BOOKS AND WRITERS
AUPASSANT, the subject of a new biography by Mr.
Francis Steegmuller," was fortunate in the friends who encouraged him in the barren years whilst he was becoming a writer. The publication of Boule de Suif came as the termination of seven years' apprenticeship to Gustave Flaubert. "It's a masterpiece," the novelist wrote to his disciple;" nothing more nor less than a masterpiece." The collection in which the tale appeared with Zola's L'Attaque du Moulin and four tales by men unknown, one of whom was J. K. Huysmans, went through eight editions. Still under thirty, Maupassant had established himself by a single story. Now he could slowly abandon the discipline he had learnt, and free himself too from the posthumous influence of another spiritual godfather, Louis Bouilhet, who had believed in his future as a poet. But his early good fortune in finding such masters in his very limited family circle and his quick success were balanced by a grave misfortune: after Flaubert's death there came no fresh friend to prod him into self- criticism ; to show him the poverty of so many of the anecdotes that he grew so deft at elaborating into stories ; to point out the formalised insufficiency of his view of life which made possible the endless-belt-production of his neatly turned little melodramas, so fitting, many of them, even now, to be reprinted for straphangers, on the page between suburban crime and the sporting news. Zola, for all the melodrama of his plots, had a breadth of vision which won even Flaubert's grudging respect. His criticisms might have been valuable to Maupassant, but so afraid was the young man of finding his identity submerged in the " naturalistic " school that he kept Zola at arm's length.
Maupassant had a rare talent before he vulgarised and over- worked it, the talent for recording the findings of his senses, for noting down the messages of his eyes, his ears, his nose and his fingers, uncontaminated by thought-out attitudes or emotional likes and dislikes. Even at the end of his life he could write at times with a visual freshness, as in the description of the Abbe Vilbois' walk home after his day's fishing in Le Champ d'Oliviers: "It was a July evening. The dazzling sun stood only just above the jagged sky-line of distant hills, and threw the priest's elongated shadow aslant across the white road shrouded in its pall of dust. The distorted black shape cast by his monstrous shovel-hat moved along the wayside field, playing apparently some brisk game of climbing the olive-trunks as it came to them, only to drop down immediately and glide across the ground between tree and tree."
The eye was not the only one of Maupassant's senses able to record with sharp authenticity its sensations of the outer world. "But what struck me most," says the narrator of L'Ami Patience, "was the smell. A revolting scented smell that recalled face-powder and the damp air of a cellar." He could also note down feelings less precise and richer in overtones, as in the very trivial little tale Enragee, where the young bride walking along the beach describes the night: "It was magnificent, one of those nights that summon up great, inchoate ideas into the mind ; ideas more like sensations than thoughts, which make one long to open one's arms, to open one's wings, to embrace the sky—who knows what ? One feels all the time that one is just about to understand things that lie beyond human knowledge."
But for Maupassant so many perceptions aroused, not this feeling of a universe somehow comprehensible and purposive, but an uprush of fear. The world was cruel and menacing, concealing not only the slow working of his own hidden disease and his own eventual madness, but a principle hostile to man. "Nature is our enemy. We must always fight against her, for she brings us back perpetually to the animal state," he wrote in L'Inutile Beaute. His tale of the supernatural Le Horla was no isolated experiment in the Manner of Poe ; it is of all his stories the one pervaded with the deepest feeling—fear.
* Maupassant. By Francis Steegmuller. (Collins. 12s. 6d.)
Emotionally, Maupassant was but crudely developed. His un- dependable father and his high-principled, hysterical mother gave him a childhood picture of rivalry, of marital catch-as-catch-can, which ended in Laure de Maupassant's retirement from the duel to devote herself to the bringing up of her sons. Flaubert, as spiritual godfather, made of the young, unhappy, eternally restless govern- ment clerk a finished writer. But though there was real affection on the novelist's part for his dear Alfred's nephew and a certain tolerance of the animal vitality in the young man, which pre- vented his pursuing his art with the monastic single-mindedness of his mentor, Flaubert was far from understanding" the lad's "trouble. "A cultured man has not as much need of exercise as doctors pre- tend," he expostulated, shocked at the hours and days his disciple devoted to violent sports. But Maupassant was driven to overstrain and overwork himself throughout his life, and Flaubert's gospel of art could do nothing to heal the deep dissatisfaction that urged him to it. Never free from his sad and suffering mother, he was capable of no deeper ties than to those companions with whom he rowed, drank, ate, gossiped and pursued women. His amours, whether passing or loosely persisting—though on no permanent footing—reflected his childhood's view of love as a battle-ground on which unwariness spells defeat. To conquer, not to be deceived, to deceive a man and at the same time retain his friendship, to let no woman " cling ": these were his principles, the principles of a man terrified of releasing emotions which might put him off his guard. None of Maupassarft's characters is ever in love ; passing infatuation, obsessive jealousy, the drive to triumph and humiliate are the common stuff of their sexual relationships.
Intellectually, Maupassant was as undeveloped as in his emotions, repeating the crudest generalisations as his findings on human nature. "And then painters, you know, make a speciality of absurd marriages ; they almost all marry models," says the narrator of Le Modele. "She was one of those good-hearted but unbearable old maids who haunt all the hotels and pensions in Europe, ruin Italy, poison Switzerland, render the charming Riviera uninhabit- able, carrying their bizarre manias with them everywhere," he writes of Miss Harriet, for him the typical Englishwoman. His attitude to Jews was no more charitable. His master in this kind of characterisation was Balzac, but the Corneille Humaine presents a broad view of society which such generalisations hardly disturb. Only once, in Bel-Ami. did Maupassant achieve something of Balzac's breadth.
The best of his stories are still those that have been most popular in this country : the comical, often cruel Norman anecdotes ; inci- dents like Mon Oncle Jules, which are seen through a child's eyes ; the tales of the Franco-Prussian War ; the tales of horror, and occasional pieces with Mediterranean settings. Those aiming at psychological subtlety and his many exercises in the sensual- sentimental are best neglected.
Mr. Steegmuller would be far from agreeing with these judgements. Except for the late novels of "high life," he accepts Maupassant almost complete, though commenting at times on the poverty of his intellectual attitudes. Over the risky stories he seeks to jockey his reader into a man-of-the-world attitude ; there are to be no moral judgements as we follow the disastrous life-story of Flaubert's protégé and Laure de Maupassant's son. The book's scholarship is so thorough and so unobtrusive, the examination of documents, letters and the texture of the tales so perceptive, that it is sometimes hard not to accept Mr. Steegmuller's viewpoint. When, however, he descends to passages of sensational writing, that are, surely, no more legitimate on his side of the Atlantic than on ours, one is conscious that his book, while remaining a masterly work of exposi- tion, is defective on the critical side. The Catholic Church, he tells us, does not consider Maupassant anti-clerical since he made fun of the Freemasons. In the same way Mr. Steegmuller asks us to accept a great deal of vulgar triviality, since at his best Maupassant was a perceptive and economical writer J. M. COHEN.
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