“Builders”

In June of 1992, I spent a week in a fiction workshop at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. The story I wrote for the workshop was a rip off of The Catcher in the Rye, though unlike Salinger’s version mine was populated by characters resembling the cardboard cutouts you see in the stands at sporting events these days. It lacked urgency, plot or any trace of felt life. The best thing you could say about it was that it contained very few spelling errors.

On day one, the instructor gave each of us a thick stack of photocopied stories by nine writers I’d never heard of. I was by far the least well-read person in the group. Midway through the week, we read “Builders” by Richard Yates. The experience of reading that story was comparable to the experience of falling in love on a blind date (which, as they frequently say in workshops, really happened to me; we’ve been together now for thirty years. I’m referring to my wife, here, not to Richard Yates.)

The narrator of “Builders” is Bob Prentice, a rewrite man on the financial news desk at the United Press who dreams of becoming the next Ernest Hemingway. Like Hemingway, he’d been a soldier, married young and worked as a journalist. Unlike Hemingway, everything that came off of his typewriter was “always something bad.” To make a little extra cash, he agrees to ghost-write a series of first person narratives for a cabbie, based on “hundreds of experiences” the cabbie had notated on 3x5 file cards. The task becomes increasingly humiliating. Bob is reduced to thinking of himself as “the hackie’s hack.” His ironic shield ultimately gives way to regret and guilt as he loses his job, his marriage and his Hemmingway fantasy.

When my week in Iowa ended and I returned to my life, I found myself spending my nonworking hours—and often, covertly, my working hours—trying to write like Richard Yates. I read and loved everything he wrote, but “Builders,” which was Yates’ favorite among all his stories, was the one I went back to again and again. My own stories reeked of self-consciousness. I wanted so much for them to be funny that the humor always felt imposed rather than organic, as if I were saying to the reader, “Good one, eh?” Nothing much of consequence happened in those stories because I never risked dropping the veil of ironic detachment. Reading “Builders,” I understood that until I found the courage to take that risk, my stories would never move the reader or move me. Humor and felt life had to coexist on the same page.

Literature, Charles Baxter has said, is not an instruction manual. I agree. Yet, while “Builders” didn’t teach me how to live, it did show me how to bring my fiction to life. Five months after the Iowa workshop, Yates died of emphysema in a Birmingham, Alabama V.A. hospital. “Builders,” for me, is still alive and robust.