Here’s a little trivia about 19th century French author Guy de Maupassant that is likely to surprise many people. As of late summer 2019, he has almost 250 writing credits on IMDb (credits as in “based on a story by”). That is almost as many as Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway combined. It is also—and here’s where things get impressive—more than triple the credits of Jane Austen. What may be most impressive about Maupassant’s popularity among filmmakers is that his writing credits are not weighted toward just a handful of stories. Even Shakespeare cannot make that claim: for every film version of Two Gentlemen of Verona there are a dozens of Romeos pursuing Juliets. The point to be made here is one that speaks directly to de Maupassant’s writing.
Screenwriters and director like his stories because they are cinematic. Which means they are easy to visualize when reading. Very often, reading a de Maupassant story is like reading a screenplay where the description of action is limited to the essentials to expanded upon visually during filming. Consider the economy of this passage from “The Diary of a Madman” which foreshadows his transformation into a murderer of humans rather than of a caged bird:
“And then I did as assassins do—real ones. I washed the scissors, I washed my hands. I sprinkled water and took the body, the corpse, to the garden to hide it. I buried it under a strawberry-plant. It will never be found. Every day I shall eat a strawberry from that plant.”
All the information necessary for the reader to create the scene is there. Then with the last assertion made at the end, all the information necessary to reflect the state of mind of the character is summed up in just one short sentence. This is the secret sauce of de Maupassant’s writing and the secret of popularity. Although he can write long stories (as well as novels) his best writing is trimmed down to the particulars with an eye toward allowing the reader to fill in certain portions of information themselves. Sometimes this information is dependent upon the imagination of the reader. At other times, any addition detail would be absolutely extraneous. The passage from a story popularly known as “The Jewels” that describes what can only be termed a major turning point in the plot provides a startling example of the author’s commitment to making things simple for his readers:
“One evening, in winter, she had been to the opera, and returned home chilled through and through. The next morning she coughed, and eight days later she died of inflammation of the lungs.”
Simplicity, stripping a story down to essentials and refusing to burden readers with information overload is what makes de Maupassant so much more better suited to fiction in the short form rather than the novel. To describe the death of one of the two major characters in a story so tersely in a novel would feel like a cheat. The length and breadth of a novel not only allows room for the author the put in stuff that really isn’t directly necessary, but almost requires it. Who wants to pay for the extra amount for a the heft of a novel just to get two sentences about the death of a character. Where’s the detail? Where’s the payoff for the emotional investment? This difference is one of the aspects of the short story that draws certain writers and certain readers. The logistics of length mandate that there simply isn’t enough time to become so emotionally invested characters that two sentences describing their death feels like a cheat.
It is this habit of getting right to the point, leaving certain information out and putting trust in the reader to connect some necessary dots that has drawn hundreds of filmmakers to his stories. It is much easier to put something into a film adaptation and please the reader than it is to take things out and please the reader. Guy de Maupassant died just two years after William Dickson invented the movie camera (and just one day short of two years after Thomas Edison stole credit for inventing it), but reading his short stories almost makes it seem as if he knew what was coming. Writing during a century notorious stuffing stories with ornate language and superfluous detail, de Maupassant can now be recognized as a short story author way ahead of his time.
