It Happened in Flatbush

A Brooklyn girl named Betty Smith last fortnight made more news than a city editor could shake a stick of type at. She

> Published a first novel (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn--Harper; $2.75).

> Watched its sales whizz past the 150,000 mark.

> Honeymooned in New York with an Army private named Jones.

Newsmaking Betty Smith, who described herself as a onetime "third-rate actress in second-rate companies," also: 1) pocketed $55,000 for the movie rights to her book; 2) publicly scratched Hollywood's eyes out when it offered her $1,200 a week ("I don't want any part of Hollywood"); 3) turned up as a blue-ribbon cook whose apple pies and chocolate layer cakes had won top prizes at the Michigan and North Carolina State fairs.

But it was Betty Smith's marriage to Private Jones (first name: Joe) that finally brought about the impossible and gave a book about Brooklyn more newspaper space than the Dodgers. When Betty Smith was living in Chapel Hill, N.C., turning out unsalable one-act plays and reading the late Thomas Wolfe's Of Time and the River, which she says caused her to begin her novel, Private Jones was assistant editor of the Chapel Hill Weekly. Though they lived for six years in the same small town, they never met. A series of articles about Army life by Private Jones did what proximity did not. To Private Jones came a letter of praise from Betty Smith: to Betty Smith came a letter of thanks from Private Jones. Came more letters, came a meeting at Virginia Beach, Va., came love, came marriage the next day, came a furlough, came New York, came reporters--all of which might have happened just as well in Betty Smith's novel as out of it.

Cake-making Miss Smith has pleasantly seasoned her first novel--an old-fashioned family pudding of well-baked corn--with two simple and staple condiments: authentic recollections of childhood and a well-communicated respect for the endless valor of the poor.

The story is that of Francie Nolan from her twelfth to her seventeenth year in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn before and during World War I. The book has most of the time-tested character types and situations in fiction: Katie, the hardworking, self-sacrificing mother; Johnny, the lovably alcoholic, singing-waiter father; Francie, the good, book-loving slum child who yearns to be a writer; Neeley, her little brother; and an assortment of incredible relatives, including a peasant grandmother who speaks with the wisdom of Confucius and the force of the King James Version.

Johnny dies--on Christmas day, of course--in time to allow Katie (from whose beauty the bloom has not been rubbed by years of scrubbing tenement hallways) to marry long-suffering Ser geant McShane, whose invalid wife also conveniently expires. Francie, as the book ends, gets to college, thanks to McShane's $10,000 a year (he has become a Tammany Assemblyman).

There are authentic scenes as well: Francie and her brother collecting junk in the Brooklyn slums; purchases of five-cent soup bones, stale bread and smashed pies; the traditional childhood customs and mores of the Brooklyn streets. Example: storekeepers on Christmas Eve tossed their unsold trees at children; if the children stood upright under the impact of a tree, they could have it free.

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