Guy de Maupassant - One Depressed Guy

Beloved Family,

There are many authors whose works I have read, in whole or in part. There are even more authors whose work I've been meaning to read for decades, in some cases several decades. Sheryl recently got a free bag of books from Borders! She chose nothing but classics. This means that, last night, I got to start the Aeneid, an epic I've wanted to read for many years. It's first line alone is among the most famous phrases in all literature: "I sing of arms and the man..." The first official journal of the National Rifle Association, many years before The American Rifleman, was called Arms and the Man.

Before starting Virgil's master work last night, I stayed up late to finish the last of 26 short stories by de Maupassant. I've been about a month working at this little anthology. It has given me both respect and sadness for its author.

De Maupassant is a fellow who can turn a phrase with the best of them. And he can whip up what Mark Twain would call "a flowery comparison" with the ease of a true master. Many people have tried to describe outdoor scenes and their impact on the characters and their moods. But when this fellow does it, I almost forget that I'm sitting up in bed with one light on, warm and dry, in a rented house in Chubbuck, Idaho. I can actually believe that I'm breathing the first breaths of spring by the Seine river in the 1880s. I can feel myself riding a horse along a path through a forest which meets overhead and whose beginning and end are lost in the distance of both directions.

His characters are well developed and well drawn. You feel that you know them or have known someone just like them. In that respect, he has a great deal in common with Charles Dickens.

But, while Dickens always shows us that virtue will, in some degree, triumph in the end, de Maupassant repeatedly shows us that no one is completely virtuous and that, in the end, it makes no difference how virtuous one has tried to be. His point of view, then, is quite hopeless, especially in his later stories. Perhaps the Victorian period, with its much spoken of suppressed sexualilty, was even worse for the passionate Gallics. I don't really know. Actually, it seems that their usual casual attitude towards marriage vows was already very much in place by 1850 when the author was born. His characters seem to lament that they cannot find happiness in such behavior. But, as we all know, "Wickedness never was happiness."

Even a man who has led an absolutely virtuous life, such as Monsieur Saval in the story entitled Regret, feels that by avoiding opportunities he had to commit adultery with his best friend's wife, he has only contributed to the pointlessness of his own existence! What an attitude!

If you get an anthology of De Maupassant, you may find that its stories are arranged chronologically as are those of our little volume. This makes it easy to observe a pattern to the development of his themes as he grows older. I say "older" rather than "old," because he never grew old. He died of syphillis in middle age. In his early twenties, he participated in the Franco-Prussian War, a terrible humiliation for France and a type of preview of the First World War in its protracted battles in trenches dug in mud. Several of his earlier stories are either about the war or are about its impact on peoples' lives after the war. The occupation of portions of France by Prussian (northeast German) soldiers seems to have left an almost manic bitterness in the soul of France if de Maupassant's writings are any indicator.

The war caused many men to lose either their lives or their livelihoods. It caused many women to lose what little virtue they thought they had. It caused old women to lose their husbands and sons. And there are stories about all such unfortunates. Mother Sauvage is perhaps the most moving of his stories about the Prussian occupation. The reader finds sympathy for everyone in the story in one way or another. A Duel is perhaps the closest thing to a cheerful story in the whole book, and even it is upsetting until near the end.

After he finishes his period of lamentation over the Franco-Prussian shootout, he moves into a series of stories about young men of means, all of whom seem to have fine houses or apartments and a staff of servants. They all seem to be idle wanderers, casually experimenting with the lives and feelings of others. To be a de Maupassant protagonist is not necessarily to be a likable person. But some of these men feel genuine remorse for the hurt they've caused, one such fellow even going so far as to kiss the three-days-dead face of an older Englishwoman who had committed suicide when she realized that her love for him was hopeless.

A number of his later stories seem to be about what he perceives to be the inevitability of repeating our parents' mistakes. Hautot and Son is a prime example.

Finally, at the end of the anthology, he dabbles in an almost Poe-like fascination with insanity and what it does or does not entail. Who Knows and The Horla are such stories. If he'd been born earlier, hemight have given Edgar a run for his money in that genre. He's pretty good at it.

All in all, let me say that I like Guy de Maupassant as a man and like him very much as a wordsmith. I recommend him for anyone who likes short stories and for anyone who likes well drawn characters and well-painted scenery. I cannot recommend him as a source for a person's philosophy of life.