"Asmaose Bience."By Carey Me-Boni. 2 Williams, "New York: A. and-C.
Ambrose Pierce is the stormy petrel of American literature. His strange, striking personality together ' with the unusual nature of the work unite to make him writer even now somewhat outside the customary estimates and canons, He is the sort of man who creates ardent defenders and implacable foes.
In dramatic contrast (everything about' Bieree tends to drama) the present year of grace has produced no fewer than five biographical studies of this savage sat-frist and maker of the most powerfal macabre short stories since Poe. Tt has become evident that Pierce wil always win the plaudits of those sympathetic to the literary come-outer, the challenging seep! iconoclast, the fierce cynic—word, the Ishmaelite beyond the fold of conventional literature and, equally, will arouse the antagonism of all conformists.
Meanwhile a worthy waik is gradually being done by the arduous, efforts of sundry Intter-day critics to rescue the real Pierce from the mists that have enshrouded the Pierce of myth and mystery. A writer's romantic life and character may give him a certain piquant; jon, Byron, Poe, Francis Thompson, But to confuse this with a true pronouncement on his contribution is surely not eritielsm. At its worst it is literary chatter, at its best glorified journalism, Latest" among " these _recent attempts at clarification is the jography of Carey MeWilliams, who has devoted six years to his task, and who certainly does not Jack zeal and industry. One may at, once evedit him with disposing, by his earnest investigations, of many of the spurious statements. rife these long years concerning Pierce: since his ambiguous exit in Mexico, some fifteen years ago. For this we owe him thanks. Moreover he has, on the whole, avoided the two extremes: the view which can only see Pierce a6 a kind of misunderstood demi-god and that which ards him as the incorrigible, naughty boy of our native literature, Tt may be said that we approach nearer to the true Ambrose Pierce in this portrait than in the books of Dr. Danziger and Mr. Neale, though for me the sketch by Vincent Starrett is still the best.
The successive stages of Bierce's "eventful history" are traced in detail after a preliminary. chapter dealing with his Ohio origin as the son of a small farmer. His wi experiences, constituting so honor able a part of his career, and in the biographer's view the richest and most influential on his character and art, are graphically pictured. The narrative then takes up the M.D. early days in San Francisco, with Pierce developing his satirie powers in papers like the News Letter and the Wasp, followed by an account of the several years in England, comparatively unfamiliar phase of his varied existence; with the return to San Francisco again, and his steady rise into place and power by his connections with the Argonaut and later Mr. Hearst's Examiner, until he had become a kind of eriticgod on the Pacific coast. His family life, involving the death of both: his boys, one of them tragic, and the final' separation from his wife, as well as his close association with many friends, especially women, is, brought so fully into the picture that one gets a full idea of Bierce's private relations and the vital part played thereby in the molding of his character.
The final lonely years of south, are so reviewed as to make a moving spectacle of loss, disillusionment and pain. Bierce's sensitive idealism, hidden under a front of sang fraid and cynic denial, writhed under the torture of human fate as his temperament foreed him to see With this helpful throwing of light, into some of the darker corners of Bierce's meanderings, it would be pleasant to record that the material had been handled with judgment and the proper literary finish. Unhapily, this is hardly 30. For one thing, the proof reading is extremely, In the larger matter of literary judgment the biographer's position is, to put it mildly, open'to question. His general attitude seems to be that of emphasis on the merit of Bieree, the satirist, with his-fiction secondary. Mr, McWilliams affects! to treat the short stories as crippled by the acceptance of an outworn formula and the use of the stale stock-in-trade handed down by the tradition of the horror tale, ° Thi seems to us bad criticism. Bierce's stories, the best of them, ave original and fine, and vill preserve his name literature simply because of the inventive faculty they exhibit, the perfection of their manner, and the brilliant way he constructs plot that explodes effectively in a climax, Technically he follows 0. Henry in this respect. The biographer is, seduced by the present shapeless manipulation of form, a mere fad of the hour.
One other point must be made, We gather: in reading the book that the author desires to rescue his sub-Ject from, misrepresentation and to show him sympathetically understandable and, at bottom, fine human being. At' times he' does bring this out. "But in spots: he s0 vigorously bears down on the darker side as to seem almost a spokesman for the enemy. Hence, as a psychograph the study does not appear to add up to a consistent portait, It is only fair to add that to paint character s0_ contradictory, typical of the Freudian subtleties we have become accustomed to nowadays, in.a hard task at the best, This then may be described as a, helpful book about an important man, though falling short of being an important piece of criticism. Yet it is a step in the right. direction: the rehabilitation of a writer around whom a vast amount of loose, unauthentic statement has gathered, Some debris removed, the building can be the plainer seen. The final critical judgment will come Inter, Ambrose Bieree wrote satirie proce and verse and above all imaginative romance that will secure him a place in his country's letters, His faults lof extravagance and subjective verse, us his too great rage over small, local persons and things, will be forgotten. He will be recognized, eventually, as a sort of American Juvenal, intensely honest in excoriating the frauds and follies of his time, And such fiction, as "An Ocjeurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" (to wyention but one title), selected: by Howells to. represent him in. the novelist's edition of Great American Short Stories, will loom up not less but larger. Some day some critic who can give quality to his land authority to his ost produce a book to place beyond controversy. What has far been accomplished will ther. bel seen as merely preliminary.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.