1825 Nineteenth St.,N. W.,Washington, D. C.,June 30, 1901.
I am glad my few words of commendation were not unpleasing to you. I meant them all and more. You ought to have praise, seeing that it is all you got. The "Post," like most other newspapers, "don't pay for poetry." What a damning confession! It means that the public is as insensible to poetry as a pig to well, to poetry. To any sane mind such a poem as yours is worth more than all the other contents of a newspaper for a year.
I've not found time to consider your "bit of blank" yet at least not as carefully as it probably merits.
My relations with the present editor of the Examiner are not unfriendly, I hope, but they are too slight to justify me in suggesting anything to him, or even drawing his attention to anything. I hoped you would be sufficiently "enterprising" to get your poem into the paper if you cared to have it there. I wrote Dr. Doyle about you. He is a dear fellow and you should know each other. As to Scheffauer, he is another. If you want him to see your poem why not send it to him? But the last I heard he was very ill. I'm rather anxious to hear more about him.
It was natural to enclose the stamps, but I won't have it so so there! as the women say.
Sincerely yours, Ambrose Bierce.
1825 Nineteenth St.,N. W.,Washington, D. C.,July 15,1901.
Here is the bit of blank. When are we to see the book? Needless question when you can spare the money to pay for publication, I suppose, if by that time you are ambitious to achieve public inattention. That's my notion of encouragement I like to cheer up the young author as he sets his face toward "the peaks of song."
Say, that photograph of the pretty sister the one with a downward slope of the eyes is all faded out. That is a real misfortune: it reduces the sum of human happiness hereabout. Can't you have one done in fast colors and let me have it? The other is all right, but that is not the one that I like the better for my wall. Sincerely yours, Ambrose Bierce.
The Olympia,Washington, D. C.,December 16,1901.
I enclose the poems with a few suggestions. They require little criticism of the sort that would be "helpful." As to their merit I think them good, but not great. I suppose you do not expect to write great things every time. Yet in the body of your letter (of Oct. 22) you do write greatly and say that the work is "egoistic" and "unprintable." If it were addressed to another person than myself I should say that it is "printable" exceedingly. Call it what you will, but let me tell you it will probably be long before you write anything better than some many of these stanzas.
You ask if you have correctly answered your own questions. Yes; in four lines of your running comment:
"I suppose that I'd do the greater good in the long run by making my work as good poetry as possible."
poet's birthright for a mess of "popularity." If you do I shall have to part company with you, as I have done with him and at least one of his betters, for I draw the line at demagogues and anarchists, however gifted and however beloved.
Let the "poor" alone they are oppressed by nobody but God. Nobody hates them, nobody despises. "The rich" love them a deal better than they love one another. But I'll not go into these matters; your own good sense must be your salvation if you are saved. I recognise the temptations of environment: you are of San Francisco, the paradise of ignorance, anarchy and general yellowness. Still, a poet is not altogether the creature of his place and time at least not of his to-day and his parish.
By the way, you say that * * * is your only associate that knows anything of literature. She is a dear girl, but look out for her; she will make you an anarchist if she can, and persuade you to kill a President or two every fine morning. I warrant you she can pronounce the name of McKinley's assassin to the ultimate zed, and has a little graven image of him next her heart.
Yes, you can republish the Memorial Day poem without the Post's consent could do so in "book form" even if the Post had copyrighted it, which it did not do. I think the courts have held that in purchasing work for publication in his newspaper or magazine the editor acquires no right in it, except for that purpose . Even if he copyright it that is only to protect him from other newspapers or magazines; the right to publish in a book remains with the author. Better ask a lawyer though preferably without letting him know whether you are an editor or an author.
I ought to have answered (as well as able) these questions before, but I have been ill and worried, and have written few letters, and even done little work, and that only of the pot-boiling sort.
My daughter has recovered and returned to Los Angeles.
Please thank Miss * * * for the beautiful photographs I mean for being so beautiful as to "take" them, for doubtless I owe their possession to you.
I wrote Doyle about you and he cordially praised your work as incomparably superior to his own and asked that you visit him. He's a lovable fellow and you'd not regret going to Santa Cruz and boozing with him.