A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [3]
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 sound, 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