The Pat Hobby Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I thought I had read all of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I had read all the novels. I had read the short pieces and notebooks collected up after he died and published as The Crack Up. I had read a book of his short stories, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and Other Stories. I knew there were certainly more stories out there but assumed I had read the best. So it was a surprise and a pleasure to suddenly learn of a whole other set of stories, almost a novel in themselves, concerning a forty-nine year-old screenwriter named Pat Hobby.

A couple of weeks ago The New Yorker published an untitled Fitzgerald story recently discovered in Fitzgerald’s papers at the University of Princeton. They announced it as a mis-filed “Pat Hobby” story written in the summer of 1940. I read it, and didn’t think much of it, but was lead from there to learn that Fitzgerald at the end of his life had written a series of short stories featuring the character Pat Hobby, a forty-nine year-old, washed-up film writer, scheming his way into marginal employment at the studios while juggling too much drink, losses at the track, and damaged pride. The stories, seventeen of them, had been published a month at a time in Esquire magazine from January 1940, through May 1941, the last five posthumously as Fitzgerald had died of a heart attack in December 1940. The stories were collected in a book published in 1962.

By 1962, Fitzgerald’s reputation had been completely revived. Though he died as a once-popular, mostly forgotten, jazz-age writer who had outlived his time, during the war his novel The Great Gatsby was re-discovered and Fitzgerald’s timeless talent was re-assessed. The Pat Hobby stories, which Fitzgerald had placed in Esquire without the use of agent or editor, were left out of Fitzgerald’s resurgence as his unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, and other unpublished writings (that become The Crack-Up) were cobbled into books by Fitzgerald’s friend and literary critic, Edmund Wilson. In 1962, the stories were brought together as a book with an Introduction by Arnold Gingrich, the original editor at Esquire telling the story of their first publication including some of the correspondence between author and magazine: Fitzgerald desperate for payment and habitually sending in first drafts quickly followed by denunciations of same and revisions. The peak into the business side of being a professional writer is worth reading in itself. In any case, Fitzgerald was able to produce seventeen stories (or eighteen, counting the one in The New Yorker) between October 1939 and December 1940 for seventeen monthly editions of the magazine. The book includes both the version of the story “A Patriotic Short ” as it appeared in the December, 1940 edition as well as a revision to the story that Fitzgerald submitted too late to be substituted for the earlier copy.

The stories, I’m happy to say, are wonderful. Despite his louche life Pat Hobby is a lovable lout. You laugh at him, but he’s charming, not pathetic. That he used to be successful, back when movies were silent and the writer’s job was very different, makes him sympathetic, a victim of the changing movie business. And his being a hack in an industry composed of hacks and strivers and lucky breaks and broken losers means you laugh at the whole enterprise, not just at Pat Hobby flailing in the midst of it. I was reminded of P. G. Wodehouse’s similar series of comic stories about a similar loser, Bertie Wooster, in the “Jeeves” books, although Pat Hobby has no valet to save him. Fitzgerald’s writing, and the 1940s date also put me in mind of Raymond Chandler. So I place Pat Hobby in good company.

Here are the seventeen stories in the order they appeared in Esquire and the book:

Pat Hobby’s Christmas Wish. Pat gets a new secretary who has been holding on to a note for eighteen years that Pat Hobby thinks they can use to blackmail a movie executive.

A Man in the Way. Pat steals a good idea from a new writer, who turns out to be the Producer’s girlfriend. This story introduces a reoccurring character, Jack Berners, the Producer.

“Boil Some Water–Lots of It”. Pat gets involved in a case of mistaken identity and a violent scene at the Big Table in the studio commissary.

Teamed with Genius. Jack Berners hires Pat to collaborate with a playwright who’s never written a film script before.

Pat Hobby and Orson Welles. Pat has a remarkable resemblance to Orson Welles.

Pat Hobby’s Secret. Pat Hobby is enlisted to trick a fellow writer into giving up the solution to a script problem that the writer won’t divulge without more money.

Pat Hobby, Putative Father. Pat is asked to show some wealthy foreign visitors around the lot. One claims to be his son from an earlier marriage.

The Homes of the Stars. Pat gets mistaken for a tour operator and squires an out of town couple through a couple Beverly Hills houses.

Pat Hobby Does His Bit. Pat spoils a shot and gets drafted into taking over a small part for the rest of the film.

Pat Hobby’s Preview. Pat tries to impress a girl by taking her to a film premiere that Hobby has a screenwriting credit on.

No Harm Trying. Pat figures out a scheme to get involved in a picture using a deluded executive, a new actress (who it turns out only can only say three sentences in English) and a naive but talented writer whose script Pat can steal.

A Patriotic Short. Pat, uninspired by a Civil War script he’s supposed to be working on reminisces about a happier time ten years earlier when the U.S. President visited the studio. The revised version of this story included in the Appendix seems neither better nor worse than the published version, to my eye.

On the Trail of Pat Hobby. Pat flees from a police raid at a motel where Pat was working as a clerk to make a little cash.

Fun in an Artist’s Studio. Pat’s particular humiliated look attracts the attention of a female artist who wants to paint the non-glamorous side of Hollywood.

Two Old-Timers. Pat gets involved in a car accident with a once-big actor. The cop who takes them in (“there was liquor in the air”) tells the actor how a war picture he acted in made his wife finally understand the stress of his own war service. Pat ruins the illusion.

Mightier Than the Sword. Pat gets hired to work on a picture with little to do as the producer constantly comes up with his own ideas.

Pat Hobby’s College Days. Pat scouts for a script idea at the “University of the Western Coast.” football program.

“Double Time for Pat Hobby”, the newly discovered, unpublished eighteenth Pat Hobby story, involves Pat getting caught in a mild bit of larceny when he is discovered to be on the payroll of two studios at once.

The stories don’t exactly make a novel. Hobby is a great character, but he doesn’t progress through the stories. There’s no “arc.” He’s always in the same situation. You could put the stories in just about any order and they would work equally well, although it would have been interesting to see what Fitzgerald did with them if he had lived long enough to work on a book version.

I’ve long been interested in stories of old Hollywood. I read What Makes Sammy Run? a few years ago. I had thought that The Last Tycoon and The Crack-Up were Fitzgerald’s best take on his experience. It turns out these stories I didn’t know about are a better testimonial and more fun to read. In 1937 Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood on a contract with MGM. In 1939 and 40 Fitzgerald would have been about five years younger than his character Pat Hobby, and equally in poor shape physically and financially and equally unsuccessful in movie writing. He earned only one screenwriting credit: a film called Three Comrades (1938). The irony is that Fitzgerald quickly writes and publishes seventeen stories with remarkable inventiveness and freshness about a character who does no work and can’t think up a story idea to save his life.

I borrowed the book from the library, a beat-up and stained hardback from 1962, and took it with me on a recent trip to Santa Fe. Then, in Santa Fe, I found a pristine paperback edition from 1970 in a used bookstore and bought it. I finished the book sitting in the hotel lobby in Santa Fe.