The Editor's Fence

iii. THE EDITOR'S FENCE The Wages of Research:—is exhaustion. But it is with a rather happy exhaustion that I urge my equally tired and not so happy typewriter on to the launching of this issue of EFT, The George Moore bibliography will explain all the mystery in these lines„ The Wages of Ideas:—is grants, fellowships, and unendowed scholarly excursions, which lead to research, which leads to happy exhaustion, James Hepburn (Cornell) once more spent the summer in England working on Bennett; Arthur C, Young (Rutgers) went to England to work on Gissing; Charles Burkhart went to England and France to work on Moore; Royal A., Gettmann is in England; T.E.M. Boll went to England on an American Philoáophical Society grant to work as hard as he always does on a number of projects in the EFT area; Robert A. Colby (Library, Queens College) is on a Safcbatical in England working on projects in the Victorian period; David Harvey is planning a jaunt to Englaná to work on Ford Madox Ford; I have had a profitably peripatetic summer working on Moore and Gissing with the aid of a Purdue Research Foundation grant; and I am certain there must be much more similar activity going on. Such activity would seem to demand a "Conversation in Chicago«" Conversation in Chicago: The Conference on English Fiction in Transition: H. G. Wells has been authorized for the MLi meetings in Chicago. No date or meeting place has yet been set. Admission to the Conference is limited to 35 persons, I shall welcome application from those who wish to take part; I shall send out admission cards to applicants in the order in which requests are received. Please write to H.E. Gerber, English Department, Purdue University, Lafayette, Indiana. There will be no papers and no formal reports. I hope that a lively discussion can be maintained directed towards several specific ends, λ number of scholars interested in Wells have already indicated their eagerness "to have their say." In view of the enormous activity going on in Wellsian scholarship at the University of Illinois, we may well raise some basic questions about Wells. For example : 1) Is there really much to be added to what we already know? 2) Will the new Wells material being prepared at Illinois warrant a â– fundamental re-estimation of Wells? 3) If so, in what way will the resultant view of Wells differ from that which is now generally held? 4) Can we take Vielis' early fiction seriously on critical grounds? 5) Is Wells' professed unconcern with the art of fiction a pose, a rationalization, or a considered decision? 6) Does Wells at any time have a coherent theory of the novelist's art? What is it? How, specifically, does he apply it in his own work? 7) VÃ-as Wells at any time a significant influence on the tendencies of the English novel? In what way? On what novelists? To what end? β) In what quality of his imagination does his originality lie? Is he in any sense original? What does he borrow? From whom? What does he do with borrowed techniques and materials to make them distinctively Wellsian? And so on. IV. These questions are not intended to be merely rhetorical, but to prod EFT readers into some audacious thinking and, I hope, audacious conversing in Chicago. In the meantime, I shall welcome comments, suggestions, arguments, and applications to attend our meeting. I, for one, should like to think that Wells is still capable of stimulating some lively talk about Wells. Conversation in the Office: Since the Moore bibliography is certainly going to run through two issues of EFT and since we have the material to fill an additional issue, we are talking expenses and time and effort in the editorial office. We are planning to put out an issue which will contain some 18 or 20 previously unpublished letters by H.G. Wells, Robert Weeks' report on Wells from the New York meeting, perhaps Hepburn's report on Bennett, some of the bibliographical backlog on various EFT authors, and so on. However, we may have to include this issue in the i960 subscriptions, although...