Someone said in passing the other day, "I'm considering writing a novel-in-verse about my family history." To this friend, as well as to anyone else similarly inclined, I recommend Rita Dove's classic book of linking narrative poems.
Thomas and Beulah are her grandparents, and though the book is named for both of them, it seems truly more a biography of Thomas. The book opens with Thomas and his friend Lem on a Mississippi riverboat in 1924. In this first poem young, handsome and cocksure Thomas is first touched by mortality. Lem dies needlessly, and the death of his companion, as well as the shadow of his own youthful self follows Thomas through the rest of the book.
Subsequent poems record marriage, births, work, houses, moves, automobiles bought and sold, vacations, illnesses, and finally winds down as Thomas' life winds down, in the hot, dark rooms of old age. We follow Thomas through the various stages of his life, aware as he surely is of how different his life turned out than expected, and how different he is from when he began, in hope, on that riverboat. Like many of us, Thomas is witness to history - the most dramatic episode being the Akron air disaster of 1932 -- but rarely has an active role in it. The challenge and grandeur of such a life, however, is apparent in the hands of his granddaughter.
Because she wrote the life in linking poems, instead of prose, Dove was released from the obligation of conforming to the traditional plot arc. While helpful in fiction, the need (real or imagined) to follow such a structure in biography often distorts the shape and nature of recollection. In a linking narrative such as this, each poem marks an important episode in the life of the family. Vignettes flash before readers as they might before the eyes of a dying man.
Here, Thomas has taken his city-girl Ohio bride back to see his hometown in rural Tennessee. A frustrated Beulah allows herself a small cruelty at Thomas' expense. To what married person would this stanza from "Nothing Down," not seem a bit familiar?
Eight miles outside Murfreesboro
the burn of stripped rubber,
soft mud of a ditch.
A carload of white men
halloo past them on Route 231.
"You and your South!" she shouts
above the radiator hiss.
"Don't tell me this ain't what
you were hoping for." (1)
In his granddaughter's hands Thomas' life of the common man is poignant, heroic, and charmed. By watching him and his wife walk through challenging terrain we readers share in the wisdom they gain.
1. Dove, Rita. Thomas and Beulah. Pittsburgh: Carnegie-Mellon University Press. 1986. 23.
For other linking narratives based on family history, please check out Mona Lisa Saloy's Red Beans and Ricely Yours, , Davis McCombs' Ultima Thule, or Janet Holmes' Green Tuxedo.
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