Maggie-Now, Part II

Like Tomorrow Will Be Better, Maggie-Now is a complex novel that features a passive heroine. Like Tomorrow Will Be Better, it is a novel with an agenda. However, the agenda in Tomorrow Will Be Better was one of revenge (against Joe Jones and her mother-in-law), and that of Maggie-Now is the resurrection of the dead. Smith's description of the novel for the Literary Guild circular "Wings" reveals a fundamental problem about the novel. She quotes the beginning words of the novel, which are about Maggie's father, and then the final words of the novel, which are also about Maggie's father. Why, then, is the novel called Maggie-Now? Like Tomorrow Will Be Better, Maggie-Now was a novel with a split theme, with two opposing currents. The "Wings" circular calls Maggie-Now a simple story of "an older girl, out-going and exuberant," but to the contemporary reader, Maggie is a lacuna, the empty center about which the events of other people's lives evolve. Maggie is the stereotype of a "good woman" who has few desires and gets none of them fulfilled. The first Maggie introduced is a Maggie Rose, who Patrick is courting in Ireland. This diminishes the "heroine" Maggie further, since she is not even the original Maggie, but the second of that name. It is her father, Patrick Dennis, who is the dynamic center of the novel and he has all the fun.

Patsy Moore is he is a self-centered mamma's boy, the "last of a brood of thirteen." Patsy's mother had "a strong mother-hold on her son," (3), and rather than see him marry his sweetheart, she sent him to America. When Patsy is lucky enough to be given a job with a Brooklyn politician, he marries the boss's only daughter, Mary, thereby securing his modest future: a job with the Department of Sanitation and a two-family house in Williamsburg. Their only child is named Maggie after Patsy's first love in Ireland. Patsy's personal refrain, "I'll bury youse all!," resounds throughout the book and is a key to understanding the book. Patsy is obnoxious, paranoid, always picking fights with people, but he leads a full life and outlives most of the characters.

Maggie's character is nameless in the beginning: "For the first year of its life, the baby was called and referred to as 'Baby'." (85) As she grows, she becomes sweet and compliant and "not the brightest one in the class" (90). As noted by one of the nuns in the Catholic school she attends: "She's a giver . . . She'll have a busy life, then . . . There are ten takers for one giver" (91). Maggie is an example of complete self-abnegation.

Mary, like her daughter Maggie, has no wishes and no personality: both are sacrificial lambs. When Maggie was sixteen Mary got pregnant again even though she had been warned that it could kill her. She went to the neighborhood doctor, Dr. Scaleni, and he knew that she should have a therapeutic abortion. But Dr. Scaleni was afraid. He thought to himself:

Back in 400 B.C., gentlemen, a doctor named Hippocrates said: "Natural forces within us are the true healers of disease." That was right in 400 B.C., and it's just as right in 1910 A.D. We are agreed, I believe, that abortion is against ethics and religion. It is a sin against life--against having the chance for a life to be born. That is all, gentlemen. (134)

Dr. Scaleni did not inform Mary of her condition and he let Mary labor for three days, until he was given a consultant. The consultant stated that if the labor continued, the child would be stillborn but the mother may live. However, if they intervened, the child would live but the mother would die. "So, according to the dictates of the religion, they saved the baby and let the mother die." (139) Thus Maggie's brother Denny was born and Maggie became the mother of her mother's child.

Maggie became her father's housekeeper and her brother's mother, a position which isolated her from the community: many assumed that Denny was her child and that she was unmarried. This made her ashamed and withdraw even more. On one of her rare forays into the outside world, Maggie met Claude Bassett, a travelling salesman peddling a course in salesmanship. Maggie decided to attend, because "(she didn't fool herself at all), she wanted to see more of Claude Bassett" (172). Claude resembles Bob Finch, "tall and good-looking but a little too thin," a chain-smoker with a cultivated accent (170). He walked her home the very first night and they fell in love. Against her father's wishes she dated Claude and discussed marriage. Then, suddenly, Claude disappeared.

At a church social Maggie meets Son Pheid, the son of Pheid, the plumber. He is a cheerful, kind young man who takes to Maggie right away. In Claude's absence, Son dates Maggie, and when he enlists in the army, he writes long, friendly letters. In a letter he asked her to marry him. Maggie thinks:

I want children, lots of them, and a home for them. Sonny would be a good father, a good provider, a good husband, like Uncle Timmy was. Of course, he wouldn't sit around and talk. He's have his bowling nights and his lodge meeting and one night a week to play cards with the boys and maybe fishing at Canarsie like other men do. I'd be lonesome the first year, then I'd have the children and my life would be full. I like him. I respect him. I'm proud that everyone thinks so well of him. And that must add up to love--if not now, someday. At least he wants me. It's nice to be wanted. And I want a husband. I want children. I don't want to wait. . . . (261)

Then Claude sent her a postcard saying simply "Wait for me. I'm coming back." That was enough for her: Maggie wrote to Sonny and told him no. She denies herself exactly what she wants--a husband and children--and does exactly what she doesn't want--wait.

Cycles of Loss

Maggie took a job as a ticket seller in a movie theater and waited. In the darkness of early winter, Claude returned, converted to Catholicism and they are married. But then Claude disappeared again, a continual cycle with him. When he first disappeared Maggie "went about her housework with violent tremblings in her stomach. `If I was going to have a baby now,' she thought, `I'd lose it'" (296). Claude will not to tell Maggie when or where he is going--"Claude would be restless and open the window and lean out and feel the wind on his face and close his eyes as though in ecstasy and listen as though he heard a faraway and well-beloved voice calling him" (329)--and Claude would disappear with the spring wind, every year. Maggie wordlessly accepts the situation.

Maggie supported the family by renting her house to tenants and keeping up with the repairs. As the story continues, more and more often Claude asks her for money. This is just like Smith's relationship with Finch. When Claude disappears, it is like the description that Finch wrote about the beginnings of his alcoholic binges, in almost the same words--"He kissed her and went out for cigarettes and the paper as he did every morning. But on this morning, he did not come back" (317). Patsy returns home whenever Claude leaves, and leaves when Claude comes back: they replace each other. Maggie is desperate for children, and since Claude cannot give them to her, she tries to adopt. However, since Claude is not stable, all is she only allowed to have children for foster care. Thus begins a different cycle of love and separation.

There are many sub-plots. For example, Denny is a spoiled brat who nearly turns into a hoodlum before he realizes his life's ambition to be a butcher; then he marries a nice girl and settles down. Harper & Brothers and the Literary Guild made Smith remove a line about him fondling a dead pig 1. During all this Patsy remains his irascible, self-centered and lucky self. When he is not comfortably living with Maggie, he moves into Mrs. O'Crawley's boardinghouse with his friend, Mick Mack. Eventually he decides to marry the widow; "He would have to figure out the best way to tell her. It never occurred to him to ask her" (415).

Then one year Claude came home late. "He went away too far this year . . . Where it was too cold. And he must have had a hard time getting back" (417). He finally explains that he was an orphan, put through school by a secret benefactor. When he was old enough he began searching through phone books, libraries, and office buildings for clues about his parents. What started out as a search became an obsession, and he became a wanderer. Claude announces that he's never going away again, and he becomes very ill. The children are taken away from Maggie because of risk of infection. When Patsy comes to see him for the last time he says "I said I would. And I will. In fact, I'll bury youse all!" Then Claude dies, and Maggie's last wish is that he be buried in a Catholic cemetery. However, Patsy and his friend Mick Mack do what Claude has asked them to do: they bury him at sea. They bring his ashes to the top of the Statue of Liberty:

[Patsy] removed the cover from the urn. Before he could scatter the ashes, the wind scooped most of them out of the urn. Pat had an instant of terror. The gulls, the screams, the wind and the infinity of sky and sea, and he was such a tiny dot.

There is things I don't know, he thought, and God forgive me all me sins.

Mick Mack was screaming. "Say something!" he screamed. "For the love of God say something! Don't let him go without a word! Say something!"

"What?" hollered Pat.

"Good?by! Good-by!" shouted Mick Mack.

"I'll bury youse all!" shouted Patrick Dennis Moore. (437)

Maggie's father, her footloose husband, and her spoiled brother live full, happy lives: Patsy, self-centered and mean, is rewarded by having a faithful friend and finding a rich widow to marry; Claude has the best of both worlds, home and wandering; Denny is spoiled, but nevertheless is rewarded by finding both a woman and job that he loves; and Maggie takes care of them all. Throughout the novel the men are free: it is only the women who were trapped in desiccated lives of numbing routine. Although she is centered in the title, Maggie is a marginal character in the book, a shadow in her own house: her life is a cycle of separation, pain and unrewarded labor. An interesting note was unearthed by a genealogist and is quoted at http://www.witsend.org/gen/BettySmith.htm: "In May of 1902, when Betty Smith was 5 years old, a 10-month-old sister named Maggie died. There is no mention of this event in Betty's biography."

Genre Imitating Life and Life Imitating Genre

To a certain extent, Smith was working within the generic expectations of her time. As Joanne Frye writes:

women, if appropriately female -- that is, relational, expressive, passive -- will not be competent and self-defined. From this gender stereotype spring the traditional character traits and plot choices for female characters; in service of this gender stereotype women in novels are placed in the midst of domestic social reality and bounded by a novelistic coherence of erotic and familial concerns. This same stereotype also implicates women outside novels in the limitation of femininity as it yields a possible "motive to avoid success" or at least undermines their confidence "on achievement-related issues." This stereotype even governs the possibilities for how women are perceived by others and how they perceive themselves. (198)

This is the set of cultural expectations within which Smith was working. Perhaps this explains why John Beecroft of the Literary Guild thought Maggie-Now was going to be as popular as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn 2. Since the cultural paradigm of femininity and Smith's version of it in her own life were at such odds, Maggie-Now is a strange, hollow book, unaware of its own intentions.

Smith wrote Maggie-Now after her car accident with Finch, while being married to him and while knowing that he would probably die soon. It is possible that Finch was still disappearing on binges and that would explain the strange plot of Claude's comings and goings. Smith was again weaving a myth out of her life, partly a performance piece and partly a performative. As Frye writes:

People interpret and even choose their courses of action according to their anticipated ends: projected "conclusions" such as graduation, marriage, separations, departures, births, and deaths. All such demarcating events, in anticipation, shape the human choices prior to them and, in retrospect, shape the understanding of subsequent human experiences. (20)

Smith was shaping her literature concurrently with shaping her life and part of what she wanted to do was to make the father figure, Patsy, live forever. She was willing to sacrifice herself (Maggie) and even her children (Maggie's childlessness) to achieve this end. It's no mystery that the novel begins and ends with Patsy; this is a book about the self-abnegation necessary in a life of co-dependency.

Reviews

The reviewers were split about Maggie-Now: some saw it as a tour-de-force of social realism, and others found it, like Tomorrow Will Be Better, either a) too depressing or b) too sentimental. The headlines ran from "`Maggie Now' Surpasses That Brooklyn Tree" 3 to "Unheroic Catalog of Small People,"4 to "A Tree Grows But Maggie Never Lives," 5 and "The Humor Fades" 6. The Times of London wrote "Everybody with the most rudimentary talent for letting go should enjoy it" 7 but Time Magazine wrote "Brooklyn's Author Smith almost certainly emerges as the most lugubrious writers since James Farrell. . . . Rarely have the short and simple annals of the poor seemed so simple-minded and so long" 8.

Orville Prescott, of The New York Times, remained Smith's staunch supporter. He wrote that all three of Smith's novels are "notably significant studies of certain aspects of urban life in this country [and] all immensely readable." He rates Maggie-Now as better than Tomorrow Will Be Better:

written with such unobtrusive skill that it seems to flow along as naturally as life itself. . . . Its picture of Irish immigrant life in Brooklyn is filled with the exact details that alone can insure conviction and interest. And because Miss Smith is an artist these details are distributed with a judicious hand so that "Maggie-Now" never is swamped with social documentation in the manner of many novels about urban slums 9.

The New Yorker summarized Maggie-Now in a brief note:

Patsy, a dull-witted Irish country boy who is sometimes belligerent and sometimes roguish, emigrates to Brooklyn, avoids work as much as possible, and lives a very long time. Miss Smith has filled four hundred and thirty-seven pages with words about Patsy 10.

Maggie-Now is all of these things: it is enjoyable, it is misguided, it is realistic, it is false, but it is a novel that make sense in the context of Smith's difficult life.

Accusations of Sentimentality

Then the press started centering around a different concern: "sentimentality" became the central issue of contention surrounding Maggie-Now, and, by extension, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. A second reviewer in the New York Times wrote "not everyone knows how to squeeze joy out of pennies" and ended her review: "This is not to say, however, that there is no place in literature for warmth of sentiment and affirmation. It is only to point out that, to bring the Brooklyn of yesterday to life, one `Tree' was enough" 11. In the Chicago Sunday Tribune, the reviewer wrote "Sentimentality--which is a thin haze that rises out of inordinate or excessive emotion--hovers over the pages. Sentimentality always pleases a lot of readers, and `Maggie-Now' will be popular, no doubt" 12. But Smith had her supporters. In "Speaking of Books," J. Donald Adams wrote an essay about sentiment, as in opposition to sentimentality (a "dishonest sentiment"), naming sentiment as "the only bulwark against nihilism" 13. He defended Maggie-Now against the review in the New Yorker, describing its own "deftly polished fiction is as closely confined, in its method and approach, as was the female form in a nineteenth-century corset." The entire issue was brought to a point in the Providence, Rhode Island Journal: there was an article "Are You For God or Mammon" that explored the central dilemma to Smith's critical reception. It was written about the National Book Awards ceremony at which Randall Jarrell, one of the leading proponents of New Criticism, gave the main address:

On the side of God, or rather Art--serious Art--was a Southern poet, Randall Jarrell . . . . On the side of Mammon, or rather Popular Culture . . . was Betty Smith, author of "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" and her current "Maggie-Now," big fat novels that have been and are being read with gusto by hundreds of thousands 14.

Jarrell denounced popular culture ironically by stating that, in "an ideally bad society," "Swann's Way" would not have been written at all and Proust would have written Elvis Presley's autobiography. Jarrell's point was simple: "The mass media cannot touch the experience that art, philosophy, and literature deal with" and Smith was his example of poor taste. He pointedly asked "Why is Brooklyn so much richer and bigger, so much more literate and educated . . . [and] so much less productive culturally than was Florence[?]" and ended his lecture by saying "you can be for God or you can be for Mammon, but you can't be for God and Mammon both at the same time."

Smith had tried reading Proust when there was no liquor to be had in Chapel Hill, and she didn't enjoy the experience. Her reaction had been "The sentences are so long that I have to read fast in order to get the whole meaning at once. This makes me sleepy"; she had found him too "mannered" 14. The next day Smith was the keynote speaker at the ceremony and she had her chance. First she recited an anecdote:

she recalled as a child seeing a large, garish Kewpie doll at some amusement park, and hearing a lady breath out, "Oh, isn't that beautiful!" Miss Smith said that it was then that she first learned the meaning of the truism that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. The panel broke up in a thunder of laughter and applause when Miss Smith, apparently as an afterthought, asked casually, "Has anybody read `Swann's Way' since yesterday?" 16

Smith had run afoul of New Criticism and was excluded from the canon of American literature. If you look at her novels though the lens of New Criticism, with the set of expectations taught by New Criticism, her writing does not seems to be good: from this viewpoint, she represents the poor taste of the poor. However, if you look at her literature in the context of her times and her life, it takes on a different dimension.

Evan Thomas wrote to Smith's friend, the playwright Paul Green, in order to get a quotable review of Maggie-Now for the dust jacket. As a long-time supporter of Betty Smith, Green was sure to give a positive review, and he did. He wrote:

Betty Smith has written a solid and sincere book in "Maggie-Now". Once more as in "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" she gives us a fine assemblage of characters and incidents out of the rich creative remembrance and imaginings of her own life.

That was the quote that Harper & Brothers used on the dust jacket. However, Green's letter continues: "Frankly though, I don't think the novel comes up to `A Tree'. But why should it -- or how could it?"17 In writing A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith had a hard act to follow, and it's not surprising her subsequent novels were not as successful.

One final note. Towards the end of her life, Smith was helping Thomas and Tom McCormack cut Maggie-Now for re-publication in the Harper's Perennial Library. She wrote "For six years, I have felt very very bad about [Maggie-Now]. I wrote it under great duress. But no use going over those sad years again" 18. When Thomas and McCormack undertook the cutting, they began the task with optimism, but soon they ran into trouble. McCormack wrote:

This is an extremely canny and artful book, Evan, as you probably know much better than I. Betty Smith's style seems relaxed, and her voice sounds warm and wonderfully conversational but when you start hunting for the useless superfluity that conversation usually bring it just isn't there. So often in Maggie-Now you start cutting in one place only to hear it saying Ouch! some place else. Only a pro of the first order can weave stuff together like that 18.

Smith may have been troubled during the writing of Maggie-Now, and Maggie-Now may be a troubled book, but it is also a professional one.

Endnotes

1. Evan Thomas, letter to Betty Smith, 19 Sept. 1957. Smith's brother ran a steak house.

2. Evan Thomas, letter to Betty Smith, 19 Sept. 1957.

3. Pasadena Independent, 2 Mar. 1958.

4. Denver Post, 23 Feb. 1958.

5. San Francisco News, 1 Mar 1958.

6. James D. Pendleton, unknown newspaper.

7 London Times, 4 July 1958.

8. Time Magazine, 24 Feb. 1958.

9. Orville Prescott, New York Times 27 Feb. 1958.

10. The New Yorker, 22 Feb. 1958.

11. Virgilia Peterson, New York Times, 23 Feb. 1958.

12. Richard Sullivan, Chicago Sunday Tribune, 23 Feb. 1958.

13. Help! Can't find.

14. Providence, Rhode Island Journal, 23 March 1958.

15. Betty Smith, letter to Elizabeth Lawrence, 9 July 1945.

16. Providence, Rhode Island Journal, 23 March 1958.

17. Paul Green, letter to Evan Thomas, 13 Feb. 1958.

18. Betty Smith, letter to Evan Thomas, 28 Dec. 1965.

19. Tom McCormack, memo to Evan Thomas, 13 Feb. 1965.