St. Helena,September 28,1892.
I have been waiting for a full hour of leisure to write you a letter, but I shall never get it, and so I'll write you anyhow. Come to think of it, there is nothing to say nothing that needs be said, rather, for there is always so much that one would like to say to you, best and most patient of sayees .
I'm sending you and your father copies of my book. Not that I think you (either of you) will care for that sort of thing, but merely because your father is my co-sinner in making the book, and you in sitting by and diverting my mind from the proof-sheets of a part of it. Your part, therefore, in the work is the typographical errors. So you are in literature in spite of yourself.
I appreciate what you write of my girl. She is the best of girls to me, but God knoweth I'm not a proper person to direct her way of life. However, it will not be for long. A dear friend of mine the widow of another dear friend in London wants her, and means to come out here next spring and try to persuade me to let her have her for a time at least. It is likely that I shall. My friend is wealthy, childless and devoted to both my children. I wish that in the meantime she (the girl) could have the advantage of association with you .
Please say to your father that I have his verses, which I promise myself pleasure in reading.
You appear to have given up your ambition to "write things." I'm sorry, for "lots" of reasons not the least being the selfish one that I fear I shall be deprived of a reason for writing you long dull letters. Won't you play at writing things?
My (and Danziger's) book, "The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter," is to be out next month. The Publisher I like to write it with a reverent capital letter is unprofessional enough to tell me that he regards it as the very best piece of English composition that he ever saw, and he means to make the world know it. Now let the great English classics hide their diminished heads and pale their ineffectual fires!
So you begin to suspect that books do not give you the truth of life and
character. Well, that suspicion is the beginning of wisdom, and, so far as it goes, a preliminary qualification for writing books. Men and women are certainly not what books represent them to be, nor what they represent and sometimes believe themselves to be. They are better, they are worse, and far more interesting.
With best regards to all your people, and in the hope that we may frequently hear from you, I am very sincerely your friend, Ambrose Bierce.
Both the children send their love to you. And they mean just that.
St. Helena,October 6,1892.
I send you by this mail the current New England Magazine merely because I have it by me and have read all of it that I shall have leisure to read. Maybe it will entertain you for an idle hour.
I have so far recovered my health that I hope to do a little pot-boiling to-morrow. (Is that properly written with a hyphen? for the life o' me I can't say, just at this moment. There is a story of an old actor who having played one part half his life had to cut out the name of the person he represented wherever it occurred in his lines: he could never remember which syllable to accent.) My illness was only asthma, which, unluckily, does not kill me and so should not alarm my friends.
Dr. Danziger writes that he has ordered your father's sketch sent me. And I've ordered a large number of extra impressions of it if it is still on the stone. So you see I like it.
Let me hear from you and about you.
Sincerely your friend,
St. Helena,October 7,1892.
I've been too ill all the week to write you of your manuscripts, or even read them understandingly.
I think "Honest Andrew's Prayer" far and away the best. It is witty the others hardly more than earnest, and not, in my judgment, altogether fair. But then you know you and I would hardly be likely to agree on a point of that kind, I refuse my sympathies in some directions where I extend my sympathy if that is intelligible. You, I think, have broader sympathies than mine are not only sorry for the Homestead strikers (for example) but approve them. I do not. But we are one in detesting their oppressor, the smug-wump, Carnegie.
If you had not sent "Honest Andrew's Prayer" elsewhere I should try to place it here. It is so good that I hope to see it in print. If it is rejected please let me have it again if the incident is not then ancient history.
I'm glad you like some things in my book. But you should not condemn me for debasing my poetry with abuse; you should commend me for elevating my abuse with a little poetry, here and there. I am not a poet, but an abuser that makes all the difference. It is "how you look at it."
But I'm still too ill to write. With best regards to all your family, I am sincerely yours, Ambrose Bierce.
I've been reading your pamphlet on Art Education. You write best when you write most seriously and your best is very good.
St. Helena,October 15,1892.
I send you this picture in exchange for the one that you have I'm "redeeming" all those with these. But I asked you to return that a long time ago. Please say if you like this; to me it looks like a dude. But I hate the other the style of it.