The Misanthrope

AMBROSE BIERCE: A BIOGRAPHY by Richard O'Connor. 333 pages. Little, Brown. $6.95.

THE ENLARGED DEVIL'S DICTIONARY by Ambrose Bierce. 300 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.

Late in November of 1913, Ambrose Bierce, 71, afflicted with asthma and rue, crossed the border into Mexico. He had declared a journalist's interest in the Mexican revolution and planned to seek out Pancho Villa. Around Christmas Day that year, he sent a letter home from Chihuahua City. It was the last that anyone heard from Ambrose Bierce. He vanished.

And so, in a sense, has Bierce's considerable literary reputation. No one reads him any more. His name rings louder than his works, which fill twelve volumes. In his brisk but superficial new biography Richard O'Connor (Jack London, Bret Harte) does not unwrap the mystery of Bierce's disappearance. But the book does constitute one more testament of faith in the man whose bitter messages to mankind have faded scarcely at all since he set them down.

Unwashed Savages. For his readers, his associates, his friends, his kin and for life itself, Ohioan Bierce never had a kind word or deed. He called his parents "unwashed savages" before they died; and when they died, he did not trouble to attend their funerals. After 33 years of marriage marked by frequent periods of absenteeism, his wife sued him for divorce on grounds of desertion. His two sons died sordid deaths, one a suicide (after killing his girl friend's husband), the other from pneumonia contracted during a drinking bout. His daughter saw him so seldom that he could be considered a trespasser in her life.

As a man of letters Bierce was largely self-made--and devalued his own gifts. His formal education ended after a year at the Kentucky Military Institute, where he mastered little more than the soldierly bearing that carried him through life. He taught himself, imperfectly, the art of poetry and, with more success, how to write taut and economical prose. Then he squandered the education on venomous hack work for West Coast literary journals and as a columnist for William Randolph Hearst's San Francisco Examiner. He never wrote anything longer than a short story; he was not in the habit of writing a paragraph when just a word would do. The Devil's Dictionary, a lexicon of Bierce's scorn for mankind and all its institutions --now expanded by material that the editors say has not been anthologized before--stands today not only as the distillation of Bierce's thought but as epigrammatic misanthropy bordering on genius (see box).

Human Perfidy. The novelist or essayist is a careful householder, hoarding his resources; the aphorist tosses his shiny gold coins on the floor, seeking neither to save nor to order them. That is why the art of aphorism has rarely been considered major. Yet it is through his misanthropic aphorisms that Bierce should enter literature for keeps. The confident, eupeptic American spirit also has its dark side. And of those writers who chose to dwell on its shadows, few perceived or portrayed them with greater clarity than Bierce. His agonized view of human perfidy, which he found everywhere, raps imperatively on contemporary consciences.

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