SYMHC Classics: Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Bierce was a soldier, a journalist, an editor, a satirist and a philosopher. He was a complicated man with an unwavering moral code and a life of experiences both fantastic and horrific, which informed his writing. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hi, and Happy Saturday everyone. Since National Poetry Month is
coming to a close, we thought we would return to
our episode on Ambrose Beers today. He was a Civil
War veteran journalist, editor, satirist, and yes, poet, although in
this episode we spend more time talking about his other writing.
We got some emails after this episode first came out

(00:23):
about whether Beers might have had post traumatic stress disorder
or some other conditions stemming from his military service and
how that might have affected his writing and the uncertainties
around the end of his life. And while that is
certainly possible, we don't typically speculate on historical figures mental
health unless people who have a lot more experience in

(00:43):
medicine or mental health have already written on that subject.
There's a little more writing around this idea now, but
not so much in when we recorded the episode, and
since it is National Poetry Month, here is a very
quick poem by Ambrose Beers titled an Inscription for a
Statue of Napoleon. A conqueror as provident as brave, He

(01:05):
robbed the cradle to supply the grave. His rain laid
quantities of human dust. He fell upon the just and
the unjust, Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class
from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to

(01:29):
the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson
and uh, Tracy, are you watching or did you watch
True Detective? I did not, which you still can. But
thanks to its popularity, as you may have heard, it
actually crashed HBO go on its finale night. I did
hear that because so many people were trying to watch it. Uh.
Many people have found a renewed, or perhaps a new

(01:51):
interest in the writing of Robert W. Chambers because of
a book of short stories that he wrote in the
late eighteen hundreds, which is called The King and Yellow
in this book is referenced throughout the season one story
arc of True Detective with references to the Yellow King
and the wearing of masks in the City of Carcosa,
and in turn, Chambers influenced, UH a whole subgenre of

(02:13):
writers of so called weird fiction, including people like HP Lovecraft.
Definitely weird. Well, it's actually called weird fiction. It's not
just me going that's weird. I'm just saying, and I
love weird fiction. So, but influencing Chambers. So going back
before the work of Chambers was actually a man who
has been on my list for a long time. Uh.

(02:35):
So now seems like the perfect point to focus on him,
since True Detective pointed at all of this work so
much recently, and all of those mentions of Carcosa and
True Detective that come up. Uh, that name actually shows
up in chambers work, but it was borrowed from the
man we're going to talk about today, who is Amber's Beers,
who first mentioned it in a short story which was
called an Inhabitant of Carcosa and that was first published

(02:57):
in and Amber's Beers is a really fascinating character. He
was a soldier, he was a journalist, he was an editor,
He was something of a philosopher, he was a cynic. Uh.
He was a very complicated man with an unwavering moral code.
And his life experiences he touched so many things that

(03:17):
are historically significant in his time. Uh. And much of
it was fantastic, much of it was horrific, and it
all sort of informed his writing. Ambrose was born Ambrose
Gwinnette Beers on June forty two in Ohio. It was
in a settlement called Horse Cave. His parents, Marcus Aurelius

(03:39):
and Laura Sherwood. Beers had thirteen children, and Ambrose was
the tenth. And here's a fun fact that you can
pull out at a cocktail party if you have a
conversation law. Marcus and Laura only named their children names
that started with the letter A, So in addition to Ambrose,
they were Andrew, Aurelius, Arthur, Abigail, Augustus and Aurelia Us

(04:00):
of the female version of Aurelius Addison, Albert, Amelia, Adelia,
and al Maida. I feel like at the end they
were just swapping around some consonants to try to make
new names. It seems that way, but thirteen kids in
creativity might fall away. There's no There's no Amanda. Did
we have that name yet? When Ambrose was still a

(04:22):
young child, the family moved to Indiana and eventually settled
in Elkhart, and Marcus had a really pretty impressive library,
which served as a major source of education and inspiration
to Ambrose in his early years. He enrolled in the
Kentucky Military Institute at seventeen, and while he excelled, he
wound up leaving the school early to take odd jobs.

(04:44):
Uh so this is right, on the cusp of the
Civil War, and Beers ended up having a really impressive
military record during the course of the American Civil War.
At the start of the war, Beers's uncle, General Lucius
Varius Beers, established two companies of Union marines. This was
in April of eighteen sixty one. His nephew Ambrose was

(05:06):
among the men, and it was mere days after Lincoln's
call for volunteers when the younger Beers enlisted. Lucius had
instilled in Ambrose a strong opposition to the concept of slavery,
so he had been really eager to join the war effort. Yeah,
just as many other figures we've talked about and some
even recently, uh, the Beers family was very much part

(05:30):
of the abolitionists mindset. When Major General George McClellan led
an invasion on West Virginia, Ambrose was part of that campaign.
The following year, eighteen sixty two, he was at Shiloh
in Hardin County, Tennessee when it was attacked by the
Confederate army. That battle was devastating for the Union forces,
who were taken by surprise, but Beers was one of

(05:50):
the survivors who rallied under General Don Carlos Buell and
catalyzed a Confederate retreat, and the Shiloh Battle was one
of the bloodiest of the war, with more than twenty
three thousand casualties, and it's something that came up a
lot in his work. Two months later, the newly promoted
second Lieutenant Beers saved his commanding officer's life at the

(06:11):
Battle of Stones River in Murphysboro, Rutherford County, Tennessee, and
shortly thereafter, in February of eighteen sixty three, he was
promoted to first lieutenant and in his role as first Lieutenant,
Beer served with the ninth Indiana Regiment and he fought
at Chickamauga in September of eighteen sixty three. Beers was
also part of the Atlanta Campaign under General Sherman, and

(06:32):
this campaign was pretty rough for him personally. He lost
his closest friend during the fighting and he was also
struck in the head by a musket shot on June
twenty three, eighteen sixty four, during fighting at Kennesaw Mountain,
which is close to us. That kind of brings this
particular story very close to home. But yeah, the holes
were in Atlanta. We're in Atlanta right now. Uh Beers

(06:53):
was treated for his injury and he returned to the
front lines in September, so just a few months later,
and he served for several months before being discharged the
following January. Uh chronic dizziness and fainting spells that were
kind of brought on by this head injury had ended
his time in the war, but just a few months
before the conflict officially ended. It's not really surprising to

(07:14):
say that the Civil War changed him, because how could
it not. He was only eighteen when he enlisted, and
the horrors of battle affected him pretty deeply. The idealism
with which he had entered the service was replaced with
this cynicism that would become one of his most fundamental traits.
And his time in the war also, as I mentioned earlier,
informed a lot of his writing. There have been other

(07:36):
authors that wrote about the Civil War, and some of
them even served, like Mark Twain I think, had a
brief service. But Ambrose Beer served more than any of
those other writers. He was in the thick of it
for almost the entirety. I mean, he enlisted days after
things began and was only a couple of months before
it ended. When he was discharged. So those years he

(07:56):
was just constantly involved in the war and us sad
commentary on how deeply his time and the war had
changed him. Beers wrote later in his life, when I
asked myself what has become of Ambrose Beers, the youth
who fought at Chickamauga, I am bound to answer that
he is dead. Yeah. He was uh pretty open about

(08:20):
how much it had changed him and how sort of
bluntly it had ended his idealism. After leaving the war,
Ambrose worked in Alabama for a while as a treasury agent,
and then in eighteen sixty six he was employed by
General W. B. Hazen for an expedition into Indian territory.
And Beers had worked as a topographical engineer under Hazen

(08:41):
for a period during the war, and the general wanted
his map making skills again as his team made their
way west. Let's travel with Hazen took Beers all the
way to California. They arrived in San Francisco in eighteen
sixty seven, and Beers decided to stay on the West coast,
and he found employment with the s Mint. But he
had begun to work on writing in earnest at the

(09:03):
same time, and he started submitting essays and short satire
pieces to local papers. He was eventually published in the
San Francisco news Letter, and when the managing editor of
the newsletter resigned in eighteen sixty eight, Beer spilled the vacancy. Yeah,
even though he really didn't have any formal journalism training,
he kind of decided he was going to become a
journalist and studied on his own and came managing editor

(09:26):
of a paper. Uh. And as managing editor, he made
a name for himself by taking over the weekly column
called The Town Crier, and he really used this as
his soapbox to lampoon government officials. We mentioned earlier his
sort of uh rigid moral code and he basically if
he thought anybody was doing anything wrong, he would call
them out publicly in his column and right really derisive

(09:50):
things about them. Just pretty aggressive. Yeah. While he was
still working as a managing editor, he was also developing
another talent outside a journalism by working on short fiction
and so much in the same way as he started
his journalism career by submitting essays while working for the Mint,
he started submitting his short stories to literary journals. He

(10:11):
eventually published his first fictional story, The Haunted Valley, in
the Overland Monthly. And before we get to his life
sort of blossoming in terms of becoming a family man,
is it cool if we pause for just a second
for a word from our sponsor? Is let's do it?

(10:33):
On December one, Beers married a woman named Mary Ellen Day,
and just a few months later, in March of eighteen
seventy two, he quit his job at the paper so
that the couple could take an extended honeymoon in London,
although they ended up moving to Bristol not long into
their stay abroad because the weather there was more hospitable
to Ambrose's asthma. While he was in England, he also works,

(10:56):
submitting his writing to British journals. He eventually published to
work in the journal's Figaro London Sketchbook and Fun and
he ended up with a regular column and Figaro. Yeah,
he was writing comedy. Even though I will talk a
lot in this about how sort of dark some of
his writing is. Uh, A lot of what he was
writing was really uh, you know, funny, little satirical sketches.

(11:18):
And this time while he was in England, was productive
for both his career and his family. The couple's first child,
named Day, was born in eighteen seventy two, and their
second son, named Lee, was born in eighteen seventy four,
so they really were having an extended stay in England.
And in between these babies, Beers's first three books were born,

(11:39):
The Fiends Delight, Nuggets and Dust and Cobwebs from an
Empty Skull uh. And after baby number two, the Beers's
returned to California in eighteen seventy five, and not long
after they returned to California, they had a third child,
who was a daughter named Helen. Meanwhile, Ambrose returned to
his writing career. Once they were stateside again, he got

(12:01):
a job as an editor of the journal Argonaut. In
another case of kind of repeating patterns in his life,
he wrote a weekly column that often called out public
officials for their moral failings. However, this column, which was
called Prattle, also had the leeway to give him an
outlook for publishing fiction on a regular basis. He wrote

(12:22):
Prattle as editor of Argonaut for three years before setting
out on a surprising enterprise, you know, surprising and short lived.
In eighty Ambrose took a position as a general manager
of a mining company in South Dakota, and while the
allure of the job was probably the promise of, you know,
significant income, the gold rush had really peaked several years earlier,

(12:46):
and the corruption in the general depravity that he encountered
uh soured him on this position almost immediately. I mean,
we've mentioned how he liked to really call out people
that he thought were morally corrupt, So you can imagine
an entire business that he felt was just filled with
those people. Was really distasteful. And so by the end
of that year he was back in San Francisco. Beers

(13:08):
was about to start writing Prattling in but not with
Argonaut this time around. His column was featured in WASP.
In addition to using it as a soapbox to call
people out for their behavior and for using it for
short stories, he also used the column to share pieces
about the Civil War as well as short satirical blurbs
that would become the foundation of The Cynic's Word Book

(13:30):
and that would eventually be retitled The Devil's Dictionary. Is
the first thing I ever read by him, and that's
kind of how I fell in love with Ambrose Beers,
and we'll talk more about that in a bit. Uh.
And after leaving the WASP in eight six, and that's
one of those things where, uh, when you see it
written about, there's always there were lots of reasons he left.
Like he was, as you might imagine, not always the

(13:53):
easiest man to be around, because he did have this
sort of very strict code in his head about how
people should be and behave, and he was very opinionated
and very outspoken about it. So that there are many
factors to that exit from the WASP, and they're not
always clear. Uh. But having burned many bridges with his
critical column, he had a lot of difficulty finding work

(14:15):
after that, So for about a year he went without
a job. However, a man with a huge reputation for
being difficult in his own right came into the picture
and changed everything. So Prattle was revived by none other
than William Randolph Hurst, who offered Beers a position at
the San Francisco Examiner. This was before Hurst was the

(14:36):
media giant that he would later become. The Examiner was
his first paper, and beerst took the job on the
condition that he could write whatever he wanted, uh, like
no editorial shut down of anything. And those were terms
that Hurst actually agreed to. You know, he had sought
out beer, so presumably he was willing to be pretty

(14:57):
generous with his deal. And so Prattle One again became
a combination of Ambrose Beers's fiction and his social commentary.
And this time he built on the work that he
did at the Wasp, and he published a much larger
volume of his Civil War writings, including an occurrence at
owl Creek Bridge, which is probably his most famous work.
In this tale, which was published initially in serial form,

(15:19):
a southern gentleman contemplates his life and reminiscence about his
home and his family. Is He's about to be hung
by Yankee soldiers. And it's much more complicated than that.
Beers is sort of a master of sort of shifting
what you think is real and what is actually happening. Uh.
And the tone of the piece is cold, and in
it a steady diet of violence has kind of jaded

(15:40):
all of the players, uh, which is something that comes
up again and again in his work. This one's my
first exposure to Ambrose Bears. Did you like it when
you initially read it? It might have been in school
so that all color. It was in school, and uh,
I don't remember making or disliking it. It's also been

(16:03):
made into a film several times. Yes, I also remember
watching a film of it in school. So yeah, there's
it's it's interesting. I feel like having come in from
The Devil's Dictionary, which is much funnier and kind of
absurdist in some ways. Yeah, I have a much different
sort of relationship with him than people that were assigned

(16:24):
Civil war stories by him when they were kids. Well,
it's one of those things that I feel like I
read it at the same approximate time as reading Romeo
and Juliet, which there's It's one of those things where,
in hindsight, I kind of go, is that really the
best thing for middle schoolers to get there? You know,
first taste of this thing with Anyway, while Bears had

(16:46):
achieved a certain level of success as a writer at
this time, his home life was kind of unraveling. He
and Mary had grown apart, and he had started to
suspect that she was being unfaithful, although there was really
no evidence of infidelity. Yeah, it's one of those things that,
similar to when he left the Wasp, there's a lot
of fuzzy nous around it. There's not a lot of

(17:07):
hard details. He thinks that she received two letters from
an admirer, and it kind of seems like his pride
may have caused him to draw conclusions and be dug
in about something that really there was no substance to, uh,
which is a pity because then after almost seventeen years
of being married they separated in Then just a year later,

(17:29):
their oldest son, Day was killed in a gunfight over
Day's fiancee, who had run off with another man. Both
of the young men wound up dying as a result
of their wounds. And despite all of this turmoil that
was going on in his private life in the late
eighteen eighties, UH the early eighteen nineties were some of
Beers's most successful years as a writer. He published several books,

(17:53):
all very quickly, tales of soldiers and civilians, aggregated his
civil our stories and got a lot of critical acclaim.
The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter is written as a
diary of a man struggling with morality, and that was
promoted as a translation of a lost German text. Then

(18:14):
there's Can Such Things Be, which is a collection of
supernatural short stories, and that one includes an inhabitant of Carcosa.
And he also started at this time to mentor younger writers,
and that's something he would do for years, although apparently,
you know, he remained a rather critical human being, Like
he was very judgmental and critical of others, and he

(18:35):
would distance himself from his students and writers he was
supposed to be mentoring that he thought weren't very talented
or didn't have very original ideas, Like he wouldn't it
sounds like he wouldn't really address it and be like,
I don't really think you have what it takes. He
would just sort of quietly shut them out. He was
a complicated and difficult man. I think so right as

(19:05):
Beers's career was that, it's apex Hurst sent him to Washington,
d C. What Hurst wanted to do was kind of
enlist Ambrose Bierce's vitriol and sense of justice uh into
his fight with against the dealings of Collis Huntington's. So
Huntington's had been accused of being politically corrupt before, and

(19:27):
he was trying to slide a bill through Congress which,
if it passed, was going to forgive all the outstanding
loans that the government held. Some of these had paid
for the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad. And the reason
this is important to Huntington's is that he was basically
the last man standing of the group that was responsible
for building the project, so he was not super interested

(19:50):
in bearing the financial burden and paying back all these
loans that he now was responsible for. Hurst had gotten
wind of Huntington's scheme to shirk all these loans, and
he basically sent his journalist attack dog after him. Beers
was not a blind pawn in all of this. He
thought that the railroad was corrupt and that Congress shouldn't
be helping, and so his skilled rhetoric drew attention to

(20:12):
the bill, which was ultimately defeated. And that's the whole
episode that I mean. There have been books just about
that event, about the fight of the railroad and Congress
being involved in the legalities of the corruption, and uh,
if anybody wanted to explore that, just know it's out there. Uh.
Beers returned to California after all of this for a while,

(20:33):
but soon he asked to be transferred to Washington, d C.
Permanently and he and Hurst, as you can imagine two
very opinionated, very outspoken men were known to butt heads
uh and argue over things like this. But the request
was approved and Beers moved to d C. And started
writing his pieces for The Examiner as well as The

(20:54):
Cosmopolitan from his new home on the East Coast. And
that was in So the nineteen hundreds did not start
off especially kindly for him. His remaining son, who had
followed in his father's footsteps as a journalist, died in
nineteen o one from pneumonia, which might have been complicated
by a drinking problem, and in nineteen o five, his wife, Mary,

(21:17):
from whom he'd been separated since, died of a heart attack.
And she had actually only filed for divorce a few
months prior to her death, citing abandonment. And there is
a whole other um theory that she thought that Ambrose
wanted to get remarried, so she was sort of freeing
him from their legal marriage, but he didn't. He didn't

(21:38):
ever marry again. From nineteen o nine to nineteen twelve,
Beers worked exclusively on a twelve volume collection of his
work that was published by Neil Publishing Company, and he
wasn't working for hers anymore. During this time he seemed
to be kind of done with new writing in general,
and once the publication project of that twelve volume collection

(22:01):
was complete, Beers began a tour of Civil War battlefields
while he was en route to Mexico to witness ponto
Villa's Revolution, which, as you can imagine, was a rather
dangerous place for a foreigner to be wandering. Uh. He
also squared away all of his personal business in this time,
although whether that was just the cautionary preparedness of somebody

(22:21):
getting ready to travel to a foreign country that was
potentially dangerous, or a man who pretty much recognizes that
he's at the end of his life tying up loose
ends is a little bit unclear. You know, it would
have played out pretty much the same way either way.
He wrote a letter to his niece just before he left,
and one of the things that said was if you
hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone

(22:43):
wall and shot to rags, please note that I think
that a pretty good way to depart this life. It
beats old age disease or falling down the cellar stairs
to be a gringo in Mexico. Ah, that is euthanasia.
He yeah, it's kind of jove but also a little ominous. Uh.
Many people have wondered if he really was just going

(23:05):
to Mexico sort of with the intent that he would
not ever come back. Uh. There continue to be rumors
and theories about that. Uh. And we don't know what
precisely happened to him on his travels while he was there.
His death date is generally listed as nineteen thirteen comma
nineteen fourteen question mark. Uh. Sometimes it's just listed as

(23:25):
nineteen fourteen question mark. We have no way of knowing
how long he lived after his last correspondence, which was
a letter that he sent from Chihuahua in late December.
In that letter, he wrote as to me, I leave
here tomorrow for an unknown destination. And some people have
read into that that that was like a suicide note. Uh,
and others are like, no, he he was just wandering.

(23:45):
He didn't have a plan, and we don't know. But
after it became apparent that he had disappeared and no
one had heard from him, his daughter Helen petition the
US government to investigate what had happened to him, and
they did, but nothing was ever found. He really kind
of did a thin air move. Yeah, And of course
there've been sightings and theories about what happened, but Ambrose

(24:07):
Beers disappeared pretty thoroughly. There was really not any kind
of trace to turn over or obsess about. You don't
know if he was killed by Federal two troops, rebels,
ponto Villa himself. Nobody really knows. Some scholars have pointed
to the siege of Ohinaga, Chihuahua in January nine, fourteen
as a likely place of his death, but there's really
no substantial evidence that's ever been found. Yeah, it's just,

(24:30):
you know, a big violent event that happened near where
he was last known to be. Uh. So, theoretically that
could have easily been a place where he could have
died and been lost kind of in the carnage of
the battle. Uh And when you read Beers's work, as
I've said, there's definitely this sense of darkness and futility
and reality juxtaposed with surreality, and his war stories in particular,

(24:52):
I find extremely affecting. Chickamauga, for example, tells the story
of this young deaf boy who is on a battlefield,
but he believes it's all a game, like he thinks
he's in either a dream situation or his imagination, and
he's so lost in this, this imaginary play, that he
fails to recognize the horrible reality around him, even though

(25:13):
Beerst describes the carnage of war with extremely graphic detail. Uh.
And similarly, in Couda Gross, the story centers around a
man who kills a friend of his in a mercy killing.
The man was wounded and really suffering, and as a consequence,
the man that did the mercy killing is executed as
a killer himself. And this sort of darkness and cruelty

(25:35):
of war is always present in his works, as well
as a certain detachment even in this you know, pretty
intense description of truly grizzly scenes. Well, and that's that's
one of the reasons why uh spoiler alert, if you
have never watched Jacob's Ladder. A lot of people look
at Jacob's Ladder as a like a reworking of occurrence

(25:58):
at Owl Creek Bridge for the Vietnam War. Yes, that
comparison is often made, but his work is not without humor,
even though the tone of the humor is usually black.
The Devil's Dictionary, like I said, I find hilarious. It's
really snarky, and so to end on a humorous note,
I thought we could read a couple of definitions from
that work, because it has laid out like a dictionary,

(26:18):
with words and then their meanings. As written by Ambrose Beers.
Sarah with love nown a temporary insanity curable by marriage.
Quotation noun the act of repeating erroneously the words of another.
I love that one. I know the Internet needs to
see that one. There's prey verb to asked that the

(26:39):
laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a
single petitioner, confessedly unworthy politeness nown the most acceptable hypocrisy. Well,
and this, this next one is funny to me because
my brother calls the lottery a stupidity tax, and sometimes
I call it a day dreaming license. Lottery Nown attacks
on people who are bad math. And finally, if I

(27:02):
just love this one, it's so absurd and wonderful. Hash.
It's categorized as X. It gets no part of speech assignment.
There is no definition for this word. No one knows
what hash is. Corn Beef and deliciousness is the commentary
on sort of the mash together of things that hash
often is so yeah, that's Ambrose Beer. I highly encourage

(27:25):
people to read his work. It is easy to get
a hold of because almost all of it is on
Project Gutenberg, uh and also many other places online. I mean,
you can do a quick search and find just about
the entirety of the body of his work. His letters
are a little bit harder to get a hold of.
Thank you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic.

(27:49):
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(28:10):
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