David Guy is a novelist and essayist whose work has appeared in The Sun. Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he was invited recently by the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh to give a talk there; this is the text of his address.
— Ed.
I think that I decided to become a writer because of something about language. Not because I had a story to tell, and not because I wanted to be rich and famous, and not because I hoped to achieve immortality through art (though all of those things would eventually have a place among my ambitions), but because of a discovery that I made about language when I was eleven years old. That was the year, at Shady Side Academy, when I had moved to the Middle School; it was the year when we suddenly had male teachers, the school got much stricter, the work got much harder. It was also the year when we began to write weekly compositions in English.
At first I didn’t do well on those assignments. I had a flare for language — my whole family seems to — but as far as I knew writing was like baseball: you played the game and you did your best and you won or lost, but you couldn’t go back and play the third inning again, just because you hadn’t done well. You couldn’t keep playing it over until you got it right. In sports people spoke of an athlete’s best effort on a given day; what I had yet to learn about writing was that, if you weren’t having a good day, you could come back on another one. You could keep coming back until you won. And if you didn’t win, you could throw the game away.
My parents, then, introduced me to the concept of rewriting. I can still remember the moment — I can almost see the page — when my mother was going over a theme with me, showing me how some sentences could be improved, and I realized that simply by shifting the words in a sentence around, perhaps changing a word here and there, you could make a sentence incomparably different. You could say the same thing but give an entirely different impression. You could also, by such small changes, say a different thing. You could say something you hadn’t thought of when you’d first sat down. You could say something you hadn’t realized you’d known. (There is an old writer’s saying: how do I know what I mean until I see what I say?) Writing was not a sterile transcription of things you knew, but a means of discovering new things. Some of these things came from what we now call the subconscious (what earlier writers thought of as inspiration), but some seemed embedded in language itself. From that time on I began to enjoy writing, especially rewriting, and though various things in the future would discourage me from what I came to think of as my vocation, I continued to pursue it because of an endless fascination with language, with the whole process of writing.
Until that time, though I had always been an avid reader, I had read mostly magazines. I had loved fishing when I was young, and subscribed to Field and Stream, Sports Afield, and Outdoor Life. I also longed to be an athlete, and read magazines about whatever sport was in season: football, basketball, baseball, track and field. I read lots of pulpy prose, but I also read words that made athletes — my heroes, the men I wanted to be — come alive. I read some articles so many times that I practically memorized them. It was an intense form of daydreaming, a kind of worship, willing into being the man I wanted to become. Those tattered sports magazines were my scripture.
A great masterpiece might sit there beside some obscure and shoddy effort. Schools and universities told you what books were great and worthy and famous; a library sat there mutely and let you decide.
My father was a great reader, and he felt mildly disturbed that I spent all my time with magazines instead of books, which he believed to afford a greater pleasure. He did something soon after I entered high school that, whether by design or by chance — and I think it was by design — may have influenced my life as much as that discovery about language. I had been assigned to report on a non-fiction book for English, and my father suggested a short popular biography of Ernest Hemingway.
Hemingway embodied all of my interests. He was an athlete and an outdoorsman. He was very manly, in exactly the way that an adolescent wants to be manly (Hemingway himself was a little old for it). He shared my obsession with language — you could see that by the way he wrote — and he made the craft of writing seem a worthwhile and manly one to pursue. Hemingway was the first author whose work I read straight through. I began to take an interest in literature that rivalled my interest in sports. I played on the school teams but also wrote for the newspaper. Deep in my heart I still thought I would wind up as a linebacker in the NFL, but I began to have a secondary ambition as a writer.
In later years our fate can seem etched in stone, the path we wound up on the only one we could have taken (for all I know it is: something, eventually, would have pushed me in that direction), but I have also often mused on the random events that have shaped my life. We got the Sunday New York Times, and I read the Book Review as avidly as I read the sports pages, and one Sunday, prominently featured, was a new biography of Theodore Dreiser. Something in the enthusiasm of the reviewer, in the facts of Dreiser’s life, captured my attention. I bought the book — a substantial purchase for me — and it opened me up to a whole new kind of writer.
Hemingway had had a background much like my own, but Dreiser was a man who had been born into poverty and longed after wealth and power and status, who obsessively pursued women (an activity I was planning to begin any day, as soon as I got up my courage), who could be alternately charming and loutish, whose life seemed messier and less controlled and more interesting than Hemingway’s. Dreiser was a big city novelist, for whom skyscrapers and apartment buildings and smokestacks and factories and trolley cars and swarms of people — not the cosmopolitan capitals of Europe or the woods and lakes of the midwest — were the landscape of literature. In contrast to Hemingway’s apparent stoical certainty, Dreiser seemed a person like me, puzzled and fascinated by the world of men and by the cosmos, forever asking the big dumb questions and getting no satisfactory answers. Dreiser was also a man who in his day — perhaps because he was an outsider in American culture — had a problem with censorship, and became a pioneer in the battle against philistinism. Men he associated with — H.L. Mencken, Edgar Lee Masters, James T. Farrell — were also involved in that battle. Like many adolescents, I was disgusted by what I saw as the hypocrisy of the adult world. All my life I had harbored ideas that went against the platitudes I had been fed at school and church. I wanted to be the kind of writer Dreiser had been. I wanted to write the bold honest truth. I wanted to say the things that people didn’t want to hear. I wanted the city to be a backdrop for my books.
I wanted to be the author who put Pittsburgh on the map.
I began to keep a notebook, in which I wrote sketches of city scenes. I wrote my most private thoughts and feelings. I longed to have a story to tell, and wondered why no story came to me.
Two libraries from those days seem inextricably bound up with my ambitions to be a writer.
One was the library of the Pittsburgh Academy of Medicine, an organization then housed in an old building on Craig Street. My father was a doctor and an officer of the Academy, a friend of the librarian. He got me a job there, first just dusting the books and cleaning up, later as an acting librarian when the regular one went on his two-month summer vacation.
The Academy was an old, dank, musty place, with high ceilings, cracking plaster, creaking hardwood floors covered by rubber matting, heavy wooden bookcases fronted by glass. The building sloped down a hill, so the library was in the basement but still had windows to the outside; there was an even darker cement sub-basement that housed the more obscure books. In the summer the building was hot and stuffy, pervaded by an overwhelming mildewy smell that only old books can have. It looked out on an alley to one side, a house on the other, and at the rear on the back porches of a run-down three-story apartment building.
Most of my hours at the job were sheer torture. I was full in those days of adolescent torments and anxieties, that peculiar combination of frantic energy and restlessness and yawning lassitude. I suffered from the excruciating boredom that can only come from a job like dusting books. (I was to dust every volume in the library, removing the books from the bookcase shelf by shelf, wiping the shelves, then dusting each book individually. Even when I was the assistant librarian I had to dust for several hours every day. I have since worked in two libraries and one bookstore, and have always told my employer before I began that the one thing I wouldn’t do was dust books.) I spent nine grimy, sweaty hours a day in the library, prickles of heat crawling down my spine. I tried when I wasn’t dusting to write or read. Often I couldn’t concentrate on my reading, I couldn’t think of anything to write, and I spent long hours strolling around, wishing something, anything, would happen.
. . . my dream wasn’t an especially lofty one. I didn’t hope to be a name on the syllabus, or in the anthologies, or a statue in the park. I wanted to leave behind a book in the libraries, wrapped in plastic perhaps, worn (I hoped), smudged by coffee stains and cigarette ashes, a book that someone might pick up and read after I was dead.
That job was my first introduction to the hopeless boredom and emptiness that are foundations of any writer’s work. A writer in that situation must look into the void inside himself and discover a world — it’s no use staring out the windows — but I hadn’t learned that trick yet (few sixteen-year-olds have). I didn’t know there was a trick. That was my first realization that my vocation as a writer wasn’t going to be as easy as I had thought. It wasn’t going to happen just because I wanted it to.
The other library that was important to me in those days was the Carnegie Library in Oakland.
I don’t know why those two libraries go together in my memory. They were both part of an older Pittsburgh, one that had been around long before I was and that I felt was a part of my heritage. They shared (at least back in the stacks at the Carnegie Library) that musty smell of books, though the Carnegie Library’s air of having aged, with its stone and marble floors, was not of creakiness and decay, but of a worn and polished magnificence. But the hours I spent in the Carnegie Library — usually on Sunday afternoons — were far different from those I had spent at the Academy.
Certainly I went there to check out books; I didn’t have even enough money in those days to buy all the paperbacks I wanted to read. I also went to get a kind of liberal education, just by browsing; an author’s work was likely to be there in quantity, if not in its entirety (as it usually wasn’t in a bookstore), so I did a lot of familiarizing myself with titles simply by walking up and down through the stacks, picking up books at random. But I also went to the library for a more obscure reason, one slightly embarrassing to admit, difficult to explain, perhaps even difficult to understand. It had to do with a kind of daydreaming, similar perhaps to what I had done with those sports magazines when I was younger and wanted to be an athlete.
I saw the Carnegie Library as a kind of shrine to culture. What it said about literature — by its very existence — was extremely important to me. For one thing, it was open to anybody: anyone with even a poor education and no opportunities could go in there and read. It was a vast repository of literature; it held everything from books written centuries ago to those published only a few weeks before. There was a certain democracy to the way the books were housed: they were shelved by subject, and alphabetically, but there was no distinction in quality. A great masterpiece might sit there beside some obscure and shoddy effort. Schools and universities told you what books were great and worthy and famous; a library sat there mutely and let you decide. You could imagine some theoretical pristine intellect walking into the library with only the ability to read and emerging years later with all of Western culture at his fingertips. Writers, when they speak of their education, mention teachers less often than they do long periods of indiscriminate reading.
I knew in those days that, before it took shape, a book was an idea, a dream, a vision, in an author’s head. He might see it at first obscurely, work it out clumsily. The process of getting it down on paper was often laborious and painful, and sometimes killed whatever pleasure the author took in his original vision. Once he had put it down on paper, however, it had at least a potential existence. It was dead when it was between covers on a shelf, but it took on life when someone picked it up and read it. I could, as I strolled through the library, bring any number of visions to life, simply by taking the books off the shelf and reading them. There was something terribly moving to me about all that, all those obscure books and forgotten authors. I could bring them to life again.
What I dreamed of, on my almost weekly visits to the library, was leaving my own vision behind me on those shelves.
It was a dream of immortality, I suppose, what theorists have seen as the most basic motivation for all art. I wouldn’t argue with them, but my dream wasn’t an especially lofty one. I didn’t hope to be a name on the syllabus, or in the anthologies, or a statue in the park. I wanted to leave behind a book in the libraries, wrapped in plastic perhaps, worn (I hoped), smudged by coffee stains and cigarette ashes, a book that someone might pick up and read after I was dead. It would be a lucky choice, the kind of book which, though not famous, seemed to speak directly to that reader. He would be touched and moved by it, would stare at my name on the cover and wonder who I had been, what I had been like. Then he would figure that, having read the book, he more or less knew.
I don’t feel scorn for those youthful hopes. They still seem to me worthy things to wish for. I still do wish for them.
There are a number of ambitions from those days, and others from more recent days, that I have not fulfilled. I have not, for one thing, become the kind of writer who would put Pittsburgh on the map: I am far from being that notable a novelist, and I am also not the kind of writer — like Dreiser, or Farrell — for whom the city is a real presence, almost a character, in his book. Pittsburgh is a backdrop in my books, and lends them atmosphere, but I seem to have written the kinds of novels that could take place anywhere. I am also not a trailblazer in the battle against censorship, or philistinism, as my heroes were, though I do feel I write from my deepest thoughts and feelings, regardless of the consequences. I have not become the great and famous novelist I wanted to be; I am not even a writer who is known in his lifetime, and the whole process of publishing a novel was a lot more difficult and anguishing than I had ever thought it would be.
I have published novels, however, and I know they are in at least some libraries, so I have done the one thing I wanted to do: I have left a part of my vision behind me.
I have been through a distinguished university and I have met a number of writers and critics and I have reviewed books for the best newspapers in the country, but when someone asks me who my ideal reader is, I answer without hesitating: the kind you find in a public library. He is a person who values books, who sees them as an important part of his life. He doesn’t care about books as objects; he cares about what is inside them. He isn’t likely to have snobbish opinions about what the good and great books are, though he probably does have strong opinions. He doesn’t like to be told what is good, though he does like suggestions as to what he might try. He isn’t witty at the expense of books, or cynical about them — the whole enterprise is too serious for him — but he does speak enthusiastically and emphatically about his likes and dislikes. He doesn’t read to improve himself, or to get ahead; he regards reading as an end in itself. Some people, seeing the amount of time he spends with books, would call him an idler or a dreamer. He regards himself as a very busy person.
Through the years I have haunted any number of libraries, and have had many interesting encounters with patrons, but my favorite took place a couple of years ago in Durham, North Carolina, where I now live. It was late on a Saturday afternoon, when most of the hardcore readers had already come in for a fix. The staff was small on weekends, and didn’t have much time to straighten up. The current literature section looked as if a cyclone had hit it. Most of the books had been cleaned out, and those that remained were strewn all over the place. In fact, there was a stack of books nearly chest high on the floor. Apparently some harried staff member had been in a hurry to get the books out and hadn’t had time to shelve them. The book on the top of the stack looked interesting, and I picked it up to look at it. Immediately a woman’s voice beside me said, “Those are mine.” I looked over incredulously. With the matter of fact expression with which she must have explained herself dozens of times, she said, “We have five readers at home.” How do you get out of here? I wanted to ask. With a wheelbarrow?
That’s the kind of reader a writer wants. That’s the kind of reader he would die for. You might find him anywhere — you never know where a print addict might turn up — but the best place to look for him is in the public library.
© Copyright 1986 The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh
Reprinted with permission.
