What Never Dies
By Barbey D’Aurevilly, translated by Oscar Wilde (as Sebastian Melmoth)
In addition to penning the breviary of dandyism, Barbey D’Aurevilly wrote volumes of fiction in which formidable dandies face seductive women, with melodramatic consequences designed to shock his readers. Unpublished in his lifetime — and evidently for good reason — “What Never Dies” has been reprinted in the English translation by Oscar Wilde. Sin was one of Barbey’s central themes, and this elephantine tome is a heinous tresspass even God could not expiate.
I confess to being a bit biased: Barbey is my favorite author. The spoken narrative format in which the reader is transformed into the listener of some horrible confession, his haughty protagonists, the mysterious women, the gothic melodrama — what can I say, there’s no accounting for taste.
So after the pleasures of “Bewitched,” “A Story Without a Name,” and his chef d’oeuvre “The She-Devils,” “What Never Dies” (Ce Qui ne Meurt Pas) is a terrible disappointment. Written in 1835 when Barbey was 27, it went unpublished in his lifetime. Wilde was drawn to the manuscript and translated it, presumably for ready money, when he left Reading Gaol penniless and settled in France under the sobriquet Sebastian Melmoth.
The novel concerns a love triangle between a young man, the woman who raised him, and her daughter. In it all of Barbey’s later themes are nascent: sin and redemption, appearance versus reality, forbidden love, and his cherished Normandy countryside. Yet it has neither the superb literary craft, characterization and engrossing plot that will mark Barbey’s later works.
“What Never Dies” is meant to be a deep analysis of the human heart, but today reads like 438 pages of dull, rambling twaddle. Pared down to 50 pages it may have found a place in his short story collection “The She-Devils.”As it stands in this tedious incarnation, it should have been titled “What Never Ends.” — CHRISTIAN CHENSVOLD
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