John Luther, Writer

I spent some time on my vacation rereading Fitzgerald short stories. It was fun but a mixed bag, overall.

“Babylon Revisited” was better than I remembered. Heartbreaking. An absolute masterpiece. Every fictioneer should aspire to write a story even half as good.

“Head and Shoulders,” “The Strange Case of Benjamin Button,” “The Offshore Pirate,” “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” and many of the other well-known pieces, while replete with beautiful language and some compelling characters, seemed dated and ultimately kind of frivolous.

The stories that–barring “Babylon”–have held up best are the Pat Hobby stories. They’re poignant, funny, tragic, quintessentially American, and–to me, anyway–deeply moving.

These stories, when they’re written about at all, are dismissed as hack work that Fitzgerald cranked out for much-needed personal capital, or as pathetic . For example, consider these lines from a 1962 review in Time magazine: “The Hobby stories are no more than good copy, and occasionally, when the author’s wonderful facility wears thin, they are not even that. But their publication in hard cover rounds out the body of Fitzgerald’s work in print, and the bitter humor of the Hobby characterization is a fascinating study in self-satire.”

What a shame. Reading stuff like that compels me to defend these stories.

First, Fitzgerald considered himself a novelist. He always wrote short stories for the money–to fund the novels, which he wrote with much greater care. This is well documented in his letters, journals & elsewhere. The difference with the Hobby stories is that he was no longer in a position to demand top dollar, as he’d been in the 20s with the Saturday Evening Post. Critics forget that he was shamefully underpaid for the “classic” work he published in such venues as H. L. Mencken’s Smart Set.

Furthermore, if the Hobby stories were written solely as trifles, why did Fitzgerald write so many of them? In other words, if the guy’s aim was purely to write some fluff to generate income, he could have chosen a much more lucrative subject than a cynical, washed-up Hollywood screewriter with the ethics of a carnival barker.

Lastly, I don’t believe that Fitzgerald considered Pat Hobby–consciously or otherwise–as an alter ego for himself. The man was obsessed with and deeply understood caste systems, and arguably fewer caste systems were as rigid as those within the studios of 1930s Hollywood. Pat Hobby understood but constanty mis-played these systems, and as such was the kind of guy that Fitzgerald would have pitied. And whatever Fitzgerald’s failings, self-pity was not one of them.

Anyway, I’ve been recommending the Pat Hobby stories to people ever since my friend Colin recommended them to me over ten years ago. Whatever the circumstances under which they were written, they’re among Fitzgerald’s best work.