Customer Reviews

Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

One of the many juicy nuggets of cynicism and biting wit from the glorious mind of Ambrose Bierce. Morris captures not only the man, but more importantly, the writer and the critic. Merciless and outrageous, the Bierce presented here should stand as a shining example of what writers should be but are not in our sentimental, oversensitive culture: brutally honest and always upholding the highest standards, both literary and personal. Bierce was an unapologetic misanthrope, but one cannot help but be charmed by his acidic commentary on the world he saw. Because Bierce spared no one, he avoids the labels of racist or sexist, even though many contemporary readers would like nothing more than to place Bierce in a convenient, unfair box. Bierce saw through artiface and sham, and he always believed, largely due to his horrific experiences in the Civil War (especially Shiloh) that mankind was eternally doomed to elevate the ridiculous at the expense of reason and intellect. This is a fantastic book well-written, with an eye for accuracy and detail. Even better, the author provides plenty of Bierce's own words; words that cut and wound, never apologizing for having done so.

While early on the book lagged, it built momentum to the point where I had a hard time putting it down. Examining the circumstances that produced this complicated individual proved fascinating and heartbreaking. Outside events and Bierce himself conspired to find misery and disappointment at every turn. The book is sympathetic to Bierce, but not fawning- he's not praised as a great writer, but he is acknowledged to be the best writer among Civil War veterans. His newspaper columns are also praised, and the erosion of his patriotism after what he saw in the war (not just at Shiloh) is something that can be best understood by post Vietnam-era readers. Many of the cited quotes (particularly the bitingly critical ones) contain a sharp wit that can't be missed. I enjoyed the book and it encouraged me to read more about the era. Bierce was in many ways a forerunner of Walter Winchell (read Neal Gabler's great bio) and you can also see traces of modern observational humorists such as George Carlin. Piece of advice, though- don't tell anyone that they remind you of Bierce!

Roy Morris does an honorable job in putting forth whom he believes Bierce was and consequently why he wrote. Morris is certainly sympathetic but by no means gushy. Although some might be distracted by his psychoanalytic queries, they are important questions in understanding literature and authors. This biography is a standout due to its form, content, and organization. The first thing I told friends when I started reading was how impressed I was with Morris's vocabulary and phrasing. His writing, however, is not superficial. His persuasiveness is due to his ability to convey factual content without boring the reader; and there are plenty of facts concerning Bierce, his family, friends, contempories, as well as the social and political atmospheres over his 7 decades. Finally, the books organization saves discussion of Bierce's mysterious disappearance for the last - where it should be. I highly recommend this book to Bierce fans, Civil War buffs, and hopeful young authors.

Conventional wisdom and history books have it that Ambrose Bierce died in Mexico during the Revolution. But Morris, in this in-depth biography, offers a fairly plausible alternative. (Sorry, not giving the store away as part of the review; you're going to have to get your hands on this book.)

Much of the rest of the speculation in which Morris engages is psychological. He first analyses Bierce's childhood and parents, then takes note of his Civil War head wound, and wonders just how much the two of these things combined to contribute to the Ambrose Bierce we know today.

That said, while not denying either childhood or adult causes of personality development -- or personality change -- I give more credence to genetic causes, i.e., the ideas of evolutionary psychology, properly applied.

I find it likely that Bierce was pretty much born with tendencies toward the character he later exhibited. His upbringing and his war wound may have intensified it, but I think he came by much of his cynicism naturally. Life events probably added the dollop of churlishness to it.

I teeter on a rating and end up at 4 stars. If I were to fine tune, it would probably be about 3 2/3 stars. The psycho-speculation is interesting, but in addition to being incomplete, if not somewhat wrong, too much of a focus on it means less focus on historical biography or on literary analysis.

I'd just finished reading AB's civil war stories. This book goes far in explaining Bierce's outlook on war & humanity(or the lack of it). It cements in my mind the deciding factor I think in Bierce's growth as a writer was the Civil War.

Ambrose Bierce never had trouble giving vent to what was on his mind. More than any other American writer, even the more celebrated Mark Twain, Bierce dared to gore the sacred cows of his day. This came with a price, as Roy Morris, Jr. notes in his 1995 biography.

Family ties were cut. Friendships were cast aside. Enemies were cultivated with a passion. Bierce may not have believed the pen was mightier than the sword, but he strove mightily to make up the difference.

"One of the rarest amusements in life is to go about with an icicle suspended by a string, letting it down the necks of the unwary," Bierce wrote during his days as San Francisco's most feared columnist. "The sudden shrug, the quick, frightened shudder, the yelp of apprehension are sources of pure, because diabolical, delight."

Bierce's fame rests today on three things: The black humor of his "Devil's Dictionary", the mind-bending short story "Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge", and the way he vanished from the face of the earth. Morris presents a more rounded figure than that, of harsh invective and clean narrative whose own experience from seeing some of the worst action of the American Civil War hardened him into a thing of steel, direct in purpose though rather cold to the touch.

Morris, a writer on Civil War subjects, gives Bierce's role in the war much of his focus. While noble ideals may still frame our understanding of the conflict, for Bierce it became a kind of senseless slaughter confirming an already dark world view. He served the Union with distinction, twice braving bullets to rescue wounded comrades, but in the end would describe patriotism as "fierce as a fever, pitiless as the grave, blind as a stone and irrational as a headless hen."

For Bierce, life was a pointless parade of pain and loneliness, its amusement hollow in the end. "The world was never Bierce's oyster, however much its irritations produced, on occasion at least, some fugitive pearls of acrid wisdom," Morris writes.

The best part of the biography depicts Bierce in his element as a West Coast columnist castigating both the wealthy and the weak. Religion drew especial scorn from the inveterate atheist. "After explaining the New Life for a series of years, it is proper that he should go and learn what it is like," he wrote of one minister's passing. "We beg for all his co-workers a similar privilege."

Morris sometimes strives to psychoanalyze Bierce through his short stories, the most successful of which used either the Civil War or the supernatural as a theme. This gets thin after a while. He argues for any parental figure in Bierce's fiction to be read as substitutes for Bierce's own father and mother. He tries to pull clues from the stories of the complicated, often dark feelings Bierce had for women, though this doesn't quite square with the fact Bierce suffered from no lack of female companionship in his life.

Morris's speculations seem on firmer, more fruitful ground when analyzing Bierce's final act, his disappearance, supposedly in Mexico where he went to see Pancho Villa and the Mexican Revolution. Here Morris examines the record and offers a theory that contradicts the established story but squares with Bierce's character as we come to know him here.

Does Bierce's greatness lie more with his writing (he produced many short stories but never a novel) or his singular character? Morris puts forward a strong literary defense for Bierce, but in the end its his personality that stays with you longest. Cold, clear-eyed, dyspeptic, and completely reconciled to life at its worst, Bierce offers a case study that the pain that comes with telling hard truths can afflict the teller worse than the one being told.

It's difficult for a biographer to be objective about a subject. They carry their own personality and experience into each work. This bio comes pretty close to an even-handed look at a very controversial figure.

If you are looking for one book on Bierce, buy this one. It's the best of the lot to date.

Reasonable introduction to the subject, but less sympathetic than Carey McWilliams and just as irrelevantly psychoanalytic as Paul Fatout. Factual enough, but shallow. The author seems constantly straining to be fair to Bierce, without much liking either him or his work.

Morris' biography of Bierce is thorough and has a lot of insight, but one thing that irritates is the implication that Bierce is not a "major" writer. There's even a a blurb on the book jacket from some critic at the Washington Post referring to him as a "lesser" writer.

Are you kidding? Bierce wrote at least four or five of the greatest short stories in American literature. He pioneered the idea of showing readers that they weren't paying attention; he explored near-death experience masterfully in "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"--as well as delivering a scathing criticism of war; he wrote the most riveting Civil War story of all time, "Chickamauga," and he inspired dozens of modern and postmodern writers--Hemingway through Joseph Heller.

Yes, Bierce's work was inconsistent. But so was Twain's, Crane's, and the work of dozens of other "major" writers.

The best Bierce criticism is Richard O'Connor's _Ambrose Bierce: A Biography_, published in 1967. If you're interested in Bierce, read that one first.

who has always been one of my favorite authors . . . another reveiwer,here, mentioned this was not as good as previous biographies . . . but since i have not read any others about him, i can't comment on that . . . i did find this book to be well-written and interesting.