Many critics have seen Betty Smith’s 1943 novel, ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’ in different shades of light. To some, it is the novel that best represents America, the novel that can rightly be called “great” both in its influence and in the skill of its creation, a story of striving, a story of social change. Alas, for me the book means none of these things. I like ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’ probably for all the wrong reasons. And I wish Betty Smith was alive today so that I could write to her and tell her I see in her novel, things the other critics have missed. I would have told her how much I love the opening pages in which she paints a world I glimpsed as a child, a world I had overheard my parents describe about their childhood and a world my grandmother used to turn into bedtime stories about growing up in the early years of the last century. I would also tell Betty Smith that I love her book because Francie Nolan is a bookworm.
And I know, Betty Smith would have sent me a reply. For she writes in the preface of the Popular Library edition of her book she always answers all the letters her fans send her even when she knows she should spend that time working on her next book. “..I remember how once as a child I read a book which appealed to me deeply and I wrote my heart out in a letter to the famous author,” says Smith. “He never answered. I was hurt and ashamed that my heart had been rejected. I vowed then to try to write a better book than he when I grew up and answer any letters I got about it. So I answer each letter...sometimes it gets to be a chore and I want to give up. But then I remember I may hurt someone...so I keep on answering the letters...”
These words together with her confession of being indebted to “chance acquaintances on trains and in buses for exchanged confidences about the everlasting varieties of life” and to a person who caused her much anguish because the grief made her “grow up emotionally...” prepare you for the heartbreaking and honest story on the pages ahead.
Although the story begins in a city in New York in the summer of 1912, the characters and their dreams continue to live among us two decades into the 21st century. Here is how Smith introduces the tree whose kinsmen still grow not only in Brooklyn but in every part of the world where life is anything but a bed or roses. “You took a walk on a Sunday afternoon and came to a nice neighborhood, very refined. You saw one of these trees through the iron gate leading to someone’s yard and you knew that soon that section of Brooklyn would get to be a tenement district. The tree knew. It came there first. Afterwards poor foreigners seeped in and the quiet old brownstone houses were hacked up into flats, feather beds were pushed out on the window sills to air and the Tree of Heaven flourished. That was the kind of tree it was. It liked poor people.
“That was the kind of tree in Francie’s yard. Its umbrellas curled over, around and under her third-floor fire escape. An eleven-year-old girl sitting on this fire escape could imagine that she was living in a tree. That was what Francie imagined every Saturday afternoon in summer.”
Haven’t we all done this when we were kids, imagined our living room is a stormy ocean, turned the concrete backyard into a mighty jungle, daydreamed of adventures with Sindbad in far off places...and yet, the world Francie lives in is almost as bad as the world in Steinbeck’s ‘Grapes of Wrath’. Francie’s practical and ambitious mother, works as a janitor in a tenement building while her warm and charming father wastes his life on alcohol. The entire neighbourhood is so poor, the children spend their Saturdays selling junk, to give half of what they earn to their parents and the rest to buy “five cents worth of peppermint wafers” in a nickel-and-dime store in Broadway. The adults make barely enough money to pay the rent or pay for stale bread. When food runs out Francie’s mother creates a game for them to play in which Francie and her brother must pretend they are explorers at the North Pole trapped by a blizzard in a cave with little to eat.
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| Betty Smith |
But as the tree grows despite people trying to cut it down, where it is not wanted, on the rough sidewalks of Brooklyn where nothing else grows, Francie too grows up, overcoming the many obstacles that hinder her from blossoming into the woman she finally becomes. She escapes the poverty and the squalor and survives because of one redeeming habit; she reads. She thinks that all the books in the world are in the little old shabby library near her home and she reads a book a day, in alphabetical order, not even skipping the dry ones. “She had been reading a book a day for a long time now, and she was still in the ‘B’s...some of the reading had been wonderful and she planned to read all the books over again when she had finished with the Z’s.”
Apart from the books in the library, there was a rule her mother had made following the instructions of Francie’s illiterate grandmother who says the way out of their poverty stricken life is by teaching the next generations to read. According to the rule, Francie and her brother must read a page of the Bible and a page from Shakespeare everyday before they went to bed. “To save time, Neeley read the Bible page and Francie read from Shakespeare. They had been reading for six years and were halfway through the Bible and up to Macbeth in Shakespeare’s complete works.”
Finally, Francie who might be a younger sister of Joe March of ‘Little Women’ or Anne of Green Gables, but whose life is harsher than her predecessors, (she gives a fake address to enter a good school, loses her father when he was just 35, lies about her age to get a job, works hard to keep her family alive) moves a notch higher in the social ladder. Francie leaves Brooklyn looking at the tree, cut down by people but growing again and whispers to a little girl she sees, ‘Good-bye, Francie.’
And we end up turning the last page, with the uncanny feeling no matter what our backgrounds are, or in which century we live in, we cannot but fail to recognize ourselves within the pages of Smith’s semi autobiographical novel. Through Francie’s journey, we realize as Smith wrote elsewhere, “To live, to struggle, to be in love with life, in love with all life holds, joyful or sorrowful, is fulfillment.”
Let this essay be a testament that Betty Smith’s vow was fulfilled. She has written a book hundred thousand times “better than he,” whoever he might have been.
