A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: Henry-rené-albert-guy De Maupassant, or Guy de Maupassant, author of the naturalistic school, is generally considered to be the greatest French writer of short stories. Maupassant took the subjects for his pessimistic stories and novels chiefly from the Norman peasant life, the Franco-Prussian War, the behavior of the bourgeoisie, and the fashionable life of Paris. His short stories are characterised by their economy of style and the efficient way in which the various threads within them are neatly resolved. Some of his stories would now be considered to be horror fiction. During his last years of life, Maupassant suffered from mental illness. Maupassant was probably born at the Chateau de Miromesniel, Dieppe, on August 5, 1850, though this is not certain. The Maupassants were an old Lorraine family who had settled in Normandy in the middle of the 18th century. His maternal grandfather, Paul Le Poittevin, was Gustave Flaubert's godfather. His parents separated when he was 11 years old. Maupassant grew up in his native Normandy. The gift of a photographic memory enabled him to gather a storehouse of information, which later helped him in his stories about the Norman people. He first entered a seminary at Yvetot, but deliberately managed to have himself expelled. From his early religious education he retained a marked hostility to religion. Then he was sent to the Rouen Lycée, where he proved a good scholar indulging in poetry and taking a prominent part in theatricals. In his teens Maupassant was shown, by the poet Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909), a mummified hand. He used this haunting image in his early short story La Main Ecorchee (1875). In 1869 Maupassant started to study law in Paris, but soon, at age 20, he volunteered to serve in the army during Franco-Prussian War. After his return to Paris, Maupassant joined the literary circle of Gustave Flaubert, who introduced him to some of the leading writers of his day, including Émile Zola, Ivan Turgenev, and Henry James. From Flaubert, who was obsessed with the writer's craft, Maupassant learned the exactness and accuracy of observations, and balance and precision of style. However, Maupassant himself was more light-hearted and more cynical than Flaubert. From 1872 to 1880, Maupassant worked as a civil servant, first at the ministry of maritime affairs, then at the ministry of education. He hated to work and spent much of his free time in pursuit of women. Toward the end of this time, Maupassant published his first poetry, Des Vers (1880). Later the same year he published his short story masterpiece, Ball of Fat (Boule de Suif) in the anthology Soirées de Medan (1880), edited by Émile Zola. The story, set during the Franco-Prussian War, is about passengers on a coach, one of whom is a well-known prostitute, nicknamed 'Boule de Suif.' The story later inspired director John Ford's Western film Stagecoach (1945). During the 1880s Maupassant created some 300 short stories, six novels, three travel books, and one volume of verse. In tone, his tales were marked by objectivity, highly controlled style, and sometimes by sheer comedy. Usually they were built around simple episodes from everyday life, which revealed the hidden sides of people. Probably Maupassant fictionalized true occurrences or tales told to him, but his experiences as a reporter and columnist provided him material. Maupassant has been accused of misogynism but his portrayal of prostitutes was sympathetic. Although his stories range from moving drama to sometimes bizarre comedy, it is his macabre horror stories that have received much attention. In 1881 he reported on the French campaign against Tunisia. Among Maupassant's best known books is A Woman's Life (Une Vie, 1883) -twenty-five thousand copies of which were sold in less than a year- about the frustrating existence of a Norman wife, Bel-Ami (1885), which depicts an unscrupulous journalist, Georges Duroy, whose success is build on hypocrisy, decadence, and corruption of the society. Pierre et Jean (1888) was a psychological study of adultery of a young wife and two brothers. The novel was thought to be immoral, according to the classic definition, because the hero succeeds by doing wrong. In Luis Buñuel's film version from 1951, the emphasis is on the woman's experience. The ending is, ambiguously, a happy one. Maupassant's most upsetitbusng horror story, The Horla (Le Horla, 1887), was about madness and suicide. The nameless protagonist is perhaps a syphilitic. In the beginning the narrator - a prosperous young Norman gentleman - sees a Brazilian three-master boat flow by his house. He salutes it and the gesture evidently summons the Horla, and invisible being. The Horlas are cousins of the vampires and their advent means the end of the reign of man. Our narrator eventually sets fire to his own house, to destroy his Horla, but only his servants die in the fire. He realizes that the Horla is still alive and decides to kill himself. Maupassant had suffered from his 20s from syphilis. The disease later caused increasing mental disorder - also seen in his nightmarish stories, which have much in common with Edgar Allan Poe's supernatural visions. Some critics have charted Maupassant's developing illness through his semi-autobiographical stories of abnormal psychology, but the theme of mental disorder is present even in his first collection, La Maison Tellier (1881), published at the height of his health. Maupassant's horror fiction consists of some 39 stories, only a tenth of his total work. A recurring theme in these is madness: A Queer Night in Paris is a paranoid nightmare: its narrator feels compelled to walk the streets. In Who Knows? the subject suffers from delusions about the furniture in his house. Diary of a Madman is a story about a judge, who commits murder, just for the experience, and condemns an innocent man to death for the crime. The Inn has many similarities with Stephen King's novel The Shining. Maupassant describes two caretakers, living in the French Alps in a remote inn, which is surrounded by snow six months and unreachable. When the older caretaker goes missing, the younger in his loneliness loses his reason. His story, The Hand, based on his teenage recollection, has inspired later authors and movie directors. Maupassant's writing is sometimes compared with that of Edgar Allen Poe. With a natural aversion for society, he loved retirement, solitude, and meditation. He traveled extensively in Algeria, Italy, England, Brittany, Sicily, Auvergne, and from each voyage he brought back a new volume. He cruised on his private yacht "Bel-Ami", named after his earlier novel. In his latter years he developed an exaggerated love for solitude, a predilection for self-preservation, and a constant fear of death and mania of persecution. On January 2, 1892, Maupassant tried to commit suicide by cutitbusng his throat and was committed to the celebrated private asylum of Dr. Ésprit Blanche at Passy, in Paris, where he died on July 6, 1893. Maupassant's style has been imitated by countless writers, and his influence can be seen on such masters of the short story as W. Somerset Maugham and O. Henry. Guy de Maupassant is buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris. |
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