Publication of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Part 3

The Novel and the American Dream

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a story about the American dream. In it, a poor girl achieves success through education. Like Horatio Alger's hero Ragged Dick, Smith's heroine Francie Nolan begins the novel poor and hungry, and ends it well-clothed, fed, and moving up the social scale. In fact, Horatio Alger was probably an influence on A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Smith mentions him on page 139 and her character Johnny Nolan has the same name as Alger's stock Irish n'er-do-well, Johnnie Nolan.

The Novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn begins in 1912 as Francie Nolan is sitting on a fire escape, reading a book, surrounded by the leaves of the only tree that would grow in tenement districts. The Nolans are extremely poor: Francie and her brother Neeley look forward to the weekend because they can turn in the results of their weekly rag-picking and make a few pennies; Francie earns an extra "pinching" penny for letting the junk man pinch her cheek. Francie also does the shopping for her mother who, as the janitor for three buildings, does not have time herself. Francie is entrusted with bargaining for pennies, fighting with a crowd for day-old bread and tricking the butcher into grinding fresh hamburger for her. The ethnographic details of life in Williamsburg take up several chapters and are so exact that many of Smith's fans wrote to say that they remembered each store.

The novel then provides a flashback -- the story of Francie's parents, turn-of-the-century Austrian immigrants and American-Irish poor. Katie and Johnny Nolan are poor but happy until the birth of their first child, Francie. On the night of the birth, Johnny loses his job by spending the night drinking, and the family is cast into a poverty from which they cannot escape; the strength and endurance of Katie is all that holds them together. Katie's immigrant mother relays her philosophy of life: "In spite of hard unfamiliar things, there is here [in America] -- hope. . . . The secret lies in the reading and the writing." She instructs Katie to teach Francie the two books she has heard about, the Protestant Bible and Shakespeare. She tells Katie that she must read to the child every night, even if she does not understand what she is reading, and to save money, no matter how dire their poverty, so that they can buy a piece of land.

A year later Francie's brother Neeley is born and Katie falls in love: "I am going to love this boy more than the girl but I mustn't ever let her know" she thinks (70). But Francie understands: "Francie felt the way her mother thought about her. She grew an answering hardness against her mother and this hardness, paradoxically enough, brought them a little closer together because it made them more alike" (71). Johnny starts to drink even more heavily, and disappears for days at a time. After a scene of delirium tremens, Katie feels they must move to save the family pride, and they are so poor that all of their belongings fit into one wagon:

a double bed, the babies' crib, a busted-down baby buggy, a green plush parlor suit, a carpet with pink roses, a pair of parlor lace curtains, a rubber plant and a rose geranium, a yellow canary in a gilt cage, a plush picture album, a kitchen table and some chairs, a box of dished and pots and pans, a gilt crucifix with a music box in its base that played "Ave Maria" when you wound it up, a plain wooden crucifix that her mother had given her, a wash basket full of clothes, a roll of bedding, a pile of Johnny's sheet music and two books, the Bible and the Complete Works of Wm. Shakespeare. (94)

Eventually they find a narrow top-floor apartment where Katie can clean three buildings in return for free rent.

Book Three is the longest section and contains the main action of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Smith carries the reader through time by using holidays and important events, like the start of school, as life markers. School is a central issue for Francie. It is a mixed blessing: it is an opportunity to learn, but it is also an initiation into the American class system. Katie holds Francie back a year so that she can walk to school with Neeley so "they can protect each other." Nevertheless, in the overcrowded, immigrant classroom, the teacher is sadistic to all but the wealthy and does not even allow the poorer children to go to the bathroom. Even though the teachers are abusive to her, Francie likes the routine and relative safety of school. And, in school she learns how to read. Once she knew how to read she knew she would never be lonely again: "On that day when she first knew she could read, she made a vow to read one book a day as long as she lived" (124).

Francie's love of literature is partially born from despair at her home life. Her mother's small amount of love is directed to Neeley, and their days are an unending round of trying to find enough money to eat. Francie loves her father dearly, but he is often drunk and cannot be counted on for help. However, one day she brings him to a small school in a wealthy neighborhood, and confesses she would like to go there. Johnny forges a letter for her, against her mother's wishes, so that she can transfer to that district. Consequently, Francie knows "that there were other worlds beside the world she had been born into and that these other worlds were not unattainable" (132).

Then Johnny Nolan is expelled from the waiters' union for drinking and goes on three day binge that leaves him huddled in a doorway, nearly dead with pneumonia. At Christmas time he dies, leaving Katie pregnant with their third child. The funeral bills use up all the insurance as well as the money they had been saving to buy property--the Nolans do buy their bit of land, but it's a burial plot. The Nolans are financially destitute, and Katie decides that Francie must work to support the family, even though she wants to return to school, and Neeley does not: "Neeley has to go back to school . . . if I don't make him he'll never go back . . . where you, Francie, will fight and manage somehow" (338). First, however, Francie graduates from the eighth grade, and this is the high point of her life: "I wish I could always wear a white dress and carry red roses and that we could always throw money around like we did tonight," the thinks, a sentimental but sincere longing in the face of constant poverty and hunger.

Book Four was added after the novel was accepted by Harper & Brothers for publication. It is similar to Smith's next two novels in that it depicts a young woman struggling within the working world. Francie's first job is at an artificial flower factory, terrifyingly dull work that had to be done slowly to keep pace with the other "Brooklyn migratory workers" who knew that they would be laid off when they finished their tasks. Francie considers her future:

"This could be a whole life," she thought. "You could work eight hours a day covering wires to earn money to buy food and to pay for a place to sleep so that you can keep living to come back to cover more wires. Some people are born and kept living just to come to this." (276)

At fourteen Francie finds a better job, as a reader for a clipping agency. She is paid less than the others even though she is their top reader because she was told by her boss not to engage in "washroom gossip" with the other women, and discuss salaries. She is also unable to read at night because she strained her eyes so badly during the day. Although she was proud of the money she could make, she was overwhelmed with adult responsibilities and unequipped to handle them, especially on the subway:

There had been that time in the train when, hanging from a strap and so tightly wedged in the crowd that she couldn't so much as lower her arm, she had felt a man's hand. No matter how she twisted and squirmed, she couldn't get away from that hand. When she swayed with the crowd as the cars swerved, the hand tightened. She was unable to twist her head to see whose hand it was. She stood in desperate futility, helplessly enduring the indignity. She could have called out and protested but she was too ashamed to call public attention to her predicament. (289)

As any female commuter on the New York subway knows, this is an inevitable harassment which is only alleviated though experience: Francie was too young to know how to protest, and therefore she was a target. Sissy advises Francie to relax and enjoy it, but Francie takes her mother's advice and begins to carry a hat-pin in her pocket.

"Failed Masterpiece" Novel Ending

Although this section is interesting for its portrait of working-class life, the book loses its plot line. World War I begins; Francie loses her job, starts another job at a lower pay; decides to attend classes at Brooklyn college; meets a boy named Ben. Ben goes to college in the midwest; Francie falls in love with a soldier; Francie is jilted; and finally the plot recoups itself: Sergeant McShane, the policeman who found the dying Johnny Nolan huddled in the doorway, courts and marries Katie, and Francie is free to return to school. Then there are many "sentimental leave-takings"1 as Francie prepares herself to go to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor where she has mysteriously been able to matriculate despite her eighth-grade education. Elia Kazan, in his film adaptation of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, wisely left out all of Book Four except the marriage of Katie and McShane. On the last page, she sees a little girl on a fire escape, and the novel comes full circle.

Immediate Bestseller

Although this ending is generically different than the bulk of the novel, it worked. Harper & Brothers had sent the manuscript out to many people in the publishing and bookselling field, and they knew that they had a powerful and profit-making machine. Consequently, according to Eugene Exman in The House of Harper, they issued it as a "`Harper Find,' a designation calling for special promotion of a new author's work, and soon A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was off to the races" (241). The book had a ten thousand dollar advertising budget and it went through three printings even before it was published on August 18, 1943 2. Immediately they ran into a publishing snag, however: under wartime restrictions, Harper & Brothers only had a certain amount of paper, and, with their runaway bestseller, they ran out (Exman 241). Consequently, the Blakiston Publishing firm of Philadelphia, which still had reserves of paper, made a special arrangement with Harper & Brothers whereby they would publish the novel; the Harper's first edition of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is extremely rare.

Armed Services Editions

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn also became one of the Armed Services Editions reprints and reached hundreds of thousands of soldiers overseas in a small, pocket form. Smith wrote that the soldiers were her best fans, and that she got about 4 letters a day from men overseas:

One letter tells of 200 men on the waiting list for the book; another on a transport ship says the librarian showed favoritism in handing out the few copies and that the soldiers complained to the chaplain who brought about fair play 3.

In "The ASE in Publishing History," Michael Hackenberg wrote that "ASE books had a captive audience of millions of people far from home, who found themselves in a situation where periods of boredom alternated with periods of intense activity" (Cole 17). Consequently A Tree Grows in Brooklyn became a formative experience in reading for men who wouldn't, in the usual run of events, be drawn to reading at all. Then audience that Smith reached through this outlet was large: it was so popular among the service men that a second edition of 97,000 copies was issued in July of 1944. It was the first book in the Armed Services Editions to go into a second printing 4.

By 1945, nearly three million copies of the book in the English language alone had been sold. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was quickly translated into sixteen other languages as well, and Smith was of Harper & Brothers' authors to "be able to get behind the Iron Curtain since the war" 5. According to Exman, the success of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn made publishing history (241): the only previous novel that had sold more copies was Gone With the Wind 6.

Critical Reviews

The novel received the same warm reviews from the press that it had from the staff at Harper & Brothers. Nearly every newspaper in the United States reviewed it, and the majority of the reviews were glowing. The New York World Telegram wrote "[A Tree Grows in Brooklyn] hit the big town's literary hatchetmen this week like a Roman candle over Red Hook" 7. The Chicago Sun's review was entitled "Excitingly Beautiful First Novel" and the Philadelphia Record called it "A Brilliant First Novel About a Brooklyn Girl" 8. In the New York Times, Orville Prescott wrote: "It is the best novel I have seen in many a moon, and is the best novel of any kind that I have read in 1943" 9. In the New York Post, Sterling North wrote: "Women, first slaves in any fascist regime, have contributed subtly to the defense of democracy in books ranging from Ellen Glasgow's `A Certain Measure' to Betty Smith's `A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,' still my choice for this year's Pulitzer Prize" 10. The Yale Review commentary was a typical:

Here is a first novel of uncommon skill, an almost uncontrollable vitality and zest for life, the work of a fresh, original and highly gifted talent. It is a story about life in the Williamsburg tenement district as lived by the Nolan family, particularly by Francie Nolan, aged one to nineteen in the course of the book--my favorite heroine for 1943.

Francie is an imaginative, courageous, altogether lovable child, a superbly drawn character. Her friends and relations are funny, pathetic, gallant, and real. The terrible misery, squalor, and grinding poverty of their lives are here in their unsavory detail. Miss Smith spares nothing. But she has the vision to know that loyalty and laughter and accomplishment and pride are also part of slum life, something too many writers forget, so A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a warm, sunny, engaging book as well as a grim one. It is also a rich and rare example of regional, local-color writing, filled to the scuppers with Brooklynese, Brooklyn folk ways, Brooklyn atmosphere. I shouldn't be surprised if Miss Smith had written the best novel of the year. Certainly it is the best so far 11.

The reviewers were ecstatic about A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: many thought it was the finest novel of the year. In the New York Post, Sterling North wrote about some of the more controversial aspects of the novel:

The emotional stress which accompanies conversion to Catholicism--or a break with the Church--seems to produce literature.

For every Chesterton or Willa Cather who has turned to the comfortable confines of an ancient faith, there is a James T. Farrell or a Betty Smith ready to question some of the revealed "truths" of a childhood credo.

The first group turns to mysticism and medievalism; the second to sociological case histories and realism.

"A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" is our choice for this year's Pulitzer Prize. It is a powerful and heartbreaking first novel of a girlhood in Brooklyn. It has overtones reminiscent of Agnes Smedley's "Daughter of Earth" and contains some of the finest descriptions of poverty in the English language 12.

Although initially most of the objection to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was about its treatment of Catholicism and its use of subject matter, as time went on, it was increasingly accused of a stylistic, or generic fault--that of sentimentality.

Diana Trilling and The Nation

The rare negative reviews objected mainly to Smith's subject matter: there were critics who still felt that an urban life of poverty was not an appropriate topic for novels. They called A Tree Grows in Brooklyn "sordid," called Francie an "irrepressible slum-child" and her family the "shanty Nolans." Only one critic in a major magazine wrote an negative review on different grounds. Diana Trilling wrote in The Nation:

By now you will have been assailed by the avalanche of advertising extolling the virtues of Betty Smith's "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" (Harper, $2.75). I am a little bewildered by so much response to so conventional a little book. Like the heroine of her first novel, Miss Smith was born and raised in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, but even without knowing this fact we could guess that the story was autobiographical. Women authors, especially, always regard their own childhoods as if the process of growing up were an experience reserved for people who will one day have the sensibility to write a book about it. . . . Because Francie Nolan is very poor, Irish, a Catholic, and I suppose because a member of her family drinks, I have seen "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" compared to the novels of James Farrell, and all to the credit of Miss Smith's novel. This makes me very sad both for the condition of fiction reviewing and for Mr. Farrell, whatever his faults as a novelist of stature. Of course Francie Nolan's story is more cheerful than Danny O'Neill's and a more popular commodity, but surely popular taste should be allowed to find its own emotional level without being encouraged to believe that a "heart-warming" experience is a serious literary experience 13.

This was the first article that began the public criticism of Smith's writing as being too sentimental. It is interesting to note that, out of all the reviews of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, this is the one that is most often quoted in contemporary author biographies. With her subsequent novels, the naturalistic sordidness of her novels was increasingly overlooked, and increasingly they were accused of "sentimentality." Trilling followed up her initial assessment of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in another article called "What Has Happened to Our Novels?" in which she wrote:

Thus a book like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is typical of our fiction of this war despite the fact that most of its action antedates the last war. In Miss Smith's picture of American poverty there is neither ugliness nor rebellion, only sentiment; the explosive family life of James Farrell's realistic novels is replaced, in the "realism" of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by a sweet co-operativeness. National unity reflects itself in family unity, and fiction arms us with the illusion of domestic security against the insecurity of the world 14.

Trilling has a point. Part of the reason for the popularity of Smith's novel was its depiction of American life and unity, but what's wrong with that? In Trilling's time it was de rigueur to criticize patriotism, as it is in American intellectual circles today, but the poor and the working-class feel differently. Until American intellectuals find an open mind on this subject, it is likely that the huge rift in sentiment will remain. Moreover, as Amy Kaplan notes,

Trilling's . . . vision of the American novel must be understood in the context of [her] times. [She was] recasting a literary tradition to echo [her] own generation's disillusionment with oppositional politics and [her] disbelief in the efficacy of human agency in what Trilling called the "social field," the province of the novel itself (4).

Just as Smith was a product of her class and times, Trilling was also, but Smith was breaking new ground and Trilling was an apologist for the old.

Smith was hurt by such criticism, but when this review was written, the flood of fan letters was so unrelenting that she did not have time to dwell on it long. Later she wrote hopefully that

It seems [the soldiers] will definitely mold the new trend in literature -- realism, without the all-out condemnation of the ordinary virtues of home and family. You can see by this sentence that I'm smarting under the criticism of Trilling in Harper's Magazine. . . . Honestly, I believe there is a new era in writing coming up -- realism without sneering 15.

Although A Tree Grows in Brooklyn never did catch on in the American academy (her hybrid form didn't fit into the schools of New Criticism, Proletarian literature, or American Naturalism) it crossed class boundaries; it demonstrates the strange mixture of sentiment and brutality that is integral to the American working-class, and makes it explicit for the elite.

Literature for the People

But no amount of negative criticism could keep the book from selling. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was a hit, a social phenomenon. People were talking about it all over the world. The reaction in the United States is fully documented and the novel has been published (and is still in print) in almost every language, including Serbo-Croat, Arabic, and Japanese. A friendly letter from the editor of Good Housekeeping explains the impact of the book on the American public:

Your book is sifting down to the People, capital P. All the traveling salesmen who usually read dirty jokes--the girl who manicures my nails who gets her literature from the B features--the hired man on a New Jersey farm who has not read a book since he left school in the seventh grade . . . It is a folk book and that make it more important than anything which accrues from it 16.

Book societies across the United States gave talks on it, ministers used it in their sermons, Parent-Teacher Associations, libraries, women's clubs, and neighborhood associations organized discussions about it. Articles appeared papers across the nation, citing it as the most popular novel at the public libraries. The press followed Smith's heels and reported on any mention of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in the public world. Louis (Lepke) Buchalter, kingpin of Murder, Inc., was reading it on his way to Sing Sing, while awaiting execution; he recommended it highly to his guards 17. It was wartime:

Edward Weeks, the erudite editor of the Atlantic Monthly, who lectured at the Woman's Club of Wisconsin recently, had just finished telling an excited audience about a thrilling bombing mission to Germany. Twenty-four of our twenty-five planes participating returned safely. With this story, he terminated his talk and, after a slight pause, asked if there were any questions. "Yes," spoke up a woman quickly. "What do you think of `A Tree Grows in Brooklyn'?" 18

Although there were many novels which were popular during the 1940s, no other sold as many copies, generated as many news articles, and enjoyed success as a Hollywood movie and a Broadway play; none other became a household name. According to the sociologist Long "Reading bestsellers is a social rite as well as an individual exercise, and reading books that are `in the air' is often the token of membership in a given social group -- a ritual, as it were, of social integration" (51). A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was special for the broadness of the social integration that it represented.

In an ironic tone, the New Yorker summed up the impact that the publication of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn had on Smith's life:

What happens to a writer whose first novel sells three hundred thousand copies in six weeks is as formalized as anything you will find in "The Golden Bough." The current sacrifice on the altar of literature is a small, lamblike creature named Betty Smith, who is--need we say?--the author of "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn." Winchell has confidently announced that she is going to win the Pulitzer Prize and Leonard Lyons has printed a flat and inaccurate anecdote about her. She has autographed copies of her novel at Abraham & Strauss and been asked to address a class in creative writing at Columbia. She has received a letter from a stern lady in Boston, to the effect that the author of such a novel ought to live in a stable 19.

By the Working Class, for the Working Class

The article touches on a problem which concerned not only Smith's life, but her place in the American academy. The New Yorker continues, quoting her Brooklyn accent:

"When I was makin' a hundred dollars a month and takin' care of the kids, I paid forty-five dollars a month for rent, and people said I was a brave little woman," she told us, letting' her g's fall where they might. "Now I'm makin' a thousand a week and spendin' nowhere near forty five per cent of my income on rent. I've always wanted luxury, but essentially, I'm still a poor person, in my heart" 20.

This reference to her accent, although probably well-meant, hurt Smith. The review ends with a description of her bypassing "urban revelry" for an afternoon at the race track. The overall intent of this article was ironic condescension, and it shook Smith's uncertain confidence: how could an author from Brooklyn pretend to write "literature?" A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is ideology, but it is the ideology for the working-class, by the working-class; it demonstrates how to find happiness in poverty. Perhaps this is what Trilling objected to: the glorification of the condition of the poor. Her critique against sentimentality in literature provided the basis for the further critiques against Smith, and such critiques continue to this day.

Social orders are essentially conservative: they resist change, and change only when it is forced upon them. When an oppressed social group wrests control of its own ideology from the hegemony, there is bound to be protest. Increasingly, Betty Smith faced a difficult critical audience, because her first novel was so immensely popular; her critics were casting about for some tag to pin on her that would diminish her popularity. They discovered the tag "sentimentality" and applied it to novels that were spare, sad and undramatic. Increasingly, it seemed as if the reviewers weren't even reading her books, but merely echoing what other critics had written. Criticism, like literature, does not take place in a void: there are conventions, and the conventions most frequently dictate the criticism produced.

Endnotes

1. Elizabeth Lawrence, letter to Betty Smith, 12 Jan. 1943.

2. Publishers Weekly, 24 July 1943.

3. Betty Smith, letter to Elizabeth Lawrence, 5 May 1944.

4. Elizabeth Lawrence, letter to Betty Smith, 3 May 1944. Smith made one-half of one cent per copy.

5. John Fischer, letter to Betty Smith, 12 Dec. 1947.

6. Irene M. Hughes, letter to Bob Tabs, 10 Jan. 1958.

7. Mel Heimer, New York World Telegram 20 Aug 1943.

8. America Chapel, The Chicago Sun 22 Aug 1943 and Louis Nicholas, Philadelphia Record 29 Aug 1943.

9. Orville Prescott, New York Times 18 Aug 1943.

10. Sterling North, New York Post, 22 Aug 1943.

11. Yale Review, Nov. 1943.

12. Sterling North, A Toast to Betty Smith, New York Post, 19 Aug. 1943.

13. Diana Trilling, The Nation, 3 Sept. 1943.

14. Diana Trilling, What Has Happened to Our Novels? The Nation, May 1944.

15. Betty Smith, letter to Elizabeth Lawrence, 21 July 1944.

16. Margaret Cousins, letter to Betty Smith, 17 Jan. 1944.

17. New York News, 22 Jan. 1944, New York Post, 14 Feb. 1944 and others.

18. Milwaukee, Wisconsin Journal 20 Feb. 1944.

19. The New Yorker, 9 Oct. 1943.

20. The New Yorker, 9 Oct. 1943.