First Discovering A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Author Betty Smith, who published A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in 1943, wrote:  “It doesn’t take long to write things of which you know nothing. When you write of actual things, it takes longer, because you have to live them first.”  Her novel exemplifies her accumulated learned wisdom, as she writes shockingly and vividly about living and coming of age in Brooklyn during the early 1900’s. Although she was born in 1896, Frances ‘Francie’ Nolan, the character she speaks through is about 10 as the story begins in 1912. Smith’s book shines a light on Francie’s family (the Nolan’s) and their struggling neighbors during the turn of the century. Not many notable writers considered this time period in Brooklyn to be the ideal one for a novel’s place, but Smith regarded it as “magical.” This book is as definitive as Mark Twain’s, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are in describing life along the Mississippi River, and as roaring as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books, The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby are in characterizing the Lost Generation in Long Island and Paris, France in the 1920’s. And like those earlier literary masterpieces, Smith’s book is a top-shelf American Classic, deserving to be read for the first time or re-read today for still timely truths and wisdom. Consider strolling along with Smith through the neighborhood of her childhood memory:

You took a walk on a Sunday afternoon and came to a nice neighborhood, very refined. You saw a small 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.

By saying that the tree “liked poor people,” the author is both personifying the tree as a character in her story and inferring that the tree’s struggle was “like” the poor people of Brooklyn’s struggle. Smith’s tells her story as a third-person narrator more than thirty years after the events she first experienced, and thus she relates them from a misty, nostalgic point of view. In reading about the author’s life, in the Insights and Interviews section of the 2001 HarperCollins edition of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a reader can easily conclude that much of the novel was based on her life. Magically, 30 years later, she was inspired to reimagine her coming of age period through the innocent eyes of Francie, her main character. This technique has been used successfully in woman’s literature from Louisa May Alcott’s, Little to Women (1868) through Harper Lee’s, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). Although A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is clearly fiction, today’s readers might have little trouble believing that it could be a memoir or a work of creative non-fiction—if they had picked the book up without knowing much about it. Again, Smith, the author, speaks through Francie’s mind, about what she had learned after her teacher caught her in a whopper of a made-up story: “A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward.  A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn’t tell it like it was, you told it like you thought it should have been.”

So I don’t have to make up a whopper, I now confess that I have just completed my first reading of this book. My first impressions are that Smith “lived through events much like the ones she wrote about,” and that “she told this story the way it should have been.” By the number of years it took her to produce it, it must have been ripening in her mind’s fine-wine cellar and patiently waiting for the time (1943) when it was ready to be served. Before she even started thinking about writing this book, she raised a family, went to college, had a successful career in journalism, and published many dramas, short stories, and magazine articles. In her essay, “Fall in Love with Life,” for “This Week” magazine, Smith reflected, “As a listening child, I often heard older people say: ‘Oh the plans I made!’ And ‘What dreams I had!’ And the inevitable: If only I had my life to live over…’ I reasoned that these men and women had missed the fullness of life somehow.” Deciding at age 14 that she would not be one of those regretting adults, she turned to reading and built her life around the foundations of education. She found an early inspiration in Emile Zola’s book, and his words recalled as an adult, later inspired her to write A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. His message was, to have “a full life, “one must have a child, plant a tree,” and “write a book.”

Thankfully for several generations of readers, Smith has given us a book that we can sip and savor often. She opened up a whole new barrel of knowledge to readers like me, whose parents or grandparents grew up in the early 1900’s in cities like Brooklyn. Our families were, for the most part, immigrants coming to our country who had to struggle just to survive. Smith’s relatives were of German descent, where Francie’s grandparents were Catholic and from Ireland. Although my grandparents were Jewish and from Russia, and lived in Philadelphia, it made no difference to me: I identified with and learned something about my own roots from almost every incident that Francie wrote about. I grew up in some neighborhoods that were not that different from the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn where the Smith and the Nolan’s lived. Although I did not have to struggle for survival like Francie did, by collecting and re-selling junk found on the street, I now realize that perhaps my grandparents and parents might have had resort to measures like the Nolan’s. In the neighborhoods like the ones the Nolan’s lived, neighbors felt like a community and the bond of extended families supported each other and held each other accountable. Thus, one of the most important things that Francie learned about growing up was that she could count on her mother, her aunt, her brother, her grandparents, and some of her teachers and neighbors to steer her in the right direction. But she also learned about dealing with struggle, loneliness, and disappointment from some friends and neighbors, a few misguided teachers, and even from her father, who was both an undependable drunk and an inspired idealist. This daughter-father relationship is the most complex one in the book because, though he was not able to support the family materially, she never lost faith in his dreams. It’s hard to tell after the book gets going about how much of the story happened and how much was as Smith wished it had been. The relationships between Francie and her father, mother, brother, and aunt are what most gives this book the full ripeness character that keeps speaking to me after I completed reading it. One theme that particularly interests me in is how Smith uses a lone tree struggling to grow in Brooklyn as a symbol of her family’s struggle for survival. Although there were attempts to chop it down, it would not die. Francie observed from this, that “Everything struggles to live.”  In a like manner, Francie’s father advised her when she was in the midst of one of her most insurmountable struggles that, “You won’t die, Francie. You were born to lick this rotten life.” It well worth the read to find out how she pulled this off. There is also a 1945 black and white version of the first two-thirds of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, produced by Elia Kazan, that some of my friends recommended. After completing the book, I looked at it with my wife (who had not read it). Neither of us was very impressed with the slow-moving pace of the film. However, I have to admit that I felt charmed, both by the child actor who played Francie (Peggy Ann Garner) and by her drunk-idealist father (James Dunn), who won a Best Supporting Oscar for his role.  If you must look at it, Read the Book First! I wound up trying to explain to my wife what happened in the book that was skipped by the film. But as I have asked and written about before in this column: “How many films are as good as their classic novels?” Not many, I still conclude. What do you think? What is your favorite part of the book(or the movie), and what does it mean to you? Please “Leave a Reply” in the text box below and keep this conversation going.

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