Louis Roney: Alone in bad company

No, not Pierce; his name was Bierce and in 1913, when he was 71 and should have known better, he went to Mexico and joined up with Pancho Villa. Ambrose Bierce said that for an American to go to Mexico at that time of violent revolution was a kind of euthanasia.

Bierce had fought gallantly as a young Ohio soldier in the Civil War. After the war, he had gone to California and became a newspaper man — a “columnist, no less!” He was a bitter and despairing personality. His fiction is laced with cynicism, eeriness, and the unpredictable. An ill-disposed nomad through life, Bierce was not destined to die in bed. Between 1881 and 1906, he put together the newspaper items which comprise “The Devil’s Dictionary.”

Ambrose didn’t seem to countenance the idea that life can be beautiful. His laughter was mocking. Whatever powers impelled him were obscure and ominous.

In 1958, Peter Pauper Press brought out “The Devil’s Dictionary,” a collection of Ambrose’s epithetical musings. A friend of mine recently sent me his copy of the book. If the following appeals to your low opinion of the human animal, spring for the collected writings of Ambrose Bierce:

Abstainer: A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself pleasure. A total abstainer is one who abstains from everything but abstention, and especially from inactivity in the affairs of others.

Age: That period of life in which we compound for the vices that we still cherish by reviling those that we no longer have the enterprise to commit.

Alliance: In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other’s pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third.

Battle: A method of untying with the teeth a political knot that would not yield to the tongue.

Bigot: A person who is obstinately and zealously attracted to an opinion that you do not entertain.

Body-snatcher: One who supplies the young physicians with that which the old physicians have supplied the undertaker.

Bore: A person who talks when you wish him to listen.

Bride: A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.

Calamity: A more than commonly plain and unmistakable reminder that the affairs of this life are not of our own ordering. Calamities are of two kinds: misfortune to ourselves, and good fortune to others.

Conservative: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.

Cynic: A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.

Discriminate: To note the particulars in which one person or thing is, if possible, more objectionable than another.

Distress: A disease incurred by exposure to the prosperity of a friend.

Egotist: A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.

Epitaph: An inscription on a tomb, showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect.

Eulogy: Praise of a person who has either the advantages of wealth and power, or the consideration to be dead.

History: An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly foolish.

Homicide: The slaying of one human being by another. There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy, but it makes no great difference to the person slain whether he fell by one kind or another — the classification is for the advantage of lawyers.

Lawyer: One skilled in circumvention of the law.

Litigation: A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.

Peace: In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.

Piety: Reverence for the supreme being, based upon his supposed resemblance to man.

Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.

Positive: Mistaken at the top of one’s voice.

Pray: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy.

Prescription: A physician’s guess at what will best prolong the situation with least harm to the patient.

President: The leading figure in a small group of men, of whom — and of whom only — it is positively known that immense numbers of their countrymen did not want any of them for president.

Saint: A dead sinner revised and edited.

Scriptures: The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.

Vote: The instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself, and a wreck of his country.

Who wrote all these sardonic definitions?

The author was born in Ohio, raised in rural Indiana. He fought in the Civil War, and survived, though with a Confederate bullet lodged in his skull — a souvenir of the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain.

He wrote for Hearst's newspapers, married a San Francisco socialite and raised three children. But gloom hung over him like a cloud. He was bitterly disillusioned by corruption around him in the Gilded Age. Two sons died young, one a suicide — and his own marriage fell apart.

Bierce's “The Devil's Dictionary” reflects the point of view of a mind whose private demons assayed a topsy-turvy golden era. Ambrose Bierce was 71 in 1913 when he went south and reportedly joined up with Pancho Villa, the Mexican bandit-revolutionary. In 1914 he either died or was executed.