The best stories of Guy de Maupassant, an anti-consensus

I’ve been reading Guy de Maupassant’s stories.  I’d never really read him before, just “The Diamond Necklace,” with its famous trick ending.  I was sure that I would enjoy Maupassant, a student of Flaubert, but just never got to him.  We all know how that works.  Now, having read him a bit, I am confused.

A list, that might help. I have read, or am reading:

Selected Short Stories, Penguin Classics, 1971, tr. Roger Colet, 30 stories
Fifteen by Maupassant, Doubleday, 1972, tr. Miriam Morton, 13 not in the above
The Best Stories of Guy de Maupassant, 1945, tr. – no, sorry, “Selected by” Saxe Commins, 45 stories, 35 or so not in the two above.  I'm still reading this one.

In all three books brilliantly written stories alternate with glib nonsense.  Only one story is in all three books.  Penguin Classics has a newer collection; Oxford also has an older and newer.  Glancing through their tables of contents, they do not overlap much, either.  I believe I was looking for some sort of consensus on Maupassant’s best work.  He wrote close to three hundred stories, and I had hoped that diligent readers and translators had sorted through them and picked out the best for me.  And I suppose they think they have.  But there is no consensus, almost none.

Witness the 1884 “The Diamond Necklace” (or “The Necklace”).  Francis Steegmuller, in Maupassant: A Lion in the Path (1949), devotes an entire chapter to the story, one as long as the story itself, discussing its reception, primarily.  Why is the story so famous, that’s the question?  Steegmuller moves from Henry James’s deep appreciation of “the little perfection” – James rewrote the story as “Paste” – to the counter-reaction, as English-language critics dismissed Maupassant as a writer of trivial trick stories, based on a just a sliver of Maupassant’s work.

The two translations from the 1970s not only omit “The Diamond Necklace,” but do so almost angrily, as a matter of principle, avoiding the distortion of that horrible trick story.  The idea that this story embedded amongst thirty others will be uniquely damaging seems idiotic, especially when, as in the Penguin edition, the dangerously trivial trick story is replaced (see the Translator’s Note) by a different trick-ending story about a diamond necklace called “The Jewels.”  Leafing through the introductory material of these books, I felt like I had wandered into someone else’s argument. Maybe the newer collections have sorted this all out.

After “The Diamond Necklace,” Maupassant’s best known story is the first published under his name, the 1880 “Boule de Suif,” which is flawless, a triumph, brilliant, ethically penetrating, please continue in this vein.  A great masterpiece that Maupassant certainly did not repeat three hundred times, although he did repeat it a few stories later with “La Maison Tellier” (1881).  Or perhaps “La Horla,” a later psychological horror story, is better known; please put it on the list of the best.  To add to the confusion, Maupassant published three quite distinct versions, so be sure to read the best one, whichever that is.  I could go on.  The rest of the week, I will.