The Editor as Teacher and Learner

Abstract

The Editor as Teacher and Learner Daniel Mark Fogel Throughout my sixteen years of editing the Henry James Review, the editor’s tutorial function was always before me as an ideal proclaimed in the editorial comments in volume 1, number 1. I subscribed from the outset to the notions that a primary function of the editors of learned journals is to help scholars develop their work, that a high proportion of the work published in a journal should have been revised in response to editorial suggestions for improvement, and that, in fact, one could not justify the existence of a journal—the imperative for a sound rationale being particularly strong in a founding editor, as I was—unless that journal were the venue for significant work that would not have been created if the journal did not exist. Beyond assisting individual scholars and critics to present their research as effectively as possible, I had other aims for the Henry James Review that might also be considered pedagogical. Locally, at LSU, I wanted the journal to provide learning experiences for the undergraduate and graduate students who assisted me in its production and for the editorial group, comprising students and colleagues, who helped me with the initial screening of submissions and with whom I debated their merits in weekly seminar-like meetings. For the at-large community of Jamesians, I wanted the HJR to function not merely as an archive but as a center of activity within which the totality of knowledge in Henry James studies would be visible, so that any regular and thorough reader of the journal would be able to make out where his or her own work and thinking fit into the broad, continuously evolving field of knowledge. This aim in turn entailed another, which was to make the HJR a continual demonstration of the virtues of inclusiveness: we welcomed all scholarly and critical approaches to Henry James, and we wished to encourage a high degree of civility and mutual appreciation among them and their practitioners. I might add that the salutary lessons of [End Page 296] inclusion still are being taught by the current editor of the journal: witness the last issue (volume 17, number 2), which opens with Paul Armstrong’s philosophical reading of power and community in James’s fiction and concludes with Adeline Tintner’s careful descriptions of James’s markings on his copy of Emile Zola’s La Débâcle. Meeting such an editorial challenge requires continual learning on the part of the editor and the members of the editorial board. Thus, even as we sought to provide tutorial help to colleagues who submitted work to us, we were going to school with those same colleagues, learning the new things they had to tell us about Henry James and the new ways of understanding—new critical approaches, new vocabularies—that they brought to the enterprise. Sometimes, perhaps, we asked too much of ourselves or of each other. I vividly recall the reader’s report I received from Robert Gale, who evidently had found that he could not stomach a submission that represented an adventurous blend of deconstruction and new historicism: “Drive this woman into the desert, Dan,” the reader’s report began. “Avoid her like a plague of locusts.” Even though I always was grateful for readers’ reports that could be passed straight on to authors—clearly not an option for Gale’s pungent jeremiad—it was a report I still savor. Let me acknowledge here that I learned a great deal over the years from Robert Gale’s reports and from those submitted by other colleagues, both regular members of the editorial board and persons who served as specialist readers for particular submissions. For example, I almost recoiled from sending submissions to Jean Frantz Blackall because the effort she invested in them was so astonishing (doubling my normal regret that I had nothing but heartfelt thanks to offer our readers): Blackall’s reports were anatomies of the essays on which she was commenting, with each major assertion paraphrased and evaluated, along with a separate assessment of the evidence adduced for each line of argument. Equally memorable were John Rowe’s reports...