Harrison M. Hayford


Harrison Mosher Hayford was a scholar of American literature, most prominently of Herman Melville, a book-collector, and a textual editor. He taught at Northwestern University from 1942 until his retirement in 1986. He was a leading figure in the post-World War II generation of Melville scholars who mounted the Melville Revival. He was General Editor of the Northwestern-Newberry The Writings of Herman Melville published by Northwestern University Press, which established reliable texts for all of Melville's works by using techniques of textual criticism. Northwestern University Archives
G. Thomas Tanselle surveyed the scholarship about Herman Melville over the twentieth century and concluded that "Harrison Hayford has been responsible for more basic work —from the maintenance of a file of secondary material to the production of critical editions—than anyone else”.
Hayford received a Ford Foundation Fellowship in 1951; a Fulbright Fellowship in 1956-1957, which he spent in Florence, Italy; a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962, which he spent in Paris, France. He helped found and served four terms as president of the Melville Society.

Life and education

Harrison Hayford was born in Belfast, Maine, son of Ralph Hayford and Marjorie Chase Hayford. He had two sisters, Viola, and Marion, who died of tuberculosis as a child.
Hayford's early life was spent on the Hayford Farm, which was established in 1821 and was in 1859 made the town Poorhouse Farm. The family prospered in business, construction, and dairy farming. The Hayford Block held a ballroom and theater in the center of town. Ralph Hayford, his father, was one of seven children. After his mother died shortly after childbirth in 1891, Ralph took over responsibility from his bereaved father, Loretto, and remained on the farm to support and educate his four younger siblings.
One of Hayford's students later speculated that his love of story and language was nurtured by listening to the retired seamen who were taken into the poorhouse. The farm was auctioned by the county in the 1920s, however, when the family could not pay the taxes. Hayford attended a one-room school where his mother was the teacher, then graduated from Crosby High School in 1937.
He entered Tufts College, where he earned bachelor's degree in English in 1938. He earned a master's degree there in 1940 with a thesis on the relation of social themes and religious values in American poetry. His undergraduate roommate was the poet John Ciardi. Their shared interest in poetry was sharpened by John Holmes, a nationally respected poet who taught at Tufts. Holmes held a weekly poetry reading and discussion session in his apartment, where Hayford and Ciardi met Josephine Bosworth Wishart, a graduate student whom both courted. In the spring of 1938 Hayford and Wishart eloped by street-car to Providence, where they married.
Hayford was among the students recruited by Yale English professor Stanley T. Williams for his graduate program in American literature. Although Williams did little publication on the subject himself, he encouraged these graduate students to focus on Melville. The group did research in archives and libraries in order to move beyond the first generation of studies, which treated Melville's writings as reliably autobiographical. The Yale students became key players in the Melville Revival of the 1940s. Among them were Walter Bezanson and Merton M. Sealts. Hayford had intended to write his doctoral thesis on Ralph Waldo Emerson, but when he found that he could not gain access to crucial archival papers, he turned to Melville. His dissertation on the relationship between Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne has been called “seminal." Hayford discovered letters, journal extracts, and other materials which he later included in articles.
He joined the English department of Northwestern University in 1942 and retired after 44 years of teaching there in 1986. He also was visiting professor at University of Minnesota, University of Washington, Seattle, University of Florence, 1956-1957, Harvard University 1962, University of Maine, and University of Paris, Sorbonne, 1977-1978.
Among the Northwestern colleagues with whom he had close friendships were Carl W. Condit, Wallace Douglas, Richard Ellmann, Leon Forrest, Ernest Samuels, Walter Bernard Scott, and Samuel Schoenbaum. Ellmann, a prize-winning biographer, later recalled the "gregarious domesticity" and frequent entertaining of the group. Another colleague recalled Hayford's wife, Jospephine, as a "cultured, cosmopolitan, elegant woman," who taught art history at Kendall College, then a junior college nearby in Evanston. The wives, children, and occasionally the men in the group of department and university friends met at the Northwestern beachon summer afternoons, and three times a week the men lunched at Michelini's, an informal Italian diner just off campus. Scott was well-known for his wit and sharp-edged parodies. He supplied drawings for Hayford and Vincent, Reader and Writer, and the two collaborated on satirical projects. Scott's middle name was "Bernard," and Hayford's "Mosher," and the two often used the name "Bernard Mosher" for humorous effect.
The Hayfords had four children: Charles Wishart Hayford, Ralph Harrison Hayford, Alison Margaret Hayford, and Deborah Bosworth Hayford .

Teaching and teaching materials

Hayford taught freshman composition, graduate seminars, and undergraduate courses in new areas, such as African American literature, folk-lore, and individual American authors. After the war, he was one of the "young turks" in the English Department who worked to put freshman English at the center of a humanistic curriculum. Along with his Northwestern colleagues Wallace Douglas and Ernest Samuels, he was called one of the “early animators and contributors” to the Conference on College Composition and Communication, formed in 1949.
His 1952 freshman English anthology, Reader and Writer, edited with fellow Melville scholar Howard P. Vincent, became one of the bestselling English composition texts of its time. Selections included essays, short fiction, and poems ranging from the early English poet Bernard Mosher to contemporary writers.
He edited The Somers Mutiny Affair, a selection of historical documents concerning the 1793 Somers mutiny which students could use as a resource for essays. Commander Alexander Slidell Mackenzie and the mutiny may have been in Melville's mind when he wrote Billy Budd.

Melville revival and influence

Hayford's influence in the Melville field came without his having written an influential early book establishing him as an authority. His student, Hershel Parker, wrote that "he did it his way." He never published his Yale doctoral thesis on the relation between Melville and Hawthorne, but Melville scholars read it in manuscript and it is called "seminal". After resisting pressure to write a Melville biography, Hayford encouraged Leon Howard, then of the Northwestern English Department, to collaborate with Jay Leyda, who was researching his Melville Log, a day-by-day compilation of Melville’s activities. Howard’s 1951 biography was dedicated to Hayford and Leyda.
In 1945, Tyrus Hilway, another student of Stanley Williams, and Hayford founded the Melville Society, for which Hayford served as president four times. The prominent scholar of American literature F.O. Matthiessen disapproved of the idea, recalled Hilway, perhaps because he believed that there were already too many literary societies or that Melville did not merit one.

Textual editing

Literary study in the 1940s was dominated by the New Criticism, an approach that focused on close reading of texts and downplayed or excluded the author's life or historical situation. Hayford later remarked that "Just by looking closely at a piece of writing, they saw a lot of things that nobody else had noticed before. But you take people with PhDs, who are expected to be scholars, and you tell them that they have to find something new -- well, the first 5 may come up with something, but when you have 50 people looking, the text gets used up." These critics also did not often question whether the texts themselves were reliable. The ideal of textual criticism was to establish the author's intention, which might well have been lost when the publisher edited the original manuscript or distorted when the printer set type.

Billy Budd

Melville left loose pages of the draft manuscript of Billy Budd in disorder on his desk when he died in 1893. Melville's first biographer, Raymond Weaver found these pages among the papers made available to him by Melville's grand-daughter. Weaver produced a text for a collected edition of Melville's works in 1928, but he did not have experience with Melville's difficult handwriting and could only guess at Melville's intentions. Another version published in 1948 reproduced many of Weaver's misreadings and added other mistakes.
In 1955, Hayford and Merton M. Sealts started to study the manuscript, which had been deposited in Harvard's Houghton Library, and published their findings in a 1962 University of Chicago Press book. They found that neither of the two previous editors had realized that Melville's wife had begun to prepare the manuscript for publication, but could not resolve the many difficulties and gave up. The two earlier editors did not recognize that many of the comments were in her handwriting, not her husband's; they printed her queries and notes as if they were Melville's own. Weaver found loose sheets in a separate folder marked "Preface?" and printed them as the Preface. Hayford and Sealts recognized that she had come across the folder and guessed that it was a Preface—hence the question mark. The earlier editors also mistakenly assumed that the pages of the manuscript were in the sequence Melville intended. Hayford and Sealts corrected readings of many words, distinguished the types of papers to show the order in which they were written, observed how Melville's handwriting and writing instruments changed over the years, and noted his use of crayons and inks of different colors. They determined the stages in which Melville developed the plot. To show readers these stages, they prepared a "genetic text" that used a system of markings and symbols to show the history of each leaf, indicate crossings-out and insertions, marginal notes and who made them, and alternative readings. G. Thomas Tanselle called the genetic text an "historic achievement" that made all the textual evidence available for scholars to construct "reading texts." The 1962 University of Chicago volume included both the genetic text and a reading text, which Sealts prepared.
Some reviewers questioned the need for textual editing. They doubted that the earlier published versions needed to be revised, or objected to changing a text they had long been teaching. Princeton University literary historian Lawrance Roger Thompson, for instance, found fault with the “unacceptable attempts to throw out the ‘Preface,’” and suggested that “perhaps Melville put the so-called Preface in a separate folder because he wanted to use it eventually as a ‘Preface’ No other Preface for Billy Budd has been found.” Hershel Parker later countered that “those who felt as if they had been robbed of familiar passages did not particularly care whether or not Melville himself had rejected the passages.... what mattered to them was that as far as they were concerned Billy Budd had always come with a Preface and always should come with a ‘Preface.’”