BETTY SMITH WAS NOT A ONE-BOOK WONDER
Born in 1896, writer Betty Smith (pictured above) has always been best known for her first novel, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, published in 1943. Indeed, a lot of people only vaguely familiar with the author probably think that she was a one-novel wonder, like Margaret Mitchell or Harper Lee (for most of her life, anyway). In fact, Smith wrote four novels, all of them commercially successful. In 1947, she followed up A Tree Grows In Brooklyn with Tomorrow Will Be Better. Eleven years later, in 1958 (the year of my birth), her third novel, Maggie-Now, was published. Her final novel, Joy in the Morning, was published in 1963. Joy in the Morning is a sort of unofficial sequel to A Tree Grows In Brooklyn. The heroine’s name has been changed from Francie to Annie, but otherwise the protagonists of the two books are fairly similar. At the end of Brooklyn, Francie is 17 and on her way to college along with her boyfriend Ben. At the beginning of Joy, Annie is 18 years old and freshly arrived at college with her boyfriend (soon to be husband) Carl.
Because Joy in the Morning is so close in spirit to Brooklyn, it seems to be the novel most Smith fans turn to when they need another fix of her writing. And because Tomorrow Will Be Better was her sophomore effort, the first novel she published after Brooklyn, it too has gotten a fair amount of attention from hardcore Smith fans through the years. This essay is concerned with her third novel, Maggie-Now, which appears to be her least popular novel, although it is by no means a lost or forgotten book. It has been in print for as long as I have been alive, and I am 62 as of this writing. According to WorldCat, the internet’s largest card catalog of books, Brooklyn has been through at least 270 editions in its lifetime. It was a massive bestseller upon publication, finishing the year 1943 as the fourth bestselling novel in America, and the year 1944 as the third bestselling novel in America. Tomorrow Will Be Better and Joy in the Morning have both been through about 80 editions in their lifetime (of course, Joy has been in print for fifteen fewer years than Tomorrow, so its sales figures are the more impressive). Maggie-Now, published five years before Joy, has been through “only” about fifty editions. It is a popular book and has been enshrined in the Harper Perennial Modern Classics series. Nonetheless, it is probably Smith’s least famous book. But don’t let that prevent you from reading it. Maggie-Now is entertaining, compelling, and moving. Had an unknown, first-time novelist written it, Maggie-Now would probably have been celebrated as a masterpiece.
The story begins in Ireland in the late 19th century. The first character we meet is Patrick Dennis Moore. He is the last of his widowed mother’s thirteen children, and as a result he has been incredibly pampered and spoiled. When we first meet him he is about 18 years old, a handsome lady’s man, a bit of a rogue, and in love with a girl named Maggie Rose. Alas, he has no intention of marrying Maggie Rose. She is poor, and whoever marries her will have to support not only Maggie Rose but also her poor mother. Patrick – usually referred to as Patsy – has been made lazy and selfish by his doting mother. He’s smart enough to know that he’s not likely to ever have enough gumption to work hard enough to support a wife and a mother-in-law, let alone any children the marriage might produce. Alas, Maggie Rose’s older brother, a cop from Brooklyn, New York, comes back to Ireland when he believes that Patrick has lured poor Maggie Rose into a life of sin without any promise of marriage. He beats Patrick senseless and insists that Patrick must marry Maggie Rose. Patrick’s mother doesn’t want him marrying any impoverished local girl. In fact, she doesn’t want him marrying at all. She’d prefer that he remain single all his life and take care of his mother. So she tells Patrick that he must run away to America, where the streets are reputed to be paved with gold, and, in a few years, when he has made his fortune, send for his mother. At which point, she will travel to New York to live with her prosperous son. Reluctantly, Patrick travels to New York. But he never makes a fortune. He finds himself working as a stable boy for Michael Moriarty, a prosperous but corrupt Tammany Hall political fixer. Moriarty has a plain-looking but kindly daughter named Mary. Though Patrick is not attracted to her, he soon sees that his best chance of rising above his station in life is to marry the girl and then use her father’s connections to get a good government job. Moriarty is horrified at the idea of his only daughter marrying a stable boy fresh off the boat, and he only consents to the marriage because he believes (falsely) that Mary must be pregnant. In fact, Mary has a bit of difficulty becoming pregnant. Not until they have been married for a while does Mary give birth to a daughter, whom Mary selflessly names after the girl her husband left behind in Ireland, Maggie Rose. Maggie is a bit of a troublemaker, and, as her local Catholic priest explains it to his young curate, Father Francis, later in the book, she was dubbed “Maggie-Now” because “she was wild as a girl…Always her mother calling through the house and up and down the street:
‘Maggie, now come study your catechism.’
‘Maggie, now stop being such a tomboy.’
“Maggie, now this, and Maggie, now that.’”
Alas, by the time Maggie is born, her grandfather Michael Moriarty has been arrested for his criminally corrupt ways and lost all his money. He dies impoverished. Patsy and Mary have a small home of their own. They rent out some upstairs rooms to bring in a few extra dollars, but it isn’t enough to keep all their bills paid. Patsy is forced to get off his lazy ass and take a job with the city as a street cleaner. He hates the job and thinks it is beneath him (he has an exalted idea of his own worth).
When Maggie-Now is a teenager, her loving mother dies giving birth to a son. Maggie-Now’s father being incredibly selfish and largely worthless as a parent, it is up to Maggie-Now to raise her brother Denny. She does a good job of it, but it wreaks havoc on her social life. Most men, seeing Maggie-Now with a baby in tow, just assume she is either a fallen woman or a young mother, and don’t want anything to do with her. She does eventually find herself with a couple of suitors. One is the mysterious Claude Bassett, whom she meets after signing up to take a course in salesmanship from him. The other is a young man called Sonny who works as a plumber. Claude is cultured and mysterious and romantic but has few marketable skills and is a bit of a dreamer and a wanderer. Sonny is practical, hardworking, and loyal. Unfortunately, Maggie-Now, being a bit of a romantic herself, turns down Sonny’s offer of marriage and accepts Claude’s. Her marriage to Claude will bring years and years of joy and sorrow, passion and heartbreak. Every year, like clockwork, Claude simply vanishes in March to go off wandering to some far-off place to satisfy his wanderlust. Every November he returns. Usually he manages to land some temporary job in December as a salesclerk in a department store that needs extra help at Christmastime. He earns a few bucks which he spends on lavish Christmas presents for Maggie-Now, Denny (whom he treats as a beloved son when he’s in town), and Patsy (despite the fact that the two men can barely tolerate each other). As a provider, he is a complete dead weight. But, when he is home, is generally a caring husband and provides Maggie-Now with a more satisfying sex life than most women of the era probably enjoyed. Alas, the sex never leads to pregnancy, which is Maggie-Now’s greatest sorrow in a life that is filled with sorrows.
There’s no denying that Maggie-Now’s life is a rough one, filled with hardship and very little reward. Nonetheless, the novel that tells her story isn’t especially depressing or sad. Maggie-Now rarely gives in to self-pity. She meets each challenge and setback with guts and determination. She manages to carve out some beauty and some joy from the hard rock of her working-class existence. She is a very inspirational character. Unlike the heroines of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn and Joy in the Morning, Maggie-Now has no artistic aspirations whatsoever. She isn’t a reader. She cares little for music or theater (not that it would do her much good to care about these things, because she couldn’t afford to indulge a taste for them). All she wants in life is to be loved and to have some children to care for. She manages to at least partially satisfy these desires, but not quite in the way she was hoping to.
The book is told mainly through Maggie-Now’s point of view, but the author does a good job of occasionally breaking into the thoughts of other characters, especially Patsy Moore, Maggie-Now’s father. And his thoughts are always of himself and how to get his own way. Nowadays, a lot of novels about immigrants to America tend to sentimentalize them. Patsy Moore is an immigrant to America but Betty Smith makes no effort to airbrush away the faults in his character. He does have a few somewhat positive characteristics. Though he complains about it constantly, he nonetheless hangs on to his street cleaning job long enough to earn a modest retirement income from the city. Though he never tells her he loves her, he at least remains faithful to his wife for as long as their marriage endures (at least we never hear about any infidelities). Though he is always threatening to throw people out of his house or to bar his door to friends of Maggie-Now’s whom he has no use for, he rarely follows through on his threats. And though he rarely spends money on his family unless he absolutely has to, neither does he spend it lavishly on himself. He is an impoverished miser.
If it sounds as if I’ve given away all the twists and turns of the story, well, I haven’t. Betty Smith is good at inventing interesting plot twists and small storytelling surprises. This isn’t an adventure novel or a thriller but nonetheless I found the pages flying by. I stayed up late for several nights because I just couldn’t put it down. It is to Betty Smith’s great credit that she can make the stuff of ordinary American working-class life so compelling and so moving and so interesting. No matter how sad Maggie-Now’s plight became, I always wanted to know what would happen to her next. I was convinced that the whole thing would end with unredeemable tragedy for Maggie-Now. But I was wrong. She remains tough, and plucky, and unbowed to the very end. Life throws a lot at her but she remains durable enough to handle it all. She stumbles and falls now and then, but eventually, as the song says, she picks herself up, dusts herself off, and starts all over again.
In addition to the entertainment to be found in the plot, the novel is also interesting because of what it tells us about the time in which it was published (the late 1950s) and the time in which it is set (the first half of the 20thcentury, for the most part). Abortion is mentioned and, though this is a deeply Catholic novel (almost every character is a Catholic), Smith makes a good argument in favor of it. When it becomes clear that Mary Moriarty will die if she is forced to carry her unborn second child to term, the priests and the doctors both decide that the baby’s life is worth more than the mother’s, and condemn her to death by refusing an abortion. This seems like a strikingly progressive message for a novel of the 1950s. Also interesting is some of the stuff that would strike most modern readers as politically incorrect. Claude often refers to Maggie-Now as “my little Chinee.” And he sings her a song called “There’s Egypt In Your Dreamy Eyes.” This is a joke because no one could be less exotic than Maggie-Now, a lifelong Brooklynite whose days revolve around various forms of drudgery – caring for her young brother, caring for her obnoxious father, cleaning house, cooking, marketing, running the ticket booth at a movie theater. Alas, Maggie-Now doesn’t get the joke because, although she has many fine qualities, a sense of humor isn’t one of them. She is too literal-minded to appreciate any kind of joke or symbolism. When Claude calls her “my little Chinee” she just assumes that she reminds him of a Chinese woman for some reason.
Even if you’ve never read A Tree Grows In Brooklyn – or if you have read it but didn’t much care for it – I’d encourage you to give Maggie-Now a try. As tough female protagonists go, Maggie-Now is one of the most endearing I’ve encountered lately.