Five Years After

ix FIVE YEARS AFTER EFT from its inception and despite the nature of its contents was always a somewhat personal publication: it reflected my personal biases, my personal interests, my personal enthusiasm. For the first three years, EFT was predominantly a staff researched, staff written, and staff produced publication. There were marvellously unacademic evenings of marching around our dining room table as we collated; there were adventuresome weekly rides, two hours each way, to the University of Illinois Library in all kinds of weather for eight hours of annotating, interrupted only by paper bag lunches. Our staff during the first year consisted of Mrs. Gerber and myself. We had the assistance of a departmental typist; we helped cut the stencils, we proofread them, we corrected them, we collated, stapled, stuffed, pasted stamps, and carried the completed product to the postoffice . Editor-reader relationships, also, from the first were more personal than Is usual with scholarly journals, The fact that I am a compulsive correspondent resulted in informal relationships with hundreds of individual subscribers. An annual correspondence averaging over 600 letters to nearly 200 people over the course of five years cannot remain wholly professional. The EFT office has been an employment agency, an information bureau, a psychiatric clinic, a counseling service, a better business bureau, a travel agency. These curious peripheral activities I have not minded, for they have helped make possible a collaborative activity all too rare in our profession. I have had silent partners in more carrels of more libraries than i care to count. My collaborators and our subscribers have been the most ioyal supporters any editor could wish for. Our turnover among subscribers has been very small. The chief change has been an increase in the number of subscribers, especially of libraries and of those abroad. It is largely to the several hundred "new" subscribers, those who began their subscriptions during the last two or three years, that I would like to address these reminiscences. EFT grew out of a modestly conceived conference which met at the MLA meetings In Madison, Wisconsin, in September, 1957. This conference was rather unauspiciously, and surely unoriginally, called "The New Realists." I think about 20 people, including two specialists in American literature and one even more completely lost soul in Spanish, found their way through the catacombs to our assigned meeting room. The room had previously been struck by a cyclone, so we sat or stood or leaned where we could and talked. It was not precisely an informal meeting; it was really no meeting at all. We were in no sense a "group" or a conference, despite the designation in the MLA program. We were some 20 persons each realizing that 19 others had seriously thought about a neglected phase of English literature and who were dissatisfied with the skimpy paragraphs of sentences given over to a large number of writers of considerable stature (Wells, Bennett, Gissing, Moore, Galsworthy) and a still larger number of writers of lesser stature (Beresford, Cannan, Swinnerton, Mackenzie, etc.) who, taken together, nevertheless helped to fill out an important development in English literary history. The existing journals, we realized, did not even have space to publish all the first-rate articles they were receiving on Joyce, James, Conrad, and Lawrence. It also seemed to us that there was a more general kind of hiatus in modern scholarly studies and in the literary histories. Most Victorian scholars seemed to concentrate on the period from about 1832 to about 1370 and to dismiss much of the literary activity after I870 in a chapter often called "The Aftermath." Scholars in the modern period, while often demarking their period as from I88O on, usually dismissed the writers active between about I880 and World War I with some such label as "The Precursors" or "The Forerunners" or "The Late Victorians and Edwardians" and then went on to the real business of their studies, dealing with James (increasingly the later novels), Conrad (increasingly the later novels), Lawrence, Joyce, and so on0 The result was that a large number of writers who dominated the forty years between about I880 and about 1920 were assigned to a kind of limbo or a...