CL Dallat
‘TIS by Frank McCourt (Flamingo)
As 19-year-old Frank McCourt embarks for America to escape the poverty and gloom of another damp Limerick winter and the degradations of Irish patriotism and drink, it is unclear whether the ship will dock in Montreal or New York. Eventually orders are received to proceed to Albany – a place, the Dublin-born captain tells him with a sneer, that has all the charm of Limerick. McCourt has a long way to go before he “flies the nets”.
The book’s title, ‘Tis, is an echo of McCourt’s monosyllabic reply at the end of Angela’s Ashes (1996) to the wireless officer’s assertion, after an on-shore night of drinking and womanising, that America is “a great country altogether”. But with his sore eyes, bad teeth, painful shyness and lack of a secondary education – all the stigmata of social inferiority – McCourt’s muted enthusiasm is a little premature.
His early years in New York, as a bellhop at the Biltmore hotel, drinking in Irish bars and moving from one rooming-house to another, are the antithesis of the American dream that he has been fed by parents who returned destitute to Ireland in the early 1930s. But this is post-war New York, and McCourt moves through work as a longshoreman, a spell in the army, to night school, supported by shift work for a finance house.
His teaching career starts with the blackboard-jungle kids of McKee Vocational on Staten Island, but eventually leads him to New York’s numero uno, Stuyvesant High School, where he becomes a creative-writing teacher encouraging middle-class kids by day and Hispanic women by night to “write about what you know” – the policy that has led him to belated international celebrity.
The finest sequences in ‘Tis lie in his observations of New York characters: of Mrs Klein, an Irish Catholic whose son Michael – or “what’s left of him” after his rescue from the concentration camp in which his father died – is tended daily by nuns; or Virgil Franks, with his egg-timer by the telephone, his hatred of pigeons and his three-volume Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas; or Harry, who camps out all day in a folding chair to watch for parking spaces for the car he never uses.
Few of those engaged by McCourt’s straightforward style will be able to resist this pacey, fluent sequel. But despite a trip to impress Limerick neighbours with his GI uniform, the constant reappearance of his mother and brothers in New York, and failed attempts to re-establish contact with the father whose bizarre muddle of self-respect, alcoholism and sentimental republicanism made the family’s life a disaster, the second part of McCourt’s life is unlikely to have the same impact as Angela’s Ashes.
Writing about what you know is always more exciting if your readers don’t know it too. And for British and American readers who had forgotten the horrors of prewar slum life, poverty and unemployment in George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, or Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole, McCourt’s memories of the 1930s in Ireland were captivating as much for their awfulness as for his own eight-year-old insouciance.
The popularity of Angela’s Ashes in Ireland hinges on different issues. It belongs in a new genre of autobiographical writing whose more notable products include Dennis Donoghue’s Warrenpoint and Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark.
These have in common the unexceptional attempt to analyse the writer’s reactions in childhood to Irish society; they break new ground only because of that society’s relatively unformed structures, with their taboos on revelations that might question the validity of the founding principles: strict Catholicism in the south; staunch anti-Irishness in the north.
Angela’s Ashes is the only one of these written from such a low social and economic standpoint as to render the whole of society – church, state, culture, republicanism, the middle classes, even the working classes and those whose only offence was to buy the feckless father another drink – the hated “other”. In exposing the awfulness of poverty in Limerick, McCourt attacked the place that saw itself as being the most Catholic city in the most Catholic country in an increasingly secular world.
A measure of the impact Angela’s Ashes had on Irish society is the many imitators it has spawned. McCourt’s brother Malachy, whose self-confidence gives him an uneasy place in the diffident Frank’s memoirs, has given his version of the New York years, in A Monk Swimming. His life as an actor, TV personality, gold-smuggler and hell- raiser provides more exciting material, but his style is all flowery periphrasis, ghastly euphemisms and pointless puns.
It reminds the reader how much Frank McCourt’s gift lies not simply in having lived through interesting times, but in having developed his skills as editor and narrator to produce two fine, funny and moving slices of a past that is not simply Ireland’s, but everyone’s.