Book Review: Conversations with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Judith S. Baughman (2004)

Conversations with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Judith S. Baughman, 2004.

Conversations with F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by noted Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli and Judith S. Baughman, and published in 2004, fills an important gap in the collection of books by and about Fitzgerald by collecting 37 interviews with the author that were originally published during his lifetime.  

It’s fascinating to see how Fitzgerald was presented in the press during the 1920’s and 1930’s. In his lifetime, Fitzgerald was much more famous as “the author of This Side of Paradise” rather than “the author of The Great Gatsby.” None of the interviews in the book mention Gatsby in any detail, an indication of how the book was neglected by the public at the time it was published in 1925.  

Conversations with F. Scott Fitzgerald shows the reader aspects of Fitzgerald that might not always come across in his fiction. His sense of humor is usually on fine display in these interviews, and it’s interesting how often Fitzgerald mentions politics. Fitzgerald wasn’t a political writer, by any means, but it’s clear from these interviews that he viewed himself as a liberal. If all you know of Fitzgerald is his glittering portraits of the wealthy, you might not think that he would call himself a socialist, as he does in these interviews. Fitzgerald’s desire to show the corrosive effects of wealth in his fiction matches up with the personal political convictions that he espouses here.  

There are many fascinating tidbits for Fitzgerald fanatics to gather from Conversations with F. Scott Fitzgerald. I’ll describe some of my favorites. A highlight is Thomas Boyd’s long interview with Fitzgerald, conducted in 1921 in Dellwood/White Bear Lake, just outside of Fitzgerald’s hometown of Saint Paul. (The difference depends on how specific you want to get with the location of the house the Fitzgeralds were renting.) Thomas Boyd was a book critic who wrote an acclaimed World War I novel, Through the Wheat. Scott recruited Boyd and his wife Margaret, who published under the name Woodward Boyd, to join him at his publisher Scribners. Thomas Boyd described reading some of the manuscript of Fitzgerald’s second novel, The Beautiful and Damned. “He disappeared into the house and returned with the manuscript of The Beautiful and Damned. ‘Here it is.’ It was written on ordinary-sized paper and not typed. The pencil scrawl was in large letters and altogether it must have been two feet thick.” (p.17) It’s wonderful to have these kinds of firsthand details about Fitzgerald’s writing. You can’t help but put yourself in Thomas Boyd’s shoes and imagine the excitement of reading Fitzgerald’s handwritten manuscript.  

As a left-hander, I’m always on the lookout for references to other left-handers. One of the articles says of Fitzgerald: “He is left-handed in everything save writing.” (p.95) I wonder if Scott was a natural left-hander who was switched to writing right-handed, as so many children were in those days? I’ve seen photos of Fitzgerald wearing a watch on his right wrist, which is usually a good indicator of a left-hander. Anyway, I will gladly accept F. Scott Fitzgerald as an honorary left-hander.  

One of the most amazing interviews in this book is from 1927. The interview was titled “Fitzgerald, Spenglerian,” a reference to the German philosopher Oswald Spengler, whose book Decline of the West Fitzgerald was reading at the time. Fitzgerald sounds like a prophet: 

“Mussolini, the last slap in the face of liberalism, is an omen for America...The idea that we’re the greatest people in the world because we have the most money in the world is ridiculous. Wait until this wave of prosperity is over! Wait ten or fifteen years! Wait until the next war on the Pacific, or against some European combination!”  

Fifteen years after 1927 was 1942, when the United States, after suffering through the Great Depression, was at war with Japan, Germany, and Italy. Fitzgerald hit it right on the nose, although he didn’t live to see 1942. I’m not sure why some of the quotes from this interview aren’t more widely circulated, since they demonstrate Fitzgerald’s astute political thinking.  

It’s always interesting to see how Fitzgerald is described by people who knew him. Interviewers vary on the color of his eyes between blue and green. Fitzgerald was described in a 1927 piece by Margaret Reid as “probably the best-looking thing ever turned out of Princeton.” (p.90) I’m sure Fitzgerald delighted in that. A 1928 piece informs us that “His ties and pocket handkerchiefs are all brightly-colored.” (p.95) I approve of Fitzgerald’s sartorial flair—I always use my ties as a way to get more color into an outfit.  

Another reference to politics is made in a 1931 interview with the Montgomery Advertiser: “Mr. Fitzgerald, who said he was a Jeffersonian Democrat at heart and somewhat of a Communist in ideals, declared that the prohibition law was not only a foolish gesture but that it was a hindrance to the machine of government.” (p.101) It’s no surprise that Fitzgerald was against prohibition, but very interesting that he now moved even farther to the left in his politics. Perhaps the stock market crash of 1929 had made him slightly more radical.  

My only small quibble with the explanatory notes was the footnote following this sentence: “His novel This Side of Paradise was published before his graduation from Princeton.” The footnote reads: “Untrue. This Side of Paradise was published in 1920.” (p.102) Yes, TSOP was published in 1920, but since Fitzgerald never actually graduated from Princeton, it’s technically true that the novel was published “before his graduation” since his graduation never actually occurred. It’s splitting hairs, I know. But don’t worry too much, the Princeton Class of 2017 awarded Fitzgerald an honorary degree, 100 years after he should have graduated.  

Conversations with F. Scott Fitzgerald ends on a sad note. The last extended interview Fitzgerald ever gave was in September of 1936, on his 40th birthday. Recovering from a broken shoulder, Fitzgerald was in a bad place mentally as well, and he was really in no shape to be talking to any members of the press. But ambitious reporter Michel Mok surprised Fitzgerald by coming unannounced and knocking on the door of his room at Asheville, North Carolina’s Grove Park Inn. Fitzgerald should have slammed the door in Mok’s face. But Fitzgerald’s kindness took over, and he invited Mok in and rambled on about what a shambles his life was in at the moment. When Fitzgerald saw the article in print, he attempted suicide by overdosing on morphine. Fortunately, he was unsuccessful.  

After Mok’s article, there’s just one more short piece in the book. Barely more than a single page, it’s a 1939 article from the Dartmouth College newspaper, and it focuses more on movie producer Walter Wanger than Fitzgerald. Neither man is directly quoted in the article. And so, F. Scott Fitzgerald fades out of Conversations with F. Scott Fitzgerald, leaving his own book without a parting word. It’s like a move Gatsby might have pulled, leaving one of his own parties while all the guests are still there. 

Conversations with F. Scott Fitzgerald is essential reading for Fitzgerald fans, and it gives us a glimpse of what a fascinating and intelligent man F. Scott Fitzgerald was.  

Book Review: F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship, Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli with Judith S. Baughman (1996)

The cover of F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship, Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, with Judith S. Baughman, 1996. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship is a 1996 collection that aimed to assemble Fitzgerald’s writings and letters in which he described the creative process. For diehard Fitzgerald fans, it’s an essential title as it collects many disparate pieces of Fitzgerald’s writing. During Fitzgerald’s lifetime, his intelligence and seriousness as a writer were often denigrated. (Edmund Wilson, I’m looking at you!) A collection like F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship is an attempt, in part, to better place Fitzgerald as a craftsman who was serious about his work. For anyone who has studied Fitzgerald’s work, it’s obvious he was serious about his writing. He wouldn’t have been able to create such beautiful short stories and novels if he wasn’t serious.  

Fitzgerald wrote a number of book reviews in the early 1920’s, and these are instructive in learning what the young author thought about books written by his contemporaries. Fitzgerald was quick to recognize the talent of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. After 1925, Fitzgerald wrote very few book reviews, but he wrote about being an author in several autobiographical pieces from the 1930’s like “One Hundred False Starts,” “Author’s House,” “Afternoon of an Author,” and “Early Success.” He also wrote the very funny short story “Financing Finnegan,” which satirized his own problems with money.  

Throughout F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship, the Fitzgerald buff will find passages of interest. One of my own favorite finds was this, in Fitzgerald’s review of his friend Thomas Boyd’s 1923 novel Through the Wheat: “No one has a greater contempt than I have for the recent hysteria about the Nordic theory...” (p.88) What does this have to do with anything? This gives us some proof that Fitzgerald was satirizing Tom Buchanan’s noxious views of race in The Great Gatsby. It seems clear from the novel that Fitzgerald is satirizing Tom, but here we have F. Scott Fitzgerald saying so, not under the cover of the fictional Nick Carraway, but in his own voice.  

It’s clear how much Fitzgerald admired Joseph Conrad from many passages in the book. Fitzgerald wrote prophetically in 1923 that Conrad’s novel Nostromo was “The great novel of the past fifty years, as Ulysses is the great novel of the future.” (p.86) 

As always with Fitzgerald, there are passages of wonderful beauty. Consider this sentence, from a 1934 letter to H.L. Mencken: “It is simply that having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.” (p.138)  

There’s also a heart wrenching letter from 1938 that Scott wrote to his daughter Scottie. Scott judges his marriage to Zelda quite harshly in the letter: “You came along and for a long time we made quite a lot of happiness out of our lives. But I was a man divided—she wanted me to work too much for her and not enough for my dream. She realized too late that work was dignity and the only dignity and tried to atone for it by working herself but it was too late and she broke and is broken forever.” (p.170) It’s fascinating that Scott seems to blame Zelda for distracting him from his dream of being a writer. This was also one of Ernest Hemingway’s criticisms of Zelda, put forth decades later in his posthumously published memoir A Moveable Feast. And it’s fascinating that Scott’s last sentence is so reminiscent of Hemingway’s rhythms, with the long sentence connected with “and.”  

For Fitzgerald fans who are interested in learning more about Fitzgerald’s own thoughts on writing and literature, F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship is a must read.  

Book Review: The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A New Collection, Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli (1989)

 

Paperback cover of The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A New Collection, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, 1989. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

F. Scott Fitzgerald at his desk, 1920's.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is best known today for his novels The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, but he was also a prolific short story writer, publishing around 160 short stories. Only 45 of those stories were collected in books during Fitzgerald’s lifetime. The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A New Collection, edited by Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli, and first published in 1989, attempted to put together a definitive collection of Fitzgerald’s best short stories.

The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald essentially replaced the 1951 collection The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The 1989 collection has the advantage of length: it contains 43 stories, compared to 28 in the 1951 collection. One can always quibble with an editor’s selections, but Bruccoli did a fantastic job of collecting Fitzgerald’s most important stories, while also highlighting the breadth and scope of Fitzgerald’s short stories.

Fitzgerald’s stories show the optimism and disillusion of one man, emblematic of his generation. Fitzgerald’s life was a touchstone for many of the momentous events of his lifetime. Born in 1896, just before the dawn of the American century, Fitzgerald served in World War I, (although he didn’t see combat) spent a good chunk of the 1920’s in Paris and made his first foray to Hollywood just as silent pictures were ending. His wife Zelda’s mental health collapsed just months after the stock market crash. Fitzgerald’s stories of the 1930’s often took a darker tone as his alcoholism worsened and his cynicism deepened.

Fitzgerald writes so movingly of loss, and the yearning for the past. The last three paragraphs of “The Last of the Belles” are a beautiful example of his evocative style. In the story, the narrator is searching for the Army camp where he was stationed a decade earlier during World War I, but he can find no trace of it:

“I tried to sight on a vaguely familiar clump of trees, but it was growing darker now and I couldn’t be quite sure they were the right trees…No. Upon consideration they didn’t look like the right trees. All I could be sure of was this place that had once been so full of life and effort was gone, as if it had never existed, and that in another month Ailie would be gone, and the South would be empty for me forever.” (p.463)

Fitzgerald’s main themes of love, class, and money reverberate through many of his stories, but in this collection the reader can get a sense of Fitzgerald’s range as an author. Yes, he wrote about beautiful, privileged people searching for love, but he wrote about many other things too. Fitzgerald’s sense of humor is on display in “The Jelly-Bean,” “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” “Financing Finnegan” and the Pat Hobby story “’Boil Some Water—Lots of It.’” He examines the South in “The Last of the Belles,” “The Jelly-Bean,” and “The Ice Palace.” There are short stories about Catholicism, (“Absolution”) college football, (“The Bowl”) and Hollywood (“Crazy Sunday,” “Last Kiss”).

Fitzgerald would be so proud if he could hold this collection of his short stories in his hands. It’s 775 pages of his best writing, a summation of more than 20 years as a professional author. Fitzgerald sweated over these stories, working hard to capture his times on paper. He was a writer blessed with a remarkable gift: the ability to write perceptively about his own time, yet his writing transcends his own time as his words echo down the generations to us all these years later. In every story, no matter how contrived the plots may sometimes be, there are sentences and phrases that will take your breath away and will remind you of the power and beauty of the written word.

Some of my own favorite stories in this volume are:

“The Ice Palace”

“May Day”

“The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”

“Winter Dreams”

“The Sensible Thing”

“The Last of the Belles”

“The Swimmers”

“Babylon Revisited”

“Crazy Sunday”

“Afternoon of an Author”

Book Review: The Pat Hobby Stories, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, with an Introduction by Arnold Gingrich (1962)

 

The Pat Hobby Stories, on my Fitzgerald shelf. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood, 1937. (Photo by Carl Van Vechten)

The Pat Hobby Stories is a collection of 17 humorous short stories written by F. Scott Fitzgerald during the last 18 months of his life. The titular character is a ne’er-do-well, an aging alcoholic screenwriter struggling to eke out a living in Hollywood. The 17 stories were all originally published in Esquire magazine, the last reliable market for Fitzgerald’s short stories. Esquire paid Fitzgerald $250 for each of the Pat Hobby stories, a far cry from the $4,000 per short story he had commanded from The Saturday Evening Post at the beginning of the 1930’s.

At the time Fitzgerald was writing the Pat Hobby stories, he was living in Hollywood and working as a screenwriter. Since Pat Hobby and Fitzgerald share the same occupation, one might be tempted to read the stories as autobiographical, especially since so much of Fitzgerald’s fiction drew upon his real-life experiences. But this would be misguided, as it’s quite clear that Pat Hobby has no actual talent for writing, in contrast to his creator, who obviously had a lot of talent for writing.

Fitzgerald makes the distinction between himself and his character early in the series, writing of Pat in “A Man in the Way,” the second story in the series: “He was a writer but he had never written much, nor even read all the ‘originals’ he worked from, because it made his head bang to read much.” (p.13)

In the story “Teamed with Genius,” Pat is asked if he’s heard of an author named Rene Wilcox. This throws Pat into a panic: “The name was unfamiliar. Pat had scarcely opened a book in a decade.” Pat then offers a generic “She’s pretty good,” before he learns that Rene is a male. (p.30)

Despite their differences in reading habits, Fitzgerald did use some of his real-life experiences in Hollywood to inform the Pat Hobby stories. A screen treatment that Hobby is supposed to work with Rene Wilcox to expand into a screenplay is titled “Ballet Shoes.” Thanks to I’d Die for You, the 2017 collection of previously unpublished Fitzgerald short stories, we know that Fitzgerald wrote a short screen treatment called “Ballet Shoes or Ballet Slippers.” (Fitzgerald used both titles on the cover sheet.) Fitzgerald’s treatment dates from 1936 and was never filmed. (I’d Die for You, p.313)

In “Pat Hobby’s Secret,” Hobby is working on a screenplay that includes the plot element of an artillery shell being found in the trunk of a car. (p.52) As unlikely an occurrence as this might seem to be, Fitzgerald wrote a screen treatment titled “Love is a Pain” that incorporated this same plot element. Dated 1939/40, “Love is a Pain” was finally published in 2017’s I’d Die for You. (I’d Die for You, p.279)

The Pat Hobby stories are full of funny lines, and one of my favorites is Fitzgerald’s description of Secrets of Film Writing, a 1928 book that Hobby co-authored: “It would have made money if pictures hadn’t started to talk.” (p.31) Another line that I found hilarious is when a producer offers to pay Pat—not quite a job, “more of a sinecure” in the producer’s words. “Pat became uneasy. He didn’t recognize the word, but ‘sin’ disturbed him and ‘cure’ brought a whole flood of unpleasant memories.” (p.104)

The Pat Hobby Stories draws the reader’s attention to Fitzgerald’s wit and humor, two qualities in his writing that are often overlooked. Fitzgerald’s humor may come as a surprise to readers, as the mood most associated with his writing is a yearning romanticism. Fitzgerald was by no means a humorist, but he was capable of a fine irony in his work. Think of Tom Buchanan railing against interracial marriage at the Plaza Hotel in The Great Gatsby, and Jordan Baker’s humorous reminder “We’re all white here.” (p.137)

The Pat Hobby Stories remain somewhat neglected in the Fitzgerald canon, and they have generally drawn little attention from Fitzgerald biographers and critics. One reason is the overt humor of the stories. Pat Hobby is clearly a humorous character, and the stories’ focus on humor and irony may have dissuaded literary critics of their importance, as generally speaking, humor writing is usually critically undervalued at the expense of “serious” writing. Whereas Gatsby is poetically yearning for the green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock, Pat Hobby is prosaically yearning for the time when he owned a house with a swimming pool.

In addition to being a comedic character, Pat Hobby is also clearly an untalented hack, and a talented writer writing stories about a hack writer may make people think that the talented writer is just doing hack work himself. The Pat Hobby stories were all written for money, but this fact alone shouldn’t bias the reader against them, as money was the driving force behind everything Fitzgerald wrote. From 1919 until his death in 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s occupation was free-lance fiction writer. So, you could reasonably say that The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night were written for money as well. So were Fitzgerald’s finest short stories, like “Winter Dreams,” “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” “Babylon Revisited,” “Crazy Sunday,” and whichever Fitzgerald short stories are your own personal favorites.

The Pat Hobby Stories don’t really fit in with the rest of Fitzgerald’s work, as they lack the romantic lyricism that we typically associated with his best work. I’m not going to make the claim that The Pat Hobby Stories are Fitzgerald’s finest works, but they’re still enjoyable to read and are well-written. I wouldn’t recommend The Pat Hobby Stories for your first dip into Fitzgerald’s writing. The Pat Hobby Stories aren’t required reading for Fitzgerald 101, but if you want to go deeper into Fitzgerald’s work, they’re well worth the time.  

The Pat Hobby stories are also notable because they’re the last stories, or writing of any kind, that F. Scott Fitzgerald finished for publication during his lifetime, which gives them a unique historical significance. Fitzgerald wrote the stories quickly: a month after sending Esquire the first Pat Hobby story in September 1939, he had already written four more. Because Fitzgerald died in December of 1940, in the middle of Esquire’s publishing the Pat Hobby stories, we don’t really know what Fitzgerald himself would have done with the stories. Would he have written 7 or 8 more Pat Hobby stories and then revised them for publication as a standalone book? Or would he have left them uncollected and moved on to other subjects and stories? Fitzgerald was a tough critic of his own work, and it’s quite possible that he simply would have left poor old Pat Hobby out in the cold of his uncollected stories, rather than under the shelter and warmth of a sturdy book binding. At the time of Fitzgerald’s death, only 46 of his approximately 170 published short stories had been collected in book form. Despite the interest in Fitzgerald’s life and writing after his death, it took until 1979 for all of those stories to appear in books. Even then, there were still a few sub-par stories left to fend for themselves.

Few Fitzgerald scholars have dedicated much time or space to the Pat Hobby stories, and even Aaron Latham’s 1971 book Crazy Sundays: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood, barely mentions the stories. Fitzgerald scholar and biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli, who could usually be counted on to find something positive to say about Fitzgerald’s writings, criticizes the Pat Hobby stories. Bruccoli glosses over the stories in Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, his biography of Fitzgerald, but in the Introduction to the Cambridge University Press edition of The Love of the Last Tycoon, the novel Fitzgerald was working on at the time of his death, he’s quite critical of the stories.

Bruccoli writes: “Most of the seventeen Hobby stories about a hack movie writer are disappointing.” Bruccoli continues: “The Hobby stories are mainly travesties.” (The Love of the Last Tycoon, p.xxxvi) Okay, that seems a little harsh. I’m not going to claim that the Pat Hobby stories are Fitzgerald’s forgotten masterpieces, but they’re still enjoyable, even if they are rather slight.

What did Fitzgerald himself think of Pat Hobby? Fortunately, we have a letter in which he reveals his feelings. Frances Kroll was Fitzgerald’s secretary during the last 20 months of his life. She wrote the fascinating memoir Against the Current: As I Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald. (I reviewed that book here.) Frances’ brother Nathan was an aspiring writer, and he was considering adapting the Pat Hobby stories for the stage. Fitzgerald wrote Nathan an encouraging letter on May 6, 1940 about the possibilities of adapting the stories. As usual, Fitzgerald was an insightful critic of his own work, writing to Nathan: “the series is characterized by a really bitter humor 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.” (Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p.595)

There’s very little description in The Pat Hobby Stories. They are short short stories—all the extra fat has been trimmed away. At times it doesn’t even quite feel like Fitzgerald. The beautiful descriptions that were such a hallmark of Fitzgerald’s style are rarely to be found in The Pat Hobby Stories. It makes me a little sad since I love Fitzgerald’s style so much. Fitzgerald’s writing in The Pat Hobby Stories isn’t quite Hemingway-esque, or hard-boiled prose, but I would say that his writing seems to have changed after the personal travails he experienced during the mid-1930’s. Perhaps because Fitzgerald’s own romanticism and hope in life had been bruised and battered, so too his writing had been changed by his experiences, and his prose now emerged in a leaner style. Had Fitzgerald lived longer, it would be interesting to see how his style might have changed throughout the years. If Fitzgerald had finished The Last Tycoon to his satisfaction, it would be fascinating to know if the finished novel would have reflected this change as well.

In Fitzgerald’s Notebooks, there’s an enigmatic note of just two sentences, probably dating from the late 1930’s, where Fitzgerald compares himself with Hemingway: “I talk with the authority of failure—Ernest with the authority of success. We could never sit across the same table again.” (The Crack-Up, p.181) The Pat Hobby Stories are certainly about failure, as Pat Hobby’s schemes go awry time and time again. But like a cork in the ocean, Pat Hobby keeps bobbing to the surface. It’s hard to imagine Hemingway writing about a character as hapless as Pat Hobby.

“Pat Hobby sat in the bar. Pat Hobby was drunk. The bar was across the street from the movie studio. Pat Hobby loved the movie studio. The movie studio treated Pat Hobby badly, but still he loved it. Pat Hobby loved the movie studio the way some men loved some women. The women had treated these men badly. But still the men found the women attractive despite the hurt and the pain. Or maybe the men still found the women attractive because of the hurt and the pain. Pat Hobby was not sure. All Pat Hobby wanted to do was to go back inside the movie studio. But the policeman would not let Pat Hobby in the gates. Pat Hobby cursed the policeman as he walked away.

Pat Hobby decided he would go to Tijuana and find some whores. There were always good whores there, and if you paid them enough, afterwards they would listen to all of your problems as you laid your head on their chest. Pat Hobby knew where the good whorehouses were. The whores there were not beautiful. But they were good-looking enough so you did not have to close your eyes and think of a movie star. Pat Hobby made love to his whore three times that afternoon. Pat Hobby knew there was good whiskey there too. Enough whiskey to get a man good and drunk so he could go to the bullfight and cheer for the brave young matador in his tight pants. Pat Hobby had always wanted to be a matador. But Pat Hobby was not one of the brave ones. The whiskey coursed through Pat Hobby’s veins and it made him feel very brave today. Pat Hobby suddenly jumped over the fence into the bull ring. The bull stared at Pat Hobby. Pat Hobby took off his jacket and waved it around. The bull was wounded, and he hobbled over to Pat Hobby. Pat Hobby danced around and waved his jacket more. The bull charged Pat Hobby. Pat Hobby jerked to his left and avoided the horns. Pat Hobby smacked the bull on the rump as he charged past. The crowd cheered for Pat Hobby. On the next pass, the bull gored Pat Hobby in the upper thigh. The bull’s horn tore through an artery. Pat Hobby fell to the dirt. Pat Hobby watched the blood pool around him quickly. Pat Hobby knew it was a fatal wound. Pat Hobby smiled at his last moment of glory. Pat Hobby waved to the crowd and smiled just before he passed out. Then the young matador in the tight pants killed the bull. The crowd cheered.”  

If you’re interested in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last years in Hollywood, The Pat Hobby Stories are an entertaining and humorous diversion.