Literary Context: A Weed in the Hothouse

Any biography has to be based on the assumption that the author is, indeed, not dead. After four years of research and writing, Betty Smith has come to life in my mind, and hopefully she will take life in the minds of my readers. This living Betty Smith, of course, has her limitations. She sometimes looks and acts a little like Carol Siri Johnson, and understands the world a little like Carol Siri Johnson. These are the inescapable limitations of biography, and with these in mind, perhaps a shadow of the true person will cast itself on the wall. Or perhaps the facts that I have supplied will allow every reader to imagine Betty Smith in his or her own image.

One thing that can help us, reader and writer, to differentiate Betty Smith from our own projected images, is remembering that Betty Smith's time was different from ours. Betty Smith is a person, yes, but she is also a product of her times. The Betty Smith that published her bestselling novel in 1943 could not have done so in 1923, when publishing was the purview of the privileged few, or in 1963, when the world had different things on its mind. Not that Betty Smith wouldn't have written: she probably still would have produced that massive text, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but it would be in a kitchen cabinet, or a cardboard box in the attic somewhere. One of her grandchildren would read that manuscript and say "this should be published some day," and then it would go back into that desk drawer or that cardboard box for the next generation, since no one is interested in the rambling of an old lady. But history was propitious for Betty Smith, her novel was published, and it led her to spend her adult life in a different world from the one in which she grew.

Harper & Brothers

Of primary importance in this biography is Smith's relationship with her publisher, Harper & Brothers. Harper & Brothers and its editors--Edward Aswell, Elizabeth Lawrence, Frank MacGregor, Jack Fischer, and Evan Thomas--were the kind older sister and brothers that Smith never had. Moreover, they were instrumental in the literary product that became the "Betty Smith," the public "Tree Lady" that is remembered by most people who grew up during the second world war. Harper & Brothers published her novels, even when she began to argue with them, and they pushed her to write until her final years. The personalities at the publishing firm and the inter-office memos are as much a part of this story as Betty Smith herself. As a reader in the archives and a researcher in life, I was able to see many different sides to her story. This is the way in which a contextualized biography can go beyond the mere "personal" to give a wider picture of the forces that create a literary and public figure.

The basic theory of this dissertation, then, is that literature occurs at the intersection of three variables, those variables being the life of the author, the context of history, and chance. When those variable coincide, i.e. Betty Smith plus 1943 plus Harper & Brothers, a text results. Conversely, if any of those variables had not happened, if Betty Smith had sat in a corner chair growling, if men had settled the moon in 1943, instead of going to war, or if Harper & Brothers had decided that, under no circumstances would they hire or publish women, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn would never have been published and the world would be the poorer for it.

Sentimental Literature

For those of you who have not read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, I urge you to do so. It is a beautiful and sad bildungsroman of a girl growing up in the tenements of turn-of-the-century Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Although it has acquired the reputation of being adolescent literature, let me assure you that few high school students in the United States could wade through its 430 pages. It is still read in Europe, and still provides Europeans with one picture of American city life. I read it when, in my twenties, I had just moved to Brooklyn and was making a daily commute on the crowded subway to Manhattan. Although A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was (and is) accused of being sentimental, the life that is portrayed on its pages is graphically recalled details of inner-city life, so that reading it, for me, was a powerful sentimental experience. Also, the academic reader can comfort him or herself with the thought that the text is sociologically valid and therefore justifiable. Doesn't sentimentality exist in the lives of the poor as elsewhere? One of the great beauties of Betty Smith's writing is the elevation of the quotidian to a transcendent gladness. The sadness of the novel comes from everyday losses.

Critical Theory

A critic's theory is often dictated by his or her subject matter. My theory, that "Betty Smith" is alive but made possible only through the convergence of three variables, personality, history, and chance, arose out of the study of Smith's work and life. Similarly, this dissertation will be paying special attention to those issues which were important in Betty Smith's work and life, on both the personal and the social levels. Smith's personal themes, which resound throughout her work, are her great love for her father and her grief at his death, her great ambivalence for her mother and her complex feminism, and her love for her children. The social themes which are necessarily a part of her text, since they were a part of her life, are poverty, abuse, and class.

The life and literature are treated separately in this dissertation because, from the beginning, I have viewed it as one step in the process of writing a full-length biography; the following chapters are the building blocks from which the final text will be constructed. I have imagined the chronology, which I have had to construct from the records, as the skeleton, and slowly I am adding the clay of fact to make a figure. I hope there are no neglected hollows in the present text, I hope that it is merely a smaller form of that which is to come. And if there are hollows, I hope my readers will inform me.

Leon Edel

In Writing Lives: Principia Biographica, one of Leon Edel's principals is that the biographer must discover the keys to the private mythology of the subject. He calls it "searching for the figure under the carpet [or] the private self-concept that guides a given life" (30). Edel's theory is that "the public facade is the mask behind which a private mythology is hidden," and it is the biographer's task to "sort out the themes and patterns, not dates and mundane calendar events which sort themselves" (30). When I first began this dissertation, I thought that Edel had described the way that his subject, Henry James, was to be approached, and that his words would not apply to me and Betty Smith. I thought Edel was too mystical, too symbolic. Smith, I thought, was a straightforward plebeian working-woman whose concerns were money, her children, and writing work that would communicate with the world. However, Edel's theory applies as much to her as it did James: behind the hard-working, chain-smoking mother who wrote a novel despite her poverty, are the dreams which motivate her actions. It may be presumptuous of a critic to say "I understand the inner life of this writer" but sometimes a critic, who does not have so much invested in the outward form of things, can see things that neither an artist nor her loved ones can see. That is another benefit of biography.

Edel writes that it is the biographer's difficult task of "becoming for a while that other person, even while remaining himself" (40). In a way, it is like being a psychoanalyst: the biographer must strain to keep his or her mind open to the texture of the experiences of the subject, while at the same time seeking for resonances with her own experiences. Both ways--being separate and identifying--can lead to insights. "To be cold as ice in appraisal, yet warm and human and understanding, this is the biographer's dilemma" writes Edel (41). The inevitable transference must be tempered with the material in the archives.

Consequently, when I began this project, I started with some faulty assumptions that I had to change along the way. Most of these pertained to Smith's interaction with Harper & Brothers: I saw the publisher as the big bad wolf, forcing her to change her story to appease the moral majority. Imagine my surprise when I came across a paragraph, early in Smith's correspondence with her publisher, in which she offers, unsolicited, to make those very changes that I had attributed to Harper & Brothers! I learned that, when writing a biography, it is important to keep an open mind for as long as possible, and to let all of the facts take their place before drawing conclusions. And if there's one thing I learned, it's that you can't make any assumptions about the publisher-writer contract. They're all different, they're all complex. And, of course, they change over time.

I cannot avoid the topic "autobiography" in a treatment of Smith. Two of her novels are unabashedly drawn from her life experiences, following the events in her life closely, and the other two are events pieced together from memory and the emotions resulting from two marriages. All four are, in a sense, performance pieces about her life. She wove in contemporaneous autobiographical events, like the strange soldier who appears, out of nowhere, at the end of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, asks Francie to marry him, then abandons her to marry his childhood sweetheart. Although it is obvious, it was not until late in the dissertation-writing process that I woke up one morning, saying to myself: "that's Bob Finch! He did that to her, just as she was writing this!" Smith never could separate her fiction from her life.

In regard to her personal myths, I was surprised to discover how much her search for her dead father had influenced her life. In a way, it was responsible for her divorcing her hard-driving and ambitious husband George Smith; it was responsible for her search for solace in the writing of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; it was responsible for her divorce from the kind Joe Jones; it was responsible for her marriage to a confirmed and very sick alcoholic, Bob Finch. Also, her complex relations with her mother formed a kind of feminism not often found in feminist texts. Smith had a great ambivalence, distrust and sometimes hatred of women, but that stemmed from that assumption that women are the power structure, the leaders, the strong ones, that women are superior to men. This aspect of her personality allowed her to occupy the powerful position she created for herself and to have an elemental confidence in her actions at all times. What was special to Betty Smith is the same thing that is special to Francie Nolan: it is her heroic aspirations that made her want to tell her tale.

Paul Lauter, Resa Dudovitz and Nina Baym

Smith found a receptive audience for her tale in the 1940s, but over the decades her audience has eroded, and now she is in danger of being forgotten; "Betty Smith" is an unknown name in the academic world. Paul Lauter writes that "in the twenties processes were set in motion that virtually eliminated black, white female, and all working-class writers from the canon" (436). Smith is one of the casualties of this systematic exclusion, on two grounds: she is from the working-class, and she is female. As Resa Dudovitz writes in The Myth of Superwoman: Women's Bestsellers in France and the United States,

Serious consideration of bestselling women's fiction which falls outside the area of formula fiction is still quite minimal despite that fact that women's fiction in all its many forms, in addition to being a multi-million dollar international business, reaches an enormous number of women throughout the western world. (1)

In "Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors," Nina Baym writes about how male psychology necessitates man's attempt to separate himself from woman, and therefore defining a literature of celibacy; consequently, woman becomes the "enemy" (130). How surprised the creators of the canon would be to discover that Betty Smith would agree with them on that last score!

Literature of the 1940s

Even the decade of the 1940s has been excluded from the American canon: there is an assumption that since the men were away at war, no writing was done; consequently, there is little critical work available on the war years. In one of the few literary analyses of the 1940s, Chester Eisinger presents the time period as one of great social conservatism and personal alienation, and although initially this sounds convincing, in two independent analyses of popular literature, both Ruth Miller Elson and Susan Ellery Greene found that 1940 marked the largest shift in ideology in American literature in history. Eisinger wrote that "The conservative imagination, on the other hand, finally won a secure place in this period as a part of the landscape of American fiction. . . . The quest for the self was intensified in the fiction of this decade in such a way as to assume the proportions of a movement" (5). In popular literature, Greene found exactly the opposite: the "emergence of a mature American middle and upper class willing to cope with the complexities of the modern world" (161). What could account for such diametrically opposed views? Eisinger was writing about a select group of novels that had been defined as "American literature" and Greene was writing about popular literature. But what, really, is the difference?

There are two separate threads of intellectual history that I am following, the history of reading in American universities, and history of the reading in the American public. The two threads of history are related: sometimes they twist together, sometimes they diverge, and both are related to our contemporary concept of reading, writing and literature. When Modernism was evolving, university reading split off from public reading, and it took some readers with it, but it also took some of its texts (such as Hemingway) from the popular sphere. And public reading has always followed its own course, obeying a different of rules, according to political and economic events in the culture at large. Dudovitz writes:

Until the massive take-over of the publishing world by huge financial groups, the bestseller was a fairly reliable indication of popular tastes and concerns. The examples are quite obvious: from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) to Nevil Shute's On the Beach (1957) to Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward (1970), bestsellers have been books which address major concerns of a population. (25)

Sometimes academic and public interests converge, such as what is happening today, when scholars are interested in looking at a whole culture rather than parts. But in Betty Smith's time they were far apart.

American Popular Literature of the 1940s

Unlike in Eisinger's restricted world view, popular American literature in the 1940s enjoyed a rich and progressive era. Politically, it was the culmination of New Deal philosophy (Greene 156). Elson writes:

If best sellers are a clue to the intellectual history of the ordinary American then the early 1940s are a watershed. Up to that time almost all of the best sellers plucked the reader from his complex world and set him down in the never-never land described by Sinclair Lewis. From the 1940s on most of the popular books were still of this sort, but the best seller list now included books that seriously faced many of American's most unhappy problems. . . . (10)

Elson names Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck, 1939), Never Come Morning (Nelson Algrin 1942), Strange Fruit (Lillian Smith, 1944), Hiroshima (John Hersey, 1946), The Amboy Dukes (Irving Shulman, 1947), The Naked and the Dead (Norman Mailer, 1948), and Jailbait (William Barnard, 1949) as examples. Subjects that had previously been taboo, such as poverty, slums, the experiences of Jews and Catholics, and relations between the races, became desired and desirable public reading.

Women in Literature

Greene analyzes popular literature from 1914 to 1945 topic by topic, and on the subject of women she says:

The views on the position of women, as related to that of men, follows a pattern in these novels similar to those on social questions. In the books that appeared from 1914 to 1916, male characters are central in the stories and they dominate female characters. Women generally are portrayed as pure creatures who are to be honored. Their lives are limited to their homes, except for a few single women who hold a limited number of jobs until they find husbands. During the period of conscious rebellion, 1918 to 1927, men are no longer either as central to the stories or as dominant over women. Women also follow a wider variety of professions and exotic hobbies. The novels published from 1928 to 1937 mark a partial retrogression in that men again are more central to the stories and more dominant over women. Women do, however, continue to hold a wide variety of jobs. The same situation is true in the mysteries. By the time of the appearance of the last group of novels, 1938 to 1945, the strong role of women is restored. The rebellions of the twenties are now accepted. (159)

I would add that in the 1950s another retrogression occurred, eliminating women from the workplace and the professions, including academics; the past exclusion of women such as Betty Smith from the canon of American literature is part of that social retrogression.

Bumper Year for Best-Selling Novels

At the end of 1943, the publishing industry released figures that showed that book sales were up 20 to 30% from 1942. On Dec. 20, 1943, Time Magazine wrote:

For 1943 seemed to mark the second year of an epoch that sober, responsible publishers and all the carriers and custodians of U.S. culture had hoped for all their lives: a time when book-reading and book-buying reached outside the narrow quarters of the intellectuals and became the business of the whole vast literate population of the US

This is documented in many articles appearing between December 1943 and February 1944: a spokesperson for the publishing industry must have mailed out a press release with those words in it. The article also mentioned that "It was a bumper year for best-selling novelists (most of them women)," naming Smith, Ilka Chase (In Bed We Cry), Elizabeth Janeway (The Walsh Girls), and Helen Howe (The Whole Heart), and mentioning Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead) and Christine Weston (Indigo) as previously remaindered writers who had become best sellers. Elson attributes this shift in the subject matter of popular literature towards socially-conscious realism to

the unique combination of the depression of the 1930s and the war of the 1940s. Social problems here and abroad now became personal dilemmas. The changes in lifestyles--everybodys--engendered by the Depression and the War rubbed most noses in rather grim realities, realities not actually new, but newly perceived. Middle class America now had to relate to problems they had assumed happened to other people . . . . Interestingly enough these catastrophes--Depression and War--increased both the size of the reading public and the amount of time people could devote to reading. (Elson 10-12)

This was likely the only time that A Tree Grows in Brooklyn would have been published: the public was hungry for realistic books about social problems in the 1940s, and was willing to listen to the voices of women.

Exclusion from the Canon of American Literature

Smith was excluded from the academic canon partially on the basis of her class: she grew up in the tenements and as she said in in The New Yorker, 9 Oct. 1943, she always remained a poor person at heart. If Smith had not written her novel in the 1940s, it is quite possible that she never would have been published. In The American Dream and the Popular Novel, Elizabeth Long writes:

the people who work in trade publishing are, like most potential readers of hardcover novels, middle- and upper-middle-class. The industry and the processes described above are therefore limited to a certain social class. . . . most authors came from the middle and upper-middle class. . . . most authors [are] from the ivy league (Long 35, 37, 41).

It was only in that brief era that publishing houses began to listen to other voices than that of the middle and upper middle class. This is a difficult fact for most readers to confront, and the mind immediately starts searching for exceptions to the rule, but Long has carefully tabulated her data:

Authors known to have had parents who were laborers, skilled craftsmen, or relatively poor tradesmen and white-collar workers never account for more than one-fifth of the authors of any period, and sometimes for no more then 10 percent. (Long 38)

Post-Depression Era Literature

It was the alignment of the political, social and economic forces of the depression and post-depression era that made middle-class bookbuyers interested in poverty; the writer Smith came of age during the Roosevelt administration, when the government took a positive and supportive interest in the arts.

Published literature occurs at an intersection between a private world and a public one. To fully understand American literature, it must be placed within its social and economic context: "Ideally scholars and critics should know more about the literary marketplace of the author's time than the author would have known" (West 1). A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was a bestseller and bestsellers are social events that occur because of a peculiar need in a social order at a certain time. Bestseller criticism, then, must be contextualized. Without looking at the economic sources of literature the critic risks making conclusions from class-based assumptions, or operating within a closed world of signification, meaningful to a few elite, but meaningless to the world at large.

New Criticism failed to give a complete view of a work of art: the object, disconnected from its environment, lost meaning within that environment. According to Linda Brodkey in Academic Writing as Social Practice, New Criticism and "new New Criticism," such as Deconstruction, maintains "the unmitigated privileging of formal properties as the basis of `reading'" (67). In "Who Paid for Modernism?" Joyce Wexler interrogates the myth of James Joyce as a persecuted, alienated artist who could not find a commercial publisher: he did not want a commercial publisher, and since he found a patron, he did not need one. Indeed, the myth of the artist in the garret is finally detaching itself from a more realistic concept of poverty: after all "Garrets, studies, and libraries are obviously signs of the leisure requisite for writing" (Brodkey 59). In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway complains continuously of poverty while living on parental subsidy. Wexler writes that "contempt for the commercial side of publishing was common among modernist writers" (440) and this is in keeping with the British tradition of patronage of the arts. James West writes that:

The European model of book publishing works well for an author in a traditionally minded, aristocratic society in which there are numerous (if not especially generous) sources of private, institutional, or governmental patronage. In a free-enterprise democracy, however, one needs an active, aggressive, profitable publishing industry in order to support a class of literary authors (43).

In this way Betty Smith is more "American" than most writers in the canon of American literature. American literature needs an active, aggressive author in order to connect with that publishing industry and get a book to the press. These factors, and the location of the publishing industry also favored writers from New York (Long 39).

Betty Smith was an extraordinarily hardworking and creative woman, but she did not live outside of history: her success as a best-selling working-class novelist would not have been possible if the economic and social conditions had not been propitious. Due to the depression, the American public was interested in the lives of the poor, the quasi-socialism of the Roosevelt administration gave Smith the leisure to write, and World War II drew men away from business, leaving women such as Smith and her editor, Elizabeth Lawrence, in control in their absence.

Working-Class Literature

The critics loved A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and the press loved the working-class celebrity Betty Smith, but during her lifetime, she saw a public shift away from the sensibility that gave her a place in American literary life. Increasingly her writing was accused of sentimentality, a derogatory term intended to exclude her from literary history. It worked. Until recently, the literary academy has concentrated on the upper classes and the events, politics and ideas that surrounded them. The writings of Betty Smith were by, for and about the poor and the events, politics and ideas that surround them. In the past, this designation was enough to consign a book to the academic dust heap, but we are now beginning to realize that no one social group holds the key to life, and writings of all economic, ethnic and gender groups are valuable. The writings of Betty Smith will add a different vision and a valuable dimension to the critical study of American literature, and her life needs to be made available to students and scholars.