Anne Diebel
Henry James, The Yellow Book, and Literary Personality
Henry James contributed both "The Death of the Lion" and "The Next Time" to The Yellow Book in the mid-1890s. Both stories are concerned with the situation of the modern writer facing the demands of the market and the "dreary duty of being a personality," as James writes in "The Death of the Lion." Each story circles around the genius at its center, never touching on the substance or character of his greatness. "About-ness" is what these stories are about: the writer is surrounded by admirers, acolytes, and opportunists; his work is circulated, reviewed, gossiped about, and circumscribed by market trends. But these stories are also concerned with the situation of the modern reader, who is distracted from reading by the spectacle of literary personality; the characters (including the narrators) most invested in the writers are those who have the least familiarity with or concern for the work itself, except in its being either aggressively circulated or protected from circulation. So while these stories seem to be about how people write, about cultural conditions enabling or disabling the production of literature, they are actually about how people read literature—which is, quite often, by not reading it. Finally, I consider how James's decision to publish these stories in The Yellow Book situates him in the very culture of personality he so stridently critiques.