The Most Famous American Writer You Never Heard Of—Ambrose Bierce and the Period of Honorable Strife: The Civil War and the Emergence of an American Writer

I was a boy when I watched the Twilight Zone episode, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.  Rod Serling, who created and produced the Twilight Zone, introduced the episode, “An occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge: in two forms, as it was dreamed... and as it was lived and died. This is the stuff of fantasy, the thread of imagination... the ingredients of the Twilight Zone.”

The story was so well done that my memory of the episode haunted me for a long time and still does.

Briefly, during the Civil War, Union soldiers ready a man for hanging.  With noose around neck, he drops, but the rope breaks and he slips into the river below and somehow makes it home to his wife.  As he is about to fall into her arms, the reverie ends.  He has not escaped and dies abruptly.

It was a well-made short and had won at Cannes, but I thought it just an episode and did not know its provenance.  I was well into adulthood when I learned more about the author, Ambrose Bierce.

His The Devil’s Dictionary is how he comes to the attention of most people, unless some high school teacher assigns one of his short stories.  The Devil’s Dictionary reveals a humorous, but deeply cynical man.  Indeed, it is the quality that most defined Bierce.  As an example, his definition of Inhumanity as “n. One of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity” aptly makes the point.

Such people may not be born, but experiences of life lead them to look at the motives of men from a deeply skeptical viewpoint.  How did Bierce get there?

It was the American Civil War that most influenced the man.  In Ambrose Bierce and the Period of Honorable Strife: The Civil War and the Emergence of an American WriterChristopher Kiernan Coleman studies the military career that left its indelible mark on the subject.

Bierce grew up in Indiana and tried his hand at a few trades until the Civil War arrived.  For a time, he was at a military academy, but left after a year.  Kentucky Military Institute (KMI) was mostly southern in sympathy and that might have had some effect, as he was from a staunchly abolitionist family.

When the war came, Bierce had been whiling away the time, and was the second man to enlist in the company that would become part of the Ninth Indiana Regiment. That unit would gain the nickname, “The Bloody Ninth.”  The sobriquet gives an indication of what the young man was in for. 

Coleman’s account makes it seem that before the war Bierce was a bit of a devil-may-care, or liked to think he was.  His enlistment, however, was as an idealistic anti-slavery man as much as, if not more than, to save the Union.

War would change him.  He would not lose his antipathy to involuntary servitude, but idealism would not survive.  The mischievous lad might not have become a martinet, but he came to appreciate the need for discipline in the dangerous business of war.

The author speculates that, pre-war, at military school Bierce could stomach only the year he spent there.  This he contrasts with “a positive preference for spit-and-polish discipline while serving under Brigadier William Hazen” that Bierce acquired.

Hazen met Bierce and his unit after the campaign in Western Virginia.  That effort had been successful and Hazen thought his command would be a disciplined force.  As they did not meet his standards, he set about to put them in shape. This was not popular amongst the troops save for one.  Bierce said of the general that he was “the best hated man that I ever knew, and his very memory is a terror to every unworthy soul in the service.”

Bravery in battle led to a promotion to sergeant.  Distinguishing himself in that role saw Bierce raised to the rank of sergeant major.  The young man was now the senior non-commissioned officer in his regiment.  Considering that he was just shy of nineteen when he first enlisted, it could be considered a meteoric rise.  Of course, the odd Confederate bullet may have opened up the possibility of advancement as well.

Bierce was not finished moving up.  He would be commissioned a second lieutenant and eventually, a first.  Hazen found him useful and he was the General’s topographic engineer.  The making of maps, which he might have learned something of at KMI, was a valuable and necessary skill.  Battles were lost due to lack of accurate geographic knowledge.

As he was clearly a man of skill and bravery in the profession of arms.  Whence came the tendency to cynicism?

A possible clue to the change in spirit would be his wounding.  He had been detailed by General Hazen to take the orders for advancing the picket line to the units involved.  The troops would move forward watched by Confederate snipers who relished officers as targets.

Captain Eastman, leading from the front was shot, fatally as it would turn out.  Bierce went to the assistance of the doomed man.

Coleman began Chapter 13, Casualties of War, with a Bierce story that parallels what happened to Ambrose to a point

“The Butternut(i.e. a confederate soldier)takes aim; he pauses a second.  The shot is more difficult this time.  The second officer is kneeling over the first now.  No mind; he presses the trigger.  A loud report, a flash, a puff of grey smoke, then-nothing.  For a moment the Butternut thinks he misses.  But no; suddenly the second man falls to the ground.  It is a good day for hunting Yankees.” 

Obviously, the second officer would be Bierce.  Coleman does not say it happened exactly that way, but a serious head wound was inflicted.

The story of his journey to the army hospital in Nashville is harrowing.  The recuperation on leave home does not seem to have been complete.  His romance with a local girl apparently died during the furlough.

The author quotes what Ambrose’s brother Albert said of the man post-wound, “He was never the same after that.  Some of the iron of that shell seemed to stick in his brain, he became bitter and suspicious, especially of his close friends.”

Coleman’s account makes clear the words happy camper could never apply to Bierce.  

Was the injury the origin of the literary career of the man who would write so cynically?  If so, his fans owe some gratitude to the shot that wounded him. Bierce’s worldview meant he was not going to write Hallmark card level cheerfulness.

He would continue in the army and after the war, would work with General Hazen in government service and pursue a writer’s career.  His end is mysterious as he disappeared presumably while traveling to another civil war, this time in Mexico.  Considering his life and writings, it was fitting he went as a man of mystery.  He might have wanted it that way.

Full disclosure: Christopher Kiernan Coleman was my undergraduate classmate.  He was and is what I was not, a scholar.  Ambrose Bierce and the Period of Honorable Strifeis well-ordered and Chris’ prose is a pleasure to read.

Review-Burning Up the Air, Jerry Williams, Talk Radio and the Life In Between

Below is my review of Burning Up the Air, Jerry Williams, Talk Radio and the Life In Between by Steve Elman and Alan Tolz as it appeared in the April, 2008 issue of the Sturbridge Times Magazine.

Talk show icon Jerry Williams wasn’t a bad guy

The year was either 1957 or 1958. The volume on my radio was low enough so that my parents could not hear it downstairs. I was listening to early rock and roll when I should have been sleeping. Usually, I tired quickly, turned off the red motorola set and fell asleep. One night, not being sleepy after the 10:00 p.m. news, I heard the promo for the next show. Thinking it might be more music, I kept listening.

It wasn’t song, it was a force of nature. It was Jerry Williams, the man who was pioneering talk radio in the Boston area. He can claim as much as anyone to have invented the genre. From the mid-fifties to the new millennium he was on Boston Radio with a few breaks for a mid-life crisis here and there. For much of the time,Williams was the dominant radio personality in the market.

Two of his many producers have collected everything that could be found about the man and have talked to everyone they could to put together a biography that is a page turner. Burning Up the Air, Jerry Williams, Talk Radio and the Life In Between reads as if it were a labor of love. Not that the authors, Steve Elman and Alan Tolz, were likely to be above wanting to throttle the man on occasion. From their tales, it is obvious Williams could try the patience of a saint.

It’s all in the book. How he probed callers to get a story or an answer. Occasionally, when he found himself battling with a particularly, unreasonable caller, he would shoot out a familiar line:“They’re out there tonight!” Later, as he aged, and even though you knew he would do nothing else but radio, he would vent his frustration by shouting, “I’m getting out of the business.”

A high school drop-out, actually, a high school flunk-out, Jerry still had an expert knowledge of many issues. But it was not only mere knowledge, it was what he knew how to position that information that set him apart. The authors make the point about how he “knew how to select the hottest topics for discussion, how to set things up in an hour, how to strike sparks in an interview, how to smoke out and shape good calls, how to keep the momentum going.” Today’s crop of talkers don’t really seem to be as skillful as Williams.

There is another aspect of his popularity that I had never thought about before reading this book. While one may not call his voice operatic, it was pleasant and in no way grating as are many on the radio today. Elman and Tolz discussed his training under a mentor. Jerry had a voice described as a “high baritone.” His acting coach, Bob Breyer, told him how to use the voice and through training in radio plays,Williams must have learned something.

Through the book, one can recognize the political changes in Massachusetts and the nation such that Jerry, uber liberal through the first part of his career, was by the end considered a conservative by many. He never thought he went through a metamorphosis from one political view to another. The authors describe his outlook,“Jerry had always presented himself on and of the air as his own man. Since the late sixties, he’d been uncomfortable with labels of all sorts. When forced to choose from conventional terms, he might opt for “liberal,” even when he felt that what had come to be known as “liberalism” had moved toward something completely alien to his feeling about the role of government.” He was uncomfortable with Dukakis in power as he had been with Nixon. He probably gagged at the description by a Boston Globe writer, Clea Simon, that he had purveyed “conservative chat.”

The structure of the book is chronological except for the last chapter. The authors intersperse a timeline of the major national and world events that are happening contemporaneously so one is never lost for the era. Event follows event in sequence and the reader will be through it in no time. He was not a perfect man and the authors present him, in the words of Oliver Cromwell, “warts and all.” I’m not sure how it will resonate with anyone who has never heard of him. After all, his show, no matter the issue and the impact, was personal. The authors have a website (http://www.jerrywilliams.org/) with a lot of audio clips that might give a small flavor for the man.

Many folks in this area got to experience Jerry during the campaign to stop the New Braintree prison. There was a big Saturday on the New Braintree Common. Williams was there as more or less MC. Next to him was a mock up of Michael Dukakis. During a lull, Jerry all of a sudden, with perfect delivery, said,“and now a word from Kitty (Dukakis). Pause. MEOW.” The crowd convulsed in laughter. It should have been in the book.

One other item that should have been in the book was that he was the only supporter of busing who ever admitted that it had all been a mistake. He always seemed to be full of himself, but I’ve never heard anyone else admit it. As Jerry used to say of people he felt okay about, he was “not a bad guy.”

Of course, Elman and Tolz couldn’t include every minute of his life. No matter, there is a lot covering an interesting man and his times. He did not engender neutrality in people.You either loved or hated him. I don’t know what was written as the cause of death on his certificate, but I’m sure it was not a dearth of personality.

Please note, the website appears to have disappeared.

Review of The Quaboag And Nipmuck Indians: The Quaboag Indians, A Loup People and the Nipmucks of the Upper Quinebaug River Valley

Below is my review of The Quaboag And Nipmuck Indians: The Quaboag Indians, A Loup People and the Nipmucks of the Upper Quinebaug River Valley as submitted to the editor of The Sturbridge Times Magazine for the October 2015 issue.  

The Quaboag And Nipmuck Indians: The Quaboag Indians, A Loup People and the Nipmucks of the Upper Quinebaug River Valley By Donald Duffy

Book review by Richard Morchoe

It has been said that the closest a human population has ever experienced to an invasion from outer space was the American Indian encounter with Europeans. To say that the native population was blindsided is understatement. Out of the blue, beings with different appearance, outlook, history and customs appear, and the invaded must make sense of it, quickly.

No more was that the case than out here in Western Central Massachusetts. The indigenous people had to deal with a geopolitical situation for which they were not and could not be ready.

The meeting of English and Indian in our region has been the subject of a few books. The latest is The Quaboag and Nipmuck Indians. The subtitle, The Quaboag Indians, A Loup People and the Nipmucks of the Upper Quinebaug River Valley is descriptive of where the people lived and that's where we live. The Quaboag tribe made home along that river and the Quinebaug, where it flows through Sturbridge, was the abode of a segment of the Nipmucks.

The author, Donald Duffy of Palmer, has not written a book that will replace any that went before, but is an addition to the genre and stands on its own. The author refers to previous work in the text and the bibliography.

What is an enjoyable aspect is the exploration of geography. The author goes over the conjecture of where places really were. This is useful as we are dealing with a population that had no written language. Never was the term, lost in translation more apt. There are often many spellings for a place. The Brits did as well as they could phonetically, except when they didn't.

Language misunderstandings were a problem, mostly for the indigenes. The settlers had a talent, if not genius for putting more into a deed then the sellers thought was included.

One bit of difficulty for the reviewer is the Massachusetts Indian campaign against the Mohawk. In 1669, an alliance of tribes from the Pioneer Valley eastward mounted an expedition to deal with depredations of the New York tribe. The Mohawk were formidable and feared so the adventure involved serious risk. According to Duffy and some others, it was an unmitigated disaster.

Ill planned and ill executed from start to finish, the Indians from the East came home weakened and some bands were effectively ruined. The defeat was so all encompassing that the Quaboag were happy to have the English settle as protection against the bad boys to the west.

Leo Bonfanti, author of several pamphlet size booklets of English-Native history from settlement to conclusion of the Indian war in Maine, viewed the Mohawk-Massachusetts encounter in a different light. In Volume II of his BIOGRAPHIES AND LEGENDS of the NEW ENGLAND INDIANS, he essentially agrees with Duffy and other writers up until the end of the battle.

According to Bonfanti, under their leader, Chikataubut who fell in the encounter, the Massachusett counterattack defeated the Mohawk. The reverse was enough to cause them to request mediation from the Dutch and English.

This is an important, as Duffy notes the Quaboag welcomed protective English settlement. If they had lost heavily against the Mohawk, siding with KingPhilip could only have been suicidal as they would now have two mortal enemies.

Success against the Mohawk might have allowed them some confidence in their own ability against the colonists.

Then again, maybe none of that mattered. Michael J. Tougias, in his novel of the era, Until I Have No Country, writes of an older Indian speaking to a younger warrior, telling him that the tribes would lose the war. The youthful man asks him why fight then. His reply was that they had, more or less, to do something

That has its own logic, somewhat. Duffy details the fate of the Nipucks of the Quinnebaug who tried to stay out of the war. They avoided the fate of the Quaboag which was immediate death, slavery or exile. In the end it did not matter. They were effaced from the land as were their neighbors to the north, albeit in slow motion with all legal niceties observed, sometimes.

It is fascinating to think that events that shaped where we live played out almost outside our doors. The battles that happened here were local events, but also involved the three major imperial powers of the day, England, France and The Dutch Republic.

It is conceivable that the Quaboag who ambushed the colonials in Wheeler's Surprise could have wiped them out, had it not been for the “Praying Indians” aiding the English. Had they destroyed the remnant on Foster's Hill as well, it would have been an immense victory, but in the end, would have probably changed little.

The Quaboag and Nipmuck Indians is far more than battles in scope, and even if you've read other books, this will be worth your while. The author has a previous work, Around Pottequadic, that looks at the native people and settlers more to the Ware and Palmer area. I look forward to reading it.

Review of Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

The sinking of the Lusitania is still controversial a century later.  Below is my review as submitted to the Sturbridge Times Magazine for the August, 2015 issue.

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

By Erik Larson

Crown, 2015

Hardcover, 448 pages

ISBN-10: 030

ISBN-13: 978-0307408868

List: $28.00 Amazon: $15.40

Book review by Richard Morchoe

Just over a hundred years ago a great ship sank off the coast of Ireland during a brutal war. In and of itself, that should not have been a major historical event. Many vessels would be sunk during that conflict, yet the torpedoing of RMS Lusitania generated the most controversy and is so even today.

There are many reasons for that, maybe the biggest one is wrong. If you went to school in this country in the 50s or 60s, it was easy to come away with the impression that the sinking of the ocean liner was the casus belli that led our country to fight Germany in the First World War. As a history nerd, I knew there were others, but the timeline had escaped my awareness.

Setting things straight for me was journalist Erik Larson in his book, Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania. According to the author, “I always had the impression, shared I suspect by many, that the sinking immediately drove President Woodrow Wilson to declare war on Germany, when in fact America did not enter World War I for another two years-half the span of the entire war.”

That's a nice bit of information for those of us with historical myopia, but it is hardly the whole book or even the most important aspect. I had not read anything by Erik Larson, and though that does not make one's life an empty desert, I have been missing out. An author of several books, the man knows how to spin a yarn.

I have a personal reason for reading Dead Wake. Much of my family comes from near where the sinking took place. The Lusitania went down just off the Old Head of Kinsale, a peninsula jutting out into the sea in Southern Ireland. Some of my relatives still farm in the area.

Ireland is an old country and it is not the biggest event to have happened in the region. Kinsale has suffered invasions and massacres and battles. The town itself celebrates its Spanish connection far more than the Lusitania. That said, the demise of the Cunard Liner is not forgotten.

As I was reading the book, it seemed Mr. Larson displayed a tad of Anglophilia. Nothing wrong with that. England is the mommy country, from whom we get some useful ideas such as trial by jury and habeas corpus.

The author referred to the harbor officially called Cobh as Queenstown, the name given it by the occupying British. It seemed he was favoring the Empire's cause.

Except, that is probably more your reviewer's paranoia. Later in the book he would note some possible skullduggery by the Admiralty.

On Page 183 he gives an account of the failure of to provide support for the liner as it approached Ireland. There are lapses and incompetencies in wartime and that may have been all that it was. Or it may have been a bit more sinister, as leaving in the lurch a ship that carried not only passengers, but valuable military cargo.

Larson notes that in a letter Churchill had sent to the head of the Board of Trade, hoping for shipping along the coasts, he wrote, “For our part we want the traffic-the more the better; and if it gets in some trouble, better still.” Was Winston hoping for a disaster?

The captain, William Thomas Turner was born to go to sea. He knew his trade and did his best to sail the ship safely and was at his post until nothing else could be done. If anyone was not to blame, it was him. No matter, Churchill relentlessly tried to pin the blame on him.

World War II may have been his finest hour, but World War I, when you add in Gallipoli, was not a great four years for Winston.

Larson's book is not all about the politics and military policy. He takes you from before the ship sails, to the boarding to cast off and on to the ocean all the way to the fatal encounter with the German submarine. The author goes with you on the sub, U-20 to feel the primitive conditions of what was high tech back then.

Shipboard life is not scanted and it is almost as if we are traveling with them. Passenger Gertrude Adams wrote of it, “There were so many on ship that it really was like living in a town. One saw fresh people every day & never knew who they were.”

There were many interesting voyagers, not the least Theodate Pope and her platonic traveling companion, Edwin Friend. They were both leading lights in American Spiritualism. Pope would survive. Her friend was not so lucky and she would have nightmares of searching for him. She never found him but her spiritualist set claimed to have been visited by him on occasion.

Larson's bio says he is a journalist and not a historian. Dead Wake is an entertaining read, but a student of history would have no reason to scorn it.