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MENCKENIANA a Quarterly Journal MENCKENIANA A Quarterly Journal S. L. Harrison, Editor Gail Shivel, Associate Editor Editorial Board: Charles A. Fecher, Editor Emeritus Frederick Betz, Southern Illinois University (Carbondale) Vincent Fitzpatrick, University of Maryland (Baltimore County) Fred Hobson, University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) Richard Schrader, Boston College Menckeniana is published quarterly by the Enoch Pratt Free Library, 400 Cathedral Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21201. c 2011, All Rights Reserved. ISSN 0025-9233. Submissions and books for review should be sent to the Editor, Menckeniana, P.O. Box 249154, Coral Gables, Florida, 33124 or by e-mail to [email protected]. Typeset (exclusive of cover) by Gail Shivel using LATEX AMBROSE AND HENRY Don Swaim Adistanceofthirty-eight years separated the two literary infidels. When they first met in the winter of 1911, Ambrose Bierce was sixty- nine and renowned. H.L. Mencken was thirty-one and on the cusp of achieving lasting prominence. Bierce was only two years from his disappearance into Pancho Villa’s Mexican desert—while Mencken would write voluminously until 1948, silenced by a catastrophic stroke. The occasion of their encounter was the funeral of the literary critic Percival Pollard, who died of a brain tumor in Baltimore in December. Except for their ages, the two writers had much in common. Both were journalists, both were enthralled by the English language, both were published authors, both were partial to alcohol, both were reli- gious skeptics, and both, in their time, were America’s greatest cynics. Physically, they were opposites. Bierce was tall, more than six feet, with blue eyes, blond hair and mustache turned to white, and strikingly handsome. Mencken was moon-faced, chubby (“without muscles” as playwright and novelist Ben Hecht put it), hair parted in the middle, cigar usually clenched between his teeth. Certainly, Mencken knew of Bierce long before Bierce became aware of Mencken. In addition to his columns in the Hearst news- papers and Cosmopolitan Magazine, Bierce had published ten books, including his masterpiece, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1893), ti- tled in Britain In the Midst of Life, the collection that included the classic story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Mencken, in My Life as Author and Editor (published posthumously in 1993), writes, “though I had a relish for Bierce’s epigrams, I thought his short stories rather artificial, and his critical writing—especially his insistence on what he chose to regard as ‘pure’ English—as decidedly second-rate.” Clearly Mencken, perhaps intimidated and unconsciously influenced by the older writer, failed to give Bierce his proper due. It is likely that Bierce learned of Mencken through Percival Pollard, with whom Henry had corresponded, and possibly through Pollard’s influential critical work Their Day in Court, published in 1909 by 1 Walter Neale, who, incidentally, was Bierce’s publisher at the time. In his book Pollard, with overly abundant commas, gushes over Bierce non-stop for thirty-one consecutive pages: “Ambrose Bierce, the only one of our men of letters sure to be heard of, side by side with Poe and Hawthorne, when our living ears are stopped with clay, committed, for most of his life, the fatal mistake of being, as well as a literary ge- nius, a great journalist.” Pollard also mentions the youthful Mencken, but only in passing and only in connection with Mencken’s vision of Nietzsche as standing “aloof from his fellows.” By this time, the pre- cocious Mencken had published six slim volumes, including The Gist of Nietzsche (1910), as well as his uncredited What You Ought to Know About Your Baby (1910), ghostwritten for Leonard K. Hirsh- berg, M.D. Irony of ironies, six years earlier, Mencken had written hack advertising copy for Baltimore’s Loudon Park Cemetery. This was where Pollard’s body was to be cremated, and where Mencken himself would be buried alongside members of his family. Pollard had written to Mencken to complain about splitting head- aches. Henry, a hypochondriac and normally rational until it came to health, urged Pollard to travel to Baltimore for treatment. Mencken knew just the place, a small local hospital that specialized in homeopa- thy, the notion that gradual ingestion of diluted minerals and other substances would somehow enable the body to heal itself. Unlike Mencken, Bierce, who knew quackery when he saw it, wasn’t fooled. He sardonically called homeopathy (which he spells homoeopathy in his Devil’s Dictionary), “A theory and practice of medicine, which aims to cure the disease of fools. As it does not cure them, and some- times kills the fools, it is ridiculed by the thoughtless, but commended by the wise.” In any event, Pollard’s wife brought the desperately ill critic to Baltimore from their home in New Milford, Connecticut. Bierce, a product of a struggling farm family of English ancestry, was born on June 24, 1842, in southern Ohio and reared hardscrabble in rural Indiana, although his father, a staunch opponent of slavery, boasted a decent library. Bierce once wrote, presumably of his child- hood home, about “the scum-covered duck pond, the pigsty close by it, the ditch where the sour-smelling house drainage fell.” Four decades after Bierce’s earthly debut, Mencken arrived on September 12, 1880, in Baltimore, a metropolis of 400,000, to a well-to-do cigar 2 manufacturer who produced such brands as La Cubana, Havana Rose, El Cabinet, Daisy, and La Mencken Paneta (although in adulthood Mencken smoked “Uncle Willies,” rolled by the Schafer-Pfaf Com- pany). Neither Bierce nor Mencken earned more than high school educations. Mencken graduated from the Baltimore Polytechnic In- stitute, while Bierce spent one year at the now defunct Kentucky Military Institute in Lyndon, failing to graduate. Both men were essentially autodidacts, each read voraciously, and both developed determined and vocal opinions about what they read. Bierce, at six- teen, became a printer’s devil for the anti-slavery Northern Indianan in Warsaw. At nineteen, Mencken landed an unpaid job as a reporter for the Baltimore Morning Herald. Prospects were bleak for young Bierce, youngest of ten siblings (all of whose first names quixotically began with the letter A), until the outbreak of the Civil War. Enlisting as a private in the Ninth Regiment, Indiana Volunteers was the best decision he could have made. Although severely wounded in the battle of Kennesaw Moun- tain, Georgia, he recovered, earned the rank of brevet major, and entertained the notion of making the military his career. Bierce came of age during that terrible war, and its carnage influenced him and his writing morbidly, incalculably, and forever. On the other hand, in Baltimore, young Henry never experienced the military, certainly not warfare, although reporting on the great fire of 1904, which rav- aged the heart of the city, proved to be a milestone in his life. As a journalist for the Herald, Mencken went into the conflagration as “a boy driven by the hot gas of youth,” he later said, only to emerge as “settled” and “almost middle-aged.” For a man who never experienced battle, Mencken was astonish- ingly flippant regarding war. In 1926, he wrote: “The pacifists who now rant in the open forums and suffragette magazines all seem to ground their case on the thesis that the people of the United States 3 naturally abhor war and shrink from its horrors as an I.W.W. shrinks from soap. The notion, it seems to me, has a flavor of applesauce. It would be far more accurate, though plainly not the whole truth, to say that they delight in war and enjoy its gaudy uproar as a country boy enjoys circus day...As poor men go in this world, soldiers are well fed and well clothed and have very little work to do.” As much as Bierce wrote about war, he did not generalize. He allowed his personal experience on the field of battle speak for itself, such as what he saw at Shiloh: “Along a line...lay the bodies, half buried in ashes; some in the unlovely looseness of attitude denoting sudden death by the bullet, but by far the greater number in postures of agony that told of the tormenting flame. Their clothing was half burnt away—their hair and beard entirely; the rain had come too late to save their nails. Some were swollen to double girth; other shriveled to manikins. According to the degree of exposure, their faces were bloated and black or yellow and shrunken. The contraction of muscle which had given them claws for hands had cursed each countenance with a hideous grin. Faugh! I cannot catalogue the charms of these gallant gentlemen who had got what they enlisted for.” Unlike Mencken, Bierce was peripatetic. After the war, he served as a Treasury agent in Alabama, was a member of a military expe- dition through dangerous Indian territory, and worked as a watch- man at the San Francisco Mint. He wrote and read and studied the night-hours away. Eventually, he wrote and edited for such California weeklies as The News-Letter and The Wasp. Later, he found himself as an expatriate writer in England (where he published his first three books under the pseudonym Dod Grile), as a failed gold mine opera- tor in the Black Hills of Dakota, and—unexpectedly—a star-columnist with his own byline for William Randolph Hearst’s new San Francisco Examiner. Not only did Bierce become famous, he became arbiter, no matter how offthe mark, of all that was then literary in Califor- nia, earning himself the sobriquet “Wickedest Man in San Francisco.” Hearst, a man Bierce came to despise, dispatched him to Washington, D.C.
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