James Hayford

Recollecting Who I Was, My Life and Work, by James Hayford.  Published by Oriole Books, South Burlington. $20 in paperback

reviewed by Chris Braithwaite

The term "real Vermonter" summons up lots of images — loggers, farmers, weathered horsewomen, independent politicians, hunters of deer and fishers for trout.

But poets?

James Hayford's autobiography, published a decade after his death, can be read as a primer in what it means to be a Vermonter, and how they get that way.

And James Hayford was, above all else, a poet.

This will not be news to the people who made his acquaintance at craft fairs across the Northeast Kingdom, picked up a free copy of a poem as one might sample a batch of maple candy and, if the flavor was right, bought one of the collections of poetry Jim had printed up by his personal publishing house, Oriole Books.

It would not be news to those who heard him discuss the comforting power of poetry as a guest lecturer in grade school classrooms across northern Vermont.

Nor would it be news to those who found the poet's corner at a Bread and Puppet Domestic Resurrection Circus in Glover, and paused to hear Jim read his work. 

It did come as news to the people who get to decide, in some high and distant place, what constitutes serious poetry.

"My first and worst lost cause is poetry," Mr. Hayford wrote at the beginning of a late chapter, "Lower-Case Creation."  He could not persuade people to love poetry, he continued, because he could not persuade many editors of books and magazines to publish his poems.

"And this is partly because I have kept on writing in a way that is regarded by most of those who are in authority as outmoded, passŽ, hopelessly old fashioned — even bankrupt and exhausted."

It wasn't until the eightieth — and final — year of his life that "those who are in authority" recognized James Hayford as "the least known major American poet," and "a national treasure among living American poets."

It wasn't until the second-last month of his life that he was appropriately awarded with an honorary degree from the University of Vermont. Terminally ill, Mr. Hayford lacked the strength to read the poem he had selected for the occasion.

This would be the stuff of tragedy if Jim Hayford wasn't Jim Hayford; if he wasn't a Vermonter.

I have come to understand the term as one who puts place above position. 

Vermonters are people who have been captured by this place.  They would rather do what they can, here, than pursue their ambition to wherever it might take them.

Jim was once advised by a sophisticated friend and admirer that to get published he must move to New York City, where he could rub elbows with those editors who held such power over his career. 

Jim thought it over, and stayed in Vermont. 

This story reminded me of a conversation with another brilliant artist, the painter Anna Baker.  She too was told that, if her talent were ever to be acknowledged and rewarded, she must abandon Barton for New York. 

Anna was an immigrant from Ontario.  But when she rejected that advice, she became a Vermonter.

However much it may enrich us by the company of the brilliantly underemployed, this fixation on place is of course profoundly unAmerican.

America is all about moving — to America in the first place, and then on and on and on until, some historians speculate, the frontier became a goal in itself, not for the riches and opportunity that waited there, but only for the newness of the place.

Vermonters are the descendants of the people who stayed behind, and those who came to join them and discovered that, at last, they could move no further.

By nature, Vermonters tend to be outsiders. 

Recollecting Who I Was is essentially a personal journal leavened with scores of the author's poems.  As he revised it for publication, the author wrote, he gradually reined in his more extravagant ambitions.

"I would do well to leave a reasonably accurate and honest record of a twentieth-century life lived on the outside fringes of the literary, academic and political communities.  I think there are many of us out on the geographical, economic, and spiritual fringes who have not approved of the way the people at the centers were running the world; we have raised our voices, and, not being listened to, dragged our feet, probably not vigorously enough. If any human beings survive into the twenty-first century, our experience may prove useful to them in charting a wiser course.  Meanwhile one has to behave as if there was a good chance that we could save ourselves — and future generations."

Jim marked himself as an outsider at Amherst College, where the skinny freshman from Montpelier was turned down by prestigious Alpha Delta Phi and joined Sigma Delta Rho, which dwelt "at the absolute bottom" of the fraternity pecking order.

In his junior year, his fraternity rejected a promising candidate because he was Jewish.

Jim resigned from Sigma Delt, a gesture that shook Amherst all the way up to the president's office.

Then comes a sentence that leaves no doubt that this is a book by a man driven to tell the simple truth:  "It's a very good question how I would have felt about all this if I'd been elected to Alpha Delt." 

While he sustained himself artistically with poetry and music (which he both wrote and performed on organ and piano), Jim put food on the family table through a series of teaching jobs.  In the late 1930s and early '40s he was part of the original faculty of the highly experimental new college in Plainfield called Goddard.  He taught without enjoyment in New Jersey.

In the late '40s he was teaching at the Burr and Burton Seminary in Manchester, Vermont, and enjoying it.  He was selling some poetry — two poems to Harper's Magazine and another to the Saturday Evening Post. 

His marriage to Helen Emerson, a first cousin from New Hampshire, had survived an early rough patch, and the couple had one son, Jamie.

Then Jim's concern about the impending nuclear arms race drew him into national politics. In this area, he managed to establish himself as an outsider's outsider.

Jim worked hard in support of Henry Wallace, who wanted America to come to peaceful terms with the Russians before they got the atomic bomb. 

"It looked to many of us," he wrote, "as though the bomb might lead to an arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union that would end all arms races — and the human race."

Unfortunately, Wallace also had the support of the American Communist Party, which selected him as its presidential candidate to run against Harry Truman in 1948.

At the first national convention of the Progressive Party in July that year, Jim and another Vermont delegate drafted a last-minute platform amendment. 

It was a simple statement that the party did not give blanket approval to the foreign policy of any nation.

The party was already highly critical of U.S. foreign policy.  The "any nation" Jim had in mind was the Soviet Union.

The point, he wrote, was to "give us a defense, however slight, against some of the Red-baiting we knew we were all going to be subjected to in campaigning for Wallace...."

When it was voted down on the convention floor, however, the Vermont amendment had precisely the opposite effect. It gave the Red-baiters just the ammunition they were looking for.

It was a major moment in the edgy, nasty politics of the day, and Jim included several contemporary published accounts in his book.  The most colorful, if least accurate, was penned by H.L. Mencken:

"...when an honest but humorless Yankee from Vermont tried to get in a plank disclaiming any intention to support the Russian assassins in every eventuality, no matter how outrageous their doings, it was first given a hard parliamentary squeeze by the Moscow fuglemen on the platform, and then bawled to death on the floor."

Jim's support for Wallace had already generated so much tension at Burr and Burton that he had resigned and relocated his small family to West Burke. 

His deeply principled and highly suspect political convictions essentially destroyed his career as a teacher.

In West Burke Jim raised goats unprofitably, did odd jobs for his neighbors, and taught their kids to play the piano at rates that started at $1.50 for a half-hour session and climbed to $2.50.

He and Jamie followed Helen's teaching career to Orleans in 1954.  Jim took a job as an over-qualified but under-certified vocal music instructor for the district. "I taught one class a week in every elementary schoolroom in the towns of Barton, Irasburg, Glover, and Westmore, as well as in Barton Village and Orleans Village."

But it wasn't until 1966, at the age of 53, that Jim returned to a full-time, public school teaching job. That was in Winooski, after the administration in Orleans starved him out by cutting his job to quarter-time, his annual salary to $1,300.

I have so far managed to write a lot of words about Mr. Hayford's autobiography without mentioning that it is mostly about poetry.

To do that subject justice, it is almost necessary to begin again.

The poet Robert Frost was a gray eminence at Amherst College.  As an undergraduate, Jim made his acquaintance, showed him some of his poems.

At the end of his senior year, Jim was surprised to learn that he would be the first recipient of a $1,000 poetry prize, funded by Amherst at Mr. Frost's urging.  It would turn out that Jim was also the last recipient of Mr. Frost's prize.

"Oh don't thank me," the old poet told the young Amherst graduate.  "There are some terrible conditions attached."

Mr. Hayford continued:

"Next morning, Frost laid down the terrible conditions:  I was to stay away from

1. Colleges and universities
2. Big cities
3. Art colonies
4. Europe"

In themselves, these conditions didn't particularly cramp Jim's style. Indeed he left almost immediately for Germany, and a summer of study at the University of Heidelberg.

But Mr. Hayford's close association with Mr. Frost became a creative burden he carried through the next 15 years.  Here is the moment when he was able to set it down:

"One day in the spring of 1949, in the kitchen at West Burke, I read over a poem I had just written and was thrilled to find that the voice speaking in it was unmistakably mine — not Frost's, not Dickinson's, not anybody else's."

At a meeting with Frost some years before, he recalled, "I remarked that there were a few poets around who needed to be de-Frosted.  He was not amused.  I paid for this levity by taking so many years — until I was 36 — to de-Frost myself."

Up to this point, the author had salted his text with the occasional poem. However, he wrote, "Now that I've reached that turning point in this book, I shall let the poems — My Papers — do more and more of the talking about how things were going."

At this point, indeed, the narrative becomes largely poetic, sometimes with only a line or two of prose between poems. 

The device works because the poet writes about his day-to-day experiences in terms that are at once elegant and accessible.

Here's one I liked about a son's coming to a certain age:

Parental (1949)

What will befall you now
Is out of my control —
What wars you fight in, how
You save your soul.
 

Though still I intervene
From sympathy or anger,
My presence on the scene
Won't spoil your danger.
 

Mr. Hayford was a great reviser, sometimes working a short poem through 40 drafts before he was satisfied.  He shares a bit of this process with the reader, offering an early and final version of several poems.

"Final," however, may not have been a word that could be applied to a Hayford poem before his death in 1993.  In a "postlude" to the book, Mr. Hayford's friend and publisher, Paul Eschholz, recalls that one of Mr. Hayford's Christmas poems arrived with a last-minute amendment penned into the printed text.

There's one entire chapter devoted to the construction of a poem, its inspiration, its meter and rhyme, and the need for tireless revision.

Here, on the subject of modern poetry, the young radical emerges:

"I think poems ought to make some sort of literal sense."

He defends the idea later in the chapter:

"I am convinced, here in the latter half of the twentieth century, that many of our readers, both experienced and inexperienced, are defeated by most of the poetry that is now published.  A few years ago, the doctrine seemed to be that unless a poem was so hard that it took a full Professor of English several hours to 'explicate' it, it wasn't worth bothering with....The poet never made a point; he wasn't allowed to hint at what he meant of draw the smallest conclusion."

Being, after all, a poet, Mr. Hayford sums up this long argument with a wonderfully short poem:

The Diffy-Cult (1968)
 

This being difficult
In a work of art
For difficulty's sake —
 

What surer way to insult
The serious heart,
Which never learned to fake.

Jim Hayford's work tends to the descriptive rather than the analytical; to the celebratory rather than the critical.

So the choice of poems for this article says more about the reviewer than the reviewed.

To round out that thought, here's another one I like.  It has, after all, been a long winter.

Winter Sitting (1951)

Whom wintertime confines indoors
Or to the circuit of the stores,
Post office, lunchroom, railway station,
With nothing to do but winter chores,
Become each other's occupation.

Then are the brave seen arrogant,
The patient pitifully meek,
The learned otherwise ignorant —
No sir, it is not far to seek
How any virtue makes us weak.