Seamus Deane
ANGELA’S ASHES by Frank McCourt (Flamingo, R66,95)
FRANK McCOURT’S memoir has been published to loud acclaim, especially in the United States, where it won a 1997 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. It recounts the story of his family, starting in New York and thence transferring to Ireland, specifically to Limerick, during the 1930s and 1940s.
Now in paperback, Angela’s Ashes is a harrowing tale of extreme poverty, fecklessness, illness, dirt, near- starvation and death. One child dies in New York; the twins die in Limerick. Frank contracts typhoid fever; the father, Malachy, drinks and sings rebel songs, finally disappearing into alcoholism.
The mother, the Angela of the title, leads a life of martyrdom, forever pregnant, depressed, hungry, reduced to begging in her heroic attempts to keep her children alive. The Limerick they live in is a city of extreme Catholicism, dominated by a savage church, pubs crowded with heavy- drinking, sexually repressed working-class men and homes ruled by avariciously respectable and desolate women.
The opinions expressed, with great regularity, about the English, Protestants, the North, Ireland’s struggle, the Famine, the Catholic religion, are as ignorant and trite as one could wish. Malachy combines alcoholism, fecklessness and a gift for storytelling that is, by now, an almost classical formation for a male of the Irish underclass.
It is in the memoir’s strange combination of the remembered with the stereotypical that its appeal and its problems lie. Perhaps too much is remembered; or, more precisely, too much is told over and over again. The filth and stench of unsanitary conditions, the starveling diet, the high incidence of grotesques and eccentrics inhabiting the lanes of Limerick, the endless prejudice of uneducated and prolific opinions about the world in general and the Irish world in particular ultimately have an eroding effect.
In fiction – and all autobiography is fiction, although not all fiction is autobiography – a certain economy with the truth is both necessary and admirable. In this work, there is little such economy. It could have been even more harrowing had it been more compressed. As it stands, its implacably reiterated detail stifles the very response it sets out to evoke.
There was, some years ago, a theatrical production of The Diary of Anne Frank in a small Dublin theatre. The actress playing the central part was so bad that when the Nazis came to search the house, the audience shouted: ”She’s hiding in the attic!” At times, Angela’s Ashes evoked in me a similar response.
There are two elements in this story that in part account for its great appeal. One is its cousinage with all of those stories that have emerged from the collapse of traditional religious and political authority in Ireland. The other element is the current American vogue for stories of victimage and upbeat recovery. McCourt’s memoir combines these in such a potent manner that it could hardly avoid popularity.
McCourt is certainly a fine writer, but he believes too much in the reliability of memory, as if that were enough in itself.
Seamus Deane’s debut novel, Reading in the Dark, was shortlisted for the 1996 Booker Prize. It is now available in Vintage paperback