Editor's Introduction

As I prepare to step down next year from the Editorship of this Journal which has taken up so much of my professional life (and, indeed, personal life) for the past sixteen years, I inevitably find myself contemplating what I have done and am doing, what I have learned and am continuing to learn. There have been some extraordinary highs and lows in this experience, sometimes connected in the same event. I would never have even had to contemplate being an editor had my friend Maurice Beebe not died so prematurely in 1986. I would never have had to learn how to be both Editor and Managing Editor had our wonderful Managing Editor, Kitty Szamar, not died so tragically in 1989. I would never have taken over ownership of JML (through my Foundation for Modern Literature) and thus been able to preserve its future (through the current owner, Indiana University Press) had it not been for the machinations of a former dean, who seemed hostile both to journals and to the Humanities (and especially to journals in the Humanities, as to their editors).

I have learned more about the mechanics of editing than I ever wanted to learn, as well as something of the mechanics of dealing with academic bureaucrats. I have even learned to use a computer (most of the issues of JML for the past half dozen years have been prepared on this old laptop of mine), although I still won't use e-mail and continue to write my own essays with a more-than-half-century-old fountain pen. I have acquired a knowledge of and respect for what Beebe would call "hard scholarship" that, as a critic of literary texts, I rarely needed to worry about in my own work.

Some faithful readers may remember that, many years ago, I actually published a scholarly essay in JML—on the Cretan background of Nikos Kazantzakis, requested by Beebe for the special Kazantzakis issue (volume II, 1971-72), which he had assigned me to edit. (That essay then became the opening chapter of my book The Cretan Glance: The Life and Art of Nikos Kazantzakis.) Aside from this necessary archival work, I rarely even entered library stacks, except to find more novels to read. That had been my pattern since high school; it was powerfully reinforced by my experience in graduate school (while I wanted to read as widely as possible in the primary texts, my classmates seemed to concentrate on secondary sources); and I saw no reason to alter my pattern until I became Editor of JML.

I accepted that position out of a sense of obligation to Maury Beebe, and while I was willing to make major changes in editorial practice and policy, I have always regarded as sacrosanct our primary emphasis on archival scholarship. JML was widely viewed as the scholarly journal of record for modern literature when I assumed this job, and I am proud to say that it remains so today. I am confident that my successors will be able to speak similarly.

It has not always been easy to be a critic in one part of my professional life and a scholar in another. But I recognized from the start how valuable this dichotomy could be to me—how much it strengthened my teaching and, indeed, my criticism. I also suspect that I was able to maintain a certain distance from scholarship that made me a better reader and, thus, a better editor. For while I am always delighted to encounter a submission based on solid research in one of our great research institutions—the HRC, for instance, or the Beinecke, or the Library at SUNY-Buffalo, or the British Museum or Bibliothèque Nationale—I am not likely to suspend disbelief about the other requirements for a JML article: clear and jargon-free prose, convincing logic and sound organization, and a respect for the primary text.

But if my respect for scholarship—for literary history, say—has grown alongside my New Critical...