My new reading project: novels set in Brooklyn. There are, I've already discovered, tons of them. I wonder how long I will last at this endeavor. Will it be a sterile or a fruitful exercise?
How is it that I never read, until this very week, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn? It's certainly the best known novel with the noun "Brooklyn" in its title. I've known about it all my life and just never got around to looking at a single page. Did my parents, always tentative about sex, warn me off because the novel has a few frank passages. Or was it anti-Brooklyn snobbery? As a young person, I wanted to read about far off places -- Pitcairn Island, nomadic central Asia, and the Africa of Rider Haggard, -- certainly not familiar grimy Brooklyn. At the McDonald Avenue branch of the public library, there were many well-worn copies of of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn sitting on the shelf -- which I ignored and, if I remember correctly, disdained.
What did I miss? Tree is not much in the way of a fiction. There's nothing like a plot, only a series of loosely-related episodes, and except for the central figure, not much character development. It's a barely-disguised autobiography. Francie Nolan, tracked from birth through her escape to, believe it or not, Michigan!!, comes from a grindingly poor family ("food insecure" before the term was invented). Much of the first few hundred pages is the barebones account of the struggle for sustenance (and lodging). There is so much emphasis on overcoming lack that Tree almost seems to fetishize or celebrate poverty.
So much scrabbling for the next meal is hard to bear, painful to read. It's especially painful for me, because Betty Smith, born in 1896 in Williamsburg, preceded my father, also a native of Williamsburg (born in 1904) by only a few years. He came from an immigrant family as poor as poor can be, and some of the stories that he told me about the impoverishment of his youth echo and sometimes exceed Smith's. The essence, therefore, of this "novel," is familiar to me, perhaps entirely too familiar.
One blot upon the novel is its casual bigotry. Irish characters sometimes go to "Jewtown" for clothes or food. Jewish characters are gross stereotypes. But what can be expected from a popular novel of the 1940s, when the radio offered us, day after day, large doses of Amos and Andy, Life with Luigi, The Goldbergs. How we guffawed at ethnic "humor" in those unenlightened days!
Nor was I happy about the novel's Brooklyn chauvinism. For example:
""There's no other place like it," Francie said.
"Like what?"
"Brooklyn. It's a magic city."
"It's just like any other place."
"It isn't. It's mysterious here in Brooklyn. It's like -- yes -- a dream. The houses and streets don't seem real. Neither do the people."
I wish the novel offered some corroboration for the claim of Brooklyn's magic and mystery. If it was there, I didn't find it in this grim novel, nor at the corner of Newkirk and Coney Island Avenues where I first came to awareness.
The "tree that grows in Brooklyn" is the so-called 'tree of heaven," ailanthus altissima. Smith has chosen it as a symbol of resilience, for the tree of heaven can thrive under the most inauspicious circumstances. I, for one, can remember playing on the roof of one of those six story apartment houses so common in our neighborhood, and noticing an ailanthus growing right out of the asphalt. I was astonished. But I wish that Betty Smith had chosen a different tree to invest with meaning, because the ailanthus is, frankly, a "trash tree." It's generally considered a noxious weed, an invasive species. It grows rapidly but is short-lived. Its wood is soft and useless. It suckers vigorously and eternally, pours forth strong alleopathic chemicals upon its neighbors, invades subterranean sewers and pipes, is extremely fecund, and stinks. It is known to gardeners and foresters not as the "tree of heaven" but as the "tree of hell." It's not a tree that often finds itself celebrated in fiction. Nor in pastoral. Brooklyn, my Brooklyn, was a city of magnificent oaks, maples, sycamores and elms. My people, my fellow Brooklynites, deserve a more distinguished avatar than the tree of of so-called heaven.
Some will remember that T. S. Eliot once referred to the tree that grows in Brooklyn as the "rank ailanthus."
