A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Read online

  A Tree Grows

  in Brooklyn

  BETTY SMITH

  With a Foreword by

  Anna Quindlen

  Contents

  E-book Extra

  Self-Reliance: A Reading Group Guide Foreword

  As much as any other beloved book in the canon...

  BOOK ONE

  1 Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New...

  2 The library was a little old shabby place. Francie thought...

  3 Papa came home at five o'clock. By that time, the...

  4 After she had seen Papa off, Francie went up to...

  5 Mama came home at six with Aunt Sissy. Francie was...

  6 Neeley came home and he and Francie were sent out...

  BOOK TWO

  7 It was in another Brooklyn summer but twelve years earlier,...

  8 The Rommelys ran to women of strong personalities. The Nolans...

  9 Johnny and Katie were married and went to live on...

  10 Francie wasn't much of a baby. She was skinny and...

  11 Johnny celebrated his voting birthday by getting drunk for three...

  12 Katie was ashamed to stay in the neighborhood after Johnny's...

  13 Lorimer Street was more refined than Bogart Street. It was...

  14 Life was pleasant in Lorimer Street and the Nolans would...

  BOOK THREE

  15 Four rooms made up the new flat. They led one...

  16 The neighborhood stores are an important part of a city...

  17 Piano lessons! Magic words! As soon as the nolans were...

  18 School days were eagerly anticipated by Francie. She wanted all...

  19 Francie expected great things from school. Since vaccination taught her...

  20 Katie's campaign against vermin and disease started the day her...

  21 Francie liked school in spite of all the meanness, cruelty,...

  22 Oh, magic hour when a child first knows it can...

  23 School days went along. Some were made up of meanness,...

  24 Francie counted the year's passing not by the days or...

  25 Johnny was one for taking notions. He'd take a notion...

  26 Most children brought up in Brooklyn before the First World...

  27 Christmas was a charmed time in Brooklyn. It was in...

  28 The future was a near thing to Katie. She had...

  29 In the summer of that same year, Johnny got the...

  30 "Today, I am a woman," wrote Francie in her diary...

  31 Two very important things happened in the year that Francie...

  32 Francie had started a diary on her thirteenth birthday with...

  33 Yes, there was a great curiosity about sex among the...

  34 When Francie heard Aunt Sissy tell Mama that she was...

  35 Once more it was in the week before Christmas. Francie...

  36 Johnny died three days later.

  37 Katie stayed in bed the day after the funeral and...

  38 Just before Christmas vacation ended, Francie told Mama that she...

  39 Francie and Neeley were confirmed in may. Francie was almost...

  40 Two days, Francie came home for lunch and did not...

  41 Laurie was a good baby. She slept contentedly most of...

  42 Francie hardly had time to get used to Laurie when...

  BOOK FOUR

  43 "You got the idea now," said the forelady to Francie....

  44 Francie had been working two weeks when the layoff came.

  45 Christmas again. But this year there was money for presents...

  46 "In ten more minutes," announced Francie, "it will be 1917."

  47 For the little while of the Christmas holidays, it had...

  48 A Newspaper lay on Francie's desk. It was an "extra"...

  49 Francie came away from her first chemistry lecture in a...

  50 Sissy expected her baby late in November. Katie and Evy...

  51 When it got too cold to go walking, Francie enrolled...

  52 One sunny day in the spring when Francie was sixteen,...

  53 She wrote that night as she had promised--a long...

  54 It was the first time Francie had seen McShane without...

  BOOK FIVE

  55 Francie jumped as someone tapped her on the shoulder. Then...

  56 Saturday! The last Saturday in their old home. The next...

  About the Author

  Books by Betty Smith

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  E-book Extra

  Self-Reliance: A Reading Group Guide

  A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

  TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

  In a particularly revealing chapter of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Francie's teacher dismisses her essays about everyday life among the poor as "sordid." Indeed, many of the novel's characters seem to harbor a sense of shame about their poverty, but they also display a remarkable self-reliance (Katie, for example, says she would kill herself and her children before accepting charity). How and why have our society's perceptions of poverty changed--for better or worse--during the last one hundred years?

  Some critics have argued that many of the characters in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn can be dismissed as stereotypes, exhibiting quaint characteristics or representing pat qualities of either nobility or degeneracy. Is this a fair criticism? Which characters are the most convincing? Which are the least convincing?

  Francie observes more than once that women seem to hate other women ("they stuck together for only one thing: to trample on some other woman"), while men, even if they hate each other, stick together against the world. Is this an accurate appraisal of the way things are in the novel?

  The women in the Nolan/Rommely clan exhibit most of the strength and, whenever humanly possible, control the family's destiny. How does Francie continue this legacy?

  What might Francie's obsession with order--from systematically reading the books in the library from A through Z, to trying every flavor of ice cream soda--in turn say about her circumstances and her dreams?

  Although it is written in the third person, there can be little argument that the narrative is largely from Francie's point of view. How would the book differ if it was told from Neeley's perspective?

  How can modern readers reconcile the frequent anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant sentiments that characters espouse throughout the novel?

  Could it be argued that the main character of the book is not Francie but, in fact, Brooklyn itself?

  Foreword

  AS MUCH AS ANY OTHER BELOVED BOOK IN THE CANON, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn illustrates the limitations of plot description. In its nearly five hundred pages, nothing much happens. Of course that's not really accurate: Everything that can happen in life happens, from birth and death to marriage and bigamy. But those things happen in the slow, sure, meandering way that they happen in the slow, sure, meandering river of real existence, not as the clanking "and then" that lends itself easily to event synopsis.

  If, afterwards, someone asked, "What is the book about?"--surely one of the most irritating and reductionist questions in the world for reader and writer alike--you would not say, well, it's about the pedophile who grabs a little girl in the hall, or about the time a man went on a bender and lost his job, or about a woman who works as the janitor in a series of tenement buildings. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is not the sort of book that can be reduced to its plot line. The best anyone can say is that it is a story about what it means to be human.

  When it first appeared, in 1943, it was called, by those critics who liked it, an honest book, and that is accurate as far as it goes. But it is more than that: It is deeply, indel
ibly true. Honesty is casting bright light on your own experience; truth is casting it on the experiences of all, which is why, six decades after it was published and became an instant bestseller, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn continues to be read by people from all countries and all circumstances. Early on in its explosive success it was described as a book about city life, a story about grinding poverty, a tale of the struggles of immigrants in America. But all those things are setting, really, and the themes are farther-reaching: the fabric of family, the limits of love, the loss of innocence, and the birth of knowledge.

  All of this takes place in the life of Francie Nolan, who is eleven years old when her story opens in the summer of 1912, in a third-floor walk-up apartment in the shadow of the hardy urban ailanthus tree, the "only tree that grew out of cement," a tree "that liked poor people." The scene is set immediately in the first few pages, of a hectic, vivid, hard-scrabble neighborhood where the children sell junk for pennies, spending half on petty indulgences and bringing half home to parents who can barely make the rent or pay for bread, even the stale next-day sort sold at the local wholesaler.

  Francie's mother is small and pretty but steely and tough; her father is warm and charming but feckless and, above all, a prisoner of his need for drink. And all of this would lapse into stereotype were Smith's people and situations not seen by the girl in ways that are so undeniably true, simply told but full of the small details and moments that remind us of our own lives: the bank made from an old can Francie's mother nails inside the closet to save money to buy a bit of land, the starched shirfront her father wears beneath his old tuxedo as he works as a singing waiter, the librarian who never looks up as she stamps the child's books, the teacher who insists she write only about the beautiful and serene and never about what she really sees around her.

  It is not a showy book from a literary point of view. Its pages are not larded with metaphor or simile or the sound of the writer's voice in love with its own music. Its glory is in the clear-eyed descriptions of its scenes and people. When the Nolans move, their emptied apartment has "that look of a nearsighted man with his glasses off." When the children watch their father drink, they "pondered how a nightcap could also be an eye opener." When Francie writes the sort of grand essay her teacher expects, she rereads her own words and concludes: "They sounded like words that came in a can; the freshness was cooked out of them."

  There is little need for embellishment in these stories; their strength is in the simple universal emotion they evoke. Francie must go and be immunized at a public clinic to be allowed to attend school; added to her fear of the needle is the ignominy of listening to the doctor and nurse discuss how dirty she is. Across the broad divide of class that separates her from the well-to-do doctor and the nurse who has risen out of the same environment but turned her back on it, Francie finally says when her arm has been bandaged, "My brother is next. His arm is just as dirty as mine so don't be surprised. And you don't have to tell him. You told me."

  "I had no idea she'd understand what I'm saying," the doctor says afterwards, surprised.

  This is one of those children who understands almost everything around her. The description of her passage into adolescence, when she suddenly sees the world as dingy and flawed, her parents as human and not omnipotent, the theater melodramas she had formerly loved as creaky chestnuts, is among the great descriptions in fiction of the turn of the kaleidoscope occasioned by growing older and growing up. Finally she questions the game her mother has created when food runs low, the game in which she and her brother pretend they are explorers at the North Pole trapped by a blizzard in a cave. "When explorers get hungry and suffer like that, it's for a reason," Francie says. "But what big thing comes out of us being hungry like that?" Katie Nolan replies sadly, "You found the catch in it."

  Readers have met this sort of girl before in the pages of memorable fiction, the perceptive child who reads indefatigably, writes obsessively, dreams of a future different than what the past and present would portend. Jo March of Little Women is one, the eponymous Anne of Green Gables another, Betsy Ray of the beloved Betsy-Tacy books a third. But Francie Nolan and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn reveal the inherent weakness in those stories, a lack of realism that has made them enduring novels for girls while this has as often been a book for adults.

  In Francie's beloved Brooklyn, a rapist stalks the hallways, young women give birth out of wedlock and are reviled and even attacked, the nice old man in the junk store is not someone a child should risk being alone with. The March girls of Little Women are poor, but their poverty is styled a kind of noble blessing; Betsy Ray is bound and determined to be a writer and this is portrayed as an inevitability. But the poverty of Francie's family is degrading and soul destroying, and the possibility of really becoming a writer a considerable dream, given the need to leave school and work in factories and offices to provide food and rent money. When Francie goes to the theater, she is disdainful of the plot twist in which the hero appears at the last moment to pay the mortgage and save the day. "What if he'd been held up and couldn't make it?" she asks herself, and answers the question the only way she knows how: "You betcha they'd live, thought Francie grimly. It takes a lot of doing to die."

  So why is this not a grim book, with Francie's beloved father crying through delirium tremens and her teacher giving her "C"s in English when she dares to write about that real-life horror instead of gerrymandered tales of apple orchards and high tea? Part of it is certainly because we know Francie has finally triumphed. A wise contemplative voice oversees the action of the novel from time to time, and it is both the voice of the author, Betty Smith, and the unmistakable voice of a Francie grown to equanimity and stability. There is no doubt that this is an autobiographical story; originally written as memoir, it was reconfigured as fiction at the request of an editor at its publishing house. Smith herself, describing the deluge of reader letters that accompanied both the initial publication of Tree and its subsequent editions, wrote, "One fifth of my letters start out 'Dear Francie.'"

  But even did we not suspect that Francie has in fact grown up not only to write but to write a spectacularly successful bestseller, there is already a kind of peace at the end of the novel that prefigures a better life for the beloved characters. Francie's little sister, born after their charming and ineffectual father's death, will know a life far easier than Francie and her brother Neely have; even as she irons the union label in Neely's shirt, Francie is on her way to college far from Brooklyn. She is leaving, but leaving with everything she has learned from a place of great poverty and great richness. In a deeply affecting conclusion she looks across the tenement backyards where the tree has been chopped down and yet grown again and sees a little girl and whispers, "Good-bye, Francie" to her former self.

  Is it only Francie to whom we say farewell at that moment? Of course not, or else this book would have been long forgotten. This is not simply a portrait of a section of a city nearly a century ago, nor a description of how the poor lived then in America. It is not, despite what some critics wrote, a book about social issues, about the class struggle and union membership and public education for the poor. This is not one of those social welfare novels in which the characters exist as marionettes, the strings jerked by the fashionable causes of their time. In life such issues only exist embodied in human beings, and to the extent that they are part of this book it is because of the portraits of people trampled or saved or scarred by them.

  Instead this is that rare and enduring thing, a book in which, no matter what our backgrounds, we recognize ourselves. Francie does not say "good-bye" to the tenements or the tragedies but to the girl she once was, the illusions she once had, the life she once led.

  --Anna Quindlen

  Book One

  1

  SERENE WAS A WORD YOU COULD PUT TO BROOKLYN, NEW YORK. Especially in the summer of 1912. Somber, as a word, was better. But it did not apply to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Prairie was lovely and Shenandoah had a beautiful so
und, but you couldn't fit those words into Brooklyn. Serene was the only word for it; especially on a Saturday afternoon in summer.

  Late in the afternoon the sun slanted down into the mossy yard belonging to Francie Nolan's house, and warmed the worn wooden fence. Looking at the shafted sun, Francie had that same fine feeling that came when she recalled the poem they recited in school.

  This is the forest primeval. The murmuring

  pines and the hemlocks,

  Bearded with moss, and in garments green,

  indistinct in the twilight,

  Stand like Druids of eld.

  The one tree in Francie's yard was neither a pine nor a hemlock. It had pointed leaves which grew along green switches which radiated from the bough and made a tree which looked like a lot of opened green umbrellas. Some people called it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed fell, it made a tree which struggled to reach the sky. It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps and it was the only tree that grew out of cement. It grew lushly, but only in the tenements districts.

  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.

  That was the kind of tree in Francie's yard. Its umbrellas curled over, around and under her third-floor fire escape. An eleven-year-old girl sitting on this fire escape could imagine that she was living in a tree. That's what Francie imagined every Saturday afternoon in summer.

  Oh, what a wonderful day was Saturday in Brooklyn. Oh, how wonderful anywhere! People were paid on Saturday and it was a holiday without the rigidness of a Sunday. People had money to go out and buy things. They ate well for once, got drunk, had dates, made love and stayed up until all hours; singing, playing music, fighting and dancing because the morrow was their own free day. They could sleep late--until late mass anyhow.