I think he may have finally checked out of the real world and is floundering around somewhere in the town of Peyton Place. I'm beginning to be concerned for his well being -- what with all those suburban floozies lurching around.
Please someone, save Davey from himself before, like Grace Metalious, his success busts up his "ambitious life" and he drinks himself to death at 45 -- or however old he is.
Cracking the Shells
By David Brooks
The New York Times
Fifty years ago, Grace Metalious touched a cultural nerve. She published “Peyton Place,” about the scandals, betrayals and lusts that lurk beneath the placid surface of a New England small town. “Peyton Place” became the best-selling novel in American history up to that time. It inspired a movie, a TV show and, as Leonard Cassuto notes in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the modern soap opera as we know it.
When critics write about “Peyton Place” today, they tend to see it as a premonition of the glorious achievements of the 1960’s. Some describe it as an early revolt against the repressive bourgeois order of 1950’s suburbia. But “Peyton Place” was set in a rural town without radio, TV or much consumerism — with farms and outhouses instead of split-levels. This was the sort of supposedly quaint rural community people in the 1950’s were trying to get out of in order to flee to the suburbs.
Others see “Peyton Place” as a precursor to feminism and the baby boomers’ invention of the female orgasm, which apparently took place at Woodstock. It’s true that much of the action in the novel is initiated by strong women. But Metalious treats their strength and sexuality as obvious features of human society, and clearly rejects the notion that to be a woman is to be a member of a cause or the sisterhood collective.
In truth, the first striking fact about the book is that in its pages the personal is not political. After the class consciousness of the 1930’s, and the national solidarity of the 1940’s, Americans in the 1950’s were inclined to define problems in moral and psychological terms, not as the products of economic or political forces.
And a big anxiety of the age was the fear of conformity. This was expressed in books about other-directed personalities, lonely crowds and Organization Men, not to mention all those movies in which James Dean, Gary Cooper or Gregory Peck bravely stood apart from the mob.
Tasting affluence, worried about the power of advertising, troubled by pervasive racism, Americans fixated on the power of social pressure, and the way individual autonomy could be inhibited by the judgments of the crowd.
This is what “Peyton Place” is about. It’s about the fear of being talked about in a small town, and how people act and lie to themselves in order to avoid being the subject of gossip.
One woman leads a life of frigid respectability because she’s afraid that if she loosens up people will discover she is not a widow; the father of her daughter was in fact a married man with whom she was having an affair. Another character fakes war medals to hide his battle fatigue.
“Peyton Place” is what George Orwell called a good bad book because it doesn’t just instruct readers to discover their authentic selves so they can be free to be you and me. That bit of naïveté wouldn’t become popular until the 1970’s, a more innocent decade than the 1950’s. Metalious reminds readers that some people’s authentic selves are truly rotten. The most authentic character in the book rapes his stepdaughter.
Metalious’s core message is not that everybody can be good, but that everybody should engage in the high-risk search for unpleasant truths. She has her favorite character define two kinds of people: “Those who manufactured and maintained tedious, expensive shells, and those who did not. Those who did, lived in constant terror lest the shells of their own making crack open to display the weakness that was underneath, and those who did not were either crushed or toughened.”
This message obviously hit home in the 1950’s. The biggest change between then and now is that the whole tradition of moral and cultural commentary, so prevalent then, has been swallowed up by politics. Today, it’s hard to find writers who define social problems as matters of intellectual rigor — at least since Christopher Lasch and Allan Bloom died. Now we have our moral arguments by proxy, by debating who is more hateful, Bush or Clinton, or whether Terri Schiavo should live or die.
In today’s debates the battle lines are more clearly drawn, and since people are organized into factions, there’s actually more conformity and complacency than even in the 1950’s.
That’s why there remains something bracing and clear-eyed about Grace Metalious, who only wrote soap operas — and lived them. The success of “Peyton Place” busted up her ambitious life and she drank herself to death at age 39.
Photo credit: David Brooks. (The New York Times)
Technorati tags: David Brooks, The New York Times, Grace Metalious, Peyton Place, Feminism, Social Change, Politics, Government, commentary, news, op ed
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