Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
In 1929 F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote Ernest Hemingway that because his short stories now earned $4000 a pop he was "an old whore" who had "mastered the 40 positions" when "in her youth one was enough." But were the upwards of 180 stories he cranked out when not writing The Great Gatsby really the work of a literary prostitute selling out his talent for a fast buck? Kirk Curnutt and Robert Trogdon don't think so. Each episode they draw a random title from a hat and explore its place in Fitzgerald's career, in the magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post or Esquire where it may have appeared, and in the overall development of the American short story. Along the way, they talk literary politics, history, and gossip from the 1920s and 1930s, rediscovering the lively personalities and rivalries that tried to define the porous boundaries between commercial and artistic fiction, between the popular and the avant-garde, between the forgotten and the canonized.
Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
At Your Age
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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.