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Frank McCourt, right, and brother Malachy

In his follow-up to "Angela's Ashes" Frank McCourt confronts the indignities of immigrant life.

By Andrew O'Hehir
www.salon.com

August 31, 1999
Web posted at: 4:30 p.m. EDT (2030 GMT)

(SALON) -- Say what you will about America and about the publishing industry, the fact is that surpassingly strange things, miracles almost, still happen in both. Would anyone have believed, say, five years ago, that one of the decade's biggest books would be a memoir of a desperately poor Depression childhood, written by an unknown retired schoolteacher? Like any book or movie or cultural phenomenon that captures the public imagination unexpectedly, Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes" was a beneficiary of its time and place. The hysteria for all things Irish (or, still more dubiously, "Celtic") was at its height in 1996. Fifty-year anniversaries of D-Day, the fall of Berlin and the Hiroshima bombing had focused the nation's attention one last time on the Depression generation, which, as Bob Dole's presidential campaign demonstrated in tragicomic fashion, was finally relinquishing its hold on American society.

"Angela's Ashes" is a fable testifying to the redemptive powers of two things turn-of-the-century Americans desperately want to believe in: storytelling and America itself. We read about a half-starved boy with infected eyes and rotten teeth, scrounging the docks of Limerick on Christmas Day for loose lumps of coal so his mother could finish cooking a half-boiled pig's head, and we know he grew into a man who could write about such things with humor, tolerance and even love. You can argue -- and some critics did -- that "Angela's Ashes" was shamelessly sentimental, and that it played to Irish-Americans' hazy, half-imaginary notions of their tragic origins. In the finest Irish tradition of "begrudgers," former neighbors of the McCourts in Limerick assured visitors that all had not been as the ungrateful Frankie depicted it, and that other families had had it worse. But the secret of "Angela's Ashes" is simple and has little to do with the Irish mythology of suffering: Nothing in Frank McCourt's miserable childhood could quench his compassionate spirit or his love of life.

For me -- and, I imagine, for thousands of other children of immigrants -- it was impossible to read "Angela's Ashes" with dispassion. My own father was growing up poor in Dublin during the same years McCourt was growing up poor in Limerick, and I identify the two so strongly that I suspect my critical judgment of McCourt's work is compromised even as my feeling for it is enriched. We all look for things that speak to us personally in whatever we read, but in this case the histories are uncannily similar. Both were born to immigrant families in New York (just three years apart) and then sent "home" to Ireland as young children after their families' fortunes turned sour in the Depression. Later, both returned to America as teenagers, worked their way through college, and went on to teaching and writing careers (McCourt in the New York City schools, my father at the University of California).

I don't think my great-grandmother's household was nearly as desperate as the McCourts', but it wasn't a picnic either. Around the time young Frankie was out hunting for coal on the docks, my father was gathering mussels along the rocky seafront of Clontarf, on Dublin's north side, so his grandmother could cook them in buttermilk for the family's dinner. (Anytime we ate in a restaurant that served mussels, my dad would tell this story again, by way of explaining that he'd never pay for the damn things in his life.) In both families, the stories vary, "Rashomon" style, depending on who is doing the telling. My father remembered his Irish childhood as years of cold, hunger, loneliness and want. His aunts and cousins remember a loving, almost genteel household, straitened by circumstance, in which my father was the pampered prodigy.

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