Master schedule of all "Salute to City Reading" posts is here.
The first time I read Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn it was because my grandmother pulled a book club edition off my mother's shelf and told me I needed to read it, that it was, in her words, "the story of my life". You have to understand that my grandmother, Catherine Lennon Hurley, was certainly a reader but not someone who found great significance in the books she read. She read for enjoyment, was happy to pass along a decent mystery or novel but books were not a place where she found herself. So my mother and I took this to be a very big deal. Then my great aunt Marion (my grandmother's younger sister) saw the book in her hand and said "oh yes - that book is exactly what it was like growing up".

So I totally had to read it.

I have returned to Smith's classic a dozen times since then and talked to my grandmother and Aunt Marion about it and to many other folks who have roots in NYC. While the novel is set in Brooklyn, my family came from the Bronx but very nearly everything else is the same - the Irish American father, the Eastern European mother, the significance of the church and the neighborhood in their lives, the bone crushing poverty, the alcoholism, the sorrow, the sweetness and on and on. It is, most certainly, my grandmother's life in early 20th century NY (although she was born in 1919, about eighteen years after the protagonist, young Francie Nolan).

Here is how Smith describes Francie's father early on:

Yes, everyone loved Johnny Nolan. He was a sweet singer of sweet songs. Since the beginning of time, everyone, especially the Irish, had loved and cared for the singer in their midst. His brother waiters really loved him. The men he worked for loved him. His wife and children loved him. He was still gay and young and handsome. His wife had not turned bitter against him and his children did not know that they were supposed to be ashamed of him.

Everyone, please let me introduce my great grandfather, Thomas Lennon. He was beautiful wasn't he? And always the center of the party - everyone loved him, everyone loved being noticed by him. When she was dangerously ill with tetanus as a child my grandmother recalled that he was the only one who could touch her without making her scream in pain. When her brother Thomas was burned in an accident only their father could clean his burns every day. His wife, Julia, was kind and capable and the one who made sure all of them were fed and clean and had a roof over their heads but that, as important as it was, is not what the children remembered. "Nana was a good woman," recalled my grandmother and yet, and yet...they all adored their father. Betty Smith understood this:

Francie knew her mama was a good woman. She knew. And papa said so. Then why did she like her father better than her mother? Why did she? Papa was no good. He said so himself. But she liked papa better.

And so the story plays out much as you expect it to, both in fiction and real life. As Smith writes about the neighborhoods where the Nolans live, their jobs (Katie Nolan scrubbing floors in exchange for free rent, just as my great grandmother Julia did), their movements from butcher to baker to deli for cheaper food at the end of the day or the week (my grandmother recalled the same planned expenditures) all of the story moves forward to the end you know can not be denied:

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.

Johnny Nolan dies at 34, from a lifetime of drinking (although Katie convinces the doctor to write something else.) Thomas Lennon was dead at 43, the same causes. While Johnny leaves behind two children and a pregnant wife, my great grandmother Julia was left with 8 children, the youngest only a toddler. There were suggestions that she give some of the children up - the church ran orphanages filled with the children of lost fathers. But Julia was tough and she held on and she got them through. All of her children made it safely to adulthood and while they mourned their father they knew it was their mother that saved them.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is widely acknowledged as a classic and rightfully so but it is a far more complex story than most people realize. This is truly gritty urban drama - a story deeply entrenched in the ugliness of poverty and alcoholism and sex. The sex part is probably the biggest surprise for new readers - not that it is ever graphically portrayed - as the impact of sex on the poor is so directly discussed. There are repeated discussions of girls who become pregnant and errant boys who leave them to the scorn of the neighborhood women, girls who marry when they are "three months gone"and those who make a choice to lose a child rather than struggle for another mouth to feed. When Francie is three months old, Katie become pregnant again and the midwife offers a medicine that will take care of her "problem". Katie decides to soldier on but there is no higher ground offered in this decision. The long gap between her second and third children (more than ten years) is never explained and that is one area where I think Smith removed the story from reality. In a true Irish family there would have been a pregnancy every two years or so unless the wife purposely separated herself from her husband. Katie does not do that but doesn't become pregnant either. Julia Lennon, of course, had no such luck. She did purposely end a pregnancy though, because she could not bear to carry another at that time.

Oh, Julia. I've often wondered how her life might have been different if she had not fallen for Tom Lennon. But then I look at a picture of him (and you should see the pictures of his sons!!) and I swoon. In 1909, when they were dating, Tom & Julia were asked to leave a dance floor for holding each other too close. She was gone for him from the first moment, I'm sure, just like Katie & Johnny:

Feeling his arms around her and instinctively adjusting herself to his rhythm, Katie knew that he was the man she wanted. She'd ask nothing more than to look at him and listen to him for the rest of her life. Then and there, she decided that those privileges were worth slaving for all her life.

For a slice of Brooklyn at the turn of the last century and up through the first World War, you can not do better than A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. It's a lovely story, sad in parts but triumphant as well. For me it is indelibly linked to my own family which is not a bad thing at all. The Nolans bring Tom & Julia a little bit closer to me which is really one of the best gifts any book can give.

[Tom Lennon circa 1910; Julia Lennon - center, also circa 1910. That was the year they were married; Tom died in 1933. Final pic is Tom & Julia with sons Thomas & Jimmy in back, Robie in front and my grandmother "Kay" on her mom's lap! circa 1922]