Authors: Grace Metalious
Both
Peyton Place
and
The Beans of Egypt, Maine
are, of course, works of fiction. But whereas the former is remembered as “earthy,” “scandalous,” and sensational, the latter is described as “realistic,” “startling,” “powerful.” Yet Metalious's working poor are both more complicated and less stereotypical than the “phenomenally fertile” and emotionally crippled Beans of Egypt, Maine. The residents of Peyton Place do not inhabit a world of social isolation, breakdown, masculine bravado, and rugged individualism. They live within and are bound up with a community both of their making and out of their control. Neither victims nor heroes, they “make do.” Their physical proximity to the town's center remains throughout the book a powerful reminder of their place (irritating though it might be to town elites) in the social fabric and consciousness of the community. Poverty cripples Kenny Sterns, Henry McCracken, and Lucas Cross in many ways, but they are still capable of kindnesses, take pride in their work, and participate in the collective life of the town. Incest is portrayed as an aberration, not a mark of working-class life. Unlike Chute, too, Metalious directs her anger at a government that “turned away” from the poor and failed to provide services. Where Chute finds meddling social workers, remote teachers, and intrusive government, Metalious finds the charade of charity, the crime of public indifference, and the value of a good teacher, well-funded schools, and social interaction.
It was a startling message to middle-class Americans increasingly distanced from the poor in bedroom suburbs and exclusive communities. It remains a sharp contrast as well to the conservative politics of Reagan populism, which clouds many recent representations of the working poor. Lamenting Metalious's premature death, the writer Merle Miller explained her appeal: “There are several reasons for the popularity of Grace's books. First, she had great narrative skill. She may outrage you, but she never bores you.”
46
Academics also found much to admire in Metalious's work, comparing
Peyton Place
to the small-town chronicles of Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and John O'Hara; the 1957 paperback edition of O'Hara's
Ten North Frederick Street
joined
Peyton Place
on the nation's censored lists. Carlos Baker, a professor of literature at Princeton University, remarked in a
New York Times
review, “If Mrs. Metalious can turn her emancipated talents to less lurid purposes, her future as novelist is a good bet.”
47
Like others who were sympathetic to Metalious's working-class realism, Baker saw the young author as a new kind of female writer, “an emancipated modern authoress” who knows a lot about life and a lot about “bourgeois pretensions” and is not afraid to use “earthy” words to describe either.
The image of Metalious as an emancipated woman writer worked in tandem with a carefully crafted portrait of her as “just a housewife.” For publicity photos Messner rejected the genteel public relations portraits in favor of the hometown photos of the author in her blue jeans, men's flannel shirts, and ponytail. Press releases, however, referred to Metalious as the “housewife whose book cost her husband his job,” or the “housewife who wrote a bestselling novel.” This split image added both to the shock value of the book— “How could a mother with children write such stuff?” —and to its defense— “Here is both a modern rebel and a ‘normal’ respectable woman.” Comparing the most popular photograph of Metalious, which became known as “Pandora in Blue Jeans,” with any of a number of photos in the 1957 Vassar College yearbook, readers would be hard-pressed to see much difference. She represented a style both Messner and Meyer wagered would have wide appeal among disparate audiences, including highly educated young women. By collapsing the borders between author and book, they would blur the boundaries that separated writing's publics. While this tactic was enormously successful as a marketing tool, it also meant that Metalious's work would be judged as much for what it revealed about her role as à wife and mother as for what it disclosed about her skills as a writer. Believing that Metalious had been badly abused as a writer of realistic fiction, the critic Otto Fried-rich wrote bitterly upon her death: “The middle-class book reviewers on the middle-class newspapers could have forgiven her such literary sins if she had just gone to college and become a lady, one of those elegant creatures who write so tirelessly about the sensitive and the misunderstood.”
48
Like Kitty Messner, Friedrich thought Metalious a writer of enormous talent.
A yearning for recognition as a novelist, however, was not what motivated Metalious to write
Peyton Place.
Born in September 1924, Marie Grace DeRepentigny came of age in a household headed by her mother, disciplined by her grandmother, and crowded with material desire. “My mother wanted Paris trips and a colonial house with a fanlight over the front door and a chauffeured limousine, and she never got any of them.”
49
Her father, a printer for several Manchester newspapers, left the household he couldn't satisfy when Grace was eleven. Six years later, Grace would escape through marriage to a man who shared neither her French heritage nor her family's Catholicism. Instead, he shared her excitement, her iconoclastic pursuits, and her ambition for a better life. Grace left behind a French-Canadian community her mother felt superior to and a culture of longing she would never forget. “A woman has recently written a book called,
All I Want is Everything,”
wrote Grace in 1958. “I haven't read it but I think it is one hell of a title. All I want is everything, and I want it all the time.”
50
In many ways, the aspirations of Grace's mother helped shape the stories her daughter would write. Hovering over
Peyton Place
is a landscape of female desire, of woman-owned dreams dead and denied. It is a place familiar to those “who know that they do not have what they want, who know that they have been cut off from the earth in some way.”
51
Yet the politics of
Peyton Place
is not easily captured by the classificatory terms class, ethnicity, and gender. It is not a proletarian novel, yet the tradition of cultural criticism provides few ways to chart the kinds of human agency and consciousness that structure the feelings of Metalious's books. Instead, Metalious presents a story located in the uneven and problematic nooks and crannies of working women's lives: the terrain of female longing and desire, of escape and dreams deferred. “I don't go along with all the claptrap about poverty being good for the soul and trouble and struggle being great strengtheners of character,” Metalious wrote in “All About Me.” “It has been my experience that being poor makes people mean and grabby, and trouble makes them tight-lipped and whiny.” In many ways, writing was a way “to hack her way” out of poverty, an act of rebellion as well as ambition. “I think I began
Peyton Place
the day I was born,” she once remarked.
To reread
Peyton Place
is to rediscover more than a lost best-seller. It is to find as well a route into what the historian Carolyn Steedman has called the “Landscape for a Good Woman” —a place of hidden secrets, of emotional bits and pieces, of consciousness cut off from the rituals of certainty, of stunted and shrouded lives. When asked to write a short autobiography for the usual author's file at Messner, Metalious was brief: “I was born. I married. I reproduced.” It is the classic testimony of a Good Woman. It is our good luck that Grace Metalious turned it into a “bad” book.
ARDIS CAMERON
October 1998
Portland, Maine
I would like to thank the many students, colleagues, friends, relatives, and strangers who shared with me their memories of
Peyton Place.
A special thanks to Nancy Webb Mackay and her grandfather David Jewitt Noyes, whose island drugstore in Stonington, Maine, helped introduce a generation of post-World War II teenagers to the pleasures of the paperback, and, unwittingly, to the shared readings of
Peyton Place.
1.
For an excellent discussion of the evolution of the term
Literature
and of middlebrow literary culture see, in particular, Janice Radway,
A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), esp. 39-153 and 305-20; Andrew Ross,
No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture
(New York: Routledge, 1989).
2.
Joan Shelley Rubin,
The Making of Middlebrow Culture
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), xii-xiii.
3.
Interview with June Carter, Stonington, Maine, 1998; interview with Nancy Kavanagh, Boston, Mass., 1998.
4.
Michael True, quoted in Emily Toth,
Inside Peyton Place: The Life of Grace Metalious
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981), 136.
5.
“Letters to Author,” quoted in ibid., 131.
6.
In 1958, a year and a half after its release,
Peyton Place
surpassed the more than twenty-year record of
Gone With the Wind
as the nation's bestseller
(New York Times,
February 2, 1958). In 1965, almost ten years after publication,
Peyton Place
remained the top-selling fiction title in America, with
God's Little Acre
and
Gone With the Wind
ranked third and fourth respectively. By 1975, when book auctioning and television advertising were standard marketing practices,
The Godfather,
with 11,750,000 copies sold, had become the first super blockbuster.
Peyton Place
had fallen to fourth place, with 10,070,000 copies sold. Both
The Exorcist
and
To Kill a Mockingbird,
second and third respectively, had outsold
Peyton Place
by only a few hundred thousand copies. By 1988,
Peyton Place
would move into third. See Alice Payne Hackett,
70 Years of Best Sellers, 1895-1965
(New York: R. R. Bowker, 1967), 12, 40, 201; Alice Payne Hackett and James Henry Burke,
80 Years of Best Sellers, 1895-1975
(New York: R. R. Bowker, 1977), 10, 33; statistics as of 1988 are from Marilyn Slade,
New Hampshire Profiles,
May 1988, 55-93 (in Metalious folder, Gale Public Library, Laconia, N.H. [hereafter GPL]). See also Maurice Zolotow, “How a Best-Seller Happens,”
Cosmopolitan,
August 1957, 37; Otto Friedrich, “Farewell to
Peyton Place,” Esquire,
December 1971, 162; Patricia Carbine,
“Peyton Place,” Look,
March 18, 1958, 108; Merle Miller, “The Tragedy of Grace Metalious and
Peyton Place,” Ladies Home Journal,
June 1965, 111; Toth,
Inside Peyton Place,
131, 208, 333, 368. According to Mati Freirich, writing in
Trade Paperbacks
in 1981,
Peyton Place
was the best-selling novel of the century at that time (quoted in “New Biography of Peyton Place,”
Laconia
(New Hampshire)
Evening Citizen,
July 4, 1981); see also Friedrich, “Farewell to
Peyton Place,”
160, and
Publishers Weekly,
March 9, 1964. On competing titles, see Slade,
New Hampshire Profiles,
55-93. The Metalious letter is quoted in Toth,
Inside Peyton Place,
151.
Yankee
magazine put total sales as of 1990 at 20 million. See
Yankee,
September 1990, 92-138.
7.
Toth,
Inside Peyton Place,
131.
8.
William Loeb, “The Filth They Live By,”
Manchester Union Leader,
January 1957 (reprint in Metalious folder, GPL).
9.
Phyllis Hogan, article in
Times Literary Supplement,
September 20, 1956 (Metalious folder, GPL).
10.
As recent scholars have been making clear, the explosion of the paperback industry was fueled by readers from all class backgrounds attracted to the cover art and the authors’ gritty style. Even the overtly salacious pulps were churned out for “respectable” people and Fawcett, Dell, and Pocket Books were continually surprised by the extent of the market for soft porn, including both lesbian fiction and romance novels. See Harriet Hawkins,
Classics and Trash: Traditions and Taboos in High Literature and Popular Modern Genres
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990); Thomas L. Bonn,
Under Cover: An Illustrated History of American Mass Market Paperbacks
(New York: Penguin, 1982); Ann Barr Snitow, “Mass Market Romance: Pornography for Women Is Different,”
Radical History Review
20 (1979): 141-61.
11.
One reader was the novelist Stephen King, whose discovery
of Weird Tales
and other pulp magazines in his aunt's closet helped launch his imagination and desire to write. See
The New Yorker,
September 7, 1998, 56-67.
12.
Quoted in Friedrich, “Farewell to
Peyton Place,”
160.
13.
Emily Toth, quoted in “New Biography of Peyton Place.”
14.
Sidney Skolsky, “Latest Success Story of
Peyton Place,” Laconia Evening Citizen,
September 29, 1956 (Metalious folder, GPL).
15.
For an excellent discussion of New England scenery and how it was manufactured in the nineteenth century, see Dona Brown,
Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 41-47.
16. Zolotow, “How a Best-Seller Happens,” 38.
17.
Estelle Freedman, “ ‘Uncontrolled Desires’: The Response to the Sexual Psychopath, 1920-1960,”
Journal of American History
74, no. 1 (1987): 83-106. See also Linda Gordon, “The Politics of Child Sexual Abuse: Notes from American History,”
Feminist Review
28 (January 1988): 56-64, and “Incest and Resistance: Patterns of Father-Daughter Incest, 1880-1930,”
Social Problems
33, no. 4 (April 1986): 253-66.
18.
Jane Glenn pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter and was sentenced to prison. Her brother was put on probation and remanded to the state reform school.
19.
Laurie Wilkins, quoted in the
Boston Traveler,
March 13, 1964 (Metalious folder, GPL).
20.
Carlos Baker, “Small Town Peep Show,”
New York Times Book Review,
September 23, 1956, VII:4.
21.
Sterling North, “Shocker Written by Village Wife,”
New York World Telegram,
September 29, 1956.
22.
Ibid.; J.O., “Not for Kiddies” (miscellaneous reviews, Metalious folder, GPL).
23.
“Novelist in Paris Suggests Banning
Peyton Place,”
reprinted in
Laconian Evening Citizen
(miscellaneous reviews, Metalious folder, GPL).
24.
Carbine,
“Peyton Place,”
110.
25.
The term
sex panic
emerged in the 1990s to refer to efforts to shut down commercial venues of sex and public arenas of sexual exchange as well as to name the New York City-based organization created to oppose these efforts. It has since come to mean the social and cultural fears of sexual agency and the kinds of antisex crusades that such fears spawn. For a discussion of the relationship between sexuality and social order, see Carole Vance, ed.,
Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality
(Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984); Michel Foucault,
The History of Sexuality: An Introduction,
trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger,
Nationalisms & Sexualities
(New York: Routledge. 1992); Michael Warner,
Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
26.
Karl Fleming and Anne Taylor Fleming,
The First Time
(New York: Berkley Medallion, 1975), 162.
27.
Barbara Wolfson, “Who's Taking Care of the Babysitter?”
Women: A Journal of Liberation
6, no. 2 (1979): 18.
28.
Carbine,
“Peyton Place,”
108.
29.
Interview with anonymous subject, August 1998.
30.
For an important reassessment of the 1950s and the limits of the “feminine mystique” as a metaphor for the times, see Joanne Meyerowitz,
Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994).
31.
For statistics on the TV show see Leo Litwak, “Visit to a Town of the Mind,”
New York Times,
April 4, 1965, 46; Paul Monash and Cecil Smith, “Notes on
Peyton Place,” Television Quarterly
(Fall 1964): 49-56; Friedrich, “Farewell to
Peyton Place,”
160-62. Comments on Vietnam and statistics are from Friedrich.
32.
Alessandro Portelli,
The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories
(Albany: State University of New York, 1991), especially 253-57.
33. Francis X. Clines, “A Lawmaker Asks: Watergate or
Peyton Place?” New York Times,
October 6. 1998, A21.
34.
Litwak, “Visit to a Town of the Mind,” 52.
35.
Paul Monash, quoted in ibid., 54.
36.
Quoted in Toth,
Inside Peyton Place,
94.
37.
Quoted in Litwak, “Visit to a Town of the Mind,” 52.
38.
Monash and Smith, “Notes on
Peyton Place,”
53.
39.
Litwak, “Visit to a Town of the Mind,” 64.
40.
Ibid., 65.
41.
Miller, “Tragedy of Grace Metalious,” 111.
42.
Hal Boyle, “Grace Unfolds to Hal Boyle Hazard of Husband Losing Job,”
Laconia Evening Citizen,
August 29, 1956.
43.
North, “Shocker Written by Village Wife.”
44.
Louise Riegel quoted in Toth,
Inside Peyton Place,
78; Metalious quoted in ibid., 80.
45.
Edmund Fuller, review,
Chicago Sunday Tribune,
September 23, 1956; review,
Time,
September 24, 1956.
46.
Miller, “Tragedy of Grace Metalious,” 111.
47.
Baker, “Small Town Peep Show.”
48.
Friedrich, “Farewell to
Peyton Place,”
162.
49.
Grace Metalious, “All About Me,”
American Weekly,
May 18, 1958, n.p.
50.
Ibid.
51.
Carolyn Steedman,
Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 14.