MAUPASSANT

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22389, 30 April 1938, Page 18

MAUPASSANT

A Genius of the Short Story

(BFECUU.T WRITTEN JOS TH» PttSJ.)

[By K. G. C. McNAB.]

In 1896 Arnold Bennett wrote with pride in his journal that he was familiar with de Maupassant and the de Goncourts. Thirty years later, more sure of himself and less awed by greatness, he wrote; "Maupassant is wearing very well." And Maupassant will continue to do so, for his greatest power was to incite his reader to co-operate. It was Maupassant's supreme quality as a writer of the short story and his gift to that form of "art to write with such intense objectivity that the reader made the comments that most writers are obliged to define. Indignation, pity, scorn, amusement—for these Maupassant did not care, or perhaps he was certain enough of his skill to know that he had aroused them; but, like the artful p 1 leader who knows he has a pitiful qase but seems to the jury to Deunconscious of it, Maupassant left to others the tears and laughter and anger. Indistinguishable from this talent for exciting the reader is the ability, when the tale is read, to make him pause and follow in fancy the career of the people whose comedy or tragedy has just been told. In that way. through the continuing life of characters in the minds of others, the writer of the short story may have achieved a creation as considerable as the work of a novelist.

artists of the short story, and his influence is second only to Foes. He, too, led a wayward, spasmodic life. He died at 43 through his own fault: excessive physical exercise and dissipation which is legendary led him to take drugs. The effect of these depressives upon ms natural misanthropy was to cast him into a fitful melancholy which soon appeared as, only one symptom of general paralysis. He tried to take his own life, but survived to die less mercifully. His literary life did not begin with great promise, for many contemporaries of his own age were writing better plays and poems, and the advice and patronage of Flaubert seemed to have accomplished little. His first short story was the masterpiece, "Boule de Suif," and in this he showed that Flaubert's precepts were more valuable for the writer of pontes than for the novelist. Above all. said Flaubert, the artist must give an impression of reality, a reality to be achieved only through representations to the senses; and in Maupassant was the power to concentrate in a phrase a sight or smell or sound. "Boule de SuiT will arouse in those who recall the story memories" of the physical of the heroine and her companions, their dress, their skins, their voices, the essence of their bodily, forms. That Maupassant had little imagination, no thesis, no psychology, as the phrases go, did not matter; he was an observer, entirely objective, able, at a rush, to catch in words the sensual realities that he perceived. "I have never," he said, "described anything-that I have not seen." His previous exercises in poetry and the drama had now proved their efficacy, for he had learnt the value of words and was able to find the shortest, most pungent way. of putting down his observations. By instinct, laziness, or art, he realised that, to be most moving, he must stop just before he told his readers what and how they ought to feel. The.immediate realisation of a sight-or an idea is common to the tales of, Maupassant as it was to those of Poe. His success was at once international. Kipling admired his determination to see and describe the truth, and the young Arnold Bennett sighed after his "artistic shapely presentation of truth and his feeling for words as words." In their short stories and novelettes, Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig have tried to achieve the same objective faithfulness. Katherine Mansfield tried, in Maupassant's way, to leave to readers the indignation and the' sympathy. A PessimistMany French short story writers are gloomy, and Maupassant is accused of being a victim of the ma'adie du siecle; but his morbidity was of a cast more melancholy than that of the Decadents of his day and the Dadaists of ours. To contemporary gloom was added his own misanthropy, which needed no perverseness or affectation to make it universally pessimistic. Again let it be said that he wasted ng, words on scorn or hatred. His men are animals, brutally ferocious in their lust, or cruel with the cunning of a weasel. A recently published collection, ♦"Tales of Passion," is perhaps a too unrelieved series of examples of his pessimism; but, grim as the stories are, they are vivid and succinct and, in making their reader try to recall more pleasant tales, they show how deep i was Maupassant's belief that man was ruthless and selfish. There are some well-known tales in the collection. "Mad" is an extract from the diary of a judge whose severity led him to take life, at last the lives of human beings, to satisfy his pas-sions-r-a story of unsuspected evil masked by authority and respectability. "Room No. 11" is as fcorrible as anything in Bierce, the story of a woman who goes to an assignation and comes upon a cholera victim. "The Mayor of Carvelin" tells of a respected man who, driven by lust to murder, was enabled by his position ,to escape detection, but went out of his mind with remorse. "The Adventure of Walter Schnaffs" is a dispassionately ironical story of an officer decorated for an action which was merely, absurd. "The Story of a Farm Girl" describes the stupid, patiently suffering creatures who, in Maupassant, endure injustice and oppression with no hope of relief and as a matter of course. "The Trawler" tells how a fisherman was maimed lest his companions should lose property. The other tales ar& of the same nature, . gloomy * and hopeless. It is of little use to turn to something mildly farcical like "La Maison Tellier," for it will be seen at once that, though the incidents may be less depressing, there

Poc and His' Successors

The short story has a short history. It is possible to find in "Ruth, in the Parables, in Elizabethans like Deloney and Nashe, tales which can be called short stories; but the effective, continuous history of the form covers not much more than a hundred years. The most creditable and important part of this history is American. Washington Irving wanted to live by writing; by character and abilities he was incapable of sustained composition and wrote his "Sketches," intense within Irving's limits and complete, a series of short stories. Imitators trod on his heels and Hawthorne rose to equal success, so that, by 1842, Poe was able to define the new form. The short story requires to be short enough to be read at a sitting, though the length is indeterminate. It may contain fewer than a thousand words; but Henry James s "Turn of the Screw" contains 40,0£0. It must contain "no word of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to one pre-established design. It must give one single definite impression. In this way it expounds one situation, though various people may be variously affected, or it describes one event, or it illumines one character, or it illustrates one kind of emotion, and, generally, one of its virtues will be compression. Thus it has more unity than the novel, and this particular quality of singleness was called by Poe "totality." The short story is thus distinguished b length and nature from the novel. From 1840 the history of the American short story is rich: its form was popularised by scores of magazines, and at once it became the medium of a genius—Poe. The magazines demanded originality, action, variety, sensation, and Poe gave them these requirements. To a variety of subjects, which ranged from "The Fall of the House of Usher" to "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," he added mastery of horrifying language, imagery that could convey a vast idea or scene in a flash, intense penetration of character and incident, and, better than these, conviction of the absolute reality of all that he thought and wrote. Poe made certain the permanence of the short story- His American successors alone did justice to their leader: Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Joel Chandler Hams, Henry James, O. Henry, and Ambrose Bierce. The invention of different types by each of these men was made known by their followers, though the unexpected element of . many of p. Henry's tales and the wilfully macabre quality of the work of Ambrose Bierce are legacies which few of their countless pupils have used half so well. It is strange that many of the American writers of short stories lived erratically or adventurously, that the wayward thrills or sensational dangers of personal existence seemed to match the short burst of intensely real experience that is the best feature of a good short story. In America the short story is still written in countless numbers, and is still, on the general upper level, superior to that of other countries. No doubt the large circulation of several magazines enables writers to be paid more amply than the editors of English and Continental magazines can afford, and it is likely that buried in the flies of American periodicals lie gems that the diligent compilers of annual anthologies have failed to detect.

One of Three Giants

Maupassant stands with Poe and Chekov as one of the three greatest

<Xales of Passion. By Guy de Manpassant. Translated by Marjorle Laurie. T. Werner Laurie. 243 pp.

(Continued at foot of next column.)

is the same inherent contempt for man. Is it then possible to dismiss Maupassant as a writer whose attitude to his fellow-men is so inhuman that only a misanthropist or a sadist may read him with satisfaction? No doubt it is possible; but it would be wrong. Without considering the wit, the literary qualities, and the other compensations of reading Maupasfeant, and without straining after the justifications of sophistry, something remains to be said. —But an Honest Observer A man whose attitude to life is like Maupassant's may be justified as Samuel Butler may be justified for "The Way of All Flesh," Swift for his Brobdingnagians, Emily Bronte for Heatheliff, Hardy for Jude Fawley, and Shakespeare for lago. Did the creators of these characters and books believe what they wrote? There is no reason to doubt their sincerity;"they believed that men behaved in these unpleasant ways, and the experience of some of them encouraged the conviction that the unpleasant was the normal. Such was the experience of Maupassant, who, by temperament and circumstance; was inclined to resort to surroundings where the evil and selfish conduct of his fellow-creatures was • most apparent In the artificial "high" society. that he frequented -in the intervals of his absence, from der pravity and degradati6n he was not likely to see anything to shake his! belief that men were base. As he saw his world; so he described it;! and truth, repellent in such aspects, is not to be effaced by! being deplored or shunned. ..