The writer's tomb, Montparnasse cemetery
Though it provides plenty of fodder
for legitimate satire, French intellectual life must remain admirable and even
inspirational to an American observer.
To begin with it is deeper and certainly more socially approved than in
our country. You still meet a fair
number of people who without self-consciousness actually refer to themselves
and others as “intellectuals”. The
American “public intellectuals,” fairly recent cultural arrivals-- one might
call them nouveaux intelligents—may
change this. But the French news kiosks
and television programs are practically clogged with public pundits and
rock-star professors.
The French truly do love, respect,
and cherish their rich literary heritage.
One very often sees what look like ordinary people sitting in the Métro
deeply absorbed in some classic work of philosophy or fiction. Our publishing industry appears unduly to
prize novelty---what’s new. In France
even the trendiest of publishers is likely to have an excellent sideline of
“classics”. Several years ago I
discovered a series simply called “Bouquins” from the publisher Robert
Laffont. It includes two fat volumes of
Guy de Maupassant. This is not the
“complete works,” of which several multi-volume editions have been
published. But it has about as much of a
prolific author as one could conceivably schlepp onto an airplane. I think it has most of the short stories (he
wrote three hundred some), several of the well-known novellas, and a couple of
full novels. Furthermore there is a
no-holds-barred scholarly apparatus of the kind one would find only in an
academic book here. This is dipable de
Maupassant, but you can dip almost as deep as you want.
Guy de Maupassant experienced a
fair amount of history for a man who died at forty-two. He was born in 1850 during the short-lived
Second Republic, grew up during the Second Empire of Napoleon III, and lived
out his nearly frantic literary career in the Third Republic, which had been
born in the disaster of the Franco-Prussian War and continued for most of the
writer’s life in a serious and prolonged economic depression. He is usually and rightly regarded as one of
the great realists, though the realism is more on the psychological and moral
side than on that of the historical and material. One concrete historical moment does seem to
be of particular significance: the Franco-Prussian War. It is the setting for the story called “Boule
de Suif” (“Ball of Fat”), the hugely successful piece that put him on the
literary map in 1880, and for several of his others.
Like all readers of short stories,
I was already familiar with several of his better-known pieces. Many people have enjoyed “The Diamond
Necklace” (“La Parure” in French), which has one of the great trick or surprise
endings in the genre. It makes pretty
clear where O. Henry was coming from. In
a general sense it typifies a couple of Maupassant’s recurrent characteristics,
precision and economy of plot. His
frequent sexual themes, which once gave him a reputation for naughtiness and
lubricity, now seem pretty tame if mildly obsessive. What I was unprepared for was such a coherent
and grand tragic vision of the human condition in short-story form.
Guy de Maupassant came by his
neuroses honestly. He was an upper
middle class heir to a sharply contested revolutionary tradition; a syphilitic;
a free-thinker tempted by the occult; and a workaholic. Though bathed in professional success, he
worried constantly about his health and essentially withdrew from society for
the last decade of his short life.
Although he died relatively young, one of his most fully mastered themes
is the inexorability of growing old.
It is a theme recurrent in the
short stories and central to one of novels for which the editor of this
anthology, large as it is, could find no room, though his commentary has sent
me to it : Fort comme la mort (Strong as
Death). I had never even heard of
this book, though I recognized the biblical citation from the Song of
Songs: “Set me as a seal upon
thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which
hath a most vehement flame.”
Fort
comme la mort was published in 1889. That was the same year that Sigmund Freud
gave his first son the French name Jean-Martin after his old professor
Jean-Martin Charcot, the same Charcot whose lectures Guy de Maupassant had
attended at the Salpêtrière. I don’t
usually go for instant intellectual history in microwavable plastic cups, but
it really is all there in this novel: love, death, incest, Electra, the
Pygmalion myth, the doomed search for immortality through art. I have not read all that many works of
fiction that brilliantly depict growing old.
The best one that comes to mind is Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives Tale. It is
pretty clear that Strong as Death,
which I have not yet finished, will give Bennett a run for his money. I won’t pretend to tell you what it is
“about” (senescence), but the three points of the tragic triangle are an aging
painter, his aging married mistress, and her nubile daughter. A contemporary Parisian critic called it “the
chastest of Mons. de Maupassant’s works but also the most awful”. That is the kind of review to die for.
