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E-mailAlas 'Tis one year on
Author Frank McCourt remembered
Frank McCourt’s late in life swansong was as unforgettable as it was sweet. Since its publication in 1996 Angela’s Ashes has become a bona fide modern classic, which even his few remaining critics have conceded. Cahir O'Doherty remembers the distinctive Irish (and Irish American) writer one year after his passing.
Pulitizer prize winning Irish writer Frank McCourt (1930-2009), who passed away on July 19, 2009, told his story better than anyone else ever could. The only thing you can add to Angela’s Ashes, his unforgettable memoir, is that since its debut in 1996 it has become a beloved modern classic.
Of course it wouldn’t have been an Irish story without substantial numbers of his countrymen lining up to take potshots at him first. How could McCourt write about his poor mother and Limerick, the city he grew up in (McCourt was actually born in Brooklyn) like that, they cried?
It helps if you go back and read his book. What’s striking about Angela’s Ashes is how richly remembered his past is, and how detailed and finely drawn.
“When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all,” Angela's Ashes begins. “It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while.”
Either you see the gently indulgent humor in those lines or you don’t, and it turned out that some of his Irish readers really didn’t, at least at first. One former schoolmate confronted McCourt at a book signing in Limerick and ripped a copy of his book in half.
Credible death threats forced Limerick University to step up their security when McCourt visited the college. Even the actor Richard Harris, a fellow Limerick man, wrote an incandescent letter to The Times of London denouncing him in theatrical terms.
It didn’t change a thing. McCourt won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize and the 1996 National Book Critics Award. Angela’s Ashes became a New York Times bestseller, and even his most ardent critics had to give him his due.
In an irony McCourt would have laughed at, this year Limerick is set to benefit financially from his literary efforts. An organization called Books Abroad has scheduled a two-week Irish literary tour beginning in September.
The group will spend two nights in Limerick at a local hotel and will take part in a special literary walking tour of the city, dedicated to Angela’s Ashes. The cost of the two-week tour is a minimum of $5,850 per person, which would have been an unheard of sum in McCourt’s youth.
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