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

“No, not the bloody Limerick Leader. I wouldn’t wipe the hole of my arse with the Limerick Leader. There’s a book over there on the table, Gulliver’s Travels. That’s not what I want you to read. Look in the back for another thing. A Modest Proposal. Read that to me. It begins, ‘It is a melancholy object to those who walk…’”

It’s a marvelous moment, introducing a boy to one of the greatest of all Irishmen, at a moment in the island’s history that would have looked all too familiar to the corrosive eye of the Dean. Ireland was still eating its young. It ate some of Frank McCourt’s friends. It almost ate him. Pneumonia didn’t get him, and neither did tuberculosis, which was general in the slums. But typhoid almost finished him off. He was ten years old. Sleeping and bleeding. From the nose, from the rectum. The regular doctor was away. A substitute arrived, reeking of whiskey, and told them Frank had a bad cold. Days passed, full of sleeping and bleeding, before the regular doctor returned.

“He feels my forehead, rolls up my eyelids, turns me over to see my back, picks me up and runs to his motor car. Mam runs after him and he tells her I have typhoid fever. Mam cries, Oh, God, oh, God, am I to lose the whole family? Will it ever end?” No. In the ghost-ridden Fever Hospital, that relic of the Famine, Frank befriends a girl in the next room, a girl he cannot see because of strict rules enforced by nuns. An illiterate porter brings the boy an enormous gift: Shakespeare. Only a few lines, buried in a history of England. But enough to burn into the boy’s mind forever. The unseen girl teaches him some poetry, and then they are discovered, and separated. Ten-year-olds, committing the terrible sin of speaking poetry. The girl dies, of course, on a forbidden trip to the lavatory.

There is much more: working, begging, stealing. In the filthy precincts of the lanes, Frank contracts conjunctivitis and just escapes blindness. He discovers sex, soccer, friendships, movies — and yearns for the America he’d left behind. His father goes off to England to find war work; he sends no money home and the children scream from hunger. He comes home once, full of whiskey and bullshit, then returns to England for good. Finally the destitute McCourts are evicted from the verminous house on Roden Lane and move to the home of a cousin. His grandmother dies of pneumonia, his uncle and aunt die of consumption. When, at 13, he discovers that his mother is all too human, Frank leaves the cousin’s home to live with an uncle.

“He says there’s no food in the house, not a scrap of bread, and when he falls asleep, I take the greasy newspaper from the floor. I lick the front page, which is all advertisements for films and dances in the city. I lick the headlines. I lick the great attacks of Patton and Montgomery in France and Germany. I lick the war in the Pacific. I lick the obituaries and the sad memorial poems, the sports pages, the market prices of eggs, butter and bacon. I suck the paper till there isn’t a smidgen of grease.”

​
Nster.com