More of the Bierce/Twain bout....

Around October 1872, Bierce and Twain attended a gala dinner at the
exclusive Whitefriars Club in Mitre Court. Surprisingly, as Morris
notes, Bierce was the guest of honor rather than Twain. Morris
continues: "...Nettled, perhaps, by Bierce's top billing, Twain
proceeded to one-up him with a skillful bit of audience stealing. Asked
to say a few words, Bierce began a humorous account of his first meeting
with Twain in the office of the _News Letter_ five years earlier. Twain,
much more practiced at public speaking than Bierce, mischievously
contrived to undercut him with some judicious deadpanning, looking off
into the middle distance with an affected air of patient boredom. The
audience, taking their cue from Twain, maintained a deathly silence
throughout Bierce's now-faltering speech. When it was over, Bierce sank
back into his seat, white-faced and embarassed. For the rest of his
life, he never again spoke before a crowd." (pp. 143-43.)

In December 1877, when Twain was again lecturing before a prestigous
crowd at a dinner party celebrating John Greenleaf Whittier's 70th
birthday, Bierce was able to get his revenge :

"...For reasons known only to himself, Twain inexplicably chose the
occasion to poke fun at the trebly named Augustans, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. In a long - it
quickly became interminable - after-dinner speech, Twain regaled the
astonished listeners with a typical western 'stretcher' about three
drunken tramps who had impersonated the famous writers during a visit to
a miner's remote cabin in the Sierra Nevada foothills. The three tramps,
he said, had taken over the cabin, eaten up the miner's food, drunk his
whiskey, cheated brazenly at cards, and stolen their host's last pair of
boots. Twain's good friend William Dean Howells was in attendance that
night, and he looked up once from his dinner plate to see Twain frozen
with embarassment before an appalled and unlaughing audience. Twain's
performance, Howells said later, 'was like an effect of demoniacal
possession.'

Bierce, when he heard of the incident a few weeks later, found the whole
thing hilarious. Remembering his own infamous performance at London's
Whitefriar's Club five years earlier, and not forgetting Twain's
scene-stealing role in his subsequent embarassment, Bierce could not let
the opportunity pass for a gratifying, if long-deferred, last laugh.
'Mark Twain's Boston speech,' he noted in the January 5, 1878 issue of
the _Argonaut_, 'in which the great humorist's coltish imagination
represented Longfellow, Emerson, and Whittier engaged at a game of cards
in the cabin of a California miner, is said to have so wrought upon the
feelings of 'the best literary society' in that city that the daring
joker is in danger of lynching. I hope they won't lynch him; it would be
irregular and illegal, however roughly just and publicly beneficial.
Besides, it would rob many a worthy sheriff of an honorable ambition by
dispelling the most bright and beautiful hope of his life.'"(pp. 168-69.)

Shades of Don Imus.  I am wondering if Twain translated any of his
anomosity towards Bierce into any of his characters; does anyone have
thoughts on this topic?  Do any of his characters seem to be a
characterization
of Ambrose Bierce?

I am also struck in the last passage by Bierce's 'frontier justice'
approach to Twain's 'literary circles' offenses'.  I think that despite
their stature as literary greats, gracing Whitefriars and Boston lecture
halls, Bierce and Twain both resort to the "worthy sheriff" of the West
and the "lynching" rhetoric of the South to settle their disputes and sense
of justice.  Ironically, Bierce's last phrase about "rob(bing) many a worthy
sheriff of an honorable amibition by dispelling the most bright and
beautiful
hope of his life" might have tickled Twain's fancy; he would rather have
been the 'outlaw' on the frontier, rather than the shunned author of the
literary circles of Boston.

What do others think?

(quotes taken from _Ambrose Bierce: alone in bad company_ by Roy Morris,
Jr. NY: Crown Publishers, Inc., c1995.)

-Beth Regish