Sun 6 Dec 2009
AMBROSE BIERCE – Can Such Things Be? Cassell, US, hardcover, story collection, 1893. Included in The Collected Writings of Ambrose Bierce, edited by Clifton Fadiman, Citadel Press, 1946. Reprinted several times since, both as an individual collection and in omnibus form.
Clifton Fadiman’s 1946 collection of supernatural tales by Ambrose Bierce may not be quite top-of-the-line, but Bierce’s gift for turning the apt phrase: “The fact that Henry Armstrong was buried did not to him seem to prove that he was dead; he had always been a hard man to convince.” or “…all seemed to be waiting for something to occur; the dead man only was without expectation. ”
Or this description of an encounter with an inopportune ghost: “According to the Chinese faith, a man is like a kite: he cannot ascend to heaven without a tail. Well, while I was here that night, alone and thinking of anything but him, that Chinaman came back for his pigtail. He did not get it.” Such writing makes for memorable reading, even when the stories are unremarkable — which is often the case.
Bierce may have just been too misanthropic to convey the essential horrific humanity that must form the basis of a really scary story, except in one case: “A Diagnosis of Death” is a quick, perfect gem of a tale that ought to be required reading for lovers of this sort of thing.
December 7th, 2009 at 1:14 am
I’m not sure Bierce intended scares as such in his stories. If he did he certainly undercut that with the style he used.
I suspect like Mark Twain he was making a comment on man and his nature and using he weird or off beat tale as the device, but I would have to agree that Bierce’s best stories are closer to Saki than Poe.
He was an odd duck by all accounts and came to an even odder end, but he has his own little niche in American letters carved less by the impact of the stories than the wit of the writer. I think Dan has hit on the key, namely that Bierce was more interested in the apt phrase than the apt story. Much as I enjoy his work at some point reading Bierce I always have the feeling he is shouting ‘look at how clever I am’ rather than simply telling a story.