Art & Creativity Quote by John Sergeant Wise

There is something wonderfully self-incriminating in Wise admitting he made an "honest effort" to write in the third person. The phrase is a wink disguised as a confession: he knows the third person is supposed to signal distance, objectivity, decorum. By stressing the effort, he also signals the failure. The "I" is already elbowing its way into the sentence, and the reader can feel the memoirist winning the fight against the formal pose of history.

Wise, a postbellum Southern author with family proximity to power, is writing in an era when respectable self-narration often wore a mask. Third person was a genteel workaround: it let you praise, justify, or mythologize yourself while pretending you were merely reporting. His line stages that temptation and then undercuts it. He wants credit for trying not to be the main character, while also preparing the audience to accept that he will be anyway.

The subtext is defensive, but also strategic. "When I first concluded" frames authorship as deliberation, not vanity; "print the book" emphasizes public exposure and risk. He is negotiating credibility at the very moment he risks losing it. The admission functions like a handshake agreement with the reader: I'm aware of the genre's tricks, I'm not going to insult you with fake objectivity, but I still want you to hear my version.

It works because it turns a technical choice (point of view) into a moral posture. The sentence is less about grammar than about authority: who gets to narrate a life, and how candidly they can admit they're doing it.