In First Person

Many if not most of the stories in my present effort are told from first person. One or two are told from the omniscient point of view, author as all knowing, god-like, Jehovah, commonly known as third person point of view. Rest assured that there are library shelves heavy with teaching guides on how to accomplish first and third person, distinguishing all the literary aspects for the learning writer as to which is the best authorial stance to take. I am not particularly enamored of third person storytelling although a good part of me would like to be better at it. I see this as a “failing,” but I relish the first person tale because of its immediacy, its happening in the present, its “now-ness.” I have long accepted that I will never be a “significant” writer for too much of my life has been spent living the life of a worker, father, parent who had to put aside whatever creativity I had to take care of my family (boo hoo). I have no complaints about that; I wrote when I could. I was never an academic or a literary person but someone who had his song to sing and I have done the best I could at it. I came from lower middle-class shit and I did my best to emerge onto land where I spent too many years just croaking rather than moving on from the slime. I barely escaped being blue-collar.

I favor telling my tales from first person because the tales themselves are disguises for all the issues that have assailed me over these decades. Short essays are particularly attractive to me because I can exercise my philosophical bent of mind which after all these years I attribute to a romantic distortion of a kind — a search for answers, I suppose, rather, a search for better questions to ask. I like the epiphanous essay or story.  (Winesburg, Ohio readily comes to mind. Anderson was one hell of a writer.) As I look over the manuscript I’m working on I can detect some old flaws, a kind of ornateness of style, repeating images more than once as if the reader was a dunce and could not get it the first time around and a certain tendentiousness. So when I go about editing I try to cut out this dead wood repetitiveness. Unfortunately, as I am experiencing it now, the entire story may have to be thrown away for it lacks drive or life. The vibrancy has been killed by the need to advocate or “rub” it in.

My life has a strong dose of striving to it. For a while I thought it was a need to transcend, as I might sprout wings and ascend to a heaven I don’t believe in, don’t want and find ludicrous. It was striving, a need to overcome, to excel, to be intellectually ambitious — or in plain talk, a need to be loved or cherished. I think it is best that whatever insights I have into my childhood and young adulthood come to me now as I age and reflect, because at an earlier time I think I wouldn’t know what to do with these self-clarifications. At a time in my very early adolescence I thought nocturnal emissions were given off by street buses late at night. I was a child of benign neglect but reared in basic and honest ways — it was insufficient, alas. I struggled to learn, that is for sure, to get out of the economic morass I found my family in. I lived in city projects — they were relatively safe in the Fifties. I had no awarness that we were poor — I ate enough, clothes were good and new, I did not suffer from want. I suffered from a lack of mothering and fathering. I have made up for these emptinesses as best as I could, but second hand clothing is not as good as newly bought duds. In my writing is all of this, in my writing is empathy for me, perhaps sympathy for you, but essentially my tale of woe as I have lived it. No matter what I write I am deeply involved in it. And when I write about the Holocaust i really am writing, in part, about my life which to a degree has been a holocaust of a kind. Deaths and more deaths parade about me, estrangement from relatives and a child, loss of a daughter to suicide, divorces and personally unresolved issues that linger to this day.

It is mildly ironic that I favor first person, because I am the first person in my life. First person is tactile, in your face, authentic, present, here and now. At times as I revisit these stories for editing I am only burnishing their skins while a reworking or rearrangement of the structure of the stories might be more useful — but I resist doing that. Here the writer, me, is struggling with the writer, me, about adding another character or writing from the third person point of view. I see the resistance, it is palpable. Perhaps you have experienced this as well when writing a story, essay or paper. You just have had enough of it and to considerably rework it is a pain in the ass, regardless whether such an effort might improve the very story itself. I know as students we have all faced that, especially when new data for a paper upset the whole applecart which was your original theme. Consequently I am at the point with these stories that I may just have to let them cook a while longer.

The realization that most of these stories about the Holocaust are in first person is troubling, as if I can’t tell them from another perspective or unconsciously I choose not to do so. When you write about the Holocaust I believe that one must feel in ways that almost stretch or, in fact, go beyond empathy into some other telling — and compelling — space. At times I can walk in a survivor’s shoes, for my imagination is very good — very good at that. But imagination does not a story make. Here craft and art take over. Here I struggle to put the gem into facets.

So I fritter away my time tinkering at the stories knowing full well that in many instances they have not become realized. What is one to do? I will wait. And it will come to me or it will not.