Ambrose Bierce, from ‘The Devil’s Dictionary’ to disappearing in Mexico, with Jim Norrena
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Greetings, Grammar Felizians. I'm Mignon Fogarty. And we are, you know, with these bonus episodes, I'm just doing all sorts of experimental things. And today, I just wanted to talk about a fun thing with a fun person. So I'm here with Jim Norena, who is a copy editor.

I met many years ago when I spoke at the Bay Area Editors Forum, and then he also came to my book signing in the Bay Area in California. Jim, thanks so much for being here with me today. Oh, it is definitely my pleasure, and it's very good to see you again. Yeah, you too. So we're going to talk, once we get started, we're going to talk about

The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce, which is just this wonderfully funny, delightful book. But before we start, can you talk about what is the Bay Area Editors Forum where I met you and what kind of work do you do? Oh, great question. Bay Area Editors Forum has been around for, gosh, probably 20 to 30 years and serves as a resource for freelance editors

writers, proofreaders, and certainly some of the editors are full-time employees, but it serves as a resource to help

Editors introduced their skill sets and defined their specialties so that people who are looking to hire an editor can go to Bay Area Editors Forum and they can actually use the search function to find an editor that might specialize in the area that they're responsible for.

So it's been a wonderful organization to be a part of because you're definitely with like people. Yeah, no, I really enjoyed speaking before that audience. It was, I remember great questions and just really nice people. They adored you. Maybe that's why it was so much fun. Yeah, hard audience. Yeah, tough, tough audience.

And you, I think you're a freelance editor now, right? Right now I am. I spent, I mean, my whole, my entire history is in editing and writing. And I've worked for colleges as well as book publishers. But freelance...

is something that, um, it's just, it allows me the schedule that just, that works well in my life. So for the past couple of years of return to freelancing and, uh, I have opportunities like working with you, for example, that, uh, really, really, uh,

It just gels with everything that I'm doing right now. Yeah, that's great. And people can find you. What's your website? I am typosuction.com. Typosuction. Typosuction. Well, one of the things that inspired that name is that

I like working with people that find editing fun, that they enjoy it, that there is also, as we will shortly get into with Ambrose Bierce, is that there can be comedy in the editing and the writing that I really appreciate. So I wanted to attract people that actually find the name funny. And it's like, let's take a look at this and find out what it's about.

It is. Yeah. And I really enjoy following you online, too, because you are you have a great sense of humor. You know, I mean, but I, you know, no offense to you or me, but I think Ambrose Bierce is one of the funniest people ever.

he's hilarious. The devil's dictionary. I've heard a quip or two here or there from the devil's dictionary. And it's a, it's a book where he takes regular words and defined them in a funny way. And we're going to go through a bunch of those, but yeah,

And so I had heard a quip here or there from the book, but somehow it's a public domain book. He lived in the late 1800s, early 1900s. And so I went to Project Gutenberg and started reading it just because.

sort of randomly a few months ago. And, you know, just everything about it is just delightful. Had you been, you know, and I told you I wanted to talk about it. Had you been aware of it before? Yeah, I definitely heard of Devil's Dictionary. And

For the most part, I had heard certain definitions that were humorous, but there's also a flip side to his writing that is very cynical. And he's known for his cynicism and some of the definitions and some of his quotes are

while I find them funny, they, they, they are biting. They, he definitely has a background that warrants a certain cynicism. And to me, it adds to the humor because he was able to take instances in his life that he was inspired by. And his outlook was so unique. It was, it was,

Just, you know, he's got such a great reputation. Yeah. One of the descriptions of him in Wikipedia is that he was a feared literary critic. And I'm like, yeah, I bet. Yeah, I did. You know, there was a little bit of research done.

I mean, he's known more for what I didn't know is that he's known more for his journalism than he is for his actual writing. And he was, as I'm sure you know, he was involved with William Randall Hearst and was a part of did reporting for the San Francisco Examiner. Yeah. So he's got a sense I'm in the Bay Area. It was nice to see that he was.

you know, has a history here. Yeah. And it sounded like, I mean, again, like just from the Wikipedia entries, I don't want to overstate my expertise, but it sounded like he was, you know, close to William to Hearst, you know, that they had a relationship. He didn't just work for the newspaper, but they were, you know, Hearst sent him on like a mission to DC to sort of take care of something, you know? Yes. That is, that's, I have the same understanding on that. Yeah.

Yeah. But he was feared. There was there's no question as a biting criticism. And also there are references to almost a meanness with with his with his writing. But to me, I think that it's the humor definitely comes through. You just have to look for it because cynicism can be, you know, it can be terribly off putting.

Or it can be rather insightful in a way that, you know, the truthfulness comes out.

Yeah. You know, as I was reading through the entries, you know, some of them I was like, ooh, would I want to share that one? Because it might offend people. Here, let me give you an example of one that isn't so offensive. So circus, a place where horses, ponies, and elephants are permitted to see men, women, and children acting the fool. Okay.

Yeah. So that was sort of a small example of how his view on humanity is definitely not a positive one, I'd say.

No, no. He was greatly influenced by his, you know, he fought in the Civil War and was, he was actually shot in the head, which is certainly not funny. Right, he had a head injury. Yes. And it affected him throughout his life.

But he did see firsthand certain battles in the Civil War that influenced his short stories, for which he is very well known. The one that comes to mind is –

An occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, which is his most, which is probably his most famous short story. And it is about a soldier about to be hanged. And there's certainly...

funny about it. But you can see how his experiences in wartime influenced his writing. And he's written, what is it? It's something like almost 250 short stories. And most of them interpret his experiences in wartime. Yeah, he was incredibly prolific. I

I saw the Grawlier Club, which is a private library in New York, which I have visited. I'm very intrigued by the Grawlier Club. But it named his book, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, as one of the hundred most influential American books printed before 1900. Wow.

So, yeah, he's done so much more than The Devil's Dictionary. And as you said, a lot of it is a lot more serious. Yes. Yeah. But he was able to take that perception of life and life's challenges. And especially on the political front, a lot of his satire is criticizing politics of the time and politics.

Rather accurately, as far as I'm concerned, which is why I get a kick out of it. Yeah, I don't think I highlighted any of the political words. Do you have any? Yeah, I do. Actually, well, for example, let me give you diplomacy.

the patriotic art of lying for one's country. And, you know, if you're in a bad mood, you might find that offensive. If you appreciate that the humor of it, there is a truthfulness. And certainly during our political period,

right now. Yeah. Yeah. I had one. He also is interesting because he thanked in the introduction to the Devil's Dictionary, he very sincerely seemed to thank a clergyman for his help with the book and many of the quotations. But here's how he defines clergyman. Noun. A man who undertakes the management of our spiritual affairs as a method of bettering his temporal ones. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. He actually didn't like the tag, but he didn't like being called a cynic. No, he didn't. Yeah. Yeah. The book was originally, it was originally, the first publication of the book, the title was The Cynic's Word Book. And in the introduction to The Devil's Dictionary, he wrote, a name which the author had not the power to reject, nor the happiness to approve. Yeah.

The tradition of authors not being happy with their titles or book covers goes back at least 100 years. Yeah. And then in a volume of his work, The Devil's Dictionary, I believe, is the seventh volume and was then titled The Devil's Dictionary, which was composed of newspaper articles that he had written and put together the definitions. Yeah. Yeah.

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I was surprised when I read where the name The Devil's Dictionary came from. I didn't get that one. It's so great. So, I mean, it does have that cynicism in it and, you know, the idea of being maybe devilish. But actually, he worked as what's called a printer's devil. This is an actual position at printers back in the time. So it was just sort of what they called a young apprentice in.

in the printing world. And other printers devils over the years were Benjamin Franklin, Walt Whitman, Thomas Jefferson, William Harding, and Mark Twain were all also employed as printers devils.

And no one knows really where that name came from. There are a bunch of different theories. But I love this little tidbit that the printing industry seems to have embraced it, or maybe this is where it comes from. But when the type, when the metal letters wore down to where they couldn't be used anymore, they were thrown into what was called a hell box.

And then from that box, the printer's devils took them to the furnace to melt them down so they could be recast. Yeah, I actually, I did read about printer's devil. I didn't make the connection necessarily to the title that...

that that's what inspired him. But yeah, I'm guessing that that, you know, that he had that job and then he embraced the idea of being a devil. I'm just making that assumption. His first book though, was also called the fiend's delight. So that also has a devilish concept to it. He was a fiend. Yes. Yes. But didn't he have an amazing life?

One of the things that I, one of the sort of like gee whiz facts is that he was one of 13 children. He was the 10th. Amazing. And all the children have names that start with the letter A.

Isn't that wild? Can you imagine like a parent's nightmare? Why would his parents do that? Yeah. And yeah, I don't know. Abigail, Amelia, Ann.

Addison, Aurelius, Augustus, Alameda, Andrew, Albert, Ambrose, Arthur, Adelia, and Aurelia. That is so funny. That is just so unusual. It's sort of like when I read that, I thought to myself, how many kids were they planning to have? Did they ever move on to be, you wonder? Was there a point? Yeah.

Yeah, I saw he left home at 15, but I think that was probably a lot more normal back then than it would be today. That was when he went to the job at the printer. Yes. Yeah. So it was during very formative years. You know, he was only 15 when he went to become a printer's devil. Yeah. He also, you know, on the flip side of the coin, he had he had he had personal tragedies in his life that, again, affected his outlook.

For example, I mean, he had three children. Two were sons. One of them committed suicide in 1889. And the other son, about 10 years later, died of alcoholism. And then he divorced his wife. Wow.

Wow.

There is a layer that's much deeper. Yeah. And also that head injury seems like it affected him throughout his life. He had fainting spells and things like that, I believe, as an adult later. Yeah, I read that. In fact, he had to be discharged from the army due to...

You know, the you know, the injuries that he had sustained. Oh, I didn't see that. So after he left the army, he ended up going to San Francisco, which we talked about earlier and and then went into a career of journalism.

Yeah. You know, there's an interesting break in the middle of his life. He spent, I'm not sure, it was a few years, three to seven, somewhere in there in England before he came back to the US and was a journalist again. And I always wonder, there's no, I don't know the answer to this, but, you know, back then when communication and travel were so much more difficult, like how do you up and go to England from San Francisco to get a job working for, you know, a magazine or something like that? It was...

It suggested to me that he must have been quite adventurous to be able to just do that in the middle of his life. Yeah. To add to that, that's actually when he was living in England, when he wrote his first book, The Fiend's Delight. But he also wrote it under a pseudonym, which was Dodd-Murray.

G-R-I-L-E. And that was pretty interesting to me. I couldn't come up with the background on that pseudonym, but it's ironic that that being his first book published under a different name when he was already established. Yeah, I wonder why he would do that. I guess that's another episode. Yeah, in the future. Other than Ben, I guess.

Many, many books and movies about his life. Just, I don't know, probably tens, maybe 30 or 40.

He influenced just an amazing amount of people that then in turn adapted themes that he wrote about, especially with wartime occurrences that he witnessed. Even Kurt Vonnegut, for example, you know, highly, highly praised the short story I mentioned earlier, an occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.

And other influences, David Lynch, Tobias Wolfe.

David Benioff, Charles Booker, Terry Gilliam. I don't know Terry, but they've all paid homage to his work. I do want to point out for listeners that that short story that you've mentioned a couple of times that's so great is also at Project Gutenberg. So you can read it free online. It's called An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. And I'm going to read it later because I have not.

That's the great thing about short stories. You can say, well, you know, I'll just read that tomorrow. And you can. Yeah, I wanted to share. I'll share with you, see if it inspires you're already inspired to read it. Just a quick excerpt from it to get a feel for how he writes when it's not as cynical or humorous. But yeah.

The intellectual part of his nature was already effaced. He had power only to feel, and feeling was torment. He was conscious of motion.

encompassed in a luminous cloud of which he was now merely the fiery heart without material substance. He swung through unthinkable arcs of oscillation like a vast pendulum. And this is the character who's going to be put to death? By hanging. Wow. So it's very powerful writing. You can certainly see that.

the influence of wartime and being, you know, just what he had gone through. And how he's such a master of words and wordplay. Yes, yes, yes. The swinging, evoking the noose. But also sort of hitting you over the head with it. Like some wordplay is subtle, but...

Um, but that is, is very in your face sort of wordplay, similar to the devil's dictionary and like he's making a point. Yes, yes, absolutely. Yeah. He was also accredited, um, with writing basically horror, horror fiction is what, um, the term that I read and, uh,

He created sort of the non-narrative. He would put a twist. For example, this short story has a twist at the end that is absolutely shocking to the reader. You will read it. I hope others will read it as well because it's –

Something that hadn't really been done, and he's credited for influencing the genre with this stream of consciousness writing. Yeah. No, it feels like it's hard to underestimate how influential he was. You know, as a satirist, he's mentioned alongside Swift. As a horror writer, he's mentioned alongside Edgar Allan Poe and Lovecraft. Yes.

You know, he was at the, like the Hearst newspaper in, in San Francisco at the time was just enormously influential. Wherever it was, it seems like whatever he was doing was always, you know, uh,

he was like the leader of the craft and like whatever he was working on. Yeah. He's, he's someone definitely, definitely worth reading. So, um, which, you know, it was amazing. Like for me coming to it from just reading a few funny quips and then realizing sort of what a literary person,

genius he was and what an amazing life he had. It was, it was a wonderful surprise, you know, coming at it from just, you know, a few funny definitions. But one, one thing that he's most known for in terms of the literary world is the fact that he disappeared.

Isn't this the best ending to the story? Nobody knows what happened to him. He left for Mexico in, I believe it was 1913. He was 71. Yes, yes. And in his journey, he did write a letter to a friend and basically stating, you know,

Goodbye as as part of it, but that letter has never been found. So how do we know it was written then? I guess it was claimed at the time when he was missing that this friend stated that she received a letter from him. Oh, but now the letter is missing. Yes, the letter is. Yeah. And other people claim that he was executed in Mexico and he is in an unmarked grave. Right.

but again, cannot be proved. So we are left with this incredibly influential writer

that we don't know what happened to him to this day. Amazing. It's so wild. And the sign of what an adventurer he was, at 71, he was going down to Mexico to get firsthand experience of the Mexican Revolution. He wanted to go see what was going on with the uprising, the war down there. And then...

And then disappeared. Yeah. I made a note of four possibilities to what happened to him. The first one, it's suspected that he committed suicide while at the Grand Canyon. His last words, as I mentioned earlier, the person was Blanche Partington. And he's quoted as saying, as to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination. Hmm.

Hmm, which could mean any number of things. It's pretty wide open for interpretation. Especially given his tendency for wordplay. Exactly. The second one, before crossing into Mexico, he wrote to his niece stating...

If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life, it beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a gringo in Mexico, ah, that is euthanasia. Right?

Oh, my gosh. So he knew he was going somewhere dangerous, supposedly. Yes. The third one report circulated that he was shot to death while in Mexico on the orders of Pancho Villa, who suspected he was a spy.

Then he was buried, as I said, in an unmarked grave. The last one is that he died of pneumonia while returning to the United States and today is in an unmarked grave in Marfa, Texas. None of these can be proven. So he remains this incredible mystery person.

He'd probably like that. Yes. I think he would really enjoy that. Oh, well, Ambrose Spears, what an interesting man. And, uh,

And now we have so much, you know, that we can go read that we maybe haven't read before from him to enjoy. They are. It is a delight to go through that dictionary. And, you know, even the Paris Review pulled out there. This people can your audience can look it up. The 74 best entries, which I thought 74 was a very odd, you know,

random number to make a best of list. But if you don't want to read the entire book, you can definitely read excerpts of the highlighted entries. Yeah. Do you have one more you want to share before we go? Oh, absolutely. It's so hard to choose. Let's see. Maybe a couple. Yeah. There's positive as an adjective. Mistaken at the top of one's voice. Yeah.

Well, that reminds me of something Strunk said, Strunk of Strunk and White. He said, what did you say? It's something like, if you're not sure of the answer, say it loudly. Similar idea. Reminds me of a staff meeting. There's amateur, a noun, amateur.

A public nuisance who mistakes taste for skill and confounds his ambition with his ability. This one, I mean, this is a set. It's funny and dark. So Adam's apple as a noun, a protuberance on the throat of a man, thorn.

thoughtfully provided by nature to keep the rope in place. Ooh, that is dark. It's really dark, but it's, it's funny. Very, very Ambrose Bierce though, given what we know about him now. Exactly. Exactly. Um, I also liked acquaintance, a person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to, um,

A degree of friendship called slight when its object is poor or obscure and intimate when he is rich or famous. Yeah.

I mean, he just sounds like someone I would have really enjoyed having a cup of coffee with. Yes, absolutely. And people watching and having him point out the sort of the absurdities. Absolutely. You'd be on your best behavior, though, that feared critic part. It would always be in the back of your mind. That is true. Yeah.

- Oh, Jem, thanks. It was so fun to talk about this with you today. - Oh, it's always a treat to talk about literary figures. They have such incredible histories that it helps us understand better

why their writing is as effective and as widely appreciated as it is. Absolutely. Well, again, Jim Norena, and people can find you at? Typosuction.com is the easiest way to get a hold of me. If somebody's interested in pursuing an editing project, I would love it. Great. Thanks so much. Thank you for having me. This is just a treat.

Thanks again to the Grammarpalusians for supporting the show. If you want to be a Grammarpalusian, you can sign up right on the Grammar Girl page at Apple Podcasts or find out more about the other ways to play at quickanddirtytips.com slash bonus. That's all. Thanks for listening.

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