Blockbuster Feminism: Peyton Place

(Grace Metalious rejected the formal studio photograph publishers provided choosing instead, a photo by local New Hampshire photographer Larry Smith for the book jacket of Peyton Place - 1956, Larry Smith, Laconia Evening Citizen)

In December 1956, a few months after the publication of her novel Peyton Place, Grace Metalious was invited to appear on television’s hottest new talk show, Night Beat. The brainchild of Ted Yates and Mike Wallace, whose irreverent and confrontational interviewing style quickly earned him the nickname “Mike Malice”, Night Beat pioneered late night programming pulling into televisions’ orbit millions of viewers eager to watch the smouldering Wallace interrogate the rich and the famous. “What Yates persuaded me we should do on Night Beat,” Wallace later recalled, “was to hurl a thunderbolt into that smug and placid world” of television news journalism and, by extension, the tepid topics they covered. That night they hurled Grace Metalious.

Nervous and uneasy, Grace felt especially vulnerable under the Night Beat gaze, not only because of its hard-hitting reputation but because the show was recorded live: an unedited hour under tight camera closeups, stark backgrounds, and a one-on-one exchange with Mr. Malice. As she takes her seat, Klieg lights come up almost immediately, wrapping her face in blinding, stark white illumination. Her new boyfriend, T. J. Martin, hides below her chair. Wallace lights a cigarette, slapping the smoke toward his guest like a B movie police interrogation. Already uncomfortable in the requisite panty girdle and skirt that replaced her comfortable dungarees and flannel shirt, Grace wilts under the leering gaze of her host:

“I thought your book was basic and carnal,” Wallace sneers, his cigarette stabbing the bluish air.

“You did, huh?” Grace squeaked

“What gives you the right to pry and hold your neighbours up to ridicule?” Graces’ eyes moistened.

Poised off-stage in her Schiffli-embroidered dress, fashion model Jackie Susann watched in fascination and horror as Wallace hammered away at America’s most “sexsational ” authoress. As Barbara Seaman tells the story, Susann prayed for divine intervention. “Don’t let this woman cry in front of millions of people,” Jackie pleaded. “Get her through this show, God, and I won’t smoke another cigarette tonight.” Grace plays with her ponytail, she twitches, pulls at her skirt; but she does not cry. Then, suddenly, she alters course temporarily rattling Wallace by calling him by his hated birth name. “Myron” she taunts, “tell the audience how many times you’ve been married.” Taboo, even on late night television, Wallace is speechless and angry. He refuses to talk about his three divorces.

No longer the orphans of academia, bestselling novels have attracted serious scholarly attention, their popularity no longer suspect but rather a pointed justification for analysis and inquiry. For social historians on the trail of the ordinary and everyday bestsellers provide an especially productive point of entry into the prosaic, calling attention not only to practices of leisure and readerly desire but to the unquiet habits of fans and detractors alike. “Literary texts,” the critic Terry Eagleton famously taught us, "do not exist on bookshelves, they are processes of signification materialized only in the practice of reading.” And no book is ever read more enthusiastically than the latest bestseller.

Still, texts are more than words on a printed page. Big sellers are also big talk pulling into polite conversation and onto the national imaginary the open secrets of the street, the kitchen, and conversations forged “between you and me.” A “literary H-bomb” that scandalized America, more people read Peyton Place than any other work of fiction up to that time. One in 29 Americans bought the book, countless others borrowed or stole it and we can only imagine how many flipped through its pages digging out bits of plot, pieces of characters, and quotable lines. Yet, to pick up old copies of Peyton Place is to glimpse the other side of print culture, the verbal pentimento that is also and always wedged beneath its dogeared pages: words fiercely underlined, marginalia fixed with red stars, recognition and disapproval uttered in flaming exclamation points. “Sheila!” — Joanie B. scribbles on page 149, “we need to talk!” Two images emerge from the fan letters and memories of readers. The first is that of a solitary figure reading Peyton Place at night, usually with a flashlight under the covers. The second is that of a knot of women or pair of teenagers, huddled together in excited speech.

It is this long-remembered whiff of salaciousness no doubt that keeps Peyton Place in the air of public memory, but we forget the extent to which the winds of controversy took shape in the excitable speech that conjoined “dirty” novel with scandalous “New England wife and mother of three,” a description that circulated in tandem with the name Grace Metalious. We forget, in other words, that the literary enfranchisement of Metalious was achieved, at least in part, by the seemingly incongruous coupling of a sexually candid book with a respectable housewife — a schoolteachers wife no less — from America’s most “puritanical” hinterlands. Today, Grace Metalious is all but forgotten, her remarkable achievement almost erased from the cultural literary landscape, an uncoupling few could have imagined at the time. Between 1956 and 1964, Grace Metalious became a household word, her name and image as famous and controversial a text as the novel she wrote.

There are, as historian Nancy Hewitt aptly put it, “no permanent waves” of feminist struggle, no great surges of liberation superseding one another amidst a sea of inaction and silence.  Like all social movements, “second wave” feminism was a mélange of notions, ideas, emotions, needs, aspirations, ambitions, and hopes that were always “in the air” commingling, overlapping, and intersecting, as Hewitt reminds us, with a diverse range of progressive moves and acts. We don’t often think of scandalous talk as one of these acts and yet what invites more intensive collective commentary or sets into motion with more force the ordinary affects of life — that sentient realm of expectation and desire that  “catch people up in something that feels like something?”. Quite suddenly, it seemed, the problem that had no name grew immanent in the nooks and crannies of everyday life, exerting a certain flash of recognition among those on the doleful fringes of public life, came to ground in the utterance of a name, the repetition of a story, the effort to say something.

Certainly, this is part of Peyton Place’s legacy as a bestseller and part of Grace Metalious’s historical meaning as a writer. In the years before the “revolutionary” 60s, feminism was indeed “in the air”, winning for itself a public place in many small acts and unsure moves as readers excitedly spoke of this, that, and the outrageous Peyton Place — “can you believe” — written by a mother of three and the wife of a New England school teacher. “Did you hear that she was divorced again?”

- the above is an edited extract from Must Read: Rediscovering American Bestsellers edited by Sarah Churchwell and Thomas Ruys Smith. If you liked what you read then you must read the rest of the chapter on Peyton Place and Grace Metalious here. It really is brilliant.

Today we will be giving away a copy of Must Read: Rediscovering American Bestsellers on our twitter. All you have to do is tell us what your favourite American bestseller is. The winner will be chosen at random. Click here to join in the fun.

Jenny Tighe

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