A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

Here’s a headline summary of the book we discussed for March, “Through it is often categorized as a coming-of-age novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is much more than that. Its richly-plotted narrative of three generations in a poor but proud American family offers a detailed and unsentimental portrait of urban life at the beginning of the century.” 

Here’s a little more of the plot, “The story begins in 1912, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, where eleven-year-old Francie Nolan and her younger brother, Neeley, are spending a blissful Saturday collecting rags, paper, metal, rubber, and other scrap to sell to the junk man for a few pennies. Half of any money they get goes into the tin can bank that is nailed to the floor in the back corner of a closet in their tenement flat. This bank, a shared resource among everyone in the family, is returned to time and again throughout the novel, and becomes a recurring symbol of the Nolan's self-reliance, struggles, and dreams.  Their mother Katie scrubs floors and works as a janitor to provide the family with free lodging. She is the primary breadwinner because her husband Johnny, a singing waiter, is often drunk and out of work. Yet there is no dissension in the Nolan household. Katie married a charming dreamer and she accepts her fate, but she vows that things will be better for her children. Her dream is that they will go to college and that Neeley will become a doctor. Intelligent and bookish, Francie seems destined to fulfill this ambition—Neeley less so.” (From the publisher.)

“The author, Betty Smith, the daughter of German immigrants, grew up poor in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. After stints writing features for newspapers, reading plays for the Federal Theater Project, and acting in summer stock, Smith moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina under the auspices of the W.P.A. While there in 1943, she published A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, her first novel. Smith's other novels include Tomorrow Will be Better (1947), Maggie-Now, (1958) and Joy in the Morning (1963). She also had a long career as a dramatist, writing one-act and full-length plays for which she received both the Rockefeller Fellowship and the Dramatist Guild Fellowship. She died in 1972.” (From the publisher.)

We talked about how Francie’s story was originally the memoir of Betty Smith, but her publishers asked her to fictionalize her account.  We agreed that the book does read as “real” and here is an excerpt that shows how real it is, “Having married early George H. E. Smith, a fellow Brooklynite, she moved with him to Ann Arbor, Michigan, while he pursued his law degree at the University of Michigan. At this time, she gave birth to two girls and waited until they were in school so she could complete her higher education. Although Smith had not finished high school, the university allowed her to enroll in classes anyway. There she honed her skills in journalism, literature, writing, and drama, winning a prestigious Hopwood Award. She was a student in the classes of Professor Kenneth Thorpe Rowe.”  Both Francie and Betty Smith did not finish high school.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Book Discussion Questions and Quotes

1. 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," and, 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?

*  The Nolans cannot afford to throw anything at all away, and yet, Katie allows one exception – to throw away the coffee.  “I think it's good that people like us can waste something once in a while and get the feeling of how it would be have lots of money and not have to worry about scrounging.”

*  This pride is passed on to Francie.  She writes about the poverty, is told to stop by her teachers, and perseveres anyway, not giving up on reading and writing.

*  “There are very few bad people. There are just a lot of people that are unlucky.”
*  “The difference between rich and poor", said Francie, "is that the poor do everything with thier own hands and the rich hire hands to do things.”

2. 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?

*  “Katie had a fierce desire for survival which made her a fighter. Johnny had a hankering after immortality which made him a useless dreamer. And that was the great difference between these two who loved each other so well.”

* Our conversation revolved around other stories and experiences we knew about poverty and how this book was spot on and not stereotypical.

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

*  Without Johnny, Francie would have nothing beautiful. In a way, he always delivers the song to her, instead of to the sea.  Like his songs, Johnny’s dreams have no grounding in reality.

*  Katie sends her kids alone to get vaccinated, knowing that they must learn the ways of a cruel world. Johnny just wants to show Francie as much beauty as he can.

*  “A person who pulls himself up from a low environment via the boot-strap route has two choices. Having risen above his environment, he can forget it; or, he can rise above it and never forget it and keep compassion in his heart for those has left behind him in the cruel up climb. The nurse had chosen the forgetting way.”  (These lines come right after the doctor administering Francie's vaccination makes his cruel comments about the filth of poor people. Francie sees the nurse as a mother-figure, and keeps thinking she will defend her.)

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

*  “Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words.”

*  “She was made up of more, too. She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl. Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. She was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly. She was Katie's secret, despairing weeping. She was the shame of her father stumbling home drunk. She was all of these things and of something more...It was what God or whatever is His equivalent puts into each soul that is given life - the one different thing such as that which makes no two fingerprints on the face of the earth alike.”

6. 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?

*  Katie chooses to love Nolan instead of Francie, and Francie learns to live with it.

*  “But she needs me more than she needs him and I guess being needed is almost as good as being loved. Maybe better.”

*  “She had become accustomed to being lonely. She was used to walking alone and to being considered 'different.' She did not suffer too much.”

*  “From that moment on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again. ”

*  “All my life I've been lonely. I've been lonely at crowded parties. I've been lonely in the middle of kissing a girl and I've been lonely at camp with hundreds of fellows around. But now I'm not lonely any more.”
*  “Francie is smart, she thought. She must go to high school and maybe beyond that. She's a learner and she'll be somebody someday. But when she's educated, she will grow away from me. Why, she's growing away from me now. She does not love me the way the boy loves me. I feel her turn away from me. She does not understand me. All she understands is that I don't understand her. Maybe when she gets education, she will be ashamed of me - the way I talk. But she will have too much character to show it. Instead she will try to make me different. She will come to see me and try to make me live in a better way and I will be mean to her because I'll know she's above me. She will figure out too much about things as she grows older; she'll get to know too much for her own happiness.”

One theme we discussed is how there are “firsts and lasts.”

*  “I know that's what people say-- you'll get over it. I'd say it, too. But I know it's not true. Oh, you’ll be happy again, never fear. But you won't forget. Every time you fall in love it will be because something in the man reminds you of him.”
*  “To look at everything always as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time: Thus is your time on earth filled with glory.”

Another was making your own happiness

*  “People always think that happiness is a faraway thing," thought Francie, "something complicated and hard to get. Yet, what little things can make it up; a place of shelter when it rains - a cup of strong hot coffee when you're blue; for a man, a cigarette for contentment; a book to read when you're alone - just to be with someone you love. Those things make happiness.”

And another was the symbolism of the tree.

* “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 tenement districts.”

* “But this tree in the yard-this tree that men chopped down...this tree that they built a bonfire around, trying to burn up it's stump-this tree lived!  It lived! And nothing could destroy it.”