Customer Reviews

The Pat Hobby Stories (A Scribner Classic)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Pat Hobby, once a successful Hollywood screenwriter, is nothing more than a pathetic has been. Broke, tired, and scrambling to find work, Pat takes on some unconventional methods to fill his pockets and put his name back on the big screen. But things don't turn out as smooth as Pat hopes. After all, as Pat himself repeatedly states, "I'm just a writer," and, "it's a dog's life." Pat's antics backfire and in almost every story he is left with nothing but humiliation.

The Pat Hobby stories were written between 1939 and 1940, when Fitzgerald himself was struggling to keep afloat in Hollywood. Fitzgerald paints the Hollywood scene as cold, calculating, and manipulative. A place where kissing up is more important than the quality of your talents, a place where the writer gets no respect, and a place that most likely today harbors the same attitude that Fitzgerald so deftly described in his final days.

In reading the Pat Hobby Stories, one can feel Fitzgerald's own sense of poor self-worth, despair, and hopelessness. Yet ironically, a twist of dark humor is thrown into the stories, evoking in the reader an ambiguous response of laughing at Pat Hobby while pitying him at the same time. This collection is not only entertaining and easy to read, but is one that will give you broader insight into the late great F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Most people know F. Scott Fitzgerald as one of the deans of the lost generation and an icon of the jazz-age. But toward the end of his life, in the late 1930's, Fitzgerald was also a writer for MGM studios, and these stories represent vividly and tragically this period of his life.

Through the eyes of Fitzgerald's Pat Hobby, Hollywood hack writer, we see a different side of golden age tinseltown, where an extraordinary number of talented writers and artists migrated to in the 1930's and 40's, only to butt their heads against militant mediocrity and the "studio system." As an archetype, Pat Hobby stands in for them brilliantly.

Also recommended: What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg, The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West, and The Player by Michael Tolkin.

Fitzgerald's early fiction often deals with the case of the young man who harbors elaborate and perhaps outlandish aspirations for success. In the Pat Hobby stories -- Fitzgerald's last published work -- we see depicted a 49-year-old man whose dreams have collided with a bleak reality. Years after his brief heyday as a well-paid film writer in the days of silent films, he is now quite simply a failure.

And yet Pat Hobby is a unique type of loser, one who sympathizes with the bosses and moguls rather than his fellow downtrodden peers at the bottom of the totem pole. Witness for example the startling scene in which Hobby, with righteous indignation, takes a lunch tray to attack an extra who had the audacity to sit at the VIP table in the studio canteen and refused to move. This scene offers a fascinating insight into Fitzgerald's own psychology, if one views Hobby as an alter ego for the author, while also raising broader questions about American culture.

"A Patriotic Short" is the story which best encapsulates these questions, as Hobby bitterly reflects on the contrast between his illustrious past, when he had a house with a swimming pool that was once admired by the President himself, and his current menial assignment editing a lame film script. Here, in just a few pages, Fitzgerald deftly weaves together the American obsessions with celebrity, the presidency, and of course the swimming pool, into a commentary on the idea of success itself.

Any mention of a swimming pool by Fitzgerald evokes the sad fate of Jay Gatsby. And though we might find Hobby a less sympathetic character than Gatsby, in many ways he represents the other side of the same debased coin. Both are tragic figures, equally unable to fulfill their dreams of glamour, and perhaps both equally the victims of the American ethos of success.

While I enjoyed these stories, they don't come close, in quality, to much of Fitzgerald's earlier work. While some of these stories are funny, and while some possess excellent sentences and great, interesting images, none of them shine like "The Great Gatsby" or "The Diamond As Big As The Ritz." When I first finished this book, I found it hard to imagine that the same man who wrote "Gatsby" also wrote this collection of humorous stories about a truly pitiful Hollywood writer.

Prompted by my new fascination with Fitzgerald, I read Turnbull's biography of Fitzgerald title Scott Fitzgerald, and it was excellent. And now, in light of this biography and my experiences reading Fitzgerald, I'm convinced that this book helps to illustrate Fitzgerald's tremendous, personal transformation. In between Gatsby and Pat Hobby, Fitzgerald's life fell apart. His wife had experienced breakdowns and needed psychiatric care, and Fitzgerald himself was destroyed by alcoholism. His personal life fell apart, and he even tried to commit suicide. Fitzgerald, himself, frequently spoke and wrote about his "crack up." And this book, "The Pat Hobby Stories," reads as if it were written by a literary genius whose world had broken apart.

Further, this book seems to be reflective of Fitzgerald's personal life and feelings. Around the time he wrote it, he was working at Hollywood, where he kept getting shifted from script to script. He was discontent, saying: "It's so barren out here. I don't feel anything out here," (Turnbull 1962, 293), and he described Hollywood as "a dump . . . A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement" (Turnbull 1962, 317). This book, "The Pat Hobby Stories," which focuses on the silliness and pathetic-ness of Pat Hobby and his embarrassing adventures in Hollywood, probably captures at least a part of Fitzgerald's feelings for himself and the environment in which he lived.

Ultimately, if you find Fitzgerald interesting, then I recommend reading this book - because it really says something about him. But if you just want to read a great book, I recommend you look elsewhere.

---

Two final, fun notes. First, Fitzgerald once wrote that Hollywood was "a strange conglomeration of a few excellent overtired men making pictures and as dismal a crowd of fakes and hacks at the bottom as you can imagine" (Turnbull 1962, 293). This is a neat quote, when seen in relation to Fitzgerald's fictional creation - Pat Hobby, the dismal hack. Second, Turnbull includes two descriptive sentences which relate, amusingly, to one of the Hobby stories: "At the same time [Fitzgerald] was trying to make gin a substitute for energy, and each week his secretary collected the bottles and disposed of them lest they be noticed in the rubbish" (Turnbull 1962, 298). After reading this book, you might see why this is interesting.

If you read "The Great Gatsby" because you were required to in school, you may want to refresh your memory on reading Fitzgerald for enjoyment. By reading "The Pat Hobby Stories," not only will you reintroduce yourself to the world as Fitzgerald saw it, but you will see the many parallels there are between the past and present in entertainment.
Fitzgerald follows an aging screenwriter, Pat Hobby, through his few successes and his several rejections by the Hollywood community. This is a "Death of a Salesman" in showbiz!

Of all Fitzgerald's works, these stories are most accessible, especially for those who saw the golden age of television. Of course, my approach to these short stories was from the height of "Gatsby," and the knowledge of the great film,"The Bad and the Beautiful," so I was taken by surprise with the charm, humor and the creative inspiration found in these Hollywood toss-offs. Not only are they insider truths but hung-over fantasies all at once. Groucho and Robert Cummings came to mind as I laughed out loud. Mel Brooks and Woody Allen should pay him dividends,as well as the TV studios who borrowed from his charming, off-beat take on the Hollywood system.

The Brilliant Pat Hobby Stories are just as the title says, brillliant. I have never red a collection of stories as this. The wit of Mr. Fitzgerald is astonishing as he captures ones attention and then ends the story with a dramatic twist that will leave one rolling on the floor.

I have read nothing like these stories and I know that I will never read anything like them again. When my brother convinced me to read these stories I was, at first, a little skeptical about F. Scott Fitzgerald. I had heard my brother rant and rave about him before but now I understand why he was ranting and raving about him so.

I have thoroughly enjoyed reading this collection of Pat Hobby Short stories. I am now excited to pick up the next F. Scott Fitzgerald Book that my brother will let me borrow.

What a picture. . .
I do get to see Hollywood in the late 1930s. More, though, I get to see Fitzgerald not, in free fall, but, not at his best. Yet, the pictures he is still able to create.
This is a picture from his short story, "Babylon Revisted," Fitzgerald's tale of a once-foolish, now-widowed father hoping to gain custody of his young daughter: "His first feeling (in remembrance of that "crazy spring") was one of awe that he had actually, in his mature years, stolen a tricycle and pedaled (a drunk girlfriend) all over (town) between the small hours and dawn. In retrospect it was nightmare. . .How many weeks or months of dissipation to arrive at that condition of utter irresponsibility?"
The man pedaling that tricycle, I would argue, is Pat Hobby. And these are his collected tales--seemingly unfinished--of dissipation.

These stories about a has been screenwriter are much lauded by some, but there is a reason they are so forgotten. A product of Fitzgerald's last couple of years when he had fallen to being a second tier hack screenwriter at Universal, they are proof that he was not really capable of more near the end.

The stories are of a comic nature with the main character of Pat Hobby serving as their punchline. Hobby is an unappealing self-pitying schlub of a character, and much of the humor is of a nasty and cartoonishly meanspirited variety. It all reads like warmed over Nathaniel West without the warmth or vivacity, it is genuine hack work. Fitzgerald may be a great writer but there is a reason that his reputation ends with the 1920s.

Don't give up on an author because you had a traumatic experience in high school when you were forced to read books without any say! Try F. Scott Fitzgerald in "Pat Hobby". This series of short stories are easy to put down and pick up and can introduce you to his style of writing without you having to write an essay about it! Give it a whirl!