There's a scene in Angela's Ashes that is etched in this writer's mind. A young Irish lad and his brother are starving. They sit in a makeshift kitchen watching their slovenly uncle gorge on fish and chips. When he's done, he tosses the greasy newspaper the meal was wrapped in, at them. They fall on the paper and lick every last drop of fried-fish-scented-oil. They also lap at the newsprint and swallow words, phrases, and sentences, as if the stories were a great feast themselves.
That wretchedly sad scene described so gloriously is just one example of the storytelling power of Frank McCourt, who died today in New York City at the age of 78.
Angela's Ashes was McCourt's memoir, which described the hardships he faced as a child growing up in Limerick, Ireland. The book topped best-seller lists, picked up both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was adapted into a film in 1999 starring Emily Watson as McCourt's mother, Angela and Robert Carlyle as his alcoholic father.
A Creative Writer
McCourt was a school teacher who taught creative writing in New York City's public school system for 30 years. But it wasn't until he retired from teaching in 1987 that he began to write his memoirs.
"After 20 pages of standard omniscient author, I wrote something that I thought was just a note to myself, about sitting on a seesaw in a playground, and I found my voice, the voice of a child," he told The Providence Journal in 1997. "That was it. It carried me through to the end of the book."
A Miserable Childhood
"When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all," the book's second paragraph begins in a famous and startling passage. "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.
"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 all the terrible things they did to us for 800 long years."
Dreaming of Prison
He wasn't exaggerating. Three of his six siblings died in early childhood. He was quoted as saying he dreamed of becoming a prison inmate so that he would be guaranteed three meals a day and a warm bed.
McCourt wrote with a stoic, honest, child's voice which carried enamoured readers through the dark days of his early years up to his move to the United States at the age of 19. Angela's Ashes made McCourt a celebrity. He certainly deserved the success.
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