The papers refer to it as the great Battle of Distilleryville and insist that Doke's brave actions make him a good candidate for President of the United States. The major-general, however, reports to the Secretary of War, "I think him a fool."

Doke, however, goes on to further success. As a Confederate faction makes their way to attack him, they are caught in a tornado and decimated. Later, Doke is woken up in the night about troop movements and, in his excitement, scares 2,300 mules — which then overtake the approaching Confederates. Doke takes all the credit and is promoted.

Bierce: Sweet-spiced with aromatic death!

The first published poem by Ohio-born Ambrose Bierce was printed in the September 21, 1867 edition of Californian. The 46-line "Basilica" follows a narrator who wanders "with aimless feet" by the ocean. Overwhelmed by the bright sunshine reflected from the "wind-smitten white" sea, he has to avert his eyes:

From bloody death of stricken day,
And ocean's leprous agony,
My weary eyes I drew away.

"Ocean's leprous agony"? The poem does hint at the wit which would become Bierce's legacy. In fact, the title of the poem, "Basilica," implies a religious mood. Most of the poem stays true to that, treating a sunny day at the beach like a spiritual experience. "My soul grew drunken with its ray" from the "glinting sun," he writes, like "liquid April filling May."

But it's all a smokescreen. As the romantic narrator offers his ode to the beautiful day, he encounters the true source of the poem's title: a basilisk (or "cockatrice"). The creature can kill him with one look, but the narrator describes him with the same poetic sentiment he used to describe the beautiful day:

With jeweled teeth, alas! and breath
Whose touch to passion ministreth —
Sweet-spiced with aromatic death!

The reader can only assume the narrator does not survive this run-in. After "Basilica," the Californian printed another of his poems before Bierce turned to essay-writing and short stories. He later recalled, "when I was in my twenties, I concluded one day that I was not a poet. It was the bitterest moment in my life." In his Devil's Dictionary, he defined poetry as "a form of expression peculiar to the Land beyond the Magazines."

*Some information from this post comes from Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company (1999) by Roy Morris, Jr. The full poem is collected in Poems of Ambrose Bierce (1995) edited by M. E. Grenander (it has never been published in any other collection, so far as I know).