Three Popular American Women Novelist of yesteryears

Asked why she wrote it, she gave several reasons depending on who asked the question and what sort of social strata they were in. The tree she immortalized is an “Ailanthus belonging to a hardy variety of Chinese sunac which she saw as a symbol of survival, a living reminder of her own struggle to escape the pain and poverty of Williamsburg.”

I wrote last Sunday in this column that of the 13 long listed for the 2022 Booker Prize, six were Americans. There is a massive upsurge of American novels but when we were young avid readers of fiction (around 1950s and 60s) it was British novelists we mostly read, having only passing interest in such greats as Scott Fitzgerald and Earnest Hemingway. However the three books I most vividly remember are by American authors.

Being house bound, this time due to lack of petrol for my vehicle and ‘empty fuel tank off days’ of my two courteous three wheeler drivers, I got down to more fiction reading. The book I am engrossed in at the moment is a yellowing paged, small print paperback of Betty Smith’s A Tree grows in Brooklyn.

It is far from starry eyed devouring of the book as I did as a late teenager but I certainly am absorbed in it, in every detail of living poor in Brooklyn at the beginning of the 20^th Century. And unlike in my salad days, I am interested in the author and so researched Betty Smith’s life, which is closely parallel to the life of Francie Nolan in the novel.

Betty Smith(1896-1972) was born of first generation German American parents in Brooklyn which certainly was a very poor, tenement-living mixture of Jews, recent American citizens and migrants mostly from Italy and Ireland. Christened Elizabeth Lilian Wehner, she went to three schools but had to give up education at 14-years to help her mother bring up her brother Johnny and a sister by working in the postal service.

She spent much time from early on in the local library. In 1919 she married George Smith who, wanting to study law, moved to Ann Arbour. There Betty had two daughters and once they were schooling, she turned to educating herself. She attended courses at the University of Michigan, and though without matriculation, obtained her BA and later her MA in Fine Arts from Yale.

While in the U of Michigan, she embarked on writing plays and one being accepted and produced, she won a prize for it. Betty and her husband divorced in 1935. She started her fiction writing then. She married twice more and died of pneumonia in Connecticut on January 17, 1972.

Her first novel, titled They lived in Brooklyn was rejected by several publishers until it was accepted by Harper and Brothers whose editors advised the title be changed to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Published in 1943, the novel became an instant bestseller. It is autobiographic since Betty is Francie Nolan of the novel.

Asked why she wrote it, she gave several reasons depending on who asked the question and what sort of social strata they were in. The tree she immortalized is an “Ailanthus belonging to a hardy variety of Chinese sunac which she saw as a symbol of survival, a living reminder of her own struggle to escape the pain and poverty of Williamsburg.”

Her first novel was followed by Tomorrow will be Better – 1948; Maggie Now – 1958 and Joy in the Morning – 1963. A Tree… was filmed in 1944 by 20^th Century Fox directed by Elia Kazan and starring Dorothy McGuire and James Dunn as Francie’s parents. Dunn won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor while child actor Peggy Ann Gordon won the Oscar for Best Female Actress. It was produced as a play in 1951 and a new film version came out in 1974.

Reading Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind was a stolen tasting of forbidden fruit. Grown up books as we termed them were forbidden and thus my reading of the huge tome during study hour in my school hostel, brown paper covered to make it innocuous in the eyes of the all seeing, all knowing Matron. She actually asked me what I was reading, being unusually non-whispering during study hour. History book was my prompt answer which passed muster.

Gone with ….1936 was the only published novel of Mitchell but its success is measurable by its winning the National Award for Most Distinguished Novel in 1936 and the Pulitzer in1937. Born in 1900 Mitchell died young at age 48.

Never to be forgotten was Scarlett’s O’Hara sitting on the steps of Rhett Butler’s Atlanta mansion when he finally leaves her because of the love she seemed to have for the colourless Ashley Wilkes, self consoling herself with the determination to get him back. The optimist in her promises tomorrow’s another day when she goes back to Tara – her father’s cotton plantation with its black slaves.

The 1939 film starring Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, Olivia de Havilland and Leslie Howard was directed by Victor Fleming and produced by David O’Selznik. It was nominated for 13 Oscars and won eight – best film; best actress and best supporting actress – the last creating history as Black American Hattie McDaniel won it for playing Scarlett’s nanny. She and the other black stars did not attend the premier since blacks were not allowed to sit alongside whites.

However 300,000 turned out to watch the stars as they came and went in Atlanta. The premier was at Loew’s Grand Theatre, still a theatre, and the stars stayed at the Georgia Terrace Hotel, right next to the old (for the US) block of flats where my son lives. The film was as enthralling as the book, or more so, searing itself in my memory for all time. It was redone and released several times, the last being in 1989.

The book and the film are considered perennial classics, but of late criticism has been leveled against it for romaticising slavery. Nothing seemed wrong with it to my mind.And then decades later I was in the Margaret Mitchell museum down Peachtree Street in Atlanta, Georgia, a convenient walk down from my son’s flat, with huge pictures from the film on its walls, especially Clark Gable staring at you with one eyebrow raised and flirty look. Mitchell wrote the novel in the cellar converted to an apartment, her husband not being able to afford better accommodation. Coming down with bronchial trouble they finally did move upstairs.

Margaret Mitchell had prosperous parents: father – lawyer, historian, politician and mother a suffragette, with Scottish and Irish roots. They lived down Peachtree Street and when a teenager, Margaret was rumoured to be a flirt. She graduated from Smith College, Massachusetts, and went into journalism contributing mainly to the Atlanta Journal. She gave up studies when her mother died in the flu epidemic of 1918 to keep house for her father.

In 1922 she married one of her two regular escorts – Bernien (Red) Shaw but soon divorced him due to his alcoholism and cruelty. She then married their bestman, her other favourite boyfriend – John Marsh in 1925.

‘To Kill a Mocking Bird’by Harper Lee (1926-2016) is an all-time favourite of mine and maybe better known than the previous two mentioned. Jean Louis Finch – Scout, her brother Jem and their father, lawyer Atticus Finch are indelible characters in my mind, and Atticus – Gregory Peck – is of course the all time heartthrob.

I have a further reminder. Along one of my walks is an almost derelict gloomy house with one window open and an old car in the portico. That is Boo Radley’s home to me with a mysterious, so far unseen Boo within!The widower lawyer, Atticus Finch, bringing up his two children in colour conscious Maycomb, Alabama, makes for a humane story, with him finally, but unsuccessfully defending a black youth – Tom Robinson – accused of molesting his daughter by white trash Bob Ewell. Also humane was the house confined Boo Radley attempting to befriend the two kids and finally rescuing Scout from the clutches of revenge seeing Ewell.

In 2015 Lee published her second novel Go Set a Watchman. In it 26-year old Scout visits her father in Maycomb against the backdrop of civil rights tension. He has changed and is now almost a supporter of the Klu Klux Klan. It was written by Lee in the mid 1950s and left unpublished until coaxed to do so; meeting mixed criticism. “The main characters may be the same, but Watchman is an entirely different book in both shape and tone from Mockingbird. Scout is not an impressionable girl but a young woman living in New York who discovers that her father, the great Atticus Finch, is a bigot.”

Nellie Harper Lee won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize, several honorary degrees and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007. She assisted her close friend Truman Capote in research for his In Cold Blood and took him as the model for Dill Harris, the Finch siblings’ friend. The 1962 film of To Kill… won Oscars for Best Screen Play – Robert Mulligan and Best Actor – Gregory Peck. It was nominated to the PGA Hall of Fame.