Publication of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Part 2

Betty Smith and Eugene Saxton

Smith's first letters to Saxton are very open and honest. It was then that she confessed to Saxton that she had no plans for writing any further novels:

As for the next book, I haven't thought of that yet. When I finished this one, I thought, "This is everything I know. I don't know anymore than what is in this book. If it isn't any good, then I'm no good because I can't write anymore" 1.

Although she immediately followed this statement with a qualification, her initial instinct was probably correct: although she wrote three other novels, none was as powerful as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

Betty Smith and Elizabeth Lawrence

As the senior editor, Smith corresponded mainly with Saxton at the beginning of her relationship with Harper & Brothers. However, soon Saxton became ill and he died before the book was published. Consequently Elizabeth Lawrence handled most of the editorial changes. Smith and Lawrence worked well together: Lawrence was humorous, caring and tactful and Smith responded to criticism gracefully throughout the revision process. She wrote to Lawrence:

I consider the criticism and the reworking of criticized material as equivalent to a very valuable education in the writing of a novel and I want to profit by it. If I feel that something should stay as written, I will say so, frankly and give my reasons. Otherwise, I'm glad to make whatever changes are necessary 2.

On her side, Lawrence's editorial letters requesting change were models of tact. She always started with a positive statement before moving to a criticism, and often blamed the necessity for change on the "booksellers" or others.

Censorship and Condoms

One of the major sections of the book that they had to change touched on human sexuality. Lawrence wrote to Smith:

all the salesmen have had a chance to read the manuscript and have had their enthusiasm confirmed. There is one thing, however, which disturbs them from a sales point of view. That is the episode of the balloons. Everyone is amused by it, but experience tells them that it is likely to offend the Catholic market. Its inclusion might mean a considerable loss of sales in this quarter 3.

However, Lawrence admitted that the "balloon episode" was essential to the plot. Consequently, she asked Smith to just tone it down and "free it from any connection with the Catholic church" 4.

Unfortunately this caused some loss of detail in the novel. It is likely that condoms had not yet been described in a novel, and Smith had the description all ready to go. They were disguised in a cigarette box: "There was six dull yellow articles, folded and rolled to look like cigarettes. The color was muted by a film of fine white dust. Francie unfolded them, shook them out and blew off the powder. Now they looked like unblown balloons" 5. The children then blew them up and hung them out the window, disappointed with the results. Unfortunately, Smith had to tone this down. The published version reads merely that the "contents [of the box] were very uninteresting" (91). But Lawrence was right; even this excision was not enough to placate certain religious readers.

Smith had also originally written a long section on the reaction of the Catholic community to the blown-up condoms hanging out the apartment window. In her original manuscript, the Nolans were verbally condemned by their priest in a sermon so vehemently anti-contraception that the neighborhood birth-rate increased by a third. Smith also removed a description of the childhood of this priest whose parents, since he had been "promised" to the church, allowed his siblings to die of malnutrition in order to pay for his education. All of this is omitted from the published version of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

Censorship and Swearing

As publication neared, Lawrence mediated other removals and changes. Again she referred to the salesmen:

word has been received that book sellers are finding the vendor's language in the Christmas tree episode very strong meat. Will you look over it and see what might be done by way of placating the defenders of decency? It is always interesting to discover who is shocked by this sort of thing--invariably the men to whom the language is commonplace 6.

Smith revised this section, but she was able to keep enough of the original language to maintain her meaning. "Shut your f-------trap" became "shut your lousy trap," "It's a God-damned, sonofabitchin', f------ world!" became "It's a God-damned, rotten, lousy world!" and other swearing was omitted. Smith had a special gift for rendering colloquial language in a believable way. Here the language is very important, since it integrates two aspects of working-class language, brutality and sentimentality. In a yearly ritual, the left-over Christmas trees were thrown at the children, who, if they caught them, could carry them home;

For the split part of a moment, the tree thrower went through a kind of Gethsemane.

"Oh, Jesus Christ," his soul agonized, "why don't I just give 'em the tree, say Merry Christmas and let 'em go? What's the tree to me? I can't sell it no more this year and it won't keep till next year." The kids watched him solemnly as he stood there in his moment of thought. "But then," he rationalized, "if I did that, all the others would expect to get 'em handed to 'em. And next year, nobody a-tall would buy a tree off of me. They'd all wait to get 'em handed to 'em on a silver plate. I ain't a big enough man to give this tree away for nothin'. No, I ain't big enough. I ain't big enough to do a thing like that. I gotta think of myself and my own kids." He finally came to his conclusion. "Oh, what the hell! Them two kids is gotta live in this world. They got to get used to it. They got to learn to give and to take punishment. And by Jesus, it ain't give but take, take, take all the time in this God-damned world." As he threw the tree with all his strength, his heart wailed out, "It's a God-damned, rotten, lousy world!"

When some of the older boys pulled the tree away, they found Francie and her brother standing upright, hand in hand. Blood was coming from scratches on Neeley's face. He looked more like a baby than ever with his bewildered blue eyes and the fairness of his skin made more noticeable because of the clear red blood. But they were smiling. Had they not won the biggest tree in the neighborhood? Some of the boys hollered "Hooray!" A few adults clapped. The tree man eulogized them by screaming,

"And now get the hell out of here with your tree, you lousy bastards."

Francie had heard swearing since she had heard words. Obscenity and profanity had no meaning as such among those people. They were emotional expressions of inarticulate people with small vocabularies; they made a kind of dialect. The phrases could mean many things according to the expression and tone used in saying them. So now, when Francie heard themselves called lousy bastards, she smiled tremulously at the kind man. She knew that he was really saying, "Goodby--God bless you." (154)

Smith's understanding of the relativity of language and of the principles of variation was revolutionary at her time; many other writers tried to catch the dialect of the lower-classes but their efforts produced inauthentic and condescending dialogue. Smith was able to demonstrate the strange mixture of realism and sentimentality in working-class language, and she explained her example with a clarity that no reader could misunderstand. Some critics later found the novel to be "sordid" and therefore unacceptable, but as time went on, it was the "sentimental" that became unacceptable.

Censorship and the Ending of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Perhaps the most interesting change between the manuscript and the first edition was the ending. The critics noted that the last section was very much different in tone from the rest of the novel. Rosemary Dawson wrote in The Saturday Review of Literature: "toward the end of the novel the rhythm is broken. As soon as Francie is out in the world, getting a job and finding the first love of her life, the novel takes on more of the mechanics of the usual popular piece of fiction and becomes less real" 7. The first three books of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn are largely realistic in content and naturalistic in tone. Francie Nolan's problems are a lack of money and a lack of love: throughout the novel she struggles with crippling poverty, her mother's cold practicality and her father's alcoholism. Barely able to stay in school, her plans for her future are crushed when her father dies and she must work to support her pregnant mother. But after the father's death, the novel suddenly changes in genre and in tone. It stops being lower-class realism and becomes working-class romance: Francie meets a soldier, falls in love, is jilted, works several jobs, and meets another man. Then the novel ends on an unrelated wish-fulfillment: even though she has only graduated from the eighth grade, Francie matriculates at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

In her first letter to Saxton, Smith mentioned that she had several more chapters outlined, but "the death of Johnny seemed a natural ending to the book and the other stuff seemed anti-climactic to me" 8. Nevertheless, she went ahead and expanded the novel, thereby changing the ending. When Smith finished it, she sent it to Saxton with a letter: "I have taken the outline of a planned second book and hitched it on to the first. It is really two books in one. The first ended when Johnny died" 9. Why would the professional editors at Harper & Brothers allow an author to add unrelated material, therefore causing generic inconsistency?

In the manuscript of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in the archives of the Southern Historical Collection in Chapel Hill, the novel ends after the death of the father. The two children, Francie and Neeley, are sitting miserably at the kitchen table looking forward to a life of increased poverty and hunger. Smith writes with her characteristic mixture of sentimentality and despair. Francie says:

"I believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and His mother, Holy Mary. Jesus was a baby like we were once. And he went barefoot in the summer like we do. I saw a picture. And he had no shoes on. He lived like other people lived and He went fishing like papa did once. He was always where there were poor people . . . ." She made the sign of the cross as every Catholic does when speaking of Jesus. Then she put her hand on Neeley's knee.

"But I will say now and I will always say - To hell with God!"

Neeley put his hand on Francie's hand and echoed fearfully,

"To hell with God!" 10

In the manuscript version, the novel ended there. Although this ending is more in keeping with naturalism, and although it is more satisfying to the structure of closure expected by the literary academy, Harper & Brothers would never have allowed that ending out of their publishing house. Moreover, Lawrence had scented a commercial success and Smith was willing to tailor her novel to reach the largest possible audience. By adding nearly a hundred pages and a happy ending, she changed the generic structure of the novel from literary naturalism, that would appeal to the educated classes, to an hybrid genre. This style could be called "dime-store naturalism," a portrait of the poor that was palatable to the majority taste. Smith would have liked that phrase (she loved dime stores).

The Real Tree That Grows in Brooklyn

There were some aspects of the novel that Smith would not change. When Smith submitted her novel, the title was They Lived in Brooklyn. Harper & Brothers was not satisfied with this, so Smith discussed it with her associates in the playmaker group. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was probably suggested by Josefina Niggli, a writer and friend of Smith's 11. Although at first Saxton was against using a full sentence as a title, he finally agreed. It was a wise decision since it set off a chain reaction of imitative headlines in the press; even today, most people are familiar with the title. Then Smith wrote a preface that made the metaphor, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, distinct:

There's a tree that grows in Brooklyn. Some people call it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed falls, it makes a tree which struggles to reach the sky. It grows in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps. It grows up out of cellar gratings. It is the only tree that grows out of cement. It grows lushly . . . survives without sun, water, and seemingly without earth. It would be considered beautiful except that there are too many of it.

She was also very specific about what tree it was: when she first received a copy of the dust jacket, the artist had painted a generic city tree. Smith made him change it to the ailanthus tree, that ubiquitous growth visible on railroad trestles, in empty lots, and in any crack that has accumulated dirt in New York City. Then the artist painted an ailanthus, but it was surrounded by an iron fence. Smith wrote:

Brooklyn trees are considered noxious and people chop them down, burn them and put poison on them to kill them off. No one would ever put a guard around one of those trees, no more than would fertilize a field of dandelions . . . . it grows on neglect the way the children of my neighborhood do in the book 12.

Smith was firm in her commitment to this metaphor. Her instinct on this matter was correct: the tree that grew in Brooklyn became an American icon. For continuation, see Publication, Part III.

Endnotes

1. Betty Smith, letter to Eugene F. Saxton, 31 July 1942.

2. BS to EFL, Jan 14th, 1943.

3. Elizabeth Lawrence to Betty Smith, Jan. 12th, 1943.

4. Elizabeth Lawrence to Betty Smith, Jan. 12th, 1943.

5. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, original corrected manuscript, p. 182.

6. Undated note from EFL to BS, 1942/43.

7. The Saturday Review of Literature, Rosemary Dawson, Sept. 11th, 1943.

8. Betty Smith, letter to Eugene F. Saxton, 27 June, 1942.

9. Betty Smith, letter to Eugene F. Saxton, 26 Dec. 1942.

10. Manuscript, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith Papers.

11. Niggli wrote to Smith that she felt she had title rights to The Tree, 19 August 1959.

12. Betty Smith, letter to Eugene F. Saxton, 28 Nov. 1942.