Pat Hobby-ness

 Of late, I have been reading, for about the third time, I suppose, F. Scott Fitzgerald's Pat Hobby Stories. Written in the latter depths of his alcoholism when Scott was laboring in the hated job of Hollywood screen writer, these are far from being among his best short story efforts. In fact, they are rather poorly written and sound not at all like the Fitzgerald of The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night. And that is actually one of the interesting things about these stories--that they don't even sound like him, because essentially he was no longer him. The towering talent that once was had been eaten away by drink and fatigue and malaise. 

Nonetheless, there is in the tired tone and lazy disinterest some unexpected moments of offbeat humor. Pat Hobby is a washed up Hollywood hack, scraping and begging for script collaborations, jealous of rivals, dishonest, unscrupulous, forever in the back of his mind planning his next drink. In one story, where Pat is to supply lines for a minor character, a doctor, he is inspired by a sudden phrase which pops into his mind (to no small extent because things don't just pop into his mind any longer). Boil some water--lots of it! is the phrase. This strikes Pat as being a perfectly wonderful and inventive phrase, something indeed upon which the entire script could somehow hang. All it would need otherwise were a few touches here and there. As the story draws near its end, Pat mistakes a practical joke at a movie producers long lunchroom table for a serious conflict. He rushes to the scene, armed with a metal lunch tray, and crowns the mistaken assailant over the head. A crowd of producers, actors, writers, and extras gathers at the table, a doctor is summoned, and an alarmed cafeteria worker, rushing toward the kitchen, shrieks "Boil some water--lots of it!" 

I got onto Pat Hobby for this third time, as it happens, after having finished a novel by Douglas Stuart called Shuggie Bain. This is a depressing, relentlessly brutal telling of an Irish woman's decent into alcoholism and the suffering she inflicts on loved ones, especially her youngest son, Shuggie, who spends his young years devoted to somehow saving her. Strangely, I disliked this novel rather intensely to about its mid point, but then something kind of jarred loose and I recognized the unseemly, unvarnished truth conveyed in the pages. There is more than alcoholism here. There is poverty, cruelty, ignorance, and at the center the alcoholism that is both caused by and causes the former evils. I could not help, ultimately, but be reminded of my own earlier struggles with alcohol abuse, and perhaps that's why the book had struck me at first as barely readable--not because it actually is (in fact, Stuart is a very able writer indeed), but because my own experience, which I hardly enjoy reliving, made it so. In short, after the mid point, warn down perhaps, I finally began to see it, acknowledge it, remember it. There was a time when reading about alcohol use made me want to drink, strangely enough. It seemed somehow an appropriate medicine for all of lives ills, and one used by so many of the most admirable folks! Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, London and so on. Now these stories make me want to read, not to drink.

I recall having written, as some of my last 'literary' products, a series of short stories about drinking. Like the Pat Hobby stories, they were pretty lousy things, things without heart or a pulse, dreary things. I still have those stories (which for some reason came with me to Bali) and have not looked at them or touched them in ten years, nor do I intend to. They are simply moldering away in an old manila envelope stuffed between an old copy of Writers' Market and an equally thick book by Yu Hua. I have thought from time to time how I might get rid of the damn things. Fire would be best, but I don't really have a place for burning things at present. To throw them in the garbage would risk the possible embarrassment of being viewed by other eyes, though the chance of this being happened upon by someone who can read English is rather slight, I suppose. Moreover, they would make the garbage more garbagy than it need be. I guess the point at the time was catharsis, a needful self-examination of the vacuity, the waste that I had allowed to overtake me. The problem is that even at the time, alcohol remained the answer for this.

In a similar way, Fitzgerald is saying nothing perspicacious or liberating in the Pat Hobby stories about his own alcoholism. He is merely getting these things, down, getting them done, collecting a bit of money so that he can return to the bottle. They are stories about failure, weakness, pettiness. desperation, and venture no answer or redemption.