A Novel Marketplace by Brier Evan;

Author:Brier, Evan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2019-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

From Novel to Blockbuster: Peyton Place and the Narrative of Cultural Decline

Peyton Place (1956), Grace Metalious’s scandalous first novel, was an immediate and unprecedented commercial success. At a time when first novels typically sold a total of 2,000 copies, it sold 60,000 copies in the first ten days of its official release and 104,000 copies in its first month. It was the second-best-selling novel of 1956 despite not arriving in bookstores until September 24 of that year, and it went on to be the bestselling novel of 1957 as well, spending a total of 59 weeks at the top of the New York Times best-seller list. That this is, in a sense, only the first part of the story of Peyton Place—it was soon followed by various multimedia attempts to capitalize on its fame that make the marketing of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit seem quaint and that, in terms of audience, dwarfed the success of the novel itself—should not obscure the extent of this initial popularity. Peyton Place became, in its time, the best-selling novel of the twentieth century (Cameron viii).

In the decade in which American publishing grew out of its beginnings as a cottage industry, Peyton Place became a kind of cottage industry unto itself, and it produced two sets of offshoots. One is the series of multimedia exploitations (movies, a literary sequel, two prime-time television series, and several television movies), which seem to fulfill the commercial promise of corporate synergy that the story of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit anticipates. The second set, to which much of this chapter will be devoted, has been produced not by the “culture industry” but by the culture-analyzing industry: the novel’s unprecedented success brought with it inevitable and almost immediate efforts to interpret that success. And in the 1950s, culture critics did not have to look far for an interpretation of the Peyton Place phenomenon. This was, as this book has shown throughout, a golden age for narratives of cultural decline. The form of these narratives varied—essays by Macdonald and others of the Partisan Review set, and novels by the likes of Bradbury and Bowles—and so too did the terminology—“kitsch,” “masscult,” and the “culture industry” all being variants of the same phenomenon—but the essential story of superior culture for the few threatened by encroaching culture for the masses remained unchanged. Even The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, distinguished by its refusal to demonize the corporation, includes a version of this narrative, as the promise of more money leads Tom Rath to consider leaving his job with the Schanenhauser Foundation for one at a television network. Such narratives of decline were not new to the 1950s: as Patrick Brantlinger shows, laments about the spread of culture date back at least as far as the Roman Empire. But in the context of Cold War fears of totalitarianism and the rise of television, on the one hand, and the increase in college-educated consumers and the rise of the

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