Ambrose Bierce's Civilians and Soldiers in Context
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Ambrose Bierce's Civilians and Soldiers in Context

A Critical Study

Donald Blume

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Ambrose Bierce's Civilians and Soldiers in Context

A Critical Study

Donald Blume

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Ambrose Bierce's In the Midst of Life, the second volume of The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, is hailed by critics and scholars alike as his most important literary work. In Ambrose Bierce's Civilians and Soldiers in Context: A Critical Study, Donald T. Blume refutes this and instead identifies Bierce's original 1892 collection as his most definitive and authoritative work. The two subsequent collections, appearing in 1898 and 1909, although containing subtle clues pointing back to the importance of the 1892 collection, are in their primary effect literary red herrings.

This new study reveals that the nineteen stories that comprised the original Tales of Soldiers and Civilians consist of carefully developed and interrelated meanings and themes that can only be fully understood by examining the complex circumstances of their original productions. By considering each of the nineteen tales in the order in which they were first published and by drawing heavily on contemporary related materials, Blume re-creates much of the original milieu into which Bierce carefully placed his short stories. Blume systematically examines many of Bierce's editing flaws, exposing that Bierce's decisions often weakened the original literary merits of his stories. Ultimately this story reveals, tale by tale and layer by layer, that the nineteen stories included in Bierce's 1892 collection were masterpieces of fiction, destined to become classics. Historians and Civil War enthusiasts, as well as literary scholars, will welcome this new study.

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1. “A Holy Terror”

The earliest and longest of the nineteen tales collected in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, “A Holy Terror” appeared in the San Francisco–based Wasp on December 23, 1882.1 Because of this early date of first publication, the inclusion of the story in the 1892 collection initially appears problematic since the remaining stories all appeared in print within a five-year span from December of 1886 through April of 1891. In fact, despite its early appearance, “A Holy Terror” is thematically linked to many of the tales in the 1892 collection and Bierce’s decision to include it in the collection is readily defensible. As will become clear, the story is also a particularly appropriate and illustrative opening subject for this study.
A central feature of Bierce’s treatment of “A Holy Terror” concerns the way he used his editorial position at the Wasp to carefully integrate the story into its host publication through the publication of related material over a span of many months. Of particular interest is the fact that the elaborate staging of the story anticipates Bierce’s subsequent treatment of many of his tales destined for Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. While the elaborate prepublication groundwork for “A Holy Terror” appears to have been directed at regular readers of the paper, Bierce also took steps to make the story more accessible to new readers. Thus, assuming that many people would be reading the publication for the first time, the Christmas editorial of the Wasp pointedly albeit cryptically warned new readers that they needed to pay careful attention to the details of things. Even though Bierce deliberately introduced the subject matter of the story and embedded subtle hints as to its meaning in the Christmas editorial, many readers must inevitably have extracted uninformed interpretations. Bierce apparently had these flawed interpretations in mind when in the months that followed the December 23, 1882, appearance of the story he continued to provide retrospective material with clear connections to “A Holy Terror.” While it seems unlikely that Bierce deliberately planned out the full details of his multifaceted presentation and even though he did not entirely reprise the performance while he was at the Wasp, understandings gained by carefully examining Bierce’s staged presentation of “A Holy Terror” remain instructive when and where his later tales are considered.
As touched on earlier, despite their best intentions, most Wasp-based readers of “A Holy Terror” must have extracted readings that, whether grossly wrong or simply incomplete, Bierce would have judged uninformed. As we shall see, many of Bierce’s tales elicit similarly uninformed readings by modern readers, and in light of this general fact it is useful to begin discussing each story by providing a deliberately cursory reading. In the case of “A Holy Terror,” once an unenlightened reading is established, we can turn our attention to restoring the original context of the story as it appeared within the Wasp both by making extensive use of “Prattle” excerpts and other material, and by noting and analyzing significant textual differences between the initial and subsequent versions of the story. This process of recontextualization allows the recovery of additional details, meanings, and interpretations missed during the initial reading, and, ultimately, out of these various strands of inquiry a much more fully realized close reading of “A Holy Terror” emerges.
“A Holy Terror” is subdivided into five sections or chapters. The first section of the story begins with a cryptic introduction of “the latest arrival at Hurdy-Gurdy,” a small abandoned mining camp in California. After a brief summary of the tawdry history of the camp, which concludes with a vivid description of its present advanced state of ruinous decay (in short, Bierce takes pains to point out that the camp is dead), Bierce begins the second section by describing the actions of the still unnamed man “who had now rediscovered Hurdy-Gurdy” as he paces off and stakes a claim in the cemetery of the decaying camp. At the end of this section we learn that the man is named Jefferson Doman. In the third section Bierce explains how Jefferson Doman has come to be in Hurdy-Gurdy. Six years previously Doman came west from New Jersey in search of gold, leaving his girl, Mary Matthews, behind; left to her own devices, Matthews falls into bad male company in the form of a gambler and after the gambler catches her stealing he bestows upon her a disfiguring facial scar. Matthews, craftily playing all her cards, duly informs the still faithful Doman of her disfigurement in a letter, complete with a revealing photograph, albeit attributing the scar to a fall from a horse and omitting any mention of the man’s role in the affair. Predictably, the faithful and rather naïve Doman reacts to the news by cherishing Matthews all the more. Turning again to Doman’s more immediate story, Bierce explains that after years of failure, thanks to a revealing letter sent by a friend, Barney Bree, then living in Hurdy-Gurdy, Doman looks to be on the verge of striking it rich. The letter, which Doman has inadvertently misplaced for two years, during which time Bree has expired from overindulgence in drink, explains that Bree had found gold in the graveyard. Specifically, Bree’s letter reveals that a rich gold vein is located at the bottom of a grave that holds a certain “Scarry,” a local woman of some repute for her exploits.
The fourth section of “A Holy Terror” begins with Doman standing over Scarry’s grave and reminiscing about the woman he has never had a chance to meet due to his “vagrantly laborious life” as a prospector. Subsequently, after rather gleefully pronouncing that Scarry “was a holy terror,” Doman quickly sets about excavating her grave. As darkness descends, Doman reaches Scarry’s casket, finds it has no handles, feverishly enlarges his mining shaft around it, and levers it onto one end in the open grave, which is now illuminated only by the light of the recently risen full moon. Throughout this section Bierce has painstakingly established the intricately layered elements of the scene that conspire to facilitate Doman’s undoing. Doman is not merely in a cemetery located in a deserted and decaying mining camp at night: at this point in the affair he is standing, “up to his neck,” next to a coffin in a relatively recently occupied newly reopened grave, near the overhanging “black branches of the dead tree”—a hanging tree—with a “weather-worn rope that dangled from its ghostly hand.” Further heightening the moonlit scene’s oppressive atmosphere, readers next learn that Doman is being serenaded by “[t]he monotonous howling of distant wolves, sharply punctuated by the barking of a coyote.” And yet more ill omens confront Doman: first an owl “flapped awkwardly above him on noiseless wings,” and then, with “his senses all alert,” “during this lull in the battle,” which we are told occurs as “[t]he Assassin was cloaking the sword,” Doman “became sensible of a faint, sickening odor.” Doman attributes the odor to a rattlesnake,2 and Bierce uses this misinterpretation to introduce another traditional harbinger of death into the scene. Thus, as Doman looks into the “gloom of the grave” surrounding his feet for the imaginary rattlesnake, “[a] hoarse, gurgling sound, like the death-rattle in a human throat, seemed to come out of the sky, and a moment later a great, black, angular shadow, like the same sound made visible, dropped curving from the topmost branch of the spectral tree, fluttered for an instant before his face, and sailed fiercely away into the mist along the creek. It was a raven.”
Only after this litany of this worldly as opposed to otherworldly horrors does Bierce allow Doman’s attention to focus again on the coffin. Fully primed for the Assassin’s sword, Doman now discovers that the casket has been put into the grave upside down. After momentarily trying to read the words engraved on the identifying metal plate of the coffin from his end of the open grave, the thought that Scarry’s remains are facing him, separated from his sight only by the rotting redwood boards of the casket, takes hold of Doman and soon he is imagining the “livid corpse of the dead woman” and a possible connection between her descriptive name and his own beloved Mary Matthews’s disfiguring scar. A long paragraph documents Doman’s futile struggle with the Assassin, a struggle that revolves around Doman’s attempt to determine if the woman known as Scarry could possibly be Mary Matthews. Emerging from this “agony of anticipation,” which threatens to kill him even before his curiosity can be gratified “by the coup de grâce of verification,” in the next paragraph Doman initially believes that the coffin has moved toward him. When he realizes that his enemy had not advanced upon him, but rather “he had advanced upon his enemy,” Doman smiles because he realizes the coffin cannot retreat and strikes the metal plate on the decayed coffin lid with the hilt of his knife. With “a sharp, ringing percussion, and with a dull clatter” the wood shatters and falls away to reveal to the now “frenzied, shrieking man” the “woman standing tranquil in her silences.” Confronted by the woman’s remains, Doman dies of terror.
Bierce concludes “A Holy Terror” with an appropriately pithy final section. Some months after Doman’s demise, a party of travelers on their way to Yosemite Valley from San Francisco stops in Hurdy-Gurdy for dinner. Paying a visit to the hanging tree and the cemetery, they find the opened grave containing the skeletal remains of two bodies. While the men are entertaining themselves with the grave’s contents (including the discovery of iron pyrite, or fool’s gold, in the grave), one of the women, Mrs. Porfer, wanders away, ostensibly because of her inability to “endure the disagreeable business” of the grave looting, and finds Jefferson Doman’s abandoned coat. After assuring herself that she is not being observed, Mrs. Porfer “thrust[s] her jeweled hand into the exposed pocket” and is rewarded with the discovery of a pocket book. In the book are a bundle of letters from New Jersey, a lock of blond hair, and photographs of Miss Matthews before and after her disfigurement. Not long after Mrs. Porfer’s discovery, the other members of the party make a discovery of their own: Mrs. Mary Matthews Porfer has “had the bad luck to be dead.”
In including “A Holy Terror” in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, Bierce was clearly aware that the story, despite its origins in the Wasp, was appropriate for a collection consisting largely of tales published in the Examiner. Beyond a subtle literary link to “An Heiress from Redhorse,”3 the concluding tale in Bierce’s 1892 collection, two key elements of “A Holy Terror”’—Doman’s altered mental state prior to his demise and his death from an excess of irrational fear—connect it thematically to many of the other stories included in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. Although all the stories in the 1892 collection involve elements of an altered mental state, Bierce most obviously reprised or expanded upon the implications of Doman’s altered mental state in the following stories: “A Horseman in the Sky,” “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” “One of the Missing,” “A Tough Tussle,” and “The Man and the Snake.” Furthermore, Jefferson Doman’s death from an excess of irrational fear or terror is echoed by similar deaths in “One of the Missing,” “A Tough Tussle,” and “The Man and the Snake,” and, with slight variations, in the deaths of characters in several additional tales: “A Watcher by the Dead,” “The Suitable Surroundings,” and “The Middle Toe of the Right Foot.”
Beyond these thematic links, “A Holy Terror” and Bierce’s Examiner-based stories are similar in that they are carefully fit into their host publications. Although the weekly Wasp, with its emphasis on literary and political concerns, lacked the full range of supporting material that Bierce was able to draw upon or make use of when writing stories for publication within the Examiner, Bierce as the editor of the paper was able to stage the story with a great degree of control. Critics and readers lacking familiarity with the story’s original host publication have thus been at a significant interpretive disadvantage. Indeed, to read “A Holy Terror” as Bierce meant it to be read by those who could unlock its secrets, it is essential that the Wasp’s role as the story’s original host publication be understood; moreover, in exploring the story’s staging in the Wasp, we gain a great deal of general insight into the hidden complexities of Bierce’s art.
At the time “A Holy Terror” was first published the Wasp was a weekly journal that was then remarkable for its brilliantly cynical and satirical editorial style, a style that, from early 1881 through the summer of 1886, was personified by Bierce, the paper’s editor and most important and prolific contributor. In late 1882, under Bierce’s idiosyncratic editorial hand, the Wasp was thriving: a year earlier, less than seven months into his tenure, the editorial for October 7, 1881, proudly announced that the circulation of the paper was “upwards of 11,000 copies,” which the Wasp thought “the largest circulation ever obtained by a weekly paper in California,” and then reproduced two official letters testifying to its rapidly increasing circulation. The first letter, officially notarized, proclaimed that “the circulation of the Wasp since April 15th last has increased more than twenty-one hundred (2100) copies by actual count.” In the second letter, the paper’s subscription agent, having just completed a “tour in the southern counties” of California, announced that in “about seven weeks” he had added “five hundred and fifty-six (556) new subscriptions to the Wasp, of which most were yearly.” According to the same editorial, the Wasp was
the only cartoon paper printed in colors west of the Rocky Mountains, and combining, as we venture to think, both literary and artistic excellence, has a double claim to support, which is in process of full recognition. It is not a journal that is read and thrown away, as is amply shown by the constant demands made upon us for covers and bound volumes. In this form the back numbers are preserved and will be read for years concurrently with the weekly issues. (228)
Similarly, five months after the publication of “A Holy Terror” the paper continued to thrive. On May 26, 1883, the Wasp, claiming to reach “every part of the Pacific Coast,” reported that its circulation was “nearly 14,000” and that it had added “1,107” new subscriptions since March 1, 1883. In other words, by December 23, 1882, the Wasp had in effect become a public stage for Bierce’s wide-ranging performances: he typically penned the lengthy and often diverse editorials that appeared in the paper, and his famous and devastatingly satirical “Prattle” column usually filled the following page; in addition, in almost every issue, either under his name or initial(s) or pseudonym(s), or even at times anonymously, he contributed other works ranging from serious critical commentaries about contemporary issues, to installments of his “Devil’s Dictionary” or “Little Johnny” columns, to poems and other pieces of variously satirical, cynical, and sardonic prose fiction and commentary. In short, having taken up the editorial reins of the journal in March 1881 after his frustrating foray into the Black Hills, by December 1882 Bierce had quite literally become the human embodiment of the Wasp, and in the mold of Juvenal, Addison, and Swift he was rapidly becoming the most influential literary journalist on the West Coast. Thus, when Bierce placed “A Holy Terror” in the journal’s Christmas number that year, he arguably did so with a well-developed and fully-conscious intent to both reward his more perceptive regular readers with a richly ironic holiday feast of cynicism and satire, and to concurrently afflict his less perceptive readers with a holy terror.
Given its demanding nature, “A Holy Terror” has long been more widely successful at befuddling its less perceptive readers than it has been in entertaining its more perceptive ones. Certainly, less perceptive or uninformed readers of “A Holy Terror” are unlikely to comprehend the many hidden intricacies and ironies of the tale even though the elements that cause them to stumble are often the clues and keys to understanding. For example, if they are wholly unable to penetrate Bierce’s system of grammar, readers and critics may never realize that the woman whose grave is violated was in life a whore. Recent critics who have unwittingly fallen into this popular category of readers have somewhat understandably but nevertheless erroneously concluded that the story has no significant literary depths. But this is as Bierce meant it to be: only informed and careful readers were expected to unlock the story’s secrets, and few recent critics or readers are up to the task. As already touched upon, in 1882 the situation faced by Wasp-based readers was somewhat more promising. Some, for example, presumably possessed valuable personal experience gained in the mining camps of the region, experience that would have taught them much that could be useful in reading “A Holy Terror.” On the other hand, within the context of the Wasp, it is not necessary to be a forty-niner to unseal the tale. Bierce knew that the Wasp’s regular readers were well versed in the need to read carefully where his satirical writings were concerned, and he clearly intended that some of them would discover the secrets of his tale on the strength of their own probing intellects. Helping to facilitate this outcome, in the months leading up to the publication of “A Holy Terror,” Bierce in his roles as editor and author had brought several instructive examples of holy terrors to the attention of this audience. Additionally, knowing that the well-promoted Christmas issue would attract new readers, Bierce employed the paper’s editorial page to pointedly warn new readers (and old) whose “unconsidering orbs persist in seeing things not as they are, but as they should be,” that the Wasp saw things with a greater degree of clarity. Nevertheless, despite even this last warning, it is evident that many Wasp-based readers, like their more recent counterparts, must still have come away f...

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