Maupassant, a lion in the path

by Francis Steegmuller

The First Complete And Definitive Biography Of Guy De Maupassant, From His Happy Childhood In Normandy To His Tragic Death In A Madhouse.

430 pages, Unknown Binding

Published January 1, 1958

About the author

Francis Steegmuller was an American biographer, translator and fiction writer, who was known chiefly as a Gustave Flaubert scholar.

Reviews

[Jeffrey Powanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I settled on this excellent yet dated (1950) literary biography of the great 19th Century French writer because it was the only one offered by my library. The author, Francis Steegmuller, was an American scholar, translator, and novelist; he translated the Random House edition of Madame Bovary that I own. Random House promoted this book as the "first complete and definitive biography of Maupassant," and it holds up reasonably well more than 70 years later. (Maupassant is past due for a fresh, modern biography in English, so hopefully another scholar of French literature will address that need soon.)

Fairly breezy by today's standards (it's only 430 pages, including appendices and an index), this biography covers the basics of Maupassant's family life; mines Maupassant's letters and an unpublished memoir by his valet for intimate details; provides insightful analysis of his most significant stories and novels; illuminates Maupassant's relationship with Gustave Flaubert (his mentor), Emile Zola (his rival), and other famous writers (Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, and Henry James); examines Maupassant's Madonna-whore complex and the resulting degradation and fatal case of syphilis (the “French disease”), which he contracted from a liaison with a prostitute as a young man; documents his descent into madness from neurosyphilis in 1893 at the young age of 42; lists 65 fake "Maupassant" stories that were published by an unscrupulous American publisher in 1903; and supplies four Maupassant short stories published for the first time in English anywhere. BTW, the stories are delightful. The book also includes 10 photographs.

The best parts of the book analyze Maupassant's technique. He fondly portrayed the lower strata of society because naturalism made the milieu fashionable, and also because it lent itself to his recurring themes (war, prostitution, greed, and madness). Many critics regard his stories of the Normandy peasantry as his masterpieces. But was he a "naturalist," like Zola, or did he aspire to "something higher," like Flaubert, his mentor? Steegmuller argues the latter. In general, Maupassant was even less "realistic" than Flaubert, and he approached his fiction with a sense of farce, absurdity, irony, and horror. If he could tell a story that caused readers to be gratified and moved by it, then he felt he succeeded.