Books: Wire the Money

THE PAT HOBBY STORIES (159 pp.)—F. Scott Fitzgerald—Scribner ($3.50).

Scott Fitzgerald wrote short stories with the speed of a tabloid rewrite man, and for the journeyman’s unvarying reason: to satisfy a desperate and constant need for money. The legend is familiar; when dun notes piled too high during the bright, wild days with Zelda, Scott could lock himself in a room and come out next morning with a story salable at $3,500.

But by the late ’30s, Fitzgerald was living on faltering nerve and occasional movie jobs. Then in 1939 he began what were to be the last of his short stories—a series of brief burlesques about an over-the-hill Hollywood scriptwriter, Pat Hobby. 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.

Drunken, talentless Pat Hobby—his eyes are “red-rimmed” in most of the 17 stories—is part a caricature of Hollywood, part Fitzgerald making faces at the mirror. Hobby, who once drew $2,500 a week, now connives to get past the studio gatekeeper; Fitzgerald, who once could finance a summer at Juan-les-Pins with a weekend of woodshedding, was reduced to begging Esquire Magazine Editor Arnold Gingrich: “The address is the Bank of America, Culver City, and I wish you’d wire the money if you like this story. Notice that this is pretty near twenty-eight hundred words long . . .”

With each story came the desperate plea to wire money, and eventually, although Esquire paid only $250 to $350 a story, enough was wired so that years later, Fitzgerald’s daughter Scottie remembered Pat Hobby fondly enough to speak his epitaph. “He sent me to Vassar,” she said, saying it all.