A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Betty Smith, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn  (1943)

‘That was a three-tissue movie!’ an elderly American cousin exclaimed when she saw me reading a library copy of this book, back in the early 1970s. From about 1970 we had middle-aged and elderly Americans visiting every year, and we loved them. They were our parents’ first or second cousins, whose parents had emigrated in the early 1900s. We loved that they praised us (children and teenagers) all the time and seemed genuinely interested in our lives and our opinions. To say they were a breath of fresh air is an understatement. Glimmers of that sweet positivity illuminate A Tree Grows In Brooklyn from time to time, through a veil of grim living conditions and harsh relationships.

This story of Francie Nolan growing up in early-twentieth-century Brooklyn just after it had lost its fight not to be absorbed into the New York municipality, enthralled me on first reading,  and I bought it for myself some years later, lent it, never got it back, bought another copy and the same thing happened, until I eventually stumbled on an American hardback edition for E10 which is never leaving the house (although I fully expect that it will. Ah well. Books live in our hearts, not on our shelves.)

Francie’s mother, Katie,  is  from an Austrian background and her father, Johnny Nolan, is Irish; both are Catholic. Francie’s younger brother is Neeley; (everybody in Brooklyn, Smith says, has to have a first name that ends in a ‘y’ sound). The children are really proud not only that they were born in Brooklyn, but that their parents were born in Brooklyn too, which shows how ‘just off the boat’ immigrants were looked down on. But even though Johnny and Katie are second-generation, their lives haven’t improved substantially on those of their parents. Although it is set in the years from around 1905 to 1918, ATGIB first appeared in 1943, at a time of intense discussion about how the post-war world would eradicate poverty and want, and books that told the story of poor people battling low wages, poor accommodation and the prejudice of their ‘betters’, (even if set in an earlier period) found an eager readership. The Nolans are certainly poor although they strive after education; Katie’s mother tells her to always have the Bible (the King James, a bit implausibly for a Catholic born in nineteenth-century Austria. Where did she hear about it?) and Shakespeare in the house and to  read them to the children – which they do (This is not implausible. Working-class families were often great readers and readers-aloud too, and there were cheap editions of Shakespeare on sale everywhere from the late nineteenth century.) Johnny is a singing waiter but he has a drink problem, and it is Katie who really holds the family together with her meagre earnings as a cleaner. When Johnny comes in late at night from work, Katie sits up and they talk and talk into the small hours; Francie, as a child, hears them and feels happy and safe. Francie and Neeley are great pals, only a year between them, and their adventures unfold in the course of the book – they change school illegally, fight and make up with each other and with other children, score a free Christmas tree one memorable year, and  cope with everything from vaccination (a very good thing, their mother tells them, because it helps you to tell your right hand from your left) to their father’s premature death. There are good and bad teachers, good and bad policemen and good and bad shopkeepers. The background of minor characters is sometimes sketched in – the school nurse who routinely says unkind things about the ‘dirty’ children because she doesn’t want anyone to know she is from the slums herself, the local ‘girl’ in her thirties who is man-mad, Aunt Sissy who has four husbands and a lot of boyfriends, Aunt Evy who strives after respectability, the local saloon-owner, McGarrity, who falls in (unrequited, but appreciated) love with Katie after Johnny dies, the policeman McShane who has more success, and many more.

Readers of this blog will have grasped at this stage that I love books which describe the details of dwellings, food, clothes, streets and shops. Money is short and Katie is obliged to be inventive; she makes bread pudding from stale bread, sugar, water, cinnamon and a penny apple; stale bread also forms the basis of their dinners (crumbs mixed with onion, thyme and an egg, if eggs are cheap). Potatoes are boiled and fried; meat is always minced to make it go further. Graham-crackers (digestive biscuits)-with-whipped cream is a very rare treat served with coffee at Canarsie or Coney Island. The Nolans live in a ‘railroad’ apartment, where four rooms lead into each other like railway carriages; the kitchen looks out on the backyard and the parlour or The Room (as the ‘good room’ was also called in Irish country dwellings) gives onto the street; in-between, two bedrooms lead into one another. (There is a sink in the kitchen, but the communal toilet is on the landing.) These were purpose-built flats, not converted Georgian houses like Dublin tenements, and municipal regulations ensured that there would be internal windows giving onto an airshaft – an open space for air surrounded on all four sides by other flats, with a bottom which couldn’t be reached by anyone. Duke Ellington’s ‘Harlem Air Shaft’ is a lyrical musical composition based on the tantalizing sounds that emanate from this space, but in Betty Smith’s account, fighting and shouting and groans of pain are the noises heard. And all kinds of things are thrown into the airshaft, so that in hot weather, it sends up an awful stench.

A few blogs ago I wrote about the Colliers Junior Classics and it strikes me now that there is no extract from this key American novel in any of those volumes. This might be because ATGIB has a lot of what used to be called ‘adult content’ – even in the world seen through a child’s eyes. It might also be because it describes, unflinchingly, ethnic divisions in the early 20th century city in a way that was at odds with the Colliers’ multi-racial optimism . The poor people of Brooklyn own nothing but their labour and have very little formal education, and therefore cling with fierce loyalty to the languages, customs and habits that they have brought from various parts of Europe. The Irish, Germans/Austrian, Italian and Jewish (east European) communities are each separately convinced of their superiority over all the others, and when people (children and adults) of different ethnicities meet in workplaces and schools and in street games, confrontations  are on a scale from severe teasing to physical violence. But prejudices can be overcome, and there is sometimes grudging respect for someone from a different tribe who behaves decently or reasonably.

Smith wrote a number of other books too, all set in Brooklyn, all with the same vivid descriptions of everyday life, including the poignantTomorrow Will Be Better (1948), which is about the young working life and marriage of Margy, the only child of an ill-matched, quarrelsome couple. It is set in the 1920s and the following passage is typical of the writing. The young office workers, including Margy and her friend Reenie, are tidying their hair and putting on lipstick at the long bathroom mirrors before they go home in the evening, when Reenie tells them mischievously that her mother used to say that there was a devil behind every looking-glass:

There was a small pause while the lined-up girls froze in their actions. Eyes travelled along the mirrors to Reenie. They were one – held tenuously by an old folk saying most of them had heard at home. Then the thread snapped and there was chatter and head-tossing and little scented clouds as puffs were banged against noses and made to give up the last fractional gramme of powder.

Tomorrow Will Be Better is sad but not depressing; it concludes on a note of hope. Smith wrote two other novels, Maggie-Now and Joy in the Morning, which I haven’t re-read but parts of which have stuck in my mind for nearly half a century.

These books have their faults – sometimes Smith explains characters’ motivations too much, and she can be an impatient writer, who rushes to a resolution of conflicts and situations that seems to sacrifice realism to – a kind of magic, is the best way of putting it. (Maybe she’s a magic realist? That has never struck me before.) But her books are full of heart and humanity and are, above all, hugely absorbing, immersive worlds. They never stay long out of print.

Final word: our American cousins who were 60 and older in the 1970s were born and reared in working-class neighbourhoods very like the one described in ATGIB, in Boston, New York and the Twin Cities, Minnesota. When my mother (born in Ireland in 1926) read Smith’s books around the same time I did, she found it hard to believe that Irish-Americans could have ever been so poor. What was the point of emigrating if you were just transferring your poverty from one side of the Atlantic to the other? That question was never, needless to say, raised with the American cousins.

Betty Smith, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn (Philadelphia: Blakiston 1943) republished many, many times.

_____________Tomorrow Will Be Better  (not sure of original publisher, 1948: but republished by HarperCollins 2020.)

(The film of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn was made in 1945, and directed by Elia Kazan, with Dorothy McGuire and Joan Blondell, and Peggy Ann Garner as Francie. I just googled it. )

CLEAR CLASSICS BLOG

I’m Caitriona Clear, enjoying this weekly exploration of my favourite books, especially the mid-20th-century ones. Keep watching the skies, as they used to say on Taken, the sci-fi TV series not the film.