The Pat Hobby Stories

F. Scott Fitzgerald

My Old Pals – My dear friend and fellow writer Ed Underhill gave me this book earlier this year. After reading these stories, I wrote back to Ed; here’s an excerpt:

“How is it that over my 60 years Pat and I have not yet met? I love him.

Pat is so scheming — and, really, who among us isn’t? In one way or another? Who isn’t relying upon too many of the old tricks to get by at this point? And who isn’t tiptoeing around in one form or other, whether it’s a stealthy sneak out of a room or a loud, over-confident march into a room?

Fitzgerald is so damned talented — hits the bullseye more than any other writer. And always offers lessons in vocabulary; for me:

Surcease
Athwart
Sinecure
Palpitant
Ukase
Plainting

Metafiction was created in the 1970s to describe some of the writers working in the 1960s. Scholars later applied the term going all the way back — to Chaucer, others. But these Pat Hobby stories are metafiction, too: the desperate writer writing about a desperate writer, and the back-story Arnold Gingrich provides only further spotlights the depth of the desperation and the meta aspects of the whole enterprise.

You once keenly observed that no man in his forties should read Fitzgerald on a summer afternoon ... was that it? No. It was phrased better than that ... Well, this isn’t as poignant, but I now think these Pat Hobby stories are the best stories to read while boozing on a summer afternoon. Man, they make you thirsty!

Last, but not least: Every time I read how Pat was “forty-nine years old,” it rang like a death knell. No doubt Fitzgerald’s intent. But now that I’ve finished the book, I can’t help but think, Ah, to be forty-nine again.”