Peyton Place
Authors: Grace Metalious
by Grace Metalíous
with a new introduction by Ardis Cameron
Northeastern University Press
BOSTON
Published by University Press of New England / Hanover and London
Northeastern University Press
Published by University Press of New England,
One Court Street, Lebanon, NH 03766
www.upne.com
© 1956 by Grace Metalious
Introduction © 1999 by Ardis Cameron
First published in 1956 by Julian Messner, Inc. Reprinted 1999 by
Northeastern University Press by agreement with Marsha Duprey,
Cynthia Geary, and Christopher Metalious
Printed in the United States of America 15 14 13 12 11
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Members of educational institutions and organizations wishing to photocopy any of the work for classroom use, or authors and publishers who would like to obtain permission for any of the material in the work, should contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Lebanon, NH 03766.
ISBN-13: 978–1–55553–400–4
ISBN-10: 1–55553–400–7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Metalious, Grace.
Peyton Place / by Grace Metalious; with a new introduction by Ardis Cameron.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 1–55553–400–7
1. City and town life—New England—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3525.E77 P4 1999
98–53350
813'.54—dc21
TO GEORGE–
For All The Reasons he knows so well.–
HARDSCRABBLE BOOKS
Fiction of New England
Also available as a Hardscrabble Book
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REREADING
PEYTON PLACE
We shall not busy ourselves with what men ought to have admired, what they ought to have written, what they ought to have thought, but with what they did think, write, and admire.
GEORGE SAINTSBURY,
A History of Criticism
For readers of books in the 1950s, there were two ways to traverse the borders of middlebrow culture and taste. One way was to follow the road marked “Literature” and take up the kinds of “serious” books cultural authorities deemed both universal and timeless.
1
The other was to embrace the reading habits of what Margaret Widdemer called the “tabloid addict class,” whose proclivities for cheap paperback novels—mysteries, romances, science fiction, westerns, and the mildly salacious novels alternately referred to as “sexy” or “sleazy” — defined for the middle classes the demimonde of the socially deviant and the culturally impoverished. Here, critics agreed, was the literary landscape of the low: inexpensive books with hard-hitting stories and fast-paced writing, their covers promising the “inside” story, “true” romance, or “frank, uninhibited” tales of violent emotions.
2
In the northern New Jersey community where I grew up, excursions out of the middlebrow were allowed only if we took the high road. Socially aspiring parents would nod proudly as we toted around with us schoolhouse Literature: books whose very absence from the best-seller list confirmed their literary distinction and our high purpose. Only gradually, however, did it dawn on us that many of these admirers of good literature were themselves either in some confusion over the exact boundaries of the middlebrow, or else travelers on a literary road we had not yet discovered. Hidden under beds, behind bookshelves, and in private drawers my friends and I discovered the artifacts of our parents’ silent rebellion against “good literature”:
Forever Amber, Naked Came the Stranger, Mandingo, Kings Row, A Room in Paris,
and the most explosive of all,
Peyton Place.
“It was the kind of book mothers would hide under the bed during the day,” recalled one reader. Another remembered
Peyton Place
as a site for shared confidences and clandestine meetings among close friends. “I heard my mother and her best friend whispering in the kitchen. As soon as I entered, they whipped a book into a bag, but they were too slow. I had caught my mother reading
Peyton Place,
a book banned by our town library!”
3
Uncertain about its literary merits yet powerfully drawn to its story, readers turned to
Peyton Place
en masse and often in secret. “Everyone was reading it: college graduates; high school dropouts; even ‘Ozark Mountain boys’ who rarely read at all.”
4
In the process, they called into question the normative boundaries of middlebrow reading and the literary rules of cultural authorities.
Peyton Place
remapped writing's publics.
Published in 1956,
Peyton Place
became America's first “blockbuster.” It transformed the publishing industry and made its young author, Grace Metalious, one of the most talked-about people in America. The open secret of suburban readers from around the country,
Peyton Place
became as well the overt pleasure of millions of Americans who saw in the novel scenes from their own lives as well as a graphic story against which to measure them. “I'm sure you're writing about my town,” a reader wrote Metalious. “I live in
Peyton Place.
” As if to assure the young author that she had not exaggerated the problems of small-town life, another reader confided, “If you think
Peyton Place
is bad, you should live in my town.”
5
In an age when the average first novel sold two thousand copies,
Peyton Place
sold sixty thousand within the first ten days of its official release. By year's end, almost one in twenty-nine Americans had purchased the book, putting it on the top of the
New York Times
best-seller list, where it stayed for fifty-nine weeks. Soon even these figures would be toppled as
Peyton Place
rapidly edged out middlebrow's “quality” best-sellers, including
God's Little Acre
and
Gone With the Wind,
to become at the time the best-selling novel of the twentieth century. “This book business,” Metalious wrote a friend, “is some evil form of insanity.”
6
Her critics agreed.
Peyton Place
was denounced as “wicked,” “sordid,” “cheap,” “moral filth,” “a tabloid version of life.” Canada declared it “indecent,” making its importation into the Commonwealth illegal. Providence, Rhode Island, Ft. Wayne, Indiana, and Omaha, Nebraska, followed suit, arguing that the book would corrupt young readers. “I don't know why you want to read it,” declared one advertiser, “but we are willing to sell it at $3.95.” Wealthy communities that measured their refinement by the kinds of books they kept in the town library took pride in banishing
Peyton Place.
In upscale Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, a sign was posted on the library's front lawn: “This library does not carry
Peyton Place.
If you want it, go to Salem.”
7
Among conservatives, the enormous popularity of
Peyton Place
fueled fears that the road to national decline could be read in the skyrocketing sales figures of “bad” books. “This sad situation,” wrote William Loeb, editor of Metalious's hometown paper, the
Manchester Union Leader,
“reveals a complete debasement of taste and a fascination with the filthy, rotten side of life that are the earmarks of the collapse of civilization.”
8
Others who thought the book had some merit bemoaned its writing style as “flat” and “casual,” its characterization as “conventional to a degree.” According to Metalious's biographer, Emily Toth, even Dell Publishing was amazed at their own good fortune. “Its sales force,” noted Toth, “said it would never sell.” Stumped by its success, critics fell back on the familiar.
Peyton Place,
it was agreed, “made no hard demands upon even the adolescent reader.”
9
In the decades that followed World War II, however, writing's historic publics—to borrow the literary historian Richard Brodhead's phrase—were undergoing a sea change. Like my suburban friends and their parents, “respectable” readers were border-crossing, consuming in quantities previously unimagined soft-covered texts dismissed by cultural authorities and politicians alike as lurid, sensational, cheap, and badly written.
10
By 1955, the middlebrow and their children had amply sampled the offerings of the “tabloid addict class” and found them compelling, fast paced, and true to life.
11
Miffed by the arrogance of her critics, Metalious wryly noted, “If I'm a lousy writer, then a hell of a lot of people have got lousy taste.”
12
For twelve million readers of
Peyton Place
the boundaries of “good literature,” and the normative sway they exerted, had grown increasingly porous and weak as new social needs encouraged new habits of reading. “I was living in the Midwest during the 1950s,” recalled Toth, “and I can tell you it was boring. Elvis Presley and
Peyton Place
were the only two things in that decade that gave you hope there was something going on out there.”
13
Newspaper columnists, equally impatient with the conservativism of American culture, heartily agreed.
“Peyton Place,”
announced the Hollywood reporter Sidney Skolsky, “is the most exciting thing to hit the coast in years.”
14
Thirty-two years old, the daughter of mill workers, Grace Metalious not only struck a chord with the modern reading public, she helped create it.
The story of
Peyton Place
is thus deceptively simple. It begins with Indian summer, when fall's decrepitude is held in abeyance by the dazzling reds, yellows, and deep rusts of turning poplars, maples, and oaks. By midcentury, the showy autumnal display of New England's hills had reached canonical status as an American icon, conjuring up in the nation's imagination visions of pristine church steeples, orderly village greens, and the “natural” wonders of rockbound coasts and picturesque views.
15
Trumpeted as one of the nation's unmodernized nooks and crannies, New England became in the mind's eye a place unsullied by industrialization, immigration, radical politics, and urbanization. Modernity, it seemed, had passed it by. Its men were quaint old salts, rugged woodsmen, and sober farmers, its women old-fashioned and modest and sensibly shod. Permeating this imagery was just a whiff of Puritan censoriousness as writers such as H. L. Mencken and films such as
Now, Voyager
mobilized a fictive past of social and sexual repression to explain a conservative present. Actively promoted by the tourist industry and by magazines like
Yankee, Life,
and
Look,
images of New England sedimented into a canon of straitlaced types and unblemished landscapes.
In the first few sentences of
Peyton Place,
Metalious tweaked the mythologies of tourist New England, turning the familiar postcard portrait into a voluptuous pinup poster. “Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay.… One year, early in October, Indian summer came to a town called Peyton Place. Like a laughing, lovely woman Indian summer came and spread herself over the countryside and made everything hurtfully beautiful to the eye.” Metalious had unbuttoned New England.
Female sexual agency, hypocrisy, social inequities, and class privilege replaced for Metalious the official story of “Ye Olde New England.” “New England towns,” Metalious told one reporter, “are small and they are often pretty, but they are not just pictures on a Christmas card. To a tourist these towns look as peaceful as a postcard picture, but if you go beneath that picture it's like turning over a rock with your foot. All kinds of strange things crawl out.”
15
What crawled out, however, was both strange and painfully familiar. The main story of
Peyton Place
follows the lives of three women who, in different ways and for different reasons, come to terms with their identity as women and as sexual persons in the repressive atmosphere of small-town America. Allison MacKenzie, a young girl growing up in a fatherless household, dreams of becoming a writer and, like Metalious, longs to escape the only life she knows. Her working mother, Constance, whom Allison believes to be widowed, lives a lonely and repressed life haunted by the fear that her long-ago adulterous relationship with a married man will be revealed and ruin both her life and that of her daughter, the offspring of her passionless relationship with him. But perhaps the most interesting character in the book is Selena Cross, the girl from across the tracks whose beauty, intelligence, and sensuality captivate the town and frighten Constance. Yet Selena is also a holder of secrets, her future darkened by the sexual appetites of an older man. Seizing a moment offered to her on a snowy night, she and her younger brother smash in the head of their incestuous stepfather and dig his grave in the sheep pen behind their shack.
What official discourse worked to hide, Metalious sought to unearth: incest, abortion, adultery, repression, lust, the old bones and open secrets of small-town America. But Metalious did more than simply expose sexual behaviors and practices; she dramatically reinterpreted them. When Metalious published
Peyton Place,
America was in the grip of a new wave of sexual panic. As early as 1937, J. Edgar Hoover had declared a “War on the Sex Criminal,” and between 1949 and 1955 an army of “sex experts” and politicians launched a campaign to root out the “pervert,” the “sex fiend,” and the “degenerate.” While at times these terms denoted specific kinds of sexual actors, such as homosexuals, they were also deployed more generally to describe a wide array of sexual activity, including masturbation, birth control, petting, lust (especially female), and even abortion as both abnormal and morally, if not legally, criminal. Above all, however, the 1950s rediscovered the “sex pervert” who preyed upon the innocent; he, rather than family members, became the prime suspect of child sexual abuse cases between 1920 and 1960.
17
By the 1950s, most experts argued that incest was a one-in-a-million occurrence, a view reinforced by television sitcoms, such as
Father Knows Best,
and the rhetoric of cold war politicians. Selena Cross suggested otherwise.
Metalious based the story of Selena's sexual abuse on Jane Glenn, a local girl who confessed in 1947 to killing her father and then, along with her younger brother, burying him in the barn. Her mother had died ten years before, leaving Jane, the only daughter still at home, to run the house and take care of her brother. She told the police that her father had “threatened her with harm,” and that she lived with “intolerable conditions” when her father, a merchant marine, visited. As it turned out, Martin Glenn had been sexually assaulting his daughter since she was thirteen.
18
Newspapers, however, never mentioned the words incest, rape, or sexual abuse, preferring instead popular euphemisms such as “sordid details,” “molested,” and “unhappy childhood” to explain the patricide. When Selena Cross picked up the fireplace poker and slammed it down on her father's head, Metalious cracked open a national fiction that even her publishers thought too rock-solid to confront. They were firm: she would have to rewrite Lucas Cross as Selena's stepfather. It was the only editorial change Metalious fought. “They've ruined my book,” she told a friend. “Now its trash rather than tragedy.”
19
But Metalious underestimated her own skill as a keen-eyed observer and storyteller. She knew about sexual abuse; despite the change, her portrait of child sexual abuse in America is vividly realistic and
Peyton Place
has remained one of the few novels to bring it to public attention until very recently. In almost every detail the story of Selena Cross conforms to contemporary clinical and historical studies that have revealed the discrepancies between the myth and reality of girlhood sexual assault. Selena is raped by an older male relative or stepfather; the rape is heterosexual, the brother is left untouched; she is isolated, humiliated, and terrified; she is turned into a second wife, performing household tasks and child care of younger siblings; her mother is ineffective in protecting her and ignores the girl's signs of distress; town authorities look the other way, noting that Lucas “paid his bills.” No one familiar with the horror of child sexual abuse would ever read
Peyton Place
as “trash.”