Pete Hamill in awe of Frank McCourt's 'Angela's Ashes'

Hamill: This ferocious book will still be read when all of us are gone

Author and raconteur Frank McCourt, in his autobiography, “has examined his ferocious childhood, walked around it, relived it, and with skill and care and generosity of heart, transformed it into a triumphant work of art,” writes Pete Hamill.

Frank McCourt has written a triumphant book. His memoir of an Irish childhood is in turns hilarious, heart-scalding, bitterly angry. It takes us through a world of daily, repetitive, cyclical horror in “the lanes” of Limerick in the 1930s and 1940s, providing the sort of soul-murdering detail that no survivor can ever forget. But McCourt’s soul was not murdered. This book is the proof of his survival. This book, this affirmation of humane values in the face of all odds, is his triumph.

“When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all,” he writes on the first page. “It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.”

The tone here is ironical, of course; irony, as practiced by the Jews and the Irish, can be wielded as a weapon, but it is above all a kind of armor. It is adapted as protection against all manner of psychic injury from enemies, from friendly fire, from self-inflicted wounds. Irony creates distance, a certain knowing detachment, while acknowledging membership in the club of human weakness and folly.

“People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years.”

He is saying: this is a very old story. He is saying too that he is adding to a bookshelf that includes Christy Brown and Brendan Behan, among many others, but that he will tell the story anyway. God, after all, is in the details, and so is the Devil. And he declares his authority in the following blunt sentence:

“Above all — we were wet.”

They were wet upon the return to Ireland, in some unstated year in the early 1930s: four-year-old Frank, his younger brother Malachy, and his twin brothers, Oliver and Eugene, who were less than a year old; his father, Malachy, from County Antrim in the North, and his mother, Angela, from the slums of Limerick City. They were heading home to Ireland in gloom and defeat. Malachy, the father, and Angela, the mother, had found their separate ways to New York years earlier, met at a party on Classon Avenue in Brooklyn, and were locked into marriage by the eminent arrival of Frank.

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Nster.com