Peyton Place

OPEN SECRETS: REREADING PEYTON PLACE

OPEN SECRETS: 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...