Clifton Fadiman, an author, critic, editor, and radio and television personality, wrote an essay on Ambrose Bierce a long time ago.  I read it the other evening.  A forgotten literary critic writing about a forgotten social critic.

Bierce was a short story writer, a poet, a Civil War veteran best known for his short story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” and whose book The Devil’s Dictionary, is considered one of the greatest literary masterpieces in American history.

–“Politics: a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.”

–“Conservative, n: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from a Liberal who wishes to replace them with others.”  

–“Corporations: an ingenious device for obtaining profit without responsibility.”

—Ambrose Bierce

Clifton Fadiman, who died at the age of 95 in 1999, was the Chief Editor for the publishing house of Simon and Schuster. For eleven years he was the book editor of New Yorker magazine.  From 1938 into 1948 he hosted the radio program “Information Please.”  He was the host of several shows in the early days of television. For many years he was one of those who picked the selections for the Book of the Month Club.

–“When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before, you see more in you than there was before.”

–“There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.” 

–“My son is 7 years old. I am 54.  It has taken me a great many years to reach that age. I am more respected in the community. I am stronger, I am more intelligent and I think I am better than he is.  I don’t want to be a pal, I want to be a father.”

—Clifton Fadiman

Fadiman called Bierce, who disappeared in Mexico in 1913 when he was about 71 years old, a misanthrope (somebody who dislikes humankind and avoids human society, says one definition). He was a drummer boy at the start of the Civil War and was a Lieutenant, brevet (temporary) Major, at the end. He got into newspapering in San Francisco, spent a few years in London, and became known for what Fadiman calls “slashing journalism.”  Friends and critics alike sometimes referred to him as “Bitter Bierce.”

Fadiman’s essay on Bierce includes this appraisal of literature in our country:

The dominating tendency of American literature and social thought, from Benjamin Franklin to Sinclair Lewis, has been optimistic.  It has believed in man, it has believed in American man.  It has at times been satirical and even bitter—but not negative.  It gave the world the positive statements of the Declaration, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, Emerson, Whitman, William James, Henry George, John Dewey.  This has been the stronger current. But along with it there has coursed a narrower current, the shadowed stream of pessimism. Perhaps its obscure source lies in the southern philosophers of slavery or in the bleak hell-fire morality of early puritan divines like Michael Wigglesworth and Jonathan Edwards. It flows hesitantly in Hawthorne, with fury in Moby Dick and Pierre, with many a subtle meander in the dark symbolisms of Poe.  It may appear in part of a writer (the Mark Twain of “The mysterious Stranger” and “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.”) and not in the whole of him.  You may trace it in an out-of-the-main-stream philosopher such as Thorstein Veblen. You will find it in the thoughts of H. L. Mencken and the stories of Ring Lardner.  And you will see it plain, naked, naïve, and powerful in the strange fables of Ambrose Bierce.

Thorstein Veblen, by the way, taught at the University of Missouri-Columbia for a while.

We found ourselves wondering as we read Fadiman’s assessment of literature and his portrait of Bierce what both would think today about literature and the world.  Even in the middle of the last century when Fadiman wrote his essay, he felt Bierce would look at the tragedies and atrocities of that time and would have been “afforded…a satisfaction deeper and more bitter than that which he drew from the relatively paltry horrors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries…The current scene would have filled him with so pure a pleasure.”

Some other thoughts from Bierce:

—History, n. an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.

—If you want to read a perfect book there is only one way: write it. 

—Patriotism deliberately and with folly aforethought subordinates the interests of a whole to the interests of a part. Worse still, the fraction so favored is determined by an accident of birth or residence.

And a few more from Fadiman:

—A cheese may disappoint. It may be dull. It may be naive. It may be oversophisticated, yet it remains cheese, milk’s leap toward immortality. 

—There is no reader so parochial as the one who reads none but this morning’s books. Books are not rolls, to be devoured only when they are hot and fresh. A good book retains its interior heat and will warm a generation yet unborn.

—If you want to feel at home, stay at home.

—We are all citizens of history. 

—There are two kinds of writers, the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones who can only give you themselves.

And how would they have assessed today’s American optimism/pessimism and the events of our world?

—“War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography”

—Bierce

And Fadiman:

–“A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.”

–“When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.”

We close with an observation from Bierce, wondering how much more acidic he would be with a certain device today:

–“Telephone, n: An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.”