Grace Metalious - Peyton Place

 

Barse Miller,   Factory Town, 1946 (detail)

Grace Metalious apparently taught herself how to write novels by reading them - and I'm guessing that Thackery's "Vanity Fair"was near the top of her list.  It has the same kind of sharp eyed, but kindly narrator  -  a smart, opportunistic, upwardly mobile young woman as its protagonist.- and a somewhat global picture of an entire society.

Her husband reports that the story came to her in the middle of the night and she kept him awake until dawn telling it to him.  I believe that. She has  the gift of total immersion into her imagination. But that probably also  made her awkward in real life, accounting  for her disastrous personal life and early death.

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I came to Peyton Place because one  review of  Strout’s “Amy and Isabelle”suggested that it was the better novel.  The resemblance is startling.  Both stories center around a single mother who pretends she’s a widow as she raises a teenage daughter in a small New England mill town. Both connect their lives to the local Congregationalist church, as well as the changing seasons of the harsh climate.  And both daughters have an interest in literature- much like, presumably, the two authors.

But  Allison’s mom, who’s “built like a brick shit-house”, has already worked her way up to the middle class, while Amy’s mom, who’s more plain looking, is still trying to get there.  So Metalious includes the entire community in her story, while Strout is more claustrophobic and female centric.  Allison’s mom dates the superintendent of schools, while Amy is raped by a substitute math teacher.

And eerily, both novels have a climatic scene where Mom invites her chosen mate over for dinner - and things do not go as planned. 

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Peyton Place is a cultural shorthand for a seemingly calm, respectable place that hides dark secrets, hypocrisy, and complicated scandals just beneath the surface. —— Longman Dictionary

The narrator often reminds us that people are keen to hide whatever  truth will make them look bad  to the community. So Constance McKenzie prefers to be known as a widow rather than as the  gold digging mistress of a wealthy man who died.

But it’s not like that’s a mystery which the story must resolve. Her real story is told upfront … there was no drama to the revelation.

What’s more important in this novel is the raw sexuality suggested by the very first lines of chapter one:

Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay. ..

And there’s no suggestion that this is peculiar to Peyton Place. It’s more like the narrator’s  idea of the human condition. As David, the intellectual mouthpiece in the story tells us, sexual drive is not just  another physical need —- it’s as all consuming as  the instinct for self preservation.

But there’s much that is peculiar to a small New England factory town - and even more than an exploration of human sexuality from a woman’s perspective, this might be called an “American scene novel, similar to the painting shown above.  And like that kind of painting, it’s at the margins of modernism in the arts, so its critical response has not matched its popularity.

You could hardly call it sentimental, but it is suffused with an aromatic energy as the seasons turn with three  pairs of lovers.  Will any of them live happily ever after?  Halfway through the novel, I wouldn’t bet on it.

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Notes:

*We’ve  known from early on that Rodney Harrington was going to die  in a car crash that involved women and alcohol. That’s who he was.  And we've been told many times that the town can't wait for something  bad to happen to his father, Leslie,  the heavy handed, tightfisted mogul who loves him.  So when  Rodney steps on the gas to take his date back to her apartment for sex, we know it will not end well. 

Five words are all that's needed to tell  us what happened. No gory description of the crash - and nothing at all to say about how Leslie takes the news.  What we get instead is many pages detailing  a town meeting where Leslie's forever anti-zoning agenda is soundly defeated - but nobody rubs it in - and the novel’s  good  guy articulates that. He's suffered enough, and the community knows that. And curiously even Selene, the poor girl making good, takes his side, even though she’s already sold all the sheep that might have used an out-of-code sheep shed. (he later returns the favors as foreman of the jury that acquits her of murder)

*the question does arise: is this novel primarily about its namesake, the  town of Peyton place ( not the original title, BTW) - or is it about the young woman who moves out to become a writer in New York City. Many pages are devoted to a variety of characters who have nothing to do with her, including the alcoholic handyman. But the final pages are all about her coming of age, as a woman and writer.

The story ends as she comes to terms with leaving the place that is so much a part of her. So I guess they are inseparable. BTW, the name of her book was”Samuel’s Castle”, referring to Samuel Peyton, an African slave who escaped to France, became wealthy, returned to Boston, and rejected by its blue blood society, built a castle on a hill above what would later become the town named after him. 

American racism is not a major theme in this book - but it’s not absent.  As one local put it: “ a town named - for a friggin nigger”

*****

“Peyton Placei is widely classified as popular fiction or commercial literature rather than high literary art, though critics note its realistic and gritty portrayals of small-town life.”… Google AI

Probably because it is evident that the author did not have the benefit of a college education in English literature.

 I don’t miss that one little bit.   She was taught by what she read.