Books: Have It Out in Heaven

MAUPASSANT: A LION IN THE PATH (430 pp.) — Fronds Sfeegmuller — Random House ($5).

Guy de Maupassant’s reputation among literary critics has steadily declined over the past 20 years, but his stories are still read by people who like tart, sharp character sketching, mildly risque situations and ingenious twist endings. Even critics who think his work contrived and superficial will mainly agree that no other writer save Chekhov has so enormously influenced the shape of the modern short story. De Maupassant’s own life story, as told in Francis Steegmuller’s breezy and readable biography, seems itself like one of his more mordant sketches—flashy, melodramatic and highly painful at its end.

Like other offspring of unhappily married parents, De Maupassant matured too quickly. At the age of nine he was writing to his mother: “I was first in composition and as a reward Madame de X took me to the circus with Papa. It seems she was also rewarding Papa for something, but I don’t know what.”

Relative Chastity. Guy’s doting mother could find no fault with her good-looking son. In her old age she was to recall proudly that “His childhood was absolutely chaste. It was not until he was sixteen that he had his first liaison, with the lovely E …” A mother who thought 16 an advanced age for the beginning of love was hardly likely to overtrain him in discipline. Accordingly, when the family lost its fortune in the Franco-Prussian war and Guy had to become a clerk in Paris, he complained bitterly.

But in Paris, Guy found rich compensations for his drudgery. He was befriended by the great novelist Gustave Flaubert and brought into the master’s Sunday literary circle. There he sat at the feet of Europe’s literary greats: Turgenev, Zola, Edmond de Goncourt, Alphonse Daudet, Hippolyte Taine and occasionally Henry James. Zola remembered De Maupassant as “a proud he-man [who] told us dumfounding stories about women, amorous swaggerings that sent Flaubert into roars of laughter.”

Beneath his Dragging there was a basis of solid and sordid fact. Astonishingly handsome and strong, Guy ran through a bewildering string of conquests. His mistresses included prostitutes, actresses, a singer-writer from Sandusky, Ohio named Blanche Roosevelt, a French woman whose husband was a diplomat in Rumania and for whom (perhaps to show his gratitude) De Maupassant tried to obtain the coveted ribbon of the Legion of Honor, and a Polish noblewoman.

Reproachable Genre. Between affairs, he kept increasing his mastery of the short-story form. He became, gibed a contemporary critic, “an almost irreproachable author in a genre that is not”—the cleverly contrived story, amusing and suspenseful but not quite profound or true. Generous Biographer Steegmuller speaks of De Maupassant’s stories in the same breath with Chekhov’s, but many readers will feel that De Maupassant never achieved the warm, quiet sympathy and seriousness of Chekhov. Without those qualities De Maupassant takes his own special niche, close to the top.

What he might have made of his enormous talent had he been able to discipline himself, his biographer does not try to guess. His decay (from syphilis) was rapid and pitiful. At 41, his eyes began to fail him, his memory to collapse. A year later he. tried to cut his throat. Taken to a sanitarium in a strait jacket, he lingered for a year, disintegrating from the ravages of paresis.

His old mother never reconciled herself to his death. Said she: “If God exists, I will see Him, and we will have it out.”