The Pat Hobby Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Penguin Books, 1967. 167 pages.

A surprisingly engaging collection of 17 short stories, F. Scott Fitzgerald's collection proves an engaging homage to the old adage about brevity and wit. Set entirely in the Hollywood of 1940, the collection revolves around Pat Hobby, the eternally down-on-his-luck screenwriter, a has been who's always a dime away from bankruptcy and a good idea away from eternal happiness. Not a story in this collection can be more then 2000 words and yet each manages to build the sort of comic-tragic world that Fitzgerald always adored.



Reading this after Crazy Sundays, the biography of Mr. Fitzgerald's decade in Hollywood, it's almost painfully clear how autobiographical Pat Hobby truly is. Mr. Fitzgerald had a bad time in Hollywood and so does Pat Hobby. Like Mr. Fitzgerald, Hobby's best work is more then a decade behind him and he's become an "old timer", a prisoner to his memories of swimming pools and hefty salaries. Unhappy in marriage (Mr. Fitzgerald's own unhappiness is well documented, with his wife perpetually in and out of a sanitarium), Hobby half-heartedly chases his secretaries, unable to do much more then beg someone to go for a drink. Meanwhile, he wanders the studio lot, eternally afraid of being kicked out even as he scrambles for some way to survive.

The stories work far better as a collection then they might have individually, something even Mr. Fitzgerald seemed to know as he was writing them (the introduction tells us that he was constantly pushing to have them published together in a single magazine). Individually, the stories are lightly whimsical and range from gentle satire to an almost romantic ideal of the Hollywood life. Taken one at a time, Pat Hobby becomes a mere comic vehicle who - depending on which story you read - is entierly unsympathetic. Only when read as a whole do we get Pat Hobby's history of failure and success so that as the stories continue, we become more and more eager for Hobby to succeed in his continued quest for redemption.

Mr. Fitzgerald is not always cruel to his alter-ego: there are times when Hobby's hare-brained, farcical schemes actually succeed. As the stories continue, though, it becomes clear that these happy endings are not actually happy at all. Pat Hobby wastes his money on the track, brazenly steals ideas and is always escaping his debts: he squandors any success he has and every story finds him more or less in the same place. The collection, then, soon take on an air of tragedy and one almost wishes Jack Berniers, Hobby's eternal producer, would simply boot the hapless writer off the set once and for all. Hobby himself certainly will never quit: like Mr. Fitzgerald himself, he seems forever convinced Hollywood will be his salvation.

Fitzgerald, of course, died there and with him went Pat Hobby, who is left in the final image his creator gave him: walking out of a room, a sack full of empty liquor bottles over his shoulder. The final things said about him come from a pair of bit characters: "The poor man with the sack!" says the forgettable Mrs. Doolan. "I keep thinking he'll be down in purgatory - and they'll make him carve a ship in every one of those bottles before he can go to Heaven." Which, more or less, is probably what Pat Hobby is doing right now. As for Mr. Fitzgerald himself, one can only hope that he fared much better.