“But we needn't agree about everything (only
12-year-old girl friends agree about everything) to tolerate each
other's point of view. To accept without judgment. To give and to take without
ever keeping score. And to be there, as I am for them and as they are for me,
to comfort our sorrows, to celebrate our joys.” —American essayist, journalist,
poet, and psychoanalysis researcher Judith Viorst, “Friends, Good Friends—and
Such Good Friends,” Redbook, October 1977
Longtime readers, I hope, have noticed a pattern in this
blog: the first and last days of the workweek feature a humorous quote. (Comic
relief is seldom more necessary than during these times, I think.) But I don’t
think many of you would have expected to see such an item from F. Scott Fitzgerald, born 125 years ago today in St. Paul, Minn.
But, as I made clear in this post from three years ago, Fitzgerald’s life—even his desperate last few years as a Hollywood
screenwriter—furnished material for his irony and wit.
Few were more responsible for his tragic image than
himself. He often obscured his humor through his self-mythologizing as the symbol
of Jazz Age excess and comeuppance, as well as his discounting of short stories
produced under the crushing financial pressure to pay for his wife Zelda’s
mental treatment and daughter Scottie’s education.
The 17 Hobby stories, written for Esquire
Magazine, did help relieve some of this stress. According to David S. Brown’s
biography of the novelist, Paradise Lost, they earned him a total
of $4,250, or $68,000 in current dollars.
In a sense, the series—neither as long nor as complex as his more ambitious short stories of the Twenties and early Thirties—enabled him
to tap into personal and creative instincts towards comedy that had existed
from his early manhood. All his life he loved pranks, and friends remembered
how he would laugh at his own expense.
A quarter century before The Pat Hobby Stories,
he had written pieces for Princeton’s humor magazine and a two-act musical
comedy for the university’s Triangle Club.
Moreover, several of his 1920s works sparkled with elegant
mockery:
*“The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (1922) centers on the world’s richest man, Braddock Washington, who conceals from the
world a diamond so large that “if it were offered for sale not only would the
bottom fall out of the market, but also, if the value should vary … there would
not be enough gold in the world to buy a tenth of it.”
*“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (1922) has a title character who so unnerved all around him by a process he can’t control—aging
in reverse—that they are driven to upbraid him without hope for his correction:
“There’s a right way of doing things and a wrong way. If you've made up your
mind to be different from everybody else, I don't suppose I can stop you, but I
really don't think it's very considerate."
* “The I.O.U.” (once thought lost, then finally
published in The New Yorker in 2017) is narrated by a publisher with
unabashedly commercial instincts. (“I would rather bring out a book that had an
advance sale of five hundred thousand copies than have discovered Samuel
Butler, Theodore Dreiser, and James Branch Cabell in one year. So would you if
you were a publisher.”)
* “How to Live on $36,000 A Year" (1924,
later part of his posthumous collection, The Crack-Up), is a tongue-in-cheek
essay on living well beyond one’s means. (According to the budget he and Zelda
had formulated, as their early spending spree ended, “Our allowance for
newspapers should be only a quarter of what we spend on self-improvement, so we
are considering whether to get the Sunday paper once a month or to subscribe
for an almanac.”)
The subjects of Fitzgerald’s early satire were social
status and social expectations. By the time of The Pat Hobby Stories, the source of his humor had become the absurd
lengths to which characters will go to avoid personal catastrophe.
The
protagonist of these stories, Pat Hobby, became, in effect, a means by which
Fitzgerald could laugh at his own straitened circumstances by imagining someone
even more desperate—not just an
alcoholic devalued by the Hollywood dream factory, but a womanizer and con
artist without the esteem that the novelist’s contemporaries felt for him.
“The
series is characterized by a really bitter humor,” Fitzgerald wrote Nathan
Kroll, who was considering turning it into a play, “and only the explosive
situations and the fact that Pat is a figure almost incapable of real tragedy
or damage saves it from downright unpleasantness.”
Nobody
will ever group Fitzgerald with Mark Twain, Robert Benchley and James Thurber among
the greatest American humorists. But, unlike frenemy Ernest Hemingway, his was
a generous humor, unmarked by cruelty, even as he depicted those like himself
who lost their footing on the ladder to success.
Ironically,
though unsuccessful in his attempts to succeed on screen and stage, Fitzgerald
provided comic fodder for others through The Pat Hobby Stories. In 1987, Christopher
Lloyd (most famous as the erstwhile Rev. Jim of Taxi and Dr. Emmett
Brown in Back to the Future and its sequels), took on the role of the hilarious
hack in the “Pat Hobby Teamed With Genius” installment of the PBS trilogy Tales
From the Hollywood Hills.
Then, two years ago, the Edinburgh Fringe mounted its own adaptation of the stories, with Paul Birchard (in the image accompanying
this post) as the screenwriter.
I took the image accompanying this post when I was on
vacation in the autumn of 2014 in Beaufort, SC, by the Atlantic Ocean.
