Old Gringo - Whatever Became Of Ambrose Bierce?
He was an army scout, a war correspondent, an acclaimed short story writer, the great wit of his day - so why did Ambrose Bierce go AWOL in Mexico in his seventies?
In December 1913, Ambrose Bierce - journalist, poet, Civil War scout, short story writer - penned a note to his former lover Blanche Partington, outlining his interest in following Pancho Villa’s campaign south of the border. Nothing unusual about that you might think, what with Bierce’s past and work preferences. By January 1914, however, Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce would be 71 - quite an age to be in Chihuahua on the trail of a legendary revolutionary.
Since there’s no reason why you should be familiar with him, it’s worth stressing that Ambrose Bierce was a short story writer to rival Edgar Allan Poe. Not for him the scudding clouds and Gothic piles of Baltimore’s bastard son, mind you; Bierce’s brand of horror is lent a particular vividness by his years as a battlefield reporter.
Especially famous for An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge (the Oscar-winning Spanish adaptation of which later aired on American television beneath the guise of a Twilight Zone episode), his other fantasy works include the impossibly short but utterly unforgettable An Unfinished Race, the self-explanatory The Spook House, the frontier terror tale The Boarded Window, and The Eyes Of The Panther; a story that, as Kim Newman explains in his Cat People BFI monograph, had considerable influence upon Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People.
While his short story collection In The Midst Of Life (aka Tales Of Soldiers And Civilians) is considered among the most influential American books printed before 1900, no less a body that the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration declared Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary one of "The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature".
Otherwise known as The Cynic’s Wordbook, The Devil’s Dictionary takes the reader on a satirical waltz through the English language. That it is very pointed is to be expected (Faith (n.) Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel). But it’s the fact it’s also uproariously funny that best explains why, some 120 years later, there still isn’t a text of its type to touch it. As for favourite entries, they include:
Egotist (n.) A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
Kilt, (n.) A costume sometimes worn by Scotchmen in America and Americans in Scotland.
Love (n.) A temporary insanity curable by marriage.
A fiction writer favourably compared with Poe and Lovecraft, a wit on a par with HL Mencken, portrayed by Gregory Peck in Old Gringo and Michael Parks in From Dusk Till Dawn 3; depicted in the fiction of Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein - people’s ongoing fascination with Bierce can only have so much to do with his heading to Mexico at an age when your average pensioner’s contemplating a move to Florida.
As for what became of him once he crossed the Rio Grande, theories range from Bierce meeting his end in front of a firing squad to the author reinventing himself as the enigmatic B Traven, author of The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre. Whatever the truth of the matter, both Bierce and his writing deserve as wide an audience as possible. So what if he vanished into thin air. The real tragedy would’ve been had he taken his work with him.