MIDDLE AGE BEGINS AT 40

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 379, 27 September 1946, Page 21

MIDDLE AGE BEGINS AT 40

But Youth Gets MoréYouthful Yeat by Year

[N this talk, given in the BBC’s Home Service, Alistair Cooke, | Washington correspondent of the BBC, discusses recent | American trends

HERE is a lively _ belief among middle-aged people that people in their early twenties look on them as being just as young but more experienced. This notion has now been blasted with hollow laughter by a Gallup poll just taken in the United States. Dr. Gallup evidently had noticed that most of us who use the term "middle age’ do so very confidently, until we check with other people of doubtful age. So he took a national poll on it. From this it appears that most Americans, young and old, think of middle age as beginning, like life, at 40. There were extremists who thought it started at 30, end some bare-faced optimists who thought 60 would be about right. Young people, however (by which I had better say I mean men and women of 20 and 21) had more or less the same ideas

about middle-age as old people. They, too, thought it started around 40, though there were a few rude youths who suggested 35. There were one or two very interesting by-products of this poll. White-collar professional men, for instance, arrived at the baffling figure of 41, evidently giving themselves one final twelve-month fling before agreeing to be their age. And there was a triumphant note sounded in the revelation that most American women think of middle-age as starting at 45. Obviously this means middle-age for women. For if you ask a woman in any country when middleage starts, she has just one person in mind, and it’s not Clark Gable. Working people, tended to think that middleage started sooner than the rest of the people. And I suppose it is natural that people who all their lives have done heavy manual work, and rarely had the sense of real security that comes from a healthy bank balance, should notice themselves age sooner and expect middle-age earlier than. people who are lucky enough to take their exercise by choice. However, it appears that you cannot be too careful in drawing generalisations from economics about the feeling of health and security. I was discussing this poll with a friend of mine, an American psychiatrist of long experience who said

that in twenty years of treating all sorts of groups and individuals, he could not help remarking that unhappiness is no respecter of income groups. Exactly the same kind of emotional troubles afflicts the rich and the poor, the successful and the unsuccessful, the talented and the ungifted, the town and the countrydweller. It would be interesting now if the British branch of Dr. Gallup’s pollsters would ask the same question in Britain. There would be rich fodder for the columnists, I imagine, if, for instance, British women saw themselves declining into middle-age sooner than American women. For it is something that many observers of American life have noticed, that American women put up a terrific-often alarmingly successful, and often ludicrous-resistance to the notion of middle-age. Magazines Tell the Story This topic reminds me of another trend in American life just under way that it is possible to take too obviously at its face value. It is the sudden violent play that magazine publishers are making for the attention of the young and the very yourtg. The newsagents’ shops are bulging these days with more new magazines than any magazine addict can ever remember. Now, any editor or publisher will tell you that putting out a new magazine is always a risky proposition. But in the past six months a whole flock of new magazines have come out devoted almost entirely to what the editors hope are the glamour needs of teen-age girls. There is now not only a Harper’s Bazaar, but a Junior Harper’s for smart young .women in their late *teens. There is a magazine called Deb for 16-to-18-year-olds. There is Mademoiselle, aimed at young women between the ages of 15 and 19, and there is one called Seventeen with an obvious audience. These magazines are not brave strained efforts to mimic the elegance of the two pioneer fashion magazines started over here-Vogue and Harper’s. In make-up, in lay out, in photographic succulence, they are just as lush and just as rarefied. I bought a copy of Deb the other day and it ran to more than two. hundred pages of smooth, high quality paper with hundreds of exquisite photographs of exquisite young sophisticates of 16 and 17-junior models, already scampering (or should it be gliding?) between the schoolroom and the advertising agency’s studio. ~ , Soaring Circulations This whole trend may be a by-pro-duct of reckless inflation, but not one of these magazines is having circulation trouble. I talked the other day with a young advertising executive (oh, well, he’s on the edge of middle-age) who was thought of as something of a wizard 10 years ago when he managed to boost the circulation of a national news magazine from 250,000 to 350,000. He confessed ruefully that now he feels like (continued on next page)

The American Way of Life

(Continued from previous page) a cocky country newspaper editor, when he goes over the circulation figures of these new magazines, which somehow have skipped the old anxiety of the slow coaxing of subscribers and already are bought by an astronomical number of readers. Mademoiselle, for instance, for the middle and late ‘teens, sells 425,000 copies a month, Deb has a guarantéed

250,000 and they have only just come out. And the biggest seller of all is a Magazine you would say few Americans, even, have ever heard of. It is called Calling All Girls; it is aimed at and bought by glamorous tots between the ages of 10 and 17 to the tune of 850,000 a month. Now I resist my old English instinct to draw heavy morals from light surfaces. Suppose a couple of million young American girls do buy anderead fashion magazines put out for them, which in text and advertisement want to have them impeccably groomed from. the strands of their hair to the tips of their toenails. Suppose the advertising and the romantic glamour of it all should get them down for a while, for a month, or a year, or more, I can only report to you, after much hot discussion with happy and sensible American mothers and fathers, that the American reaction is "What of it?" What we are up against here is a view of the development of children that unfussy parents the world over probably live by. Unfortunately, the wringing of hands in public is always done by the fussy, that is by the insecure, who see a drunkard in a glass of wine, and a vapid doll in a little girl who likes to play with her mother’s lipstick, On the whole, from not too casual observation, I would say Americans are probably more disposed than most nations to put up with phases of child life’ that would alarm some other parents. 5; Is it Serious? I discussed with my wife the interesting reaction of the British film critics to an admittedly dull film about American ‘teen-agers. The British critics were mostly appalled to think that the 15-year-olds in this film honestly reflected the same people in life. They all made up; they were watchful of their hair-do; they mooned and moaned over the youth of the neighbourhood; and they jitter‘bugged to the music of Frankie and | boogie-woogie. My own reaction was a certain similar alarm to that of the film critics, which I had, however, to admit was a secret fear that a daughter of mine might some.day cut up in the same fashion. My wife’s reaction was quite different. She read a passage from one

of the English critics saying what would come of young women who made up at 15 and 16 and competed for dates, and went in for similar wickedness. And she said, "But if you’re not crazy over boys at 16, when are you?" and pointed out that "the younger you get over that, the better able you are to enjoy your twenties." As for the lipstick, the grooming, the mad concern over dressing, she thought this was a matter of temperament, and that anyway it showed pretty poor faith in your children to think that because at 15 they were greatly taken with these things, they would remain a major interest. I retail this domestic dialogue to you because one so often reads in English magazines criticism of American life, without being told that Americans do not ignore the same thing that is being criticised. They just don’t think it so important. That is to say, they don’t overlook these things in themselves, but they do put a different value on them. I think the crux of the matter is that Americans, for good or ill, are not so much concerned (perhaps not enough concerned) over the impression their children will have on other people. Over here the parents seem more disposed to let their children live out their jungle

exuberance. They ask perhaps only that they show signs of being at times king or queen of the jungle. It was well said a few weeks ago, in a BBC talk from Miss Olive Shapley, that American parents tend to set an awfully high social standard, a standard of emotional poise, for their children, which is tough on the hesitant and the timid. But I think it is worth saying too, that if that is the characteristic strain set on American children, they are not submitted to the characteristic European strain of setting an early high intellectual standard on them. The intellectual goal is much more modest over here for many years, and it is interesting that where an American parent who is intellectual is too proud to have his child thought ordinary in the head, you notice exactly the same result as in Europe, of a child almost overgentle, who is aware of the parent’s being the intellectual authority, a child perhaps with many gifts but who already shows the characteristic of adult intellectuals anywhere-the inability to let their hair and their brains down and play without second thoughts, or self-con-sciousness, or inhibition. America’s "Elizabethan Age" In this talk I merely wished to anticipate a lot of strenuous lamentations over the probable fate of American youth, on the basis of the rash of extremely elegant play and fashion magazines, and (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) on the basis of an authoritative report that Miss \America, a magazine bought by girls between the ages of 12 and 17, has now a monthly circulation of 726,000 which is expected to go to something above a million by next year. The Americans, as Lord Halifax recently noted, are in their Elizabethan age. They can indulge wild fantasies and throw them off. It might be worth recalling that in Elizabethan England even soldiers and pirates wore scent, and in this day and age the Russian soldier is a heavy consumer of perfume. It did not seem to interfere much with the courage or manhood of Sir Francis Drake, or, up to latest reports, with that of the Russians either. And you may be sure that, gtoomed or ungroomed, jitterbugging or poring over her~books, American girlhood will stay sound at the core even when she’s winking shamelessly at her middle-aged critics, who perhaps have looked in the mirror and seen their | youth slipping.