Books: Boys Will Be Boys

THE YELLOW BOOK: A SELECTION (372 pp.) Compiled by Norman Denny—Viking ($3.75).

The Yellow Book was a queer literary blossom of the not-so-Naughty Nineties. Stuffy contemporaries thought it a stinkweed, but today it seems more like a pressed rose—flat and sere. A British quarterly launched by Critic Henry Harland and Draftsman Aubrey Beardsley, it ran from 1894 to 1897, published the trial flights of half a dozen future soarers.

By and for rebellious young intellectuals, it was the resolute opposite of Victorianism. Against Mrs. Grundy’s boned corset it set the languid flow of an Aubrey Beardsley tunic. It opposed ice-water morality with the dreggy wine of French “realism.” It countered convention with Oscar Wildeish witticisms (“Where is the pleasure of having parents if you may not disobey them”). For common sense it substituted shamelessly overgrown verbiage (” ‘Tears, little one,’ I said. ‘See how they swim like whitebait in the fish-pools of your eyes!’ “).

No one reading the drab little close-up of “real” life by someone signing himself “Enoch Arnold Bennett” could possibly see The Old Wives’ Tale ahead. Max Beerbohm’s A Defence of Cosmetics would seem to condemn its youthful author to remain a wishy-washy wordster forever. A humdrum little tale by Henry James, The Death of the Lion, gives no indication of the labyrinthine richness he was able to manage when he felt like it. To the contemporary eye, only George Gissing’s grim story of spinsterhood, The Foolish Virgin, seems fit to rank with the best of The Yellow Book painters and draftsmen (Beardsley, Sickert, Beerbohm, Sargent, Steer, Cotman, Guys).

For reasons hard to fathom, Compiler Norman Denny has not attempted to thumb out The Yellow Book’s plums for this anthology, preferring to collect what he calls “a fair summary” of the original 13 volumes. If this is indeed a fair summary, it is pretty hard to see why Victorians found The Yellow Book so shocking that at least one plea was made for its suppression by Parliament. The boys were more to be pitied than censored.