Books: Old Indestructible

THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES OF GUY DE MAUPASSANT (1,339) pp.)—Hanover House—($5.95).

Guy de Maupassant had an eye for life as clear and wary as that of a Norman peasant eating the good side of a wormy apple. De Maupassant was proud as a boy of his feats of strength, he grew up to be an industrious lover of women, and he died, a syphilitic madman, at the age of 43. He was a great writer.

He had a Norman’s instinct for power, and he marshaled his little world of words’ like a master. In his ten productive years he wrote nearly 300 short stories, half a dozen novels, verse, plays, and a mass of journalism. The style of his stories gave a tougher skin to all fiction written since, and during his life (1850-93) he was a rich man and internationally famous.

With all this industry, confusion was inescapable—as was plagiarism by lesser writers. Bulgarian-born Professor Artine Artinian of New York’s Bard College, long a pro-De Maupassant agitator, has now brought out the first complete English-language edition of the master’s works, with 65 stories purged from the old De Maupassant canon and with hitherto unknown or unpublished pieces added.

De Maupassant wrote “daring” stories in a society that still preserved the bourgeois decencies. Today, his people—as seen with the sharp focus of a man who wears his reading glasses because he dines alone—no longer seem as real as realism would suggest. His world, as “simple and faithless as a smile and a shake of the hand,” no longer exists. The world of 1955, distressed by its own faithlessness, may long for something more than the hard sneer of a peasant who has made good in the city. But the man had power and style, and his best stories have the indestructibility of the peasant’s Sunday bowler hat.