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People who have no experience at all with writing ask some artless questions on Quora, the “social question and answer website and onllne knowledge market” – questions like “How do I start a novel?” or “What are characters in a novel like?” One such, recently, was “Should you write a detective novel in the first or third person?” Well, that’s not quite so basic a question, and the answer is, that depends. Raymond Chandler, Sue Grafton and Ross McDonald wrote in the first person, the detectives communicating directly with you, letting you shadow them every step of the way as they unravel the mystery. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Rex Stout gave you the first person once removed, with the detective’s sidekick, one step behind the great sleuth, narrating the story. Tony Hillerman uses the third person. In the novel I just finished reading (Listening Woman), his Navajo police lieutenant, Joe Leaphorn, is involved in a deadly manhunt through Southwestern caves and canyons that takes up the last third of the book. It’s exciting, it’s intense, it’s death-defying, it calls upon Leaphorn’s physical courage and his finely-tuned awareness of the natural world…and it never would have worked as a first person narrative. There’s too much action, too many desperate chances, and most of all too much knowledge of the forbidding natural terrain. If Hillerman had written it in the first person, with Leaphorn saying “I did this, I did that,” it would have come off as braggadocio. Sometimes you need that distance, and sometimes it can add an unexpected dimension. World War II hero Audie Murphy wrote a memoir that was turned into a movie. But neither the first person account nor the flamboyant representation of it onscreen can match, for sheer drama, the cold, boring, bureaucratic prose of his Congressional Medal of Honor citation. Sometimes you need that distance, and sometimes you don’t. Sometimes there’s no other way to bring the reader close to the essential truth than having a voice tell it in the first person. And that’s one of a poet’s most important tasks—to choose what distance works best for a particular poem. Sometimes that choice seems obvious, sometimes it doesn’t. I’ve often gone back and forth, in successive drafts, between a first person and third person approach to something that was trying to become a poem, and not quite succeeding. Donald Finkel told me about a poem he had wrestled with for over a year. It began with a story told to him by a friend who had been struck by lightning and survived. He knew there was a poem there, but he couldn’t find it. He tried writing it in the third person, narrating what had happened to the young man. He tried the first person, blending the young man’s actual words into a poetic structure. He tried creating a different first person, to see if he could find the poetic essence of the experience that way. Finally, he said, “I tried two things that I would never have tried, and would never use, and would advise against them if I saw them in a student poem. The second person and the future tense: ‘You will…’ and it worked. Go figure.” Poetry began as history—the story of a tribe, or a clan, or a race, or a nation. And historians, appropriately, kept themselves out of it. The stories of Gilgamesh, or Cassandra, or Roland, or the unnamed heroines of Marie de France’s tales, are told in the third person. The bards claim no intimate knowledge of their protagonists. If Homer was there in the tents outside Troy, sharing introspective confidences with Ajax (unlikely that he had any) or Odysseus (he never would have told him the truth), we don’t know about it. But times change. Tennyson stuck to the traditional third person in narrating the adventures and misadventures of King Arthur, his court, and the ladies who had the misfortune of loving a knight. Because he had to? Not at all. He could have had Gawain and Percival and the Lady of Shalott tell us their stories, and we know that because he did, when it came to Ulysses. No Homeric distance there. The idle king confides to us that his life has become meaningless. He metes and doles laws that he knows full well are unequal, to subjects – “a savage race” – incapable of appreciating the subtleties of his distinction. Very different first personae. And yet, does it matter? Do we really care whether Tennyson ever actually plucked a flower out of a crannied wall? Sometimes, we do. It matters to us whether Sylvia Plath really had daddy issues, or whether Allen Ginsberg was really in Rockland with Carl Solomon. No, it doesn’t. Not really. If the poems didn’t speak to our own experience, our own inner selves, it wouldn’t matter to us how true to Plath’s or Ginsberg’s experience they were. The point of view chosen by a poet for a particular poem is one of the choices a poet makes, and even after you’ve made that initial choice – third person, first person (even second person?), there are many more choices that have to be made. I may end up spending a few columns mulling over the use of person in crafting a poem, and the decisions that go it into it, because the more I think about it, the more there is to say. I could write a whole column just on Robert Frost’s use of the first person across a number of poems. In fact, that’s just what I’ll do. We know by now that Frost’s carefully crafted image of himself as the simple, folksy, New England farmer was a fabrication quite at odds with the real-life complex, troubled, and not always nice man, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a sensitive and moving created character, and that’s what art is supposed to do – not strip a person bare, but illuminate the human soul. Probably Frost’s most perfect evocation of the simple farmer is in “The Pasture,” from his 1915 collection, North of Boston. There is absolutely no way to imagine this poem in any other point of view than first person, and part of the reason for that is the way that the first person narrator reaches out across the “fourth wall” to “you” – to me, to you, to whoever is reading the poem at that moment. It's hard to convey, in any other words than the poem itself, the beauty of this poem, because it is so…I was tempted to write “deceptively simple,” but there’s no deceit. It really is simple. And it’s generous. The speaker has all he needs from nature, from work, from the season. He doesn’t crave companionship to make him whole, but he invites us to come too. This is a completely invented persona. It’s not the real Anne Sexton going for a real abortion, or the real Robert Lowell, watching for love-cars and really knowing that his real mind is really not right. But it’s no less honest, no less true, and no less right there. “I” is in every line of the first quatrain, and in the first and last lines of the second. “The Pasture” could only have been presented to us by the generous farmer, inviting us along with him on his rounds, sharing with us the detail of his observations. But what about “Design”? Aren’t the dimpled spider, the moth, the flower, really the story, by themselves? They certainly could be. Yes, we know about them because someone saw them and is reporting the story back to us. But not every bit of reportage starts with the reporter. We don’t expect to pick up the Times and read, “I watched Joseph Biden step up to the podium and announce that he was going to try to find new ways to relieve student debt.” So “I found a dimpled spider” is a choice, and, just as Heisenberg told us, the observer changes the reality of the situation by observing it. Frost is another first person narrator, with another degree of separation, in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” That poem gained a certain notoriety in 1959 when critic Lionel Trilling, at an 85th birthday tribute to the poet, announced that he found Frost “terrifying,” shocking the assembled guests who had come to pay tribute to the kindly old farmer. That shock effect has long since worn off. We can look at “Stopping by Woods,” as Trilling did, and see that the narrator’s thoughts are complex and at least to some degree morbid – no wonder the little horse wants to get out of there! – but we don’t have to read between the lines to know that “Design” is about the design of darkness to appall, because the narrator damn well tells you. So we have two first person narrators, conceived differently, introduced into the poem differently. The narrator of “Design” tells us about something interesting that happened to him a while back – maybe this morning, maybe ten years ago. Whenever it was, he can’t stop obsessing about the weirdness of it, and the weirdness of the world. On the other hand, we’ve sort of surprised the narrator of “Stopping by Woods” in an unguarded moment. He’s not inviting us along, like the narrator of “The Pasture,” but there we are, so he shares his thoughts of the moment with us, and we have no reason to suppose he won’t forget them as soon as the little horse shakes him out of his reverie, and he goes back to thinking about those promises he has to keep. So these are choices – just some of the choices you have to make when you let that first person into your poem. And yet another choice is not to let him in at all. Frost gives us a dysfunctional farm family in “Home Burial” without the intercession of a narrator at all. But another dysfunctional farm family is presented through the eyes of a first person narrator, a traveler who just happens to stop by and hear the story (from two first person narrators). Why? Both stories involve a pile of bones, one that won’t stay still and one that’s been planted where it will never move again. Frost had to make those choices, and who knows but what he didn’t consider other options? Maybe Amy tells the whole story of the home burial and why she had to leave to the woman, or man, who comes to get her at the end of the poem, and that person tells us the story. Maybe the witch of Coös and her son tell their story directly to the reader, with no narrative intercession. |