It's getting hard for me to think of Ambrose Bierce as anything but the quintessential, though unrealized, poster boy for PTSD (and secondarily, TBI) from the Civil War era -- in addition to his stature as a journalist and writer of quite macabre short stories...and the funny-as-hell classic, "The Devil's Dictionary."
(The painting pictured, too, shows Bierce with the human skull he allegedly kept on his writing desk "for inspiration".)
The more I read about Bierce, the more his symptoms jump off the page -- really consistent, too, with the extreme amounts of combat trauma he experienced.
More on that later, as it comes up, but here's an item from an unrelated book I've just been reading, which mentions Bierce's "mentorship" of another San Francisco-based writer, George Sterling.
"This was Sterling's first lesson. Many more followed. Bierce...obliged him to visit the city morgue, where he bribed an attendant to display bodies for them to "strengthen the spirit." When Sterling had to rush from the place and vomit in the gutter after viewing the corpose of a drowned man, Bierce said, "Don't be embarrassed...When I was eighteen, I had to go out and bury soldiers and horses who had been lying in the sun for a week. I had my hard lessons in life, too."
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That passage is followed by another in the same book, where a different San Francisco writer -- Jack London -- reinterprets Bierce's fixation with death to the same young writer, George Sterling:
"They walked up Grant Avenue and Sterling told London about the evening that Bierce had dragged him around the city, ending up at the morgue.
"That figures," London snorted. "Bierce is fascinated with death because he detests life. He's afraid of it, I think. He doesn't want to live in the real world. Anyway, I'm not taking you to any damned morgues tonight.."
-- Source: Realms of Gold: The Colorful Writers of San Francisco, 1850-1950, by George Rathmell.
Another intepretation of course is that perhaps Bierce had seen "too much" of the real world... and was still trying to put the pieces together, for himself, even decades later.
