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Guy de Maupassant
by Amy Arden
I remember with perfect clarity the first short story by Guy de Maupassant that I read. I was 16, wildly dramatic, hopelessly romantic, and bored. I picked up the book of short stories in my high school library to kill time. Scanning the table of contents, I saw “Happiness” and flipped straight to it.
The story moved me (I actually wept), but it was more than that. The sentimental girl in me was inspired to doodle, “To be able to love like that…” on my notebook—I still have that notebook—but the budding reader in me recognized greatness. For me and Guy, it was love at first sight.
In college I went on to learn that Guy came by his mastery of the short story quite honestly. His talent is comprised of equal parts genius, mania, and the best mentoring luck can buy.
Henri-Rene-Albert-Guy de Maupassant, born in 1850, was a Norman, descended from nobles, and his maternal grandfather was Gustave Flaubert’s godfather. Maupassant briefly studied law in Paris, but in 1869 at the age of 20, he volunteered to serve in the army during the Franco-Prussian War. He returned to Paris after the war and joined the literary circle of Gustav Flaubert, who introduced his new protégé to Emile Zola, Ivan Turgenev, and Henry James. Maupassant was obviously born under a luck star.
From Flaubert, Maupassant adopted exactness and accuracy of observations. His stories are marked by economy and precision of style. He recorded only the most pertinent details of action and atmosphere. He had the ability to be joyfully light-hearted or blackly cynical, yet always precise. “Whatever it may be we wish to say,” wrote Maupassant, “there is but one word that can express it, one word to make it live, one adjective to modify it. We must search until we have discovered this word, this verb or adjective, and never be satisfied with approximations.” Under the literary guardianship of Flaubert, Maupassant published his first masterpiece, “Boule De Suif” (“Ball of Fat”) in 1880. In a decade, he created some 300 short stories, six novels, three travel books, and one volume of verse.
 In his 20s, Maupassant contracted syphilis which led to increasing neurological and mental illness in his later years. He developed an exaggerated love for solitude and a mania of persecution and death. Critics have charted his illness though his semi-autobiographical stories of abnormal psychology. It is important to note, however, that the theme of mental disorder is present in his first collection, LA MAISON TELLIER (1881) which was published at the height of his health. One of Maupassant’s most disturbing stories is “Le Horla”, about vampire-like ghouls, madness and suicide. In “Who Knows?” the protagonist suffers from delusions about furniture in the house. “Diary of a Madman” is about a judge who, for the thrill and experience of it, commits murder then condemns another man to death for the crime. In “The Hand”, a severed hand kills the man who severed it—a plot which has been duplicated countless times in cinema, most notably in “The Hand” (1981), directed by Oliver Stone. Another plot that has been duplicated is “The Inn” in which two caretakers stay in an isolated inn. One of them goes missing and the other slowly slips into madness in his solitude. It’s easy to see the correlations between this story and Stephen King’s “The Shining”.
Sadly, Maupassant was considered insane by 1891 and in 1892 he tried to commit suicide by cutting his own throat. He was committed to a private asylum in Paris where he died 18 months later.
It isn’t only Maupassant’s stories of horror and madness that have an influence on authors and screenwriters (only 39 stories—a 10th of his total—would be classified as horror). Maupassant’s style has been imitated by countless authors and screenwriters. It has been said that Maupassant’s original masterpiece “Boule de Suif” may have been the inspiration for John Fords, 1945 western Stagecoach, staring the young and aspiring actor John Wayne. His influence can also be seen on Anton Chekhov, O. Henry and W. Somerset Maugham.
Maupassant set a high bar for the short story. Certainly we would expect no less from the literary godson of Gustave Flaubert. Chekhov said of him, “in the face of the demands imposed by the art of Maupassant, it is difficult to work.” Henry James characterized him as “a lion in the path.”
In preparing to write this article, I read “Happiness” again. Maupassant writes with classic simplicity and objective calm, never sermonizing about the unhappy circumstances of his characters. Few authors can write with the clarity of Guy de Maupassant. I found that both the sentimental girl and the literature lover in me were moved once again. The difference is that now, instead of wanting to love like that, I would say: To be able to write like that…
Amy Arden is the Dusty Shelf editor.
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