F. Scott Fitzgerald’s other ‘great’ character

It is perhaps fitting — given his lack of fame and success — that many of you will have never heard of Pat Hobby. Hobby was a character who featured in a number of F. Scott Fitzgerald short stories towards the end of the author’s life, when he was working in Hollywood. Hobby is a forty-nine year old scriptwriter whose best days are long behind him. Rather than reaching out for a green light at the end of a dock in Long Island, Pat is forever scrabbling around for his next ten dollars in order to buy another drink or pay off his bookie. Regardless of whether he employs honest means to attain his ends, Pat’s adventures invariably end in failure.
    
From reading Fitzgerald’s letters from the period when he was writing these tragicomic stories, one can discern just how much he felt akin to Hobby. Writing about Pat Hobby was perhaps an even more cathartic experience than writing about Jay Gatsby. Albeit that Fitzgerald needed more than just ten dollars to pay for his wife’s care and daughter’s education among other things; he was often scrabbling around at this time for his next pay cheque to improve his lot temporarily. The critics did not need to tell him that his best days as a writer were over too. I could not help but find it Hobby-esque when I read how Fitzgerald got a break and worked on the script for Gone with the Wind, only to find his scenes cut from the final movie.
    
I partly decided to bring Pat Hobby back to life because most of us are no longer living in the equivalent of the Jazz Age. We are living in a depression. The lesson that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short fiction can gift us though, is that one should still try to retain one’s sense of decency — and, equally importantly, one’s sense of humour — during such hard times. Because that’s ‘greatness’.

Richard Foreman is the author of The Return of Pat Hobby