In discussing a certain French author, there’s a temptation to illustrate with fluffy and sensuous impressionist pieces evoking his era and favourite locations: pictures by Manet and Renoir depicting the delights of late 19th century Paris, the Seine on weekends, and so forth. But see here:
Above are pictures by the academy painter, Meissonier. Still eclipsed by the ongoing fad for impressionism, he was nonetheless one of the great professionals, specialising in war and mess.
Meissonier makes an unlikely and comical appearance as a character in Guy de Maupassant’s Sundays of a Paris Bourgeois; and if anything serves to illustrate Maupassant, it is the grim clarity of this underrated master, who was probably an acquaintance of the writer.
See here:
Napoleon rides through dirty snow from a defeat on French soil: a defeat by Blücher after Moscow and before Waterloo. No impressions here. Meissonier’s definition and balance make a clear statement of pessimism matched by grand persistence.
That picture – not the emperor – is Maupassant. A godless clarity. An alluring desolation. Guy de Maupassant really is unforgivable…
…yet we forgive. Why?
Some of the answer lies in that for which he is most often and justly praised. Style. Maupassant’s style goes far beyond the clarity already mentioned. He treats his readers as royal guests, and in this he stands supreme: consciousness of the other, the reader.
No misanthrope was ever so compulsively courteous.
***
Les Dimanches d’un Bourgeois de Paris, Sundays of a Paris Bourgeois, fell to hand (or, I should say, to mouse) at a time when I was reading distractedly and without relish. It was short, episodic, and broken by illustrations, something that usually appeals. Though I’ve read and re-read much of Maupassant over the years, this one was new to me.
Maupassant encountered Flaubert through family ties, and it was Flaubert who encouraged him to write never elaborately, but always laboriously; to seek out the right phrase, to put it in the perfect spot within its sentence, to relate sentence to paragraph so that the reader digests all with gusto and ease. The point is always made, the character or place is sketched unforgettably…yet the labour is for the writer, never for the reader.
And Maupassant surpassed his teacher, as we see in the case of Les Dimanches.
A loose series of sketches, the book describes the late-life aspirations of a narrow, unmarried Paris bureaucrat, M. Patissot, his attempts to widen his horizons after the age of fifty. It’s funny, sharpish, and full of those situations that we all recognise from our own attempts to “break out” and “widen horizons” and so on. So typically of Maupassant, while pretending to be about very little, it burrows to our secret, embarrassing cores.
Patissot’s purchase of outdoor equipment has a particularly contemporary feel. Even today, in Paris it’s a hideously complicated and expensive affair. The customer of a single business may be obliged to walk to a different street for each different item, and to pay up to five times the price of a good internet outlet. The French are the biggest suckers for the famous présentation franςaise.
The account of the protagonist’s first weekend outing with his new equipment is full of a gentle mockery that, in Maupassant’s earlier and happier period, stayed within bounds. A fall, a broken wine bottle and wet lunch, getting lost, a chance romantic hookup that comes to nothing…little happens, yet how we feel for this man! And for ourselves?
To this day, a Paris bureaucrat is a creature of fear and habit. Yet the book, while taking the protagonist from one mild failure to another, does not end with him scampering back to his office and old ways. Maupassant does not betray his character. While M. Patissot’s romantic fumblings, his excruciating encounters with Zola and Meissonier, his miserable efforts at fishing etc all come to nothing, he shows a surprising curiosity and capacity for friendship.
At the very end, he meets yet another chance acquaintance – a skeptic at at a radical feminist symposium! – and drifts off for a drink and a chat.
The worst of this book, like the worst of Maupassant, are the vulgar and “suggestive” episodes, the useless dross that excited Victorian readers and earned Maupassant his “reputation” in the Anglosphere. God knows what the purpose of that was. Sales? The French are bad at that sort of thing, and none worse than Maupassant, a normand, orthodox and conservative to the bone. The sleaze was such a bad fit, and got worse as his mental health declined and syphilis set in.
But the famous and boring immoralité is not today’s subject.
Les Dimanches is a great book because we start by disliking Patissot as a bluffing mediocrity, as we hate our own bluff and mediocrity. We finish by enjoying his wholesome aspirations to know more and do more, however futile; we admire his obtuse curiosity, and belated discovery of his fellow man, if only on weekends. Unlike many reading types, and unlike me, Patissot is a startlingly tolerant fellow. We wish him many more silly and adventurous Sundays.
***
Because of his background and insight into petty livelihoods, one might imagine Maupassant as an inadequate bookish type who, like Patissot with his fishing, ventured into short fiction, only with luck.
Nope.
Guy de Maupassant was able to use his early impoverished experiences to shape his stories of muddlers and mediocrities. The man himself was dynamic with, obviously, a stupendous capacity for work. He was also a competitive athlete, and, if you peer behind the 19th century face-hair, a heartthrob. Frenetic sex cost him his life and sanity, yet, as with Liszt, the sex usually came to him.
He did venture into long fiction: one of his novels, Bel Ami, was a blockbuster and another, Une Vie, one of the great novels of the century. Maupassant the non-novelist is a myth, perhaps caused by the great popularity of his shorter pieces. The mindless repetition of the myth is entirely mysterious, since Bel Ami and Une Vie are known and available everywhere.
But he was not one of his own mediocre characters. Syphilis aside, Maupassant’s tragedy was maybe spiritual. Pascalian. Misère de l’homme sans dieu, and so on. But let that rest. It’s another subject.
Examine just the first paragraph of Les Dimanches. It fairly shimmers on the page, inviting you in. It is simple, funny, masterful. Four lines, and so much is achieved…for the reader. All is for the reader, something that should not be rare, but is very rare.
I haven’t found this particular book online in English, but I haven’t looked hard. Plenty of English translations of Guy’s tales here for free online reading.
***
To write as he did, Maupassant must have loved us a little bit. God is in that style, somewhere.
[…] as if each phrase of Hemingway’s writing was the product of painstaking composition, worthy of Maupassant, rather than the drab grocery-listing it mostly is. (By contrast, that blue-green spray was […]
Hello Mosomoso,
I enjoyed your writing about Guy. Being an enthusiast of short stories and simple, clear, polished writing, I enjoy many of his stories, especially “The Hand”. “La Horla” also has that same crisp, crystal clarity in the style. I am always amazed at his momentum — many of the stories simply jump in and get right to the story from the first line. Others, though in the frame-tale format, such as “The Hand”, still draw me in through their engaging simplicity, and once the character in the frame starts telling his story, we’re off again on the magic carpet.
For anyone who appreciates stories written in this simple, clear way (though easy reading is damned hard writing, as Hawthorne apparently said), my own group of favourite story writers, going chronologically, runs from Guy to W. W. Jacobs and Saki, to Maugham and John Collier and Roald Dahl — with a focus on the short stories rather than novels of all, and including the children’s books of Dahl, many of which are, well, short stories, written with the same perspiring dedication to polish and precision as the adult short stories. “The Magic Finger”, “Esio Trot”, “The Enormous Crocodile”, “The Giraffe, the Pelly & Me”, and others, I read and reread as short stories.
Those who like the merits of Guy’s style might be able to go directly to Jacobs with a similar appreciation. And Maugham, we know, who was born in Paris and grew up reading all the Guy he could get his hands on in the shops, often reading the cheap volumes there where he stood without buying them, modelled his style on Guy’s.
I appreciated your last line, and had never thought of that — that Guy’s attention to style and the art of story writing must have meant he valued his readers just a little bit. I also liked your “stupendous capacity for work” statement.
It’s funny the anti-Guy movement which grew out of the Chekhov school: Chekhov was a Guy enthusiast. Also, Guy has stories without clever endings, which are simply descriptions of occurrences, a la Chekhov with his “The Fire”, “The Reed-Pipe”, etc. The university professors around the world are quite mistaken about Guy in that respect, and all of them are wrong to ignore or compare him unfavourably with Chekhov.
Other short story writers I’ve read or dabbled in, are A. E. Coppard, H. E. Bates, de la Mare, and many of the ghost story writers, such as M. R. James — himself another proponent of a brightly attractive simple style. If you happen to find “On the Brighton Road” by Richard Middleton, I think you’ll find a lovely, short example of high-polish prose cast in a gorgeous simplicity. It’s only a few pages long. Many of the 19th and early 20th century ghost story writers are worth investigating for writing in a style which shows they value the art of story-telling, and their readers.
Eric Bryan
Eric,
So many good suggestions there. Makes me feel like sitting by a wood-fire right now with hot chocolate and churros while devouring short stories from that high period of the genre.
The snobbishness over Chekhov has been around for far too long. One is granted an invisible badge of cleverness for preferring the twistless tales of Chekhov over the yarn-spinning of Maupassant and others. It’s a bit like showily preferring flint-dry sherry over a glorious raisin-sweet oloroso from an ancient solera. Okay if you really mean it, not okay if it’s forced sophistication.
While I can enjoy a session with the Russian, I’ll take a strong plot and a twist, every time.
Well, Eric, I’ll try to catch up with that Middleton story soon. And I know of one reader of this blog – a fierce Maugham groupie – who’ll love to hear any more suggestions.
Hello Mosomoso,
I’m rereading Maugham’s essay, “The Short Story”, in Points of View, a book of his essays. He mentions Chekhov recommending to his brother, once you have written your short story, strike out the beginning and end. I think if you do that you are in danger of ending up with a piece of descriptive writing, and not a story.
I recently bought a friend an edition of Cosmopolitans. This book contains all of Maugham’s shortest short stories. A 1200-1500 word limit was imposed on him by a magazine editor in the 1920s, and these stories are the result. For anyone–despite Maugham’s clarity and simplicity–who finds his longer short stories too long, these stories might be worth your while.
“The Reed-Pipe” or “The Shepherd’s Pipe” by Chekhov–I read that with an open mind, ready for whatever he might offer me. The plot is, a man, feeling good, walks through the fields into a wood. There, he meets a shepherd. He has some talk with the shepherd. The man then walks on, now feeling bad. He walks out of the wood, into the fields on the other side, feeling bad.
The End.
Wow, I sound like Hemingway there. Anyway, I think it’s not a bad story, because you can plot the plot geographically: Fields, Woods/Sheherd, Fields. There is the three-part structure from Aristotle’s Poetics, in a way: Beginning/fields, middle/wood/shepherd, and end/fields.
The plot really, like that of Pride & Prejudice, is that a man changes his mind. I think it’s okay, and am swayed some by the rural setting.
But Chekhov’s “The Fire”, I think it was, simply described a rural village burning down. It was literary reportage, as I remember, with no dramatic arc. I appreciated the simple, polished, clear writing (English translation), but was annoyed at the worship of such of Chekhov’s works for their merits as stories.
It wasn’t really a story; it was a description of a happening, or various happenings, like a polished diary entry or newspaper article. It did not have the art of storytelling. It did not have the pattern of invention and creation stamped upon it. After all, there is ARTifice in art, in storytelling, in writing, creating a story.
On the rural Russian theme, I read a story or two from Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches, and the feeling of sitting around the campfire, and feeling compassion for the peasants, is still there. I don’t remember much plot, but great atmosphere and feeling. I also read a few of Turgenev’s stories not from that collection, and I thought they weren’t nearly as good. They didn’t capture that feeling of the countryside, the popping fire, the sleeping in the hay.
Of A. E. Coppard, many are strange, but “Dusky Ruth” and “The Higgler” are his most famous, and I thought were moving.
H. E. Bates: “Elaine”. It echoes “Dusky Ruth”. They both describe–well if you are familiar with the feeling, you’ll recognize it.
Maugham’s “The Bum” (formerly “The Derelict”), in Cosmopolitans, is strangely moving to me, and not one of his strongly-plotted stories, but left in mystery.
For fascinating writing about short stories and Maupassant and Chekhov, you might like to see Maugham’s prefaces to his collected short stories. I mean the big two-volume set in a slipcase, with East & West, and The World Over. If you like Guy, I think you’ll be fascinated.
From your comments on sherry, maybe you would like Roald Dahl’s two wine stories. “The Butler” is only about three pages long, so not a big dedication is requred. “Taste” is his famous wine story, a bit longer, but still a short story (his definition of a short story: “It has to be short, and it has to be a story”).
I don’t know if you read Middleton’s “On the Brighton Road” yet; I came across another of his, about a shepherd boy, which also was weirdly striking, and the poet’s polished prose was evident again.
If you like a poet’s polished prose as well as a madly brilliant plot in your short story, John Collier is your man. When Dahl’s stories came to be reviewed in the 1950s, he was often bracketed with Saki and John Collier. The latter’s “Little Memento” I think is one of the most brilliant of his. As with Dahl’s “Lamb to the Slaughter”, the story shows extreme cleverness up to a point, and I can see a clever writer stopping there. But the endings to these stories go beyond cleverness to brilliance.
Since you mention enjoying plot twists, and you like those of Guy’s, I think some by Saki, Collier, and Dahl might be to your interest.
Many of Saki’s are light and funny, but if you want to sample his darker dramatics you might try “The Hounds of Fate” and “The Interlopers”. You’ll be in the English countryside in one, and in the Carpathians in the other.
On the snobbishness related to the Chekhov school: There is an American “literary” writer–forgotten his name–whose goal it is to exceed Chekhov’s I believe 700+ short stories. He thinks in quantity, and that when he beats Chekhov, he will attain the Grail, I guess.
Maybe you can imagine how many non-stories he’s probably written by now, just pieces of descriptive writing, perhaps many only a page long.
I recently read a one-page story by another modernist giant, Virginia Woolf: “The Haunted House”. I think it is a prose-poem, and not a story. But think of those who worship her work and speak breathlessly of the stream-of-consciousness style of hers and others’ after her.
Maugham was right when he summed up stream-of-consciousness as simply another literary technique, and that it would never replace the ancient art of storytelling or the classic story.
If you are lightly drunk, stream-of-consciousness thought or writing is quite easy, and probably boring to the sober. When someone is in that state, disjointed thoughts can come from them in almost a steady stream. I think literary ideas can be found in that condition, but a pure narration of the thoughts or vocalizations from that state are, I don’t think, literature, or stories. The idea that they are is the wishful thinking of those from the Chekhov school.
But they keep giving each other literary awards anyway.
That idea I just mentioned, about literary ideas sprouting from a pleasantly inebriated state, has an interesting example: To write “A Shropshire Lad”, A. E. Houseman followed a certain discipline, or regimen. He would drink one pint of beer, then walk one mile. At the completion of this ritual, he was always able to write his beautiful poems.
Eric
A Woolf skeptic and admirer of Houseman! I wonder if you are one of those who thinks De la Mare was a greater poet than any who won Nobels.
I’m hoarding up your suggestions, Eric, for future reading binges. Because I’ve been busy hiking across Spain and working on my other blog, I have been neglecting this site. However, I’ll be passing on your recommendations to a couple of people I know will enjoy them.
Many, many thanks for such a comprehensive response. Makes me wish you had a blog specialising in reading for pleasure.