"A Story by Maupassant" by Frank O'Connor

"A Story by Maupassant" by Frank O'Connor   (1953, 12 pages)

March 1 to March 31

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1903 to 1966

James Joyce called Frank O'Connor "The Chekhov of Ireland".   Born as Michael O'Donovan in 1903 in Cork City, Ireland, Frank O'Connor was a very prolific writer with about 150 works to his credit.   I think it is for his short stories that he is most loved now.   

O'Connor in 1918 joined the Irish Republican Army, during the Irish War for Independence.  At the end of the war he was imprisoned by the new government for about a year because of his opposition to the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 that ended the war.   

After getting out of prison, O'Connors worked as a librarian, teacher and was named as a director of the famous Abbey Theater founded  by William Butler Yeats.   In 1950 he moved to the USA to accept a teaching position.   He began to publish short stories in The New Yorker to great acclaim.   He died in 1966, he had three children and an ex-wife.   The most prestigious prize in the world for Short Stories is the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award for a collection of works by one author.  

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Frank O'Connor is the author of the only book on short stories worth reading, The Lonely Voice:  A Study in the Short Story (1962).   I have read parts of it numerous times.   There are some maddening things in the book, O'Connor was a man of strong opinions from a time before "political correctness" took over in the universities and some of the things in the book that he says about Gays, Jews, and Women will put people off but I do not think he meant anything malicious by them.   I think a very good course in the short story could be devised by reading all the public domain short stories mentioned by O'Connor with him as our first look.   (There is more on The Lonely Voice in my post on it.   If you love the short story, you will love it more after you read this book, or at least I did).    O'Connor's said the best short stories of de Maupassant all were about prostitutes and his own story entitled "A Story by Maupassant" deal with just that.    

(Last year during Irish Short Story Week Year Two I posted on two of the short stories of Frank O'Connor,"Guests of the Nation" and "The Majesty of the Law".)

"A Story by Maupassant" is set in Dublin and is narrated by a man we first meet when he is in his late teens or early twenties.  He and his friend Terry loved to stay up all night and debate the great issues of the world, especially literature.   One of their bones of contention was the work of de Maupassant.  Terry felt his work was not real literature  little more than sensationalism,  emotion based stories.  His friend said who cares if they are literature or not (what ever that may mean) they represent real life.   Here is Terry's judgment on him:

"But Maupassant is slick and coarse and commonplace. Are his stories literature?’ ‘Ah, to hell with literature!’ I said. ‘It’s life.’ ‘Life in this country?’ ‘Life in his own country, then.’ ‘But how do you know?’ Terry asked, stopping and staring at me. ‘Humanity is the same here as anywhere else. If he’s not true of the life we know, he’s not true of any sort of life.’ "

Soon each of the men get a job, Terry as a teacher and the narrator in an office.  They do not see each other very much as each gets involved with his life.    Terry had never been much of  a drinker but one day the narrator saw him leaving a very low down sort of pub looking very ragged.  He assumed he was drinking in secret.   Now the men are forty, Terry's mother has just died and he and his sister live together.

One day a police Sargent he knows knocks on his door and asks him if he can talk to him about a very confidential matter involving his friend.   It seems his friend has become to take up with prostitutes.  Any kind of sex outside of marriage was seen as a horrible sin.

He goes to his friends house to confront him with this to try to help him.  The friend has just returned from six weeks in Paris.  He notices a large volume of the short stories of Maupassant, in French, on the man's book shelves.  Terry tells him he now knows Maupassant was in fact a great writer. He learned this from a woman he met in Paris, on the streets.  

     

There is true brilliance in these lines:

‘A funny thing about those books,’ he said. ‘This woman I was speaking about, I thought she was bringing me to a hotel. I suppose I was a bit muddled with drink, but after dark, one of these places is much like another. “This isn’t a hotel,” I said when we got upstairs. “No,” she said, “it’s my room.”  ’ As he told it, I could see that he was living it all over again, something he could tell nobody but myself. ‘There was a screen in the corner. I suppose it’s the result of reading too much romantic fiction, but I thought there might be somebody hidden behind it. There was. You’d never guess what?’ ‘No.’ ‘A baby,’ he said, his eyes boring through me. ‘A child of maybe eighteen months. I wouldn’t know. While I was looking, she changed him. He didn’t wake.’

The two friend begin to debate how Maupassant would have ended his encounter with the woman had it been an episode in one of his stories.   

   

I read this in The Best of Frank O'Connor edited by Julian Barnes, an excellent book.

Mel u