Television also worked hard to give Peyton Place a face-lift. Shanties were abolished, the drunks sobered up. There were no winter binges in locked cellars filled with barrels of hard cider. Gossipy old men, quirky old women, and cranky Yankees of various types and ages were replaced with the monotonous personalities and tepid lives of Ryan O'Neal, Dorothy Malone, and Mia Farrow. Nothing but youthful charm and optimistic smiles crawled out from under the rocks of TV's Peyton Place. “Though an episode ends in a cliff-hanger,” explained the show's producer, “you can await the sequel without anxiety. For unlike the world we live in, villains will always be punished, justice will always be done, character will be improved by adversity. You are safe among friends.”39 For producers, no place seemed safer than Ye Olde New England, a nostalgic place of rock-bound tradition and shell-backed citizens. What Metalious had torn down, Hollywood built up. Studio carpenters nailed together a plywood town square, a ships chandler's, a bookstore (modeled after one in Camden, Maine), and a pillory, which was placed in the village square to remind viewers of Peyton Place's stern New England heritage. As was the case with the film, television producers relocated the town, abandoning the interior mill towns and wooded forests of northern New England for Metalious's nemesis: the picturesque, “postcard-perfect” coast. A lifeboat stood at the ready, ignobly (and oddly) hung over the chandler's front door. A wooden schooner, complete with a loading chute for its imaginary cargo of fish, waited patiently in Peyton Place's waterless harbor. Elm, Chestnut, and Maple, the names of streets Metalious had walked on as a child growing up in Manchester, New Hampshire, were replaced by Faith, Hope, and Charity, words Metalious neither used nor held in high esteem. Today, of course, television viewers will recognize the set as home to Jessica Fletcher, while shoppers no doubt will glimpse in its quaint little shops and folksy design the ersatz New England of L. L. Bean. In such a setting Allison McKenzie, Selena Cross, Doc Swain, and Michael Rossi would probably be arrested. “It has,” noted one reviewer in 1965, “no discernible Negroes, no obvious Jews, no bigotry, no religious or political division.” New England had been rebuttoned.40
In many ways, however, Hollywood's Peyton Place redressed what had been for most reviewers of the book a grievous distortion of New England life and culture. In the mind's eye of the 1950s, Metalious's Peyton Place seemed to be geographically dislocated. Images of tar-paper shacks, incenstuous fathers and drunken mothers, religious hypocrisy, strangled cats, single mothers, sexually assertive women, and peeping toms mingled in the imaginations of Americans with visions of the South, where pellagra, six-fingered hillbillies, white trash, depraved women, and weak-minded sharecroppers roamed the land. “Everybody knew that the South was degenerate,” wrote Merle Miller in the Ladies Home Journal. “Grace Metalious's books insist— usually stridently—that Puritan New England has all the southern vices and a few others that not even William Faulkner had come across.”41 “Peyton Place,” wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hal Boyle, “brings Tobacco Road up North and gives it a Yankee accent.”42 The Boston Post agreed, describing the novel as “a lusty Tobacco Road type of book.” Metalious, it seemed, needed to reset her compass.
New Hampshire authorities were especially offended by the book, and newspapers throughout the state “gleefully” reprinted any unfavorable review they could find. In Boston, officials were equally quick to take issue with Metalious's vision of their region, and while southern and western reviewers concentrated on her “gift as a storyteller,” New England newspapers focused on the distortion of character and place. “According to the blurb,” announced one outraged Yankee, “it is the story of a New England town, but it's like no other town that this New Englander has ever known. The place is a hotbed of sex.”43 Distancing the “real” New England from the sexualized characters and impoverished hummocks of Peyton Place, critics simultaneously mirrored and reproduced class-bound and Anglo-identified narratives of Ye Olde New England. Eight years after publication, television would make them “real” once more.
Metalious would never live to see an episode. At the age of thirty-nine, she died suddenly, if not surprisingly, of “chronic liver disease,” a newspaper euphemism for cirrhosis. A few months later, Peyton Place appeared on television, a product now owned and controlled by the American Broadcasting Company. The rights to the show, which earned investors millions of dollars, had been sold for a pittance; her family inherited only debt. In the publicity for the series, promoters trumpeted the stars Peyton Place had launched, simultaneously pushing Metalious and her novel deep into the background. Soon, both would mingle in the popular imagination with images of Jacqueline Susann, hot sex, social scandal, and “bad” books.
This reissue of Peyton Place provides an opportunity for a new generation of readers and scholars to reconsider the cultural politics and literary legacy of Grace Metalious. Ambivalent about her own abilities as a writer, Metalious once explained that she saw herself more as “an entertainer,” a good storyteller rather than a writer. But she was also ambitious about her writing, ever eager to develop her craft, and always writing. She wrote hundreds of short stories, beginning in the fourth grade, when she would hole up in her aunt's locked bathroom, a board over her knees for a desk, a cache of yellow second sheets for paper. When she married George Metalious at the age of seventeen, she kept a typewriter close at hand in the rickety house they dubbed “It'll Do.” “It was a little shanty house, with dirty dishes everywhere,” recalled a neighbor. “Everything was covered with grime and dirt except one spotless corner, where Grace kept her typewriter.” Metalious bristled when neighbors, reporters, and even kin suggested that she spend more time behind her sink and less in front of her typewriter. Writing Peyton Place consumed her. “I thought twenty-four hours a day for a year. I wrote ten hours a day for two and a half months.”44
Peyton Place was never considered a badly written book. On the contrary, a number of reviewers, especially those outside New England, gave Metalious good reason to think of herself as a writer. “The writing is good for its kind,” noted Edmund Fuller of the Chicago Tribune. “The pace is swift, for Mrs. Metalious has great narrative skill.” Even among those who found the book too explicit for their tastes, there was a grudging acknowledgment of her literary abilities. “When authoress Metalious is not all flustered by sex, she captures a real sense of the tempo, texture, and tensions in the social economy of a small town.”45
Reading Peyton Place today, one is especially struck by the carefully drawn, vivid descriptions of northern New England in the 1950s. She writes movingly of shack dwellers and spurned “old maids”; of the town drunk and the town bully; of underpaid teachers and parsimonious school boards; of bigotry as well as the quiet heroics of ordinary people. Her description of the cider binge in Kenny Sterns's locked cellar is both tragic and humorous and it ranks with the best of local color writing.
It is easy to imagine driving out of Peyton Place and into Egypt, Maine. Like the backwoods Maine of Carolyn Chute, Peyton Place is purposefully planned to offend the tourist. The lumber and textile industries, rather than lobster fishing, provide the backdrop, and Metalious writes poignantly of the woodsmen's relationship to the northern woods and the “company men” who owned them. “Men like Lucas looked on them [trees] as a precarious kind of security, a sort of padding to fall back on when one was given a shove by life. When all else failed and cash money was needed in a hurry, the task of ‘workin’ the woods’ was always available. The lumbermen had nothing but contempt for men like Lucas, and assigned to him the secondary jobs of the lumbering trade: the stacking of logs on trucks, the fastening of chains and the unloading at the sawmills” (28). Hardworking, a skilled carpenter, Lucas Cross couldn't afford siding. Like “It'll Do,” his home lacked running water as well.
Unlike Egypt, however, Metalious's “real” New England is a place intimately familiar with the possibilities as well as the problems of community life. Women are at the center, rather than on the margins as victim
s of men. Networks of kin and neighbors crisscross Peyton Place like ancient latticework, providing opportunities to both pry and protect, sneer and sympathize. Selena is a constant visitor in the MacKenzie household. Miss Thornton can imagine joining Kenny in a stiff drink. Doc Swain offers health care to the winter revelers and town drunks. Metalious's characters negotiate their way through and around a thick web of obligation and reciprocity, as well as meanness, personal pain, and petty voyeurism. “She'll get herself talked about” was both a community's worst fear and its greatest weapon, and Metalious shows both scorn and sympathy for the small vanities and personal longings that gave the phrase its force. She understood as well the role of the hardened outsider. Metalious wrote Peyton Place while living with her husband, George, whose job as school principal took them to the small New Hampshire town of Gilmanton. Of her neighbors Metalious remarked, “I can't say that I ever get invited into their homes. But then, I'm not sure I'd care to go.” Shunned after the publication of Peyton Place, she refused to leave. “I really love it here,” she confessed. “This is home.”
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.
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October 1998
Portland, Maine
Notes
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.
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