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