The Pops (3): Peyton Place, Grace Metalious

Peyton Place is something a little different from most of the other examples of popular fiction I'm looking at in this series. Typically, popular fiction is genre fiction; mystery (Murder on the Orient Express) and horror (Pet Sematary) have already been discussed. But what is Peyton Place? 

A "woman's novel"? Not really. For all of its blue (or scarlet) reputation, it's not a book that focuses very much either on sex or, more generally, relationships. The raunchiest scenes (Allison watching Selena being raped by her father-in-law through the back window of their shack, Norman watching Mr. Card go down - yes, down! - on his very pregnant wife through the neighbour's hedge) are voyeuristic and creepy. And Tomas Makris's wooing of Constance MacKenzie is maybe just a bit too . . . forceful. For today's tastes anyway:

  He carried her, struggling, up the dark stairway, and when he reached the second floor, he kicked the door of her room open with his foot.
  "I'll have you arrested," she stammered. "I'll have you arrested and put in jail for breaking and entering and rape - "
  He stood her on the floor beside the bed and slapped her a stunning blow across the mouth with the back of his hand.
  "Don't open your mouth again," he said quietly. "Just keep your mouth shut."
  He bent over her and ripped her still wet bathing suit from her body, and in the dark, she heard the sound of his zipper opening as he took off his trunks.
  "Now," he said. "Now."
  It was like a nightmare from which she could not wake until, at last, when the blackness at her window began to thin to pale gray, she felt the first red gush of shamed pleasure that lifted her, lifted her, lifted her and then dropped her down into unconsciousness.

Perhaps that "stunning blow across the mouth" reads a bit differently today than it did in 1956. And it's true that the fantasy of the fair-haired maiden being ravished by the swarthy foreigner (well, he has a foreign name) in such a physical manner is itself a romance-novel cliché. When Tomas accuses Constance of getting all her "ideas of virile love-making from paper-backed books and Hollywood" Metalious clearly has her tongue in her cheek. Tomas is a well-educated Mr. Rochester, an incongruous blend of "unorthodox expressions of tenderness" (which remind Constance "of love scenes in rather effete novels") and overwhelming brute force. In other words, he's romance's Mr. Right. But still, this is not a romance novel.

(Perhaps this is as good a place as any to mention some of the genres I won't be looking at in this survey of popular literature. Pulp romance is one. Here the difficulty is one of selection. Which romance novel? What are the classics of the field? Maybe one of those bricks by Danielle Steele, I suppose. But this is a genre that is so formulaic I would, in effect, just be plucking a title off the assembly line. I also won't be reading a pure fantasy novel. My reasons for avoiding fantasy are personal. I read the Lord of the Rings - the obvious choice - when I was a kid and enjoyed it immensely. I have to force myself to get through more than a page of it today. Yes, it's that bad. All those wizards and elves and hobbits and magic swords . . . I can't bear to go through any of it again. And, finally, I won't be reading any Westerns. I think everything about cowboy culture, from the silly boots and ill-fitting denim to the plodding music and line-dancing, is ludicrously phony. I should add that I write these words while watching over a herd of beef cattle, in a rural area now overrun with upscale racehorse stables. And I've never met a cowboy in my life. But back to the book at hand . . . )

Peyton Place is sui generis in another way. Most of the popular authors I'm looking at are, or were, quite prolific. They knew what to do and they did it - over and over again. Not Grace Metalious. She was that slightly rarer type of pop novelist: the one-hit wonder. In the literary field this is a common phenomenon. One thinks of names like Joseph Heller, J. D. Salinger, and Ralph Ellison. Among writers of mass market fiction you see it a lot less. Margaret Mitchell, yes. Peter Benchley, maybe. But let's face it, what makes most popular novelists popular is not some kind of quirky, hard-to-duplicate charm, but their facility and professionalism. We figure they could write these books in their sleep. And that once they get going they're rather hard to stop.

Grace Metalious wasn't that kind of writer, and not just because of her tragic early demise. I don't think it likely she would have ever turned into that kind of writer. I say so because I don't get the sense that she was really very good at the kinds of things popular writers normally do well. A list of such items would include having an ear for dialogue. Metalious seems to only have two gears: hokey regional dialect and windbag poetic utterances (Allison's mature lover lays this one on her: "You have the long, aristocratic legs and the exquisite breasts of a statue"). But, even more fatally, she can't build suspense or sustain narrative momentum. The book is a series of immediate revelations, as though she's in a rush to give you everything she's got just as soon as she's got it. This keeps the climaxes coming (sex, fatal accidents, shocking revelations), but it doesn't make Peyton Place much of a page-turner. In fact, I had a terrible time finishing it. I even found myself falling back on the old program of just trying to read one chapter a day. The Classic work I was reading at the same time was The Golden Bowl, a work I finished in less than half the time. Which should really tell you something.

The boredom I felt reading James was of a different quality than the boredom of cliché, sentiment, and melodrama found in Peyton Place. I could quote numerous passages, but there's little point. The names should be enough. The dark beauty from the wrong side of the tracks is Selena Cross. ("People turned to look twice and three times at Selena, no matter where she went, for she had an air of experience suffered, of mystery untold, which was far more entrancing than mere beauty.") The upright young man who falls in love with her is Ted Carter. The schoolteacher is Miss Elsie Thornton. The spoiled "bad boy" son of the greedy local mill owner is Rodney Harrington. The pale, poetic, neurotic momma's boy is Norman Page. The suave literary agent who seduces Allison (and so who appreciates her statuesque qualities) is Bradley Holmes. And so it goes.

This isn't to say it's a bad book. I would give it an assured spot in the literature of small-town America alongside such works as Winesburg, Ohio, Spoon River Anthology, Main Street, and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The essential fact of small town life (as we read about in these works anyway) is its repression and secrecy. As Metalious herself once put it, "New England towns 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." This scandal-seeking - looking beneath the picture and shaking the skeletons out of the closet - is her mission:

  Scandalous occurrences, of a public nature that is, do not often take place in small towns. Therefore, although the closets of small-town folk are filled with such a number of skeletons that if all the bony remains of small-town shame were to begin rattling at once they would cause a commotion that could be heard on the moon, people are apt to say that nothing much goes on in towns like Peyton Place. While it is true, no doubt, that the closets of city dwellers are in as sad disorder as those of small-town residents, the difference is that the city dweller is not as apt to be on as intimate terms with the contents of his neighbor's closet as is the inhabitant of a smaller community. The difference between a closet skeleton and a scandal, in a small town, is that the former is examined behind barns by small groups who converse over it in whispers, while the latter is looked upon by everyone, on the main street, and discussed in shouts from rooftops.

The small-town paradox can be put bluntly: Everyone in Peyton Place has a secret, and there are no secrets in Peyton Place. Tomas likes to think there are two kinds of people in the world: those with shells and those without. But in a town like Peyton Place everyone has a shell. And this is something he has to learn to accept, just as Allison ultimately comes to declare her love for "every part" of her home town. At the end of the day Peyton Place will take care of its own. Those nosy detectives and journalists from the big city be damned.

And this is what surprised me the most about the book. Of course it's no longer scandalous. In fact I'm not sure I really understand what all the fuss could have been about back in the day. Was it so groundbreaking? Fifty years after Dreiser? Or was it something about the mood of the 1950s that created such a reaction? I'm not sure, but the plain fact is that today it reads like a fairly typical Young Adult title, seasoned with a charming bit of nostalgia for a vanished past. Yes, lots of terrible things happen, but in the end the town just keeps on going. Like the seasons that are so constantly evoked, there is continuity in generational change. I can't think of another book so obsessed with the way parents shape the lives of their children. It's a bond that's stronger than place. Allison MacKenzie and Norman Page, for example, both leave Peyton Place for a while but come home to mom. We know Rodney Harrison will never amount to much just by looking at his dad. Ted Carter turns into his parents just as Allison follows in her mother's footsteps. Selena is different, of course, but we have the feeling she was born an adult.

At a time when traditional families are under such strain, and our very definition of family is changing so much, maybe this is the aspect of the book that is most nostalgic. And it's not just our sense of nostalgia. Metalious did, after all, set it in her own past (the late 1930s to mid 1940s). Which is another reason why I read it as being a novel for young people. Allison is clearly the central consciousness, and at heart this is a novel about a young girl growing up. Her world isn't innocent - there are plenty of snakes in the garden - but it does have a kind of moral simplicity and purity to it that is hardly diminished by the technical naiveté of the writing. The ending is as sappy as the Maine woods, but it works on the YA level. 

And is that so bad? It makes me think of the childlike vision of Charles Dickens, or how Stephen King identifies with a child's perspective to write his horror novels. It may be that all popular fiction succeeds by playing on chords of memory, returning each of us to a Peyton Place in our past where someone, maybe our first love, is waiting for us to come home, and where dreams and nightmares still come true.