Passage from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“She was all these things and of something more that did not come from the Rommely’s or the Nolans, the reading, the observing, the living from day to day. It was something that had been born into her and her only—that something different from anyone else in the two families. 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.”

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

If you read only one book this year, read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. The book will literally change your perceptions on life. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is that rare, delicious reading experience that absorbs the soul wholly with its quiet magic and gently let you go, changed and enlightened.

I am not sure how to encapsulate Betty Smith’s semi-autobiographical tale about what it means to struggle, live and love in the slums of early 20th century Brooklyn. This book is like an intricate quilt of tiny stories, all marvelous in themselves. There is no clear, linear story line. Perhaps because this is no artificial world imagined by an author. This is not a book that escapes reality. Rather, it is an honest and hard-pressed portrayal of reality. This book reveals the beauty of dreams born from the brutal elements of a deprived enviroment. This book tells the truth—a truth not necessarily validated by concrete detail or memories, but rather, a truth based on insight and the observance of human behavior.

Smith wrote things here that are rarely found in the sea of novels. Smith gave the poor people in her neighborhood a voice up with and colored them with deep humanity. They are neither glorified or pitied or ridden with other simplistic stereotypes. All the book's characters are complex and ambiguous, full of virtues and downfalls. They are so human that it is easy to forget that these beautiful people live inside a book.

Brooklyn itself is a character. Never has an author painted a more heart-wrenching and vivid description of a neighborhood. The enviroment that is depicted in not abhorred--rather it is probed and loved, despite the cruelities that exist there.

This world is mostly perceived through the eyes of Francie, an observant, book-adoring child that is raised to believe that there is a better life worth striving for. Her mother, Katie, is a hard-working realist that supports her family by cleaning tenements. Her father, Johnny is a high-singing dreamer, full of quick-step and charm. But he is a weak man for his drunken, careless ways.. And Neeley, her brother, is Katie’s beloved treasure and an unquestioning follower of the Catholic Church.

I am elated to have discovered this literary gem. This book will endure in me forever. I will never forget Francie, and how I saw myself in her--as the lonely child that slips into book-land to ward off the hardness of reality.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn addresses the meaning of struggling for survival. Smith uses the trees that grow in the slum as a metaphor for the type of strength that is found in her characters and in Brooklyn itself. During one moving passage, Katie fights to make Francie, a sickly baby, live. Her neighbors try to discourage her and she responds with the words of a warrior:

“’Don’t say that,” Katie held her baby tightly. “It’s not better to die. Who wants to die? Everything struggles to live. Look at that tree growing up there out of that grating. It gets no sun and water only when it rains. It’s growing out of sour earth. And it’s strong because its hard struggle to live is making it strong. My children will be strong that way.”

I am at a loss when I look back at the totality of this book and try to recall the train of impressions it has had on me. I can not say anything profound about this book. I could only analyze this book if I dissected it into bits. There are so many vignettes in this book that will stay with me as powerful lessons—from the stoning scene of a young, unmarried mother to the Johnny’s failed outing to the sea to how Francie's composition teacher told her to stop writing stories about poverty and alcholoism because the aren't pretty.

Perhaps this reverent silence within me is what is supposed to be. I have journeyed into the imaginative landscape of a masterpiece and can not voice the literary power I came in contact with.

I am certain I will return to this book again in my life. I recommend for everyone to buy or borrow A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and stay up all night reading every glorious page.

My only question is this: why is this book not more highly praised in the academic literary world? It has won the hearts of millions, yet I have not seen it on any list of literary masterpieces. If I had the power, I would dethrone James Joyce’s Ulysses and crown this book as the most important book of all time.

I have read many, many classics in my time. I have not read them all as of yet. I know that sometimes the academic world is wrong about books. The academic world sometimes tends to favor the products of intellectualism and high ideas rather than the tales and poems that provide true insight on the human condition.

If you are interested in understanding the human condition, and all its joys and sufferings, read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. In my mind, this book is the true model of what literature is supposed to be about.

The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright

Author Jean Nathan embarked on a sad mystery when she chose to delve into the life of children’s author Dare Wright. Dare Wright is best known for her photography-illustrated books about a pretty doll named Edith who is very lonely until one day two teddy bears come to live with her.

The Lonely Doll series, which began in 1947, had a tremendous impact on its girl readership—including Nathan herself. Somehow, Wright worked a special magic on her doll and teddy bears, making them seem so real in their poses and expressions.

But within those books about love and companionship lurked darker themes of punishment and abandonment. Edith is always fearful Mr. Bear and Little Bear will leave her. Mischievous Little Bear constantly lures Edith into trouble which results in spankings and threats of separation.

Nathan’s quest into Dare's story begins with a brief memory of the pink-and white gingham cover of The Lonely Doll. She becomes obsessed with the hazy memory and seeks to remember more. Eventually, she recovers the title of the book and does a little research. In the bookstore and on the Internet, she encounters comments about the books as being an autobiographical psycho-drama of childhood abuse. She can’t seem to find copies of the book anywhere, for they have fallen out of print or were lost in library circulation.

The fascination thickens. Nathan makes the right contacts, discovers Wright also lives in New York and eventually connects with her. She finds Dare Wright as a wisp of a woman in a public hospital, one that is lost in a sad otherworld, without anyone to call family.

Early on, Nathan understands that Edith the doll is an autobiographical self-portrait. The pretty, made up doll looked eerily just like the author, with the blonde, high-ponytail and gold hoop earrings.

Nathan was given hordes of photographs of Dare—ones depicting her in high-glamour, modeling her own costumes in stage-like interiors. With these artistic images, Nathan was given the only existing portal to the mysterious inner world of Dare Wright.

The biography is sprinkled with these pictures. Dare Wright was an exquisitely beautiful woman. Her presence in these pictures is incredibly haunting.

Dare Wright left very little biographical remnants. She was an incredibly shy and private woman who never married or had children. In fact, she lived her entire life as a virgin, enclosed in the clutches of her domineering mother.

Her mother, Edie Stevenson Wright was a portrait painter of the elite that always dressed to the nines whenever she went out. She was married to an alcoholic theater critic named Ivan Wright and had two children, Dare and her beloved brother Blaine.

The marriage was completely doomed and the family suffered much chaos during the early years of Dare and Blaine’s life. Eventually, the family is severed in half. Dare is separated from her father and brother. Her mother banishes their memory and begins shaping a strange life of shiny appearances and fairy tales for her and her “good and precious” daughter.

The truth is Dare Wright suffered not only severe separation, but heart-aching isolation and emotional neglect during her developing years. Her mother left her alone in the apartment. She consoled herself with dress-up games, books and dolls. Always, she craved the love and attention of her mother. This feeling would never cease, permeating her emotional core forever.

And Dare Wright never did grow up. When she entered adulthood, her mother started to take an interest in her life and completely merged with her docile daughter. They both took immense interests in their own appearances, playing and photographing dress-up sessions for years. And while many men chased after Dare for her beauty, her mother battled every advance.

This strange mother-daughter relationship was almost incestuous. They shared the same bed, often clutching one another in their sleep. They sunbathed nude together and Edith encouraged Dare to undress for the camera.

Dare never grew into her own independence, and never healed from her emotional scars. Instead, she was like those European marble fountains of Venus. From her beautiful, self-possessed beauty she spouted streams of creativity. She could sew, draw, write model, do carpentry, and of course, take amazing photos.

After many years of separation, Dare is finally re-united with her brother Blaine. Thus, began another relationship of incestuous closeness. So exited to have closed the painful chasm of their separation, and in awe of one another’s attractiveness, they fell in love in a way.

* * *

The details of this mysterious and sad life are sometimes hard to swallow. There are many more layers to Dare Wright’s life that I will not disclose here. I appreciated this book perhaps for its sadness. As I read, I wept over the tragedies of Dare Wright. I wept for the little girl so hurt by life that she never grew up; for he girl who gave birth to beautiful books that explored the painful repercussions of loneliness.

As a writer and artist myself, I am often boggled by my own desire to create. Perhaps creativity is a character trait people are born with. But I also think that highly creative people are often wounded souls, trying to heal their emotional pain through art.

I can relate to Dare Wright. I also came from a profoundly dysfunctional family and had troubles socializing in school. To escape some of the horrors that existed in my reality, I retreated to the world of books and writing poems and stories. Until well into adulthood, I lived in my imagination, often withdrawing from the world.

I understand the heart-ache of childhood loneliness and emotional neglect. For some reason, the feeling never fades. Even friends and lovers can not fill what Robert Frost called “those desert spaces” inside the soul.

For most people, childhood is a happy time of love and magic. For others, childhood is a time where frightening things happens. But the child mind has troubles comprehending the stark reality it lives in. The emotionally-endangered child retreats even further into the realm of fantasy to cope with the world.

The human impulse to fabricate and fall into the make-believe world is probably a product of evolution. How can anyone stomach the ugliness and boredoms of reality all the time? Every time we read a book or watch a movie, we escape reality. Whenever we are engaged in a captivating story, we seem to leave our bodies and enter the emotional world of the characters.

But fantasies and stories are not simply a means of escape. Story-land is also a place where our fears are explored, and our wishes are fulfilled. It’s a place where we empathize and release our own pain.

* * *

Dare Wright fell in a life-time fairy tale as a beautiful princess that longed for love. She could not cope with the real world. In fact, after her mother and brother died, she suffered a serious bout of alcoholism. After her mother, she had no one to sustain the fairy tale with. Reality started to seep into her, and with it, disillusionment. And disillusionment, coupled with alcoholism and a lack of internal independence, led to madness and despair.

The Secret Life of The Lonely Doll is not for the type of reader that just wants to escape into a world where everything works out in the end. The story of Dare Wright is painfully sad. She reminds me of Marilyn Monroe—both were girlish-women of icon-worthy beauty that never had their emotional needs met. I recommend the book to anyone who wants to examine how an artist can transform emotional trauma into creations of depth and beauty.

In the epilogue of the biography, Nathan sums up the sadness beneath the happy stories of The Lonely Doll series:

“The story of The Lonely Doll was, in large measure Dare’s own story. In the book, a tour de force of wish fulfillment, she found a way to make things right, providing her alter ego, with love and rescue in the form of two male teddy bears, the father and brother whose real-life counterparts she had lost when she was young. She ceaselessly sought that rescue in her own life, which was spent posing, playing dress-up, and retreating into fantasy in order to remain her mother’s ‘good and precious daughter,’ as if holding on to her mother and her mother’s love depended on that.”

A Quote to Chew On

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxeries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, inpenetrable, irredeemable."

--C.S. Lewis

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

Many of Carson McCullers’ stories are composed with deep compassion for the lonely soul. Her characters are often eccentric misfits that feel disconnected and misunderstood in their communities. In the course of McCullers’ masterful storytelling, her characters often find solace in the company of other lost souls, revealing the all-consuming power and complexity of the human relationship.

McCullers’ novella, The Ballad of the Sad Café, is a multi-faceted jewel of literature, rich with insight on the human condition. It maps the progression of a strange love triangle of freaks in a tiny, depressed town in the Deep South.

Miss Amelia, the story’s tragic heroine, is a strong-horse entrepreneur that stands 6’ 2” and fights like a man. She lives a solitary life, spending all her time working as a liquor-maker, a shop owner, real estate owner and a volunteer doctor. At first, her heart is encased with lead—she is weak to no one, and spares no mercy. Until one day a hunchback with a sociable and mischievous spirit named Lymon sweeps into town and claims to be her cousin, making him her only living relative. This is the beginning of a new life for Miss Amelia, one that is rich with love and community. The hunchback comes to live with her and she tends to him like a child. And soon after, a café is spontaneously sprung into life at her store. Soon, her store is molded into a gathering place for all the dejected and poverty-stricken town inhabitants that work at the mill.

In one passage, McCullers reveals why and how this magical place came to be, a place where one could drink, eat and be merry for very little. Again, she writes with immense compassion for the townspeople that are locked into poverty:

“All useful things have a price and are bought only with money, and that is the way the world is run. You know without having to reason about it the price of a bale of cotton, or a quart of molasses. But no value has been put on the human life; it is given to us free and taken without being paid for. What is it worth? If you look around, at times the value may be little or nothing at all. Often after you have sweated and tried and things are still not better for you, there comes a feeling deep down in the soul that you are not worth much.”

But at the café, “for a few hours at least, the deep bitter knowing that you are not worth much in this world could be laid low.”

Unfortunately, this place of love and community succumbs to a tragic ending. Long ago, when Miss Amelia was a young girl, she was married for six days to a man named Marvin Macy. Marvin Macy was born to neglectful parents and lived his life robbing, bullying and womanizing. But Marvin Macy doted heavily on Miss Amelia, despite her awkwardness and vowed to live as a decent man for her. But as soon as Miss Amelia married Marvin Macy, she rejected him cruelly and they were divorced short after. Marvin Macy left town swearing revenge—and does return, unleashing chaos and stealing all that she loves.

Without giving any more details about the plot, The Ballad of the Sad Café explores themes of unrequited love and betrayal through the interactions of her artfully fleshed-out characters. I recommend this book to anyone who has had their heart broken by anyone they loved unconditionally. To love at all is dually a promise for heart-blooming joy and a risk for an avalanche of pain for the lover.

Besides the characters and the plot, The Ballad of the Sad Café is sumptuous in its writing style. McCullers’ language is rich with color and poetic lyricism. Always, a Southern drawl is sensed in the slopes and streams of her sentences. She weaves swamp-imagery throughout her narrative, creating an atmosphere sweltering with a hot-bath of smells and sensations. McCullers writes, “Even in the early morning there was a sticky sultriness in the atmosphere, the wind carried the rotten smell of the swamp, and the delicate shrill mosquitoes webbed the green millpond.”

Her metaphors are unique and astute. In one passage, she describes the voice of Cousin Lymon:
“His voice was just like the voices of children who squat patiently over those tiny little holes in the ground where doodlebugs are thought to live, poking the hole with a broom straw, and calling plaintively: Doodlebug, Doodlebug—fly away home.”

Anybody who loves to read and write should adopt Carson McCullers work for a while to explore and emulate. She truly is a master of the English language. She bloomed bright in the literary world for a short span of time, but her stories will live forever, speaking multitudes about what it means to be human in a heart-breaking world.

The Glass Castle

I am gravitated to stories where the characters are slung into fates of poverty, chaos and hardship. People who live entrenched in the muck of tragedy are marked forever, either by compassion or bitterness, by strength or despair. Jeannette Walls empathetic and image-rich memoir, The Glass Castle, is about surviving the wreckage of a nomadic childhood wrought with deprivation and neglect. Walls writes her story with love, never demonizing her parents, even though they spurned so much instability for their four children.

For several years, the Walls’ family lived a colorful existence, shuttling from one dusty desert town to another in search of gold, freedom and the creative life. They slept under the stars and searched for geodes and bits of turquoise. They learned the principles of art and engineering from their parents and rejected the world of material goods for adventure and the open highway.

Walls’ mother was a woman wholly absorbed in her art and did not care for domesticity. She would rather spend her time painting than forage for food for her children. Most of the time she refused to work, despite the fact she had a teaching certificate. She was more attuned to the tortured beauty of a contorted desert tree than to the emotional and physical needs of her children.

Her father, a man with a brilliant and imaginative mind, sank into long bouts of alcoholism, unable and unwilling to hold steady jobs for the sake of the family. He had incredible charm and could con and hustle like the devil. For many years, he horded the blueprints of his imagined Glass Castle, a palace powered by solar energy, where they all would one day live. The Glass Castle serves as a greater metaphor for the book symbolizing the sweeping promises and unrealized genius of her father.

The four Walls children had no choice but to band together and fend for themselves, often taking on responsibilities that seem unimaginable for children to take. They raided garbage cans for food, collected bottles and cans for pocket change and tried to fix up the dilapidated houses in which they lived. But the children were raised to be scrappy and self-sufficient. They fought neighborhood bullies and social stigma and truly valued any material possession they ever owned.

One segment of the book that struck me is a scene where Rex Walls takes his children to the zoo to show what an animal in captivity is like. He went straight up to a cheetah’s cage and petted the wild cat. He then had Jeanette place her hand in the cage and the animal licked the salt off her palm. Of course, this caused a ruckus at the zoo, inviting stares, accusations and security guards.

Even though her mother was like a child in her degree of selfishness and practicality, she often had insightful things to say. Walls writes, “Mom, who had Maureen in one arm and her sketch pad under the other, pointed out that the animals had traded freedom for security. She said that when she looked at them, she would pretend not to see the bars.”

In many ways, the human being must make a trade-off between freedom and security. Working a steady job, getting a mortgage and raising a family requires the human soul to sit still and follow rules. Traveling, creating art and fighting the system are born from the soul’s desire for freedom and independence. The route to security is safe and comforting, but also limiting and dull. The path of freedom is exhilarating and challenging, but also dangerous and subject to social disapproval. In short, Jeannette Wall’s parents chose the path of ultimate freedom and said to hell with society’s rules.

The most amazing thing about this memoir is the outcome of Jeannette Walls herself. She somehow worked her way up the ranks of the journalism field in New York City as a gossip columnist for MSNBC. She has interviewed and rubbed elbows with the rich elite. She hid her life story for two decades in fear of rejection. She survived her childhood by being resilient, resourceful and hard-working. While many people who come from dysfunctional backgrounds succumb to substance abuse, poverty or madness, she did not. Jeannette Walls has thrived like a cactus flower under the sizzling sun.

I recommend The Glass Castle to anyone who comes from a dysfunctional family. You can not spend your whole life blaming others for what was done or not done. You can not wallow in self pity and lay down and die. You must do whatever it takes to survive, for surviving is the most elemental point of our own existences. And if you endure the madness, and take the right steps, one day, things might get brighter.