Guy de Maupassant Par Marlo Johnston (review)

Maupassant is not short of recent biographers: Frédéric Martinez’s easy read also appeared in 2012 (Gallimard), and Nadine Satiat’s well-documented life in 2003 (Flammarion). Marlo Johnston, quoting Maupassant’s distaste for ‘cette vilaine chronique secrète de l’Art, qui fait s’intéresser au lit de l’artiste plutôt qu’à sa plume’ (p. 933), justifies her work as an endeavour to dispel legends and discover the truth. This she has accomplished by exhaustive research in public archives and private collections, filling out many excisions from the Jacques Suffel edition of Maupassant’s correspondence (Geneva: Édito-Service, 1973), and drawing on recent publications, sales catalogues, and newly accessible correspondence, notably to Comtesse Potocka. Long-standing legends are demolished: of an ‘hérédité chargée’ (by an examination of his family history); his expulsion from school at Yvetot (for irreligious language and not for a poem, revealed through research in school archives); the three children allegedly borne by Joséphine Litzelmann (Maupassant’s tales involving illegitimacy are indebted to the times, and to women he knew, not to his own life). Johnston teases apart the multiple accounts of his meetings with Swinburne and George Powell (documenting the latter’s identity and writings), but without the presumption to establish an unproblematic narrative of ‘facts’ (as is found in Satiat). She highlights what remains uncertain: his location during much of the 1870 war, what lies behind the wound to his hand in 1881 (a sex party that went wrong?). Through his life she tracks medical records, pinning down the specialisms, publications, and assumptions of his doctors, viewing with scepticism contemporaries whose ‘memories’ were retrospectively coloured by knowledge of his internment or were fictionalized (Axel Munthe), and establishing the limited effects of syphilis on his writing (showing its irrelevance to his exploitation of the fantastique, but also how it occasioned the accommodation problems of his right eye and inflicted incapacitating headaches, affecting literary productivity). Johnston also provides valuable illumination for those works in which Maupassant’s experiences and the contemporary context are significant — the worlds of politics and of journalism — and establishes the itineraries of his travels. With regard to the works, she provides the text of ‘Minette’, previously known only by title (p. 219), and details of the manuscripts of ‘Un soir’ and ‘L’Inutile Beauté’. When linking Maupassant’s life to his fiction, she is appropriately cautious: fictional figures are often composite; ‘il grossit et arrange pour les besoins de l’œuvre’ (p. 336). Although Johnston makes no claim to be definitive (‘d’autres nous suivront’ (p. iii)), her work, with its extensive quotations from letters and the accounts of contemporary witnesses, is now essential for any attempt to relate Maupassant’s œuvre to his life. However, its length and detail make it difficult to consult on specific points. One can never know what facts will prove useful to future readers, but in some areas (the family’s financial affairs, for instance) precision is pushed to the limit of readability. The index includes only people, not works, and, owing to the absence of a bibliography and a reliance on ‘op. cit.’ in the endnotes, bibliographic references are often difficult to find after the first full citation.