IN PRAISE OF THOMAS TRYON'S HARVEST HOME
Legend has it that Otto Preminger was so abusive to Thomas Tryon, the star of Preminger’s film The Cardinal, that Tryon gave up acting after completing the film. If so, fans of American popular fiction ought to be grateful to Preminger, for, after leaving the film industry, Tryon took up his pen and began writing bestselling novels. Tryon’s writing career also owes something to author Ira Levin. In Paperbacks From Hell, his seminal work on the rise of horror fiction in America, author Grady Hendryx, traces the horror boom to a single book, Levin’s novel Rosemary’s Baby. Prior to Rosemary’s Baby, horror novels were treated as second- or even third-class citizens of the publishing world. Reputable publishers rarely handled them. But by situating his story in the high-class world of New York’s artistic set, and by winning blurbs from serious literary authors such as Truman Capote, Levin managed to almost single-handedly make the genre commercially viable if still not quite respectable. The careers of William Peter Blatty, Stephen King, Anne Rice, and many others might never have blossomed if not for Rosemary’s Baby.
In 1971, four years after the publication of Rosemary’s Baby, two horror novels made the year-end list of the country’s ten bestselling hardbound novels. One was Blatty’s now iconic The Exorcist. The other was, well, The Other, Thomas Tryon’s debut novel, which was published in the same month as The Exorcist. If The Other is mostly forgotten these days it may be because – unlike The Godfather, The Exorcist, Jaws, and other bestsellers of the era – it didn’t give rise to a great film. The film version is dull and forgettable. As a novel, The Other has languished in obscurity for decades. In 2012 The New York Review of Books Classics series published a new edition of the novel that at least put it back into print but doesn’t seem to have gained it a lot of new fans. The Other is a major work of twentieth-century American horror fiction but, in my opinion, Tryon’s follow-up to it, Harvest Home, is even better. Harvest Home sold well upon publication and made the New York Times bestseller list for several weeks, but it didn’t become a juggernaut like Jaws or The Godfather. It was used as the source of a hard-to-find 1978 TV movie called The Dark Secret of Harvest Home. The book appears to have had an influence on Stephen King. In one of King’s first essays for a national publication, which ran in the New York Times of October 24, 1976, he wrote:
It isn’t a great book, not a great horror novel, not even a great suspense novel. My own editor at Doubleday once told me that his fingers itched to get at it and cut out the deadwood; my guess is that Tryon’s editor at Knopf experienced a similar itch in his own extremities and was rebuffed by Tryon. Rightly so, maybe. Never mind the best seller list. Mind this, instead: Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, it is a true book; it is an honest book in the sense that it says exactly what Tryon wanted to say. And if what he wanted to say wasn’t exactly Miltonian, it does have this going for it: in forty years, when most of us are underground, there will still be a routine rebinding once a year for the library copies of “Harvest Home,” and, I hope, for “’Salem’s Lot.”
King’s famous short story “Children of the Corn” was almost certainly inspired by Tryon’s novel, which also uses the cultivation of corn as a central plot device. Corn also figures prominently in King’s stories “Secret Window, Secret Garden” and “1922.” In King’s 1992 novel Gerald’s Game, a key character is afflicted with acromegaly, a disease which plays an important role in Harvest Home as well. As far as I know, Harvest Home was the first popular novel to deal with the disease. A Google search of “acromegaly in fiction” didn’t turn up any earlier examples.
If anything, I’m more fond of the novel than King is. I enjoy the leisurely pace of the book’s first 300 pages or so and am glad that no editor got his eager hands on them. Nowadays, thrillers, especially in the horror genre, seem to be contrived to give you a nerve-jangling jolt every twenty pages or so. The result is that the novels are less effective at providing genuine terror. The jolts become so commonplace as to become dull. The horror of the late sixties and seventies was different. Rosemary’s Baby isn’t filled with sudden horrifying surprises. Much of the book deals with the mundane details of Rosemary’s life as a sixties housewife: house-hunting with her husband Guy, doing the laundry in the basement of her New York apartment building, visiting with neighbors, furnishing her new home, fixing meals. The book’s ultimate horror is made all the more horrible because of the seeming normality of much that comes before it. Even The Exorcistbuilds its suspense very slowly, layering on lots of mundane details about life in upper-crust Georgetown circa 1970. In Harvest Home, Tryon takes this strategy to the limit. The first three quarters of the book are largely devoted to lovingly describing the town of Cornwall Coombs, its oddball citizens and their many strange and Druidic customs. This part of the book could be mistaken for an Updike novel about infidelity and loss of religious faith in the suburbs if it had a little more sex and angst in it. None of this is terribly frightening. The book doesn’t become truly terrifying until about the final fifty pages, at which point Tryon lovingly repays the reader’s patience by delivering an unforgettable final act. The book’s coda is reminiscent of the terrifying final pages of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust.
Harvest Home and Ira Levin’s much better-known The Stepford Wives are two sides of the same coin. In Stepford, our female protagonist moves with her husband and children from New York City to an unsettlingly peaceful Connecticut town whose male denizens are hiding a high-tech futuristic secret. Terror ensues for the woman. In Harvest Home, our male protagonist moves with his wife and daughter from New York City to an unsettlingly peaceful Connecticut town whose female denizens are hiding an ancient low-tech secret. Terror ensues for the man. The Stepford Wives is a pallid 120-page spoof of feminism and the resistance to it. It reads like a film synopsis and has twice been made into a big-budget Hollywood film, neither of which is much good. Nonetheless Levin’s title has entered the American language as a synonym for a certain type of vapid trophy wife, more concerned with improving her floors than her mind, with pleasing her husband than with fulfilling her own potential.
Harvest Home, on the other hand is a 415-page masterwork of horror. It reads like a real novel, indeed like an Updike novel, as mentioned earlier, and may have partially inspired The Witches of Eastwick. It is well-written, eerie, and beautifully evokes its uncanny milieu. It can be read as an anti-feminist tract because the matriarchal society it describes is rotten to the core. But it doesn’t have to be read that way. It can also be viewed as an examination of the way that any group that long holds power over another eventually becomes corrupt and evil. It is a much more well-rounded portrait of small-town American life than you’ll find in The Stepford Wives. There are no sympathetic male characters in Stepford(unless you count little boys). Harvest Home has both sympathetic female characters (especially Grace Everdeen, whose murder is one of the central mysteries of the story) and monstrous ones. Its male characters also run the gamut from decent to horrible. Though it has little in common with Rosemary’s Baby, it appears, like almost all horror novels of the era, to have been influenced by it. Like Rosemary’s Baby, Harvest Home includes a scene of ritualistic rape involving a group of fanatic cultists.
Even in the seventies, Harvest Home wasn’t famous enough to qualify as a cultural landmark. But it deserves to be read today not only because it is a fine novel but also because it captures a lot of the anxieties that characterized America in the seventies: fear of sexual liberation, fear of familial breakdown, fear of female empowerment, the growing divide between city dwellers and country dwellers, fear of ecological disaster, distrust of central authority.
Tryon died of stomach cancer in 1991, when he was only 65 years old. He left behind eight novels and two collections of novellas. Horror fiction was only one of his literary strengths. He also produced tales about the dark side of Hollywood stardom, the first two installments of what was intended to be a trilogy of historical novels, a couple of bildungsroman, and at least one young-adult novel. He was neither a great actor nor a great writer, but he was a serious craftsman in both trades and he left an interesting mark on twentieth-century pop culture. Harvest Home is as close as he came to producing a genuine American masterpiece. It is a much better portrait of small-town American life than you will find in many much better-known novels such as William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy or Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt, one of which lays on the sentimentality a bit too heavily and the other of which trowels on the satire.
After giving up his film career, Tryon, a gay man, was able to leave behind the celluloid closet. He lived the rest of his life without taking any great pains to hide his homosexuality. Too often, queer writers have been shunted into the ghettos of the literary world, published only by specialty presses in small editions, even when they weren’t writing about LGBTQ subject matter. Along with Gore Vidal and Truman Capote, Tryon was one of the few gay writers of his era who was able to break into the bestseller lists as long ago as 1971, when mainstream publishing was still a very hostile place for gays and lesbians. Harvest Home is far and away his best work, and it deserves to be better remembered.