"Nothing Matters"

AMBROSE BIERCE (349 pp.) --Paul Fatout--University of Oklahoma ($4).

In the late 1860s, two things were sure to make San Franciscans sit up and take notice. One was easy gold, the other an acid writing man named Ambrose Bierce. The easy gold was usually illusory, but Bierce went on tapping a virgin lode of venom that lasted 40-odd years.

In that time, he became one of America's most brilliant journalists, sharpest wits and sourest cynics. His quarry was "conglomerate man . . . a tangled wad of rattlesnakes thawing and reeking in the Spring sunlight." Purdue University's Paul Fatout has uncoiled the tangled temperament of Cynic Bierce in a lively and readable new biography.

The Blight of Day. Bierce, who defined birth as "the first and direst of all disasters," was born in an Ohio log cabin in 1842, the tenth of 13 children. His godly parents never spared the birch rod, but young Ambrose was notably full of the devil nonetheless. Once, when a camp meeting was in full swing, he and a brother took an old white horse, wrapped it in straw, set that afire, and sent the blazing animal galloping into the midst of the hallelujah-shouting revivalists.

At 15, Bierce fled the family farm and the "unwashed savages," as he later called his parents, worked as a printer's devil for two years. When the Civil War broke out, he was among the first to enlist. Soldier Bierce did well; he served bravely at Shiloh and Chickamauga, marched into Georgia with Sherman, wound up a lieutenant. As a staff officer, he caught off-duty glimpses of such top brass as Sheridan and Grant. Of Grant's tippling, he recalled: "I don't think he took enough to comfort the enemy--not more than I did myself from another bottle." Bierce himself usually had a skinful.

At loose ends after the war, he trekked west to San Francisco and took a job as watchman at the U.S. mint. On the side, he read Gibbon and Pope, minted an acrid style of his own. In 1867, he managed to get a grisly romantic poem published in the Californian, and from then on journalism, more accurately, invective journalism, was his business.

More Unwashed Savages. He slashed at parsons ("bladder-headed sky-pilots") and their flocks: "It is gratifying to observe idiots crowding forward to be instructed in ignorance." He jeered at fraternal organizations ("The Improved Order of Flatheads"), composed A Rational Anthem ("My country, 'tis of thee,/Sweet land of felony"). Like many a cynic, he was an inverted idealist. He railed at corrupt politicos, fought the railroad barons, dubbed Leland Stanford "Zeland Stanford."

Women were a pet peeve. They were "of three sexes--the fair sex, the bare sex, and the blare sex." Even though she knew his reputation as "The Wickedest Man in San Francisco," Socialite Mollie Day, daughter of a rich Forty-Niner, married him in 1871. It was not a happy match, and after 17 years and three children they separated. Meanwhile, Bierce went on writing grotesque and macabre tales. In one, a father is decapitated by a mowing machine, in another a man bashes in his wife's head with a mallet, in a third a dog gnaws on the bones of a child. His general nausea for mankind erupted into the epigrams of The Devil's Dictionary. Samples:

Deliberation, n. The act of examining one's bread to determine which side it is buttered on.

Duty, n. That which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire.

Patience, n. A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.

Death & Dandruff. Life about him soon began to match the misanthropic contours of his thought. Two days before his 16-year-old son Day was to marry, the boy's fiancee eloped with his best friend. When the newlyweds returned, the two boys whipped out revolvers and killed each other. In 1901, Bierce's second son died of pneumonia. Bierce, who later told H. L. Mencken he kept the ashes of one son in a cigar box, uttered a stoic "nothing matters," but weeks passed before he could write a line. When few bought his collected works (1909-12), he knew he was a has-been.

The judgment was overly harsh. Though much of Bierce is intellectual dandruff from an unkempt ego, the best of the wit still sparkles, and a few true-eyed Civil War tales are at least as durable as war. Biographer Fatout fails to indicate the company Bierce keeps--Poe, Melville, Stephen Crane, H. L. Mencken--the slender, off-key tradition of pessimism in American life & letters. "Why should I remain in a country that is on the eve of woman's suffrage and prohibition?" sulked Bierce in 1912. The old (71) soldier wanted to see if Pancho Villa and his Mexicans could shoot straight. Late in 1913 he headed over the border, and then disappeared in one of the most celebrated missing-persons cases of the generation. Rumors had him killed with Villa or by Villa, exposure or suicide.

"Nobody will find my bones," Ambrose Bierce had announced before he left. No one ever has.

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