At Your Age

Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Our first episode of 2021 examines a story that has been completely ignored both by fans and scholars: August 17, 1929's "At Your Age." The lack of interest is curious for a couple of reasons. For starters, this tale of a fifty-year-old bachelor, Tom Squires, confronting age-inappropriate behavior as he chases after a debutante thirty years his junior was the submission that earned Fitzgerald his peak price of $4,000 per story from The Saturday Evening Post. His agent, Harold Ober, even called it the best story FSF had ever written. That's not true, of course, but we owe "At Your Age" a debt of gratitude given that the hefty raise it occasioned inadvertently inspired the title of this podcast: it was after that $4,000 milestone that Fitzgerald wrote the famous letter to Hemingway calling himself an "old whore" who had mastered the forty positions popular fiction demanded of authors. But "At Your Age" is also important because it explores from a mature perspective the albatross that clung to a writer who made teenage petting parties famous: the idea that he was so obsessed with remaining young that he never grew up. We put both Tom Squires's obsession with Annie Lorry and Fitzgerald's own age consciousness in a cultural context, exploring many of the crazy, often fraudulent remedies designed to stave off the waning vigor and potency that supposedly mark the midlife. From facelifts to monkey gland injections, the Jazz Age was obsessed with staying forever young; while "At Your Age" may lament the aging process, it critiques the undignified, foolish ways men in particular have pursued what William Butler Yeats called the "second puberty"---including what from a post-Philip Roth perspective we would consider the rather icky attraction to younger women.