Swimming Deep in the Yellow Book with an introduction by Oscar Wilde

Hello from the other side of the sometimes mystical and always uncomfortable line between life and death. I know it’s been a while since I’ve published anything, but when Mr. Kline approached me about his project, I saw it as an opportunity to not only dust off my talents, but also to use the new IBM automatic writing machine. Selectric. I’ve heard a lot about. Unfortunately, old habits die hard and time constraints forced me to use my time-tested writing methods. While my feet may never walk the streets of London again, it feels refreshingly good to put my pen back on the page.

As I said before, “the artist is the creator of beautiful things”. He should have added: “The investigator tramples those beautiful things with the ugly boots of hindsight worn on the feet of fools.” This article is nothing more than a few pointless conjectures, strung together in a dry, nonsensical style. To claim that I was involved in the writings of the “Yellow Book” is absolutely absurd. I have tried very hard to distance myself from that publication and you will notice that none of the works were my creation. Yes, I have certainly had a working relationship with Aubrey Beardsley. I invented Aubrey Beardsley! But didn’t Christ himself have a working relationship with harlots and thieves? Unfortunately, the truth is rarely pure and never simple. Beardsley’s drawings and Kline’s writing stain my words like the mischievous scribbles a precocious child makes in the margins of his notebooks.

Therefore, I ask that you do not judge me by this work, but rather judge the writer by it. The lowest mode of criticism is, after all, autobiography. If you’re truly fooled by Kline’s clumsy attempts to assault my character, then perhaps it’s a reflection on you, the reader, and your own personal insecurities.

While I wish I had time to respond individually to each fraudulent claim and misrepresentation, I was told this must be submitted to the publisher before the full moon has passed. So keep in mind that I may have only skimmed through the entire piece, not interested in any passage at all… and therefore I suggest you do the same.

–Oscar Wilde

Sometimes the best way to understand a writer is to write a page in their shoes. We may face the same obstacles, the same characters, and the same passion for art and writing. Writing about literature is never easy; however, when I think of the best ways to research a writer, the most obvious is to read his works. Due to shipping delays and back orders, the first words I read about Wilde were not his writings, but his biographies. The more information I found, the more I thought that Wilde’s life is perhaps even more interesting than his literature. However, it is this literature that has made his life so interesting.

There, in a passage from Dorian Gray which introduces a remarkable object, “a book bound in yellow paper, the cover slightly torn and the edges dirty” (Wilde 95). Even at the first mention, the book aroused my curiosity. As my reading progressed, this literary work becomes the root of Dorian’s character change. I was wondering how important the book was, not only to Dorian, but also to Wilde. Did Wilde have a “yellow book” of his own? Is the book yellow with age or does this color have a deeper symbolism? I had no idea the depth of information you would find when researching an untitled tattooed book.

The beginnings of my research led to some interesting discoveries. Among them, a newspaper published quarterly in London at the end of the 19th century, the yellow book. First, let me explain the newspaper itself. While its existence was short-lived, it helped spur a “change in British society away from a homogenized male elitism” (Fraser 187). A less favorable description is offered by the westminster gazette, which claimed that it would only take “a short Act of Parliament to make this sort of thing illegal” (quoted in Bobst 2). The first volume was published in 1894, so he knew it certainly couldn’t be the same book Wilde mentioned three years earlier. But wait! Wilde could have been involved. The art editor was Aubrey Beardsley. Beardsley illustrated Wilde’s Salome. Beardsley once even offered to translate. Salome, after Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas’s translation failed to meet Wilde’s approval (Amphagorey 1). On Valentine’s Day 1895, Beardsley attended the premiere of Wilde’s play, The importance of being called Ernesto. Stranger still, when Wilde was arrested later that year, the publication of the yellow book stopped abruptly. After Wilde’s release from prison more than two years later, both men lived in the same town in the south of France (McGrath 1), where Beardsley lived until his early death at age 25, writing for another controversial publication. , the savoy (Amphagorey 1).

So although there is no simple relationship between the two yellow books, does the mention of the yellow book in Dorian related to the yellow newspaper? I had to know more about its origin. because the title the yellow book? Apparently, it was Beardsley himself who thought of the title (Bobst 1). Several books were published in France in the mid-19th century with bright yellow covers, including the most famous, Backward, written by JK Huysmans and first published in 1884. Its title, literally “Against the grain”, gives only a subtle hint of the risqué content it contains. An excerpt from the Three Sirens Press English translation:

“This room, where mirrors hung on every wall, reflecting back and forth from one to the next an endless succession of rose-colored dressing tables, had enjoyed great renown among his various mistresses, who loved to bathe their nakedness in this flood of warm crimson amidst the aromatic odors given off by the oriental wood of the furniture” (Hyusmans 1).

Is it possible that this is the book that is mentioned in Wilde’s writings? Could this ‘verbal pornography’ really send someone to such depths of personal despair? I think it’s more likely that both the yellow book and Backward they are descendants of a more mythical, or even symbolic yellow book.

Beardsley once said that Wilde’s writings were excluded from publication in the “property interest” (quoted in McGrath 1). This is the point in my research where I felt like things didn’t make sense. the yellow book it was uniquely progressive, and the writings it contained expressed views that were shared by many nineteenth-century British authors, including Wilde. He was not so much famous as notorious. In fact, the magazine’s success was due in large part to its controversial content. Why not encourage Wilde to contribute? My research led me to wonder, at first, if Wilde was directly involved with the publication and perhaps even the funding of the project, and his alleged ‘exclusion’ from the publication was really just a publicity stunt executed so well that it has become in a historical fact. . the editor of the yellow book it was Henry Harland, the American expatriate who had previously been published under the pseudonym Sidney Luska. Harland had very little financial success (Soylent 1) and Beardsley came from a family with little wealth and even less income (Amphagorey 1). Is it possible that Wilde did not want his own fame to overshadow the work of these men?

Further investigation into the newspaper reveals that the publisher of the yellow book it was John Lane who dismissed Beardsley after just four issues (Elliot 33). While Lane was more concerned with avoiding further controversy, the publication’s success waned rapidly with Beardsley’s departure and the yellow bookCirculation dropped as fast as it peaked. Maybe it was just a fluke, published by an unwitting publisher. If this is true, then it should have been John Lane who banned Wilde’s contributions. But then why did Beardsley come out against Wilde? Did they both have bad blood? Or was this all a farce for the public, who loved to be aware of every detail in the lives of his new celebrities? Beardsley actually drew several unfavorable caricatures of Wilde, attacking his French skills and knowledge of the Bible (Bobst 1). Many of my sources seem to disagree on this point… some propose that Wilde was affiliated with the yellow bookBeardsley’s editorial staff and others, including Mary Beth McGrath, said that he was on such bad terms with Beardsley that they never spoke to each other (1).

I was hoping to find, through my research, a definitive answer. Maybe a yellow book in Greek or Roman mythology, or something that ties the book directly to Satan. Instead, I found a great deal of information about Oscar Wilde and those he associated with in the last ten years of his life. I think surprisingly what I found was much more interesting than any conclusive answer about an ancient book. Perhaps the reader of Dorian Gray it is better to be left to guess, wonder about the tattooed book with the yellow cover and imagine what content could be so sinister as to destroy a man’s life. The reader’s imagination could put far more vile things into the tattooed book than any writer’s pen. I suspect this was Wilde’s true intention, to allow the book to be a reflection of the reader as well as the writer. Ultimately, this is true not only for the Dorian book, but also for the book I waited so long to receive. After all this, I find myself going back to the preface, where “[T]there is no such thing here as a moral or immoral book” (Wilde). It is the readers who define the morality of internal literature.

Works Cited

Amphagorey, Raquel. “Aubrey Beardsley” November 12, 1998.

Bobst Library. “Part 6, The Artist’s Studio”. Wilde’s reading, consultation spaces. New York University Library. March 22, 2006.

Elliott, Bridget. “New and not-so-‘new’ women on the London stage: Aubrey Beardsley’s Yellow Book images of Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Rejane.” Victorian studies (Fall 1987): 33. Academic Search Elite. EBSCO host. UWWC Library, West BendWisdom. March 21, 2006.

Fraser, Hilary, Stephanie Green, and Judith Johnston. Gender and the Victorian newspaper (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Huysmans, J.K. Backward. New York: Three Sirens Press, 1951. ibiblio. June 26, 2003.

McGrath, Maria Beth. Beardsley’s relationship with Oscar Wilde. 1991.

Soylent Communications. “Henry Harris”. NNDB. 2005.

Wilde, Oscar. Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Fifth Edition). HarperCollins. August 2003.