TALES TOO TERRIFYING, TOO real to be told in polite circles; epigrams too dark for easy appreciation. A body of work too real for realism. Ambrose Bierce may be the most unjustly (and unwisely) neglected of great American writers.
Multiple viewpoints, withheld information, inquests that establish nothing and reports from beyond the grave all support a linguistic architecture as complex, as impressive as any in our literature. And yet, and yet.
Birth: the first and direst of all disasters; a definition of the sort that damns Bierce as a cynic, a limited writer. Contrariwise, Samuel Beckett’s very similar observation certifies him a genius.
But Bierce is so much more than the jaundiced hack-author of a dozen or so memorably scary stories. The implicit moral profusion of his work seems to involve every atom of it, perceptible or not. Indeed, strange absences are almost common in his work; positive, aggressive absences that tear the unlucky, or unwary, out of the fabric not only of life, but of being itself. “The Difficulty of Crossing a Field,” for instance, or in his definition of the word “kill”: to create a vacancy without nominating a successor. In a wholly other context, the ancient Greeks named this anangke, and it is one of the primal motors of tragedy, a kind of positive, and therefore paradoxical, negation.
I see him as a drastic moralist; like Nathanael West, Ezra Pound and Katherine Anne Porter. Absolutists all, absolutists of moral intuition. Bierce’s craft is impeccable, uncompromised and of a classical elegance that is as uncanny as his vision itself.
The drastic moralist functions as the scourge of sentimentalism; and in our American context, this sentimentalism may be defined as a nostalgia for what never existed (another bizarre absence). This force is as strong, perhaps, as anything in the culture, and Bierce certainly knew what his odds were in the struggle against it. On a more mundane level, he fought as a convicted abolitionist in the Civil War most of the better class of yankee writers avoided; and, later, against the San Francisco real estate and railroad tycoons in a truly epic war of words. Yet, who today can be bothered to consider the importance of such unfashionable struggles?
Sentimental America still hates Bierce, as well it should. He and his writing stands for everything we have not become.