In 1869, a young soldier-turned-journalist in San Francisco published an article titled Webster Revised in The San Francisco News Letter and California Advertiser , a local newspaper. The article was part of a series called the ‘Town Crier’, wherein he had already published the odd satirical definition of some commplace words. But with Webster Revised , published 150 years ago, he had for the first time declared his interest in ironic lexicography. In the past too, the journalist had pointed out examples of lexicographer Noah Webster himself employing humour in dictionary entries. The piece consisted of just four definitions, including this blistering critique of American politics:

“Honourable — Formerly an epithet of respect or distinction given to a member of Congress or a State Senator. The term is now applied to any one elected to a public office, or to a person who distinguishes himself in prize-fighting, embezzling, gambling, etc.; also applied in any case where the word dishonourable would be more correctly used.”

This, then, was Ambrose Gwinette Bierce (1842-1914), the celebrated American journalist, short story and horror writer and former Civil War soldier. His father, Marcus Aurelius Bierce, had given his 13 children names that all began with an ‘A’ — Abigail, Amelia, Ann, Addison and so on. Ambrose, who was the 10th, hated his first name throughout his life, declaring it to be “fit only for the mouths of women”, preferring to be called “Bierce” or even, as he came to be known later in his life, “Bitter Bierce” on account of his cynical writings. His war journalism efforts, such as the much-anthologised essay What I Saw of Shiloh , are now considered classic anti-war documents, although in his 70s he rode horseback to Pancho Villa’s Mexico, eager to see “if these Mexicans shoot straight”. It is believed that he was executed; at any rate, this was the last the world saw of him.

Here was a brilliant, if deeply flawed man, hero-worshipped by his students and protégés, reviled by his critics as a purveyor of morbidity. An American-born descendant of British Puritan immigrants, he lived in America at the height of his fame among British readers. And when America was most curious about this AG Bierce, his earlier volumes were nowhere to be found on American shores. An overly fond father, he had at the same time nothing but contempt for domesticity and lost his two grown-up sons to suicide and alcoholism, respectively. The sequence of events solidified his nihilism, his belief that “nothing mattered”.

The devil’s in the details

Contradictions and paradoxes thus defined much of his life and career — perhaps fittingly so, for The Devil’s Dictionary , a lexicon where Bierce gave his own definitions to words (such as “Famous, adj: conspicuously miserable”), struck at the heart of what Bierce saw as mankind’s paradoxes. War, loss, parenting, the sometimes ugly business of journalism — nothing could dim Bierce’s obsession with the hypocrisies of the human heart, things that modernity had either exacerbated or done nothing to address.

Consider some of the most cited entries from the book. “Christian, n. One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.”

“Education, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.”

“Harangue, n. A speech by an opponent, who is known as an harangue-outang.”

“Litigation, n. A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.”

“Conversation, n. A fair for the display of minor mental commodities, each exhibitor being too intent upon the arrangement of his own wares to observe those of this neighbor.”

While speaking of personal matters, Bierce is scarcely more forgiving — or less funny. Love is “a temporary insanity curable by marriage”. Marriage itself is “a household consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two”. And if you are a parent/slave to felines, you’ll flinch while reading that Bierce’s idea of a cat is “a soft, indestructible automaton provided by nature to be kicked when things go wrong in the domestic circle”.

To call the writer of these remarkable, deadpan aphorisms a humorist is telling only half the story. As the man himself said once, “Humour is a sweet wine while wit is a dry one, and we know which is preferred by connoisseurs.” This is the voice of a man exhausted with humanity, as opposed to merely disappointed. Bierce, while suspicious of structures and institutions, was even more suspicious of the direction he saw his country moving towards. For instance, despite writing in support of women’s right to vote in his youth, he was bitterly opposed to suffrage for much of his public life. He was similarly dismissive of socialism. In The Devil’s Dictionary , he defines a conservative in his inimitable style: “Conservative, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others.”

Much of The Devil’s Dictionary shows us a combative man, quick to see the evil in his fellow man’s heart, but just as likely to berate himself for this tendency. Here’s how he defines ‘cynic’, which he most certainly saw himself as.

“Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic’s eyes to improve his vision.”

In his usage of ‘blackguard’, Bierce is only half-joking, and that’s the kind of person his friends and family knew him to be — tough on the world, tougher on himself.

AG stands for Almighty God

It suited Bierce the writer to cultivate an air of mystery about him — this is a lesson that he learned fairly early on, while he was still in his twenties. Carey McWilliams’s 1929 biography of Bierce begins by noting that his reputation “is almost mythical, so far has it been divorced from the central value of his work”. Later in the book, McWilliams narrates how in the 1880s, Bierce used to sign his journalistic pieces “AG Bierce”. And as these satirical pieces, published in The Wasp , grew in popularity, a fellow journalist quipped, “AG stands for Almighty God”. This was around the same time he was mentor to a group of young writers, almost all of whom worshipped the ground he walked on. McWilliams wrote, “Those who liked his work manufactured a God; those who disapproved had no difficulty in imagining a Devil.”

Which isn’t to say that Almighty God was above the pettiness of mere mortals. After a decade or so of neglecting his wife (he once said, “A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle”) and drinking at his favourite inns daily until the wee hours of the morning, he flew into a rage upon finding that his wife Molly was in correspondence with an admirer. The pair separated and ultimately divorced. Bierce was also unusually dismissive of his peers — having consumed all of Homer before turning 12, he attacked his contemporaries such as Mark Twain and Walt Whitman fiercely.

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Mince no words: Bierce was known to be dismissive of his peers — Mark Twain (left) and Walt Whitman were among the contemporaries he attacked fiercely

 

Twain responded in kind, destroying Bierce’s book Nuggets and Dust: Panned Out in California by Dod Grile in a review. Twain wrote: “For every laugh that is in his book there are five blushes, ten shudders & a vomit. The laugh is too expensive.”

Fictions, factions and beyond

Not every writer was inclined to be unkind to Bierce, however. HP Lovecraft, patron saint of “weird fiction”, thought him to be a first-rate horror writer. He was also fictionalised, under his real as well as imaginary names, by several writers including science-fiction heavyweights such as Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein. In Bradbury’s story, a censorship allegory called ‘The Exiles’ (part of his acclaimed collection The Illustrated Man ), Bierce is in a group of writers (alongside Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens et al) who have been exiled from Earth, their books banned for eternity. The exiles fear the arrival of a spaceship from Earth, because they feel its crew must surely be soldiers sent to destroy Earth’s literary heritage once and for all. Bierce, of course, is shown to be delighted at the prospect of war — a nihilist’s delight, it must be pointed out, not a warmonger’s. Whistling, laughing under his breath, he alludes to several Poe fables in his response:

“Does a wolf pack stop until it’s killed its prey and eaten the guts? It should be quite a war. I shall sit on the side lines and be the scorekeeper. So many Earthmen boiled in oil, so many Mss. Found in Bottles burnt, so many Earthmen stabbed with needles, so many Red Deaths put to flight by a battery of hypodermic syringes — ha!”

Fact and fiction also collided in Bierce’s life much later, when he was a columnist in the employ of the legendary William Randolph Hearst, newspaper mogul and, later, the inspiration behind Citizen Kane , one of the greatest movies of all time. In 1900, Bierce wrote a poem about William Goebel, governor-elect of Kentucky, who was shot and killed the day before he was to be sworn in. In his usual bleak manner, Bierce wrote about the mood of the nation, if you will. The poem included the lines:

“The bullet that pierced Goebel’s breast

Cannot be found in all the West;

Good reason, it is speeding here

To stretch McKinley on his bier.”

Next year, in 1901, President William McKinley (alluded to in the poem’s last line) was assassinated, too, and Bierce’s critics accused him of provoking people to kill the president. They called on Hearst to sack him but, remarkably, Hearst refused to do so.

Imagine such a thing happening today — the journalist in question would almost certainly have been fired in time for the next day’s headlines. The world we live in today could certainly do with a few more combative wits like Bierce.

It’s a world that could do with a thorough reading of The Devil’s Dictionary , cover to cover.

Aditya Mani Jha is a freelance writer based in Delhi

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