An Inhabitant of Carcosa - Ambrose Bierce

 An Inhabitant of Carcosa - Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Bierce is an important writer in a number of genres. As a journalist, satirist, horror writer and writer of war stories, he has influenced those who followed, from H P Lovecraft to Ernest Hemingway. His war stories were based on his own Civil War experience. He was present at several battles, receiving a head wound at Kennesaw Mountain. Further service in the army, journalism in California and then England, an attempt to profit from the mining in the Dakota Territory and, finally, settling in San Francisco, as writer, and occasional agent, for William Randolph Hearst.

An Inhabitant of Carcosa is one of Bierce’s earliest weird tales. It was first published in the December 25th 1886 edition of The San Francisco Newsletter. It is a powerful little tale. The revelation that brings the narrative to its effective close is a little clunky, but the overall effect of decay and desolation is chillingly realised. The appropriation of Carcosa by Robert W Chambers, and, then, H P Lovecraft, sadly misses the point. Bierce’s Carcosa is not an alien city as such. It is all too familiar from history. Bierce’s work is informed by Ozymandias and Omar Khayyam. We and our surroundings are destined to become dust. Eventually, the name by which people call their dwelling place becomes lost to those who come later. Carcosa need not be a city distant in space; only in time.

The most peculiar parts of Bierce’s story are the opening and closing. The strange reference that this story has been told to a medium by a spirit is a most unusual framing device. Bierce had little time for religion or superstition. This last line places his story in the nature of myth, or madness, or archive. There are so many layers of uncertainty in this tale, which helps to maintain the unsettling effects, even after many readings.

By 1906, when Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary was first published, his family life was as shattered as Carcosa. He separated from his wife in 1888. Their first son committed suicide in 1889; the second, an alcoholic, died of pneumonia in 1901. Finally divorced in 1904, Bierce’s ex-wife died in 1905. In 1913, aged 71, Bierce rode south to experience Pancho Villa’s revolution in Mexico. He disappeared in 1914. 

There are many theories about Bierce’s fate, but no body to provide evidence. Read the first sentence of An Inhabitant of Carcosa. Prophecy? Unlikely. But quite possibly a statement of intent. In his last letter, if it is genuine, if it even really exists, for such is the haze of uncertainty surrounding Bierce’s last days, he says that he is heading for the Andes, a repetition of an idea from an earlier letter. ‘I am going away, so very far away. I have in mind a little valley in the heart of the Andes, just wide enough for one.’ Think of a valley wide enough for one… In that last letter, he states his intention to break off his relationship with the young woman who may have been a kind of romantic interest for his last years. (‘If I am what you think me, I am unworthy of your friendship; if I am not, you are unworthy of mine’). He ends the letter, ‘I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination’. 

Bierce believed that a violent death was preferable to a ‘natural’ one, both in terms of time spent suffering and the emotions of one’s last days. The likeliest explanation of his death is that he was lynched, having ridden away from the protection of Villa deeper into Mexico, where gringos would be treated with extreme suspicion. ‘An unknown destination’. ‘A valley wide enough for one’. Whatever the case, his body has never been found. And that notorious circumstance is just a little more chilling in the light of Hali’s words. It is a very short story; and yet it is packed with strange resonances. As a story, it sets a tone for a new type of horror literature, forming a bridge between Poe and Lovecraft. But it is so much more than that, pointing toward the psychological horror of Conrad Aiken, and the existential horror of the 21st century. The inhabitant of Carcosa is much closer to home than he first appears.