MEMOIR

The Life Force Triumphs

ANGELA'S ASHES: A Memoir. By Frank McCourt (Scribner: $23, 364 pp.)

September 29, 1996

Book Review

By Mary Morrissey, Mary Morrissy is the author of "A Lazy Eye" and "Mother of Pearl." She reviews fiction for the Irish Times

The
Irish American view of the home country–especially among emigrants of
Frank McCourt's generation–can often be irritatingly sentimental
(usually induced retrospectively) or ingratiatingly stage-Oirishy. No
fear of that in "Angela's Ashes"–here is a memoir of blood, snot and
tears. In the opening paragraphs, a bemused McCourt ruminates on how he
managed to come through his early years: "Worse than the ordinary
miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is
the miserable Irish Catholic childhood."

The reader shudders.
Are we in for a parochial, church-bashing memoir full of that
particularly Irish brand of aggrandizing self-pity? (McCourt has
described the book as "an epic of woe.") No again. By the end of this
tender, harrowing and bleakly funny volume, the reader, too, is left
marveling at how McCourt survived.

Born in New York to Irish
emigrant parents, McCourt, aged 4, returns to Limerick with his three
brothers to settle in his mother's native city. It is the 1930s and the
family is destitute, driven home by the Depression and the death of an
idolized infant daughter. McCourt's father, Malachy–"shiftless,
loquacious, alcoholic"–cannot hold a job for longer than it takes him
to down the first pay packet in a pub.

He is also from the north
of Ireland, perhaps his biggest crime in the narrow, bigoted world of
then-President Eamon de Valera's Free State. While "Dev" was busily
penning his constitution and conjuring up an image of his fledgling
state where "comely maidens" would dance at the crossroads, Malachy
McCourt was being refused work in Limerick because of his accent.

The
McCourts are reduced to a Dickensian round of "relief"–charity from
the St. Vincent de Paul society, public assistance from the state,
handouts from the priest, medicine from the public dispensary. The
family lives in abject poverty in Limerick's notorious slums, sharing
the same flea-ridden bed, a bucket with the communal sip of a whole
street standing by their front door, damp seeping through the walls.
Often hungry, always cold, the children are sent out scavenging for
fuel and scraps. McCourt's baby brother dies of pneumonia; a twin
follows six months later.

The author's mother, the Angela of the
book's title, succumbs to a low-lying grief from which she never really
recovers. McCourt describes her as pious and defeated, but this reader
found her proud, fickle, feisty and fragile by turns and blessed (or
perhaps cursed) with a tender but absurd optimism, epitomized by the
flapper dress she keeps in a trunk in case one day she might be asked
out dancing.

It is she who bears the brunt of the cycle of
anticipation and disappointment that an alcoholic imposes on those he
loves. Malachy gets a job; Angela makes feverish plans to pay off their
debts, to buy the children shoes; the boys nourish their imaginations
on the food they will have–ham, eggs, fish and chips. A doomed kind of
hope sustains them and then their father comes home drunk and penniless
and the round of begging starts all over again.

Feckless though
McCourt's father is, he is never demonized, never reduced to easy
stereotype. Here is a man who genuinely loves his children, who
comforts and cherishes them. He just can't support them. The young
Frank loves, admires and pities his father until Malachy disappears to
England to work in a munitions factory during World War II and simply
drifts out of their lives.

But "Angela's Ashes" is much more
than a personal memoir. It is a pen picture of a lost generation–lost
to early death and emigration. McCourt gives us cultural snapshots of
these embattled, impoverished lives. Here he is describing a school
pal: "Paddy Clohessy has no shoe to his foot, his mother shaves his
head to keep the lice away, his eyes are red, his nose always snotty.
The sores on his kneecaps never heal because he picks at the scabs and
puts them in his mouth. His clothes are rags he has to share with his
six brothers and a sister and when he comes to school with a bloody
nose or a black eye you know he had a fight over the clothes that
morning. He hates school. He's seven going on eight, the biggest and
oldest boy in the class and he can't wait to grow up and join the
English army and go to India where it's nice and warm and he'll live in
a tent with a dark girl with the red dot on her forehead and he'll be
lying there eating figs, that's what they eat in India, figs, and
she'll cook the curry day and night and plonk on a ukulele and when he
has enough money he'll send for the whole family and they'll all live
in the tent especially his poor father who's at home coughing up great
gobs of blood because of the consumption."

Much of McCourt's
memoir is written in this urgent present tense. With it he conveys the
contingency of a child's-eye view and the marvelous literalness of the
very young. Frank confides in the Angel of the Seventh Step, who, his
father has told him, brings new babies to his mother. It is an
illusion, of course, but the ghostly mentor brings comfort. So meager
is the joy in these lives that the reader cheers when McCourt as a
13-year-old engages in a bleak but defiant act of masturbation on a
hilltop. It seems like a triumphant life-giving yes to the possibility
of happiness.

But if there is not much joy, there is plenty of
humor. McCourt captures the rhythms of speech and the dark,
self-deprecating wit of the Irish to perfection. He writes as if he is
speaking; it is no surprise to learn that he has been a raconteur all
his life.

But what is most remarkable is that he has managed to
reenter his boyhood self so completely, while maintaining a quiet,
sardonic, authorial distance from his early life, which gives "Angela's
Ashes" its rigor and power. Whatever scars McCourt bears from his
childhood, they are not exorcised here. Only someone who has
successfully battled with his demons could have crafted such a
compelling work of art out of his own pain.
 

Excerpts From the 17th Annual Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winners

April 20, 1997

By
FRANK McCOURT, Frank McCourt is the winner of this year's Pulitzer
Prize for biography. He was for many years a writing teacher at
Stuyvesant High School. He lives in New York City

My father
and mother should have stayed in New York where they met and married
and where I was born. Instead, they returned to Ireland when I was
four, my brother, Malachy, three, the twins, Oliver and Eugene, barely
one, and my sister, Margaret, dead and gone.

When I look back on
my childhood I wondered how I survived at all. 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.

Smoldering 'Ashes'

*
Frank McCourt's Bestselling Memoir About His Painful and Impoverished
Childhood in Ireland Has Ignited an Emotional Debate in His Hometown of
Limerick

September 11, 1998

By AMBROSE CLANCY, SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

LIMERICK
— On a quiet Sunday afternoon at W.J. South's pub–all mahogany,
frosted glass, marble and mirrors–an old fellow at the bar was
contentedly sinking a pint of Guinness when a photographer's flash
whitened the room.

"I don't like my picture taken," the man
snapped, glaring. Assured that he hadn't been included in the shot, he
turned away, still angry.

Asked his name, he said "Martin, and
that's all I'm givin'. The worst thing to happen to Limerick was that
book. And the next worse was the likes of you fellas. This isn't a pub
anymore, it's a bloody disco. Try and drink a pint in peace and here's
another Yank or Englishman or God-knows-who after your opinion. Opinion
about a book!"

"That book" being "Angela's Ashes," a
coming-of-age memoir by Frank McCourt set amid the horrific poverty of
Limerick in the 1930s and '40s. It is one of the publishing phenomena
of the century. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, it has been on the
hard-cover bestseller lists for nearly two years. Sales are so strong
there is still no American paperback edition. The numbers of copies
sold worldwide, in English and in translation, are "like the national
debt: I can't begin to understand it," McCourt said recently from his
home in Manhattan.

A film version, produced by Scott Rudin and
David Brown and directed by Alan Parker, will include Emily Watson and
Robert Carlyle, star of the "The Full Monty," as McCourt's parents.

"The whole thing," the author said with comic gravity, "has gotten out of hand entirely."

*

Beyond
the numbers of editions and copies sold, there is another sure sign of
McCourt's success: the appearance of searbhas, the Irish word for
begrudgery.

"A defining national trait," McCourt said. "They
should put the word on the Irish flag. Oh, the snipers are out in
Limerick, you can be sure of that."

South's pub features
prominently in the book as the neighborhood "local," the place where
the family's meager finances go, mostly for drink for McCourt's
ne'er-do-well father. The current owner of South's, David Hickey, says
there have been many visitors lately, from the world over. Proudly, he
shows a picture of a Chinese journalist who dropped in a month ago.

The
people of Limerick, Hickey continues, have three opinions of the
memoir: "Pro, anti and against the whole debate itself. Deep down, I
feel, it's a true book, or 75% to 80% true, and that's a good
percentage for memory. The anti crowd says it never happened, the
poverty that McCourt describes. Or they say he never should have
written about his family that way, you know, his mother being sort of a
prostitute. That did not go down well.

"The pro people say it's
a great book, and something that should be said. There were poor people
everywhere in Ireland in those days. Everywhere. Don't I remember it,"
says the 60-something-year-old. "The women in the old shawls and ragged
clothes. Toilets in the yards, the smell, Jesus. And cold. And hunger."

And
are the people against the book motivated by searbhas? "Some, I
suppose." Hickey reflects. "But some who went through those times have
a sense of shame about it. Limerick people take everything so
personally, you know."

*

Thin-skin isn't all that the
people in this city of 150,000 are accused of. Many Irish look at
Limerick as forbidding, insular, clannish, hopelessly provincial. It
was a grim British Army garrison town for more than two centuries;
unlike other Irish cities of its size, it was without a university
until 25 years ago. If young people wanted higher education, they had
to leave. Meanwhile, culture was defined exclusively by the Church.

"Angela's
Ashes" seems to some people just one more black mark against their
city, a reaction that hasn't been confined to barroom arguments. Last
year, after the University of Limerick awarded McCourt an honorary
doctor of letters, comments by phone and letter began to flood in,
including anonymous threats.

"The response was overwhelmingly
favorable," recalls Colin Townsend, dean of Humanities. "But then there
were some saying McCourt had fouled his own nest, that sort of thing.
We even got a letter from a convent of nuns in Florida, letting us know
what a scurrilous book it was and that giving the author a degree was
absolutely disgraceful."

Were the threats taken seriously?

"Enough to get in touch with the police," Townsend replies. "At every event there was security. But it all went smoothly."

*

These
days, with its world-class university, and benefiting from Ireland's
powerhouse economy, Limerick in many ways has been reborn. The filthy,
crowded "lanes" where the McCourts lived are long gone, having been
replaced with new housing or gentrified into pleasant rows of brick
houses and flower boxes. The poor don't live there anymore.

Indeed,
there is a social safety net now, and life for the poor has been eased
somewhat since McCourt's boyhood days. But poverty still exists: The
poor are still ghettoized, and it is still a struggle to escape. In
what ironically are called "estates" such as Southill and Weston on the
edges of the city–bleak, graffiti-scarred neighborhoods that are
drug-plagued and violent–the dole still passes from one generation to
the next like patrimony. And now there are the added scourges of
addiction and crime.

In Weston–where the graffiti is about
soccer ("Leeds United"), nationalist politics ("Brits Out") and rock
'n' roll ("Metal Rules")–Josephine O'Reilly, 68, invites a visitor
into her immaculate home to talk about "that book."

She grew up in the lanes before moving to Weston in the early '50s.

"It
was nice then," she says in a clear, musical voice. "We had some
beautiful neighbors." Seated at a table in her small, tidy garden, she
waves a hand in the direction of the street, shaking her head. "But now
these drug people. It's very frightening. I had a car, but it was
burned out, right outside there. If they can't steal it, they burn it.
If they can't have it, you can't have it."

Still, O'Reilly–who "knew the McCourts, I lived on Windmill Lane with them"–was horrified by "Angela's Ashes."

"The
way he wrote about Angela, his own mother! I think it's a pity. She was
a very good woman. I can't see her doing anything bad. And Pa Keating
taking a child into a pub, young Frank for a pint, it was a crime to do
that sort of thing. I don't believe it a'tall."

She speaks of Malachy McCourt, Frank's brother and author of his own bestselling memoir, "A Monk Swimming."

"He
was on the radio here in Limerick, a call-in show, Malachy was. I
phoned in and said, 'Your brother has wronged your aunt, Aggie
Keating.' Malachy said she'd once hit him in the head with a bottle. I
said, 'Well, I'm sure you deserved it."'

When Josephine was 9
years old, her mother died at age 36, leaving a husband and five
children. The family lived in one room "and a very small room at that.
Right after my mother died, my grandmother stood me on a stool and
taught me to wash on an old washboard. At 9 years old I had work."
Asked if her reaction to the book might have anything to do with
memories of her own hard times, she answers indirectly:

"I can't
really be bitter or cross. He's telling the truth in a lot of ways. But
why write a book about Limerick showing it in that light?"

*

The
call-in radio show of which Josephine spoke is "Limerick 95," a
late-night program hosted five nights a week by Gerry Hannan, easily
the most dedicated and vocal critic in town of Frank McCourt's memoir.

Hannan
is the author of "Ashes," a self-published book ("I paid for the entire
excursion myself") dedicated to "all the people who grew up on the
lanes of Limerick and were perfectly happy during their childhood."

Hannan
was born in 1959, well after the lanes were gone; nevertheless, he
claims on the book cover that these are "real memoirs." The 383 pages,
he says proudly, took him "only six weeks to write." Some say it shows.
But sales have been brisk in Limerick–nearly 8,000 copies and climbing.

"I
have no ax to grind with Frank McCourt," Hannan says. "And I don't
begrudge him the success he's had with his book. But I genuinely feel
he was unfair to his contemporaries. I wrote my book to defend the
people of the city I love."

At midnight on a Monday, from his
studio on the third floor of a downtown building, Hannan broadcasts yet
another program on "the controversy." Caller Jim, who describes himself
as "a country man down to the ground," says he has not read the book
but heard it is "indecent." Terence, "67 today, and lived every day of
my life in Limerick," says that McCourt "hasn't a bloody clue. He makes
Limerick sound like a third-world country, for the love of God." Hannan
asks Terence if he had a happy childhood.

"Happy? If you wanted
some help from the church, from the St. Vincent de Paul Society, they'd
come, wouldn't they, to your place and say, 'You're not poor. Sell that
chair. Sell that table.' "

Hannan moves quickly to a new caller.

The Outsider

* Peter Collier and Warren Hinckle on Frank McCourt's American Story

* 'Tis A Memoir by Frank McCourt; Scribner: 368 pp., $26

September 19, 1999

Book Review

By
PETER COLLIER, Peter Collier is the author, with David Horowitz, of
"The Roosevelts: An American Saga." He is writing a memoir about
growing up in the San Fernando Valley in the '50s

"Angela's
Ashes" ends with 19-year-old Frank McCourt, born in the United States
but raised in Ireland, coming back to his future on a ship from Cork.
As he stands on the deck looking at the lights of America twinkling in
the darkness, the ship's wireless officer comes up to him and says,
"Isn't this a great country altogether?" And McCourt concludes that
wondrous book with a chapter containing one word: " 'Tis."

Like
a literary trick out of James Joyce, the end was a beginning in
disguise. In " 'Tis," that one-word chapter becomes a book about what
happens to McCourt in that great country he sees shimmering like a
mirage in the distance. But while "Angela's Ashes" is a book in which
things fall apart, a child's eye view of the social boneyard of
Limerick and of a fractured family's struggle for survival, it is told
with grim comic brio that makes it paradoxically uplifting. The story
in " 'Tis," though not so dark, is also not so grand. If its
predecessor was a song of innocence, this book–in some ways more an
extended epilogue than a sequel–is a song of experience, a story
filled with the compromise and puzzlement of adulthood made all the
more ambiguous because it takes place in what always remains for
McCourt a foreign land.

He arrives in New York in 1949 as a
virtual immigrant but without the immigrant's clarity about the task at
hand because he seems to have a claim from being born here before his
parents uprooted him at the age of 4 to return the family to the Old
Country. He feels like an alien, impeded in his clumsy pursuit of the
American Dream by infected eyes, rotten teeth, scant formal education.
Can he make his way and his mark? Will these Protestant straight-ahead
citizens allow him to succeed without renouncing the dual citizenship
that is his glory and his tragic predicament? Will the price of
admission in America be the renunciation of all that Irish doom and
laughter, the genius for friendship and the skylarking conversation?
These are the issues in " 'Tis." As McCourt says at one point in the
narrative, "I'd like to be Irish American or American Irish though I
know I can't be two things at once. . . ."

Thanks to a drunken
priest and a boss in the local Democratic Party (the Irish American
employment agency in New York), he gets a job, soon after debarking, at
the Biltmore, cleaning ashtrays and mopping floors and enviously
watching the young Americans his age with their fresh good looks,
arcane flirtation rituals, white teeth and college textbooks. He rents
a room and subsists on bananas, the cheapest food he can find. The
disillusion that sets in at the very onset of his new life will give
way to wry knowledge but never really leave him: "New York was the city
of my dreams but now I'm here the dreams are gone and it's not what I
expected at all." He wants it all, this prodigal life he sees all
around him, but from the beginning he so devalues it by his mordant and
cutting irony that when it finally comes to him, its worth has been
depleted.

After being drafted, he is stationed in Germany, still
digging out of the rubble, where his experiences combine "Sgt. Bilko"
and "Catch-22." He is trained to handle a truculent German shepherd in
the K-9 corps but then is made company clerk. Like other GIs, he trades
coffee and cigarettes for sex in squalid encampments of refugees, but
unlike the rest of them he is a despairing observer during his own
copulation. At one point, he is sent with others on an errand to
Dachau, and in the cognitive dissonance he accepts and finds himself
saying an Our Father at the door of an oven, knowing that his tenuous
Christianity was implicated in the horror.

Back in New York
after his discharge, McCourt still continues his picaresque life. He
feels fortunate to find a job unloading trucks for $75 a week. Yet he
has trouble with women and can't bring his future into view. He becomes
a sleepwalker in the city, with the rich life around him exceeding his
grasp in a way that causes him to wonder, "What am I doing in the world
at all?" This question haunts " 'Tis." It is never really answered,
only tabled.

He wangles his way into NYU's education school
despite his lack of a high school diploma. He strives upwardly there
but as always is undone by his Irishness, which ineradicably asserts
itself in his brogue and in his face, which he feels looks like a map
of the old country. He is ever the naif, always being slapped down by a
world more sophisticated than he. In an English class, for instance, he
timorously speaks up when the professor refers to Jonathan Swift as a
great English satirist, pointing out that Swift was actually Irish.

"Does
that mean," the professor replies in one of those put-downs that
continues to echo through a life, "that if I'm from the Virgin Islands
I'm a virgin?"

McCourt goes on to a teaching career, eventually
rising from a zoo-like vocational school on Staten Island, where he is
initially warehoused because of his Barry Fitzgerald voice, to
celebrated Stuyvesant High. By all outward measure, his life is a
success, but it doesn't feel that way. McCourt remains stuck in the
in-betweenness that is his birthright, unable to claim and occupy a
piece of ground of his own and victimized by obscure wants he cannot
satisfy. When he is poor, he wants to be comfortable. When he is
comfortable, he wants to be footloose like his bohemian brother
Malachy, a singer and wit about town. When he's doing manual labor, he
wants to teach. When he's teaching, he wants to write books. When he's
single, he wants to be married. When he finally marries a blond goddess
who represents all the illusory Protestant promise of America, he stays
out late at bars until he loses her. For McCourt, as for Oscar Wilde,
there are two types of tragedy–not getting what you want and getting
it.

McCourt seems less in control in this book and at times is
powerless to keep himself from becoming the stage Irishman, crying in
his beer, milking sentiment until it becomes false, mistaking talk for
thought. He uses his outsider's status to make some palpable hits on
aspects of American social life, particularly the class distinctions
that divide people in and out of the workplace. But at times his sharp
observations stumble into banality: "No one dies in America, they pass
away or they're deceased and when they die the body, which is called
the remains, is taken to a funeral home where people just stand around
and look at it and no one sings or tells a story or takes a drink and
then it's taken away in a casket to be interred. They don't like saying
coffin and they don't like saying buried. They never say graveyard."

If
" 'Tis" sometimes becomes tedious when telling how McCourt became a
stranger in a strange land, it is profound when dealing with his
unappeasable past. The authors of that past, his father and mother,
play a role in this book. But they are no longer those larger-than-life
figures from "Angela's Ashes"–the one shaping his sons' imaginations
with stories of Ireland's greatness and its foul betrayal, the other a
pillar of long-suffering love, endurance and survival. Here they are
diminished, cut down by life, condemned to live out the aftermath of
their primal drama.

McCourt's mother arrives for a visit in
America and stays, becoming more isolated and dispossessed although she
is in the midst of her reunited children. The father arrives for a
visit from Northern Ireland, still spreading moral chaos and deceit
among his children. Claiming to have succeeded at Alcoholics Anonymous,
he euchres Frank into a drunken spree that reopens old family wounds
and then leaves on the next boat home.

There is no resolution
for the McCourts, but there is at least a truce with life. When their
mother finally dies, he and his brothers have her cremated and wait for
a time to repatriate her in accordance with her final wishes. Not long
afterward, word comes that their father has died. Frank alone of all
the children travels to war-torn Belfast for the last rites. On the day
of the funeral, three IRA gunmen are killed running a British
barricade, and McCourt imagines them as providing his father the
"escort of his dreams . . . and he'd envy them their manner of going."

In
1985, three and a half decades after his arrival in America, Frank
joins with his brothers, Malachy, Michael and Alphie to take their
mother home to Limerick. They stand in the graveyard there, dip their
fingers in the urn brought from the New Jersey crematorium and scatter
what is left of her to the wind. Thus " 'Tis" ends where this unique
memoir first began–with Angela's ashes. And Frank McCourt completes
the book he lived all those years and only just recently got around to
writing.

" 'Tis" has those elements that made "Angela's Ashes"
such a success–the narrative brio, the fierce sympathy for human tic
and torment, the intuitive feel for character and above all the love of
language and that very Irish understanding that words are our only
weapon in our long quarrel with God.

COVER REVIEW

Homeward Bound

* IRISH ON THE INSIDE: In Search of the Soul of Irish America, By Tom Hayden, Verso: 312 pp., $25

January 06, 2002

By FRANK McCOURT

Toward
the end of his latest book, "Irish on the Inside," Tom Hayden throws
down the gauntlet: history or amnesia. Take your choice. It reminded me
of a moment when I was teaching high school English. (No, don't go
away. This won't be a "personal" review.) We were discussing the
hyphenated American, so reviled by Woodrow Wilson.

Except for
one, my students were happy with their hyphens. I asked that one:
"Joey, if I were to wake you in the middle of the night and ask you
what you are, what would you say?"

His reply was, "Tired."

If
Joey were to respond to the Hayden challenge, he might choose amnesia,
but if Hayden were his teacher, he wouldn't let him get away with it,
not in this book. Hayden would urge on Joey the glories of an Italian
heritage just as he dwells on the richness of his own Irish heritage.

And
no, he won't let it go at that. "Irish on the Inside" is an urgent
book, fueled by a great, somber energy. As the title indicates, it's
about Irishness, the search for Irishness, the definition of Irishness,
the achievement of Irishness, the perpetuation of Irishness. It is,
first of all, the story of Hayden, who angrily erases his racial
designation from a census form, "White, non-Hispanic" and pencils in
"Irish, born in the United States, American citizen." (Joey might have
said, "Yo, man, that's too much.") That response to a census form was,
perhaps, the first stroke in Hayden's long swim toward the Shamrock
Shore.

You wonder: "Why bother? Isn't it enough to be American?
Heavens, man, isn't it hard enough being human without taking on the
Celtic burden?" Especially when you're Tom Hayden. Tough, thoughtful,
radical, you've straddled history. You've faced the dogs and cops of
Chicago; you've bothered J. Edgar Hoover and you know what that can
lead to; you've sat (although sitting is not your favorite activity) in
the California Legislature for nearly two decades; you've fought for
migrants and immigrants and for the environment; you've denounced
globalization and assimilation and all things that lead to blandness.

A
little diversion here; comedian Fred Allen once defined the Lace
Curtain Irish, the more well-to-do of the clan, as "people who keep
fruit in the house even when no one is sick." He, of course, was Irish.
(Where else would you find a melancholy so hilarious?)

Allen was
looking at what happens to us when we become respectable, a fate
abhorrent to Hayden, sprung (if that's the word) from the middle class,
Midwest. If Hayden were Garrison Keillor, he'd sweep aside all those
sweet stories about a Scandinavian Lake Wobegon. He'd swarm in there
urging the natives to hold fast to their Norwegian-ness, lest they be
lost in the blandness of a consumer culture.

The United States
is a big country, but not big enough for Hayden. He would have made a
hell of an Irish monk in ancient times, a great missionary. You can see
him setting out for distant shores, bringing light to the barbarians of
Britain and lands beyond. That's what he's trying to do now–and
there's an air of desperation in his life and message. The world
already knows much of that life, which is laid out in Part I of his
book. The titles of certain sections speak for themselves: "What Is an
Irish Soul?" and "The Sixties Made Me Irish."

So far, so good.
Along the way we meet Che Guevara, C. Wright Mills, the Molly Maguires,
the San Patricios. Here, Hayden is filling in his Irish American past.
When he says the '60s made him Irish, he refers mainly to the Kennedys,
particularly Bobby–the more Irish of the two dead Kennedys. He glances
briefly at Bobby's transformation from close aide to Joe McCarthy to
his role as champion of civil liberties. He reflects on the growing
conservatism of Irish Americans, how they rushed to the flag of Ronald
Reagan. Even as he understands, he despairs. He understands that the
late Richard J. Daley, mayor of Chicago and arch tormentor of the
Chicago Seven, carries a "psychic burden" of the Famine generation.

That
is the value of Hayden's book, the search for understanding, and Hayden
expects us to engage in the same quest. A tall order. (Joey would have
been too tired.) New Age philosophy tells us, "Wherever you are, there
you are." Not for Hayden or thousands of Americans who travel the globe
in search of roots or identity or a cure for whatever ails them. There
are Americans and American Irish who write of going back, buying ruined
houses and castles, dealing with the charming eccentricities of the
locals as if County Cork were an Irish Tuscany.

Again, not for
Hayden: When he returns to the Ould Sod, it's not to pub and thatched
cottage. It's directly to the North. Nobody goes to the North; it's not
a tourist destination and you go there only if you're a spy, a
diplomat, a gunrunner, a Sinn Fein sympathizer.

Now why didn't
Hayden go to a nice place like Dublin–or even Limerick? Why the North?
Because "A central theme of this book is that the most independent
Irish consciousness is rooted in the North of Ireland … where the
ancient and enduring conflict between Irish nationalism and British
colonialism is most stark." To find himself, to define his Irishness,
Hayden has to dive right into the conflict. Not for him the ramble
through the groves of Blarney or Killarney. Up the Falls Road he goes,
or Sandy Row. The general reader will wonder, "So?" And this, if you
are a general reader, is where we lose you. Before you can understand
Part II, "Going North," you might want to take courses in Irish
history, economics, the geography of Belfast, the byzantine world of
politics in the North. If the following names mean nothing to you, then
you're wandering in the woods: De Chastelain, "Mo" Mowbray, Trimble,
Hume.

"Irish on the Inside" is not a big book, but it is packed
and demanding. You'll be charmed, perhaps, by Part I but, again
perhaps, puzzled, mystified and at-swim in Part II. Read Part II slowly
and, whether you agree or disagree with Hayden's uncompromising
views–pro-Sinn Fein, anti-colonialist–you'll find it a valuable guide
to the craziness of a troubled area.

When you finish Part II,
put the book down. You'll need rest and reflection before Part III,
"Recovering the Irish Soul." This is a call to action. Get off your
assimilated rump and be Irish. And how can you be Irish? The ways are
beyond counting. Learn the language, the geography, the history, the
songs, the literature. Eschew the "Paddy" stereotype, the St. Patrick's
Day boozing, the rest of that green nonsense. Psychologically and
spiritually you must become an archeologist. You must go digging to
find your roots, yourself.

Hayden is calling for a tremendous
expenditure of intellectual energy, defiant and defining. Tear down the
Lace Curtain, dump the fruit and wake up, Joey. It's time to be
something besides tired. It's history over amnesia.

*

Frank McCourt is the author of "Angela's Ashes" and "'Tis."

The Oscars: 76th Annual Academy Awards

THE DIRECTOR'S LIFE

Their lives writ large

* The Sheridans summon their immigrant experience and the unruly nature of memory that shaped 'In America.'

 February 29, 2004

By Frank McCourt, Special to The Times

NEW YORK — Yes, I knew him when.

So did hundreds of people — all kinds — in the Hell's Kitchen area of New York City's West Side.

We
knew Jim Sheridan as artistic director of the Irish Arts Center, where
he worked with Nye Heron to present plays traditional and experimental.

I
must have met Jim at some Irish Arts function. There was always
something going on. You could take classes in various aspects of Irish
culture: dancing, tin whistle, acting, history. All this took place in
an old building that had once been condemned but was now leased to Nye
Heron and his group for, I think, a dollar a year.

There was Jim
— fresh from Ireland by way of Toronto. There was his exquisite wife,
Fran, and there were his two daughters, Naomi and Kirsten.

And
here is the story about the whole adventure I like best. When they
drove from Toronto it was in a rented car. They had no use for it in
New York and wondered what to do with it. Dump it? Yeah. That's what
friends suggested.

"No," said Fran. She would not take the easy
way out. She drove the car all the way back to Toronto — 12-hour drive
— and took a cheap flight back.

That's Fran, and you can see
with a woman like that running the family there would be no nonsense.
She insists on that strange thing called honor.

I was sorry she
wasn't there the morning I interviewed Jim, Naomi and Kirsten. I hadn't
seen her in years and, of course, wondered if she'd changed. I
wondered, also, if the daughters had changed. They were little ones the
last time I saw them before they returned to Ireland.

But there
they were in Naomi's hotel room overlooking Central Park, natural,
good-humored, unaffected. I expected at least a little … well, you
know, world weariness.

No, that's not going to happen in the
Sheridan family. No airs here. The sisters sat on the couch while Jim
reclined in a deep armchair reaching, between remarks, for fresh fruit
and a bowl of cereal. His accent is pure Dublin. Pure.

I
reminded him that a long time ago at one of our late-night beer
sessions he talked of making a film about a family coming here from
Canada, a Polish family. Did he want to make it Polish to give himself
distance? Well, maybe, but the more they talked about it the more it
seemed necessary to make it autobiographical. Make it a Polish family
and you have trouble with language, and isn't life hard enough. Jim
created Frankie, a new character based on his brother who died as a
child, but for the rest of it the family story was rich enough.

They
weren't easy days for the Sheridans. They lived in a Hell's Kitchen
apartment, sent the children to school and survived 'til they decided
to return to Ireland.

It's a long way from Hell's Kitchen (now known to the gentry as Clinton Hill) to Dublin to Oscar night.

When
you see "In America," written by Jim, Naomi and Kirsten, you'll know
it's a love letter to New York. Jim and Kirsten still live in Dublin,
but Naomi is here writing and planning various projects. It's
commonplace now to say that Woody Allen is the great lover of New York,
but step right up Sheridans One Two Three.

At the end of the
interview we walked along Central Park South, and I said goodbye to the
Sheridans making their way into the park for a picture session. I
headed west to the streets of their memories, Hell's Kitchen. For
decades this was an Irish neighborhood, where dockers raised their
families, where they built Catholic schools and churches. And bars, of
course. It was a tough neighborhood.

Old timers say it was a great place to raise kids. Neighbors looked out for you.

What we see in "In America" is love.

Frank McCourt: When you were growing up, you were like midwives, weren't you, to a script that was developing?

Naomi Sheridan: I don't think we knew it at the time.

Frank: But you were talking about it, weren't you? About the adventures in New York?

Naomi:
I think as soon as my dad let us. We moved up to Inwood because it was
a better neighborhood and we had a bigger apartment and he was like …

Kirsten Sheridan: "… all the Irish are here."

Naomi: So as soon as we left I think he started talking about it.

Frank: I remember you saying one time you'd make it a Polish family …

Kirsten: Then the American Indian family. Is that when Johnny was a musician?

Jim Sheridan: He was going to do everything. He was a Polish musician then …

Kirsten:
He went through the entire orchestra. Then he was an American Indian.
The kids were half-American Indian, half-Irish and they came from the
West, or from Canada.

Jim: I wrote the first draft about
1990. I was [going to] the Oscars [for "In the Name of the Father"]. I
went to get a tuxedo and I was walking along Santa Monica Boulevard and
the painter who had lived downstairs who was black [but] who didn't die
of AIDS came running our way and said, "Oh, my God, oh, my God. That
house was blessed. You made, and I made it. Joey jumped off the roof
but Laura's an opera singer in Vermont." So everybody [from that
building] is either dead or famous in the end.

Frank: Extremes.

Jim (laughing):
Yeah. He said, "You should write a film about that." So I started to
and it always ended up with this stupid scene about going to the Oscars
and that didn't really work…. Then I asked the girls to write it, and
Naomi put in the voice-over. They wrote two completely independent
scripts, which had nothing to do with me. It was all about going to
school and having to shop at the …

Kirsten: … the Salvation Army. And being [ticked off]. I hated that Salvation Army.

Naomi: All these kind of odd people would lunge out from between the racks.

Kirsten: Mam would get a Hoover for like a dollar. She loved it. She still does.

Frank: When you were writing, did you have any models from any other films?

Kirsten: No, because my dad just wanted a kid's point of view. So it was the easiest job ever in the world. It was like writing a diary.

Naomi: Just stories, memories, that stood out.

Kirsten (laughing): I think [Dad] expected to see a hero emerge out of the mist called Jim.

Frank (laughing): You took care of that.

Kirsten: We did. My hero was called Kirsten.

Naomi:
I think it's weird like that everybody remembers something different or
remembers the same scene differently. Kirsten wrote stuff that I was
like, "When did that happen?" and vice versa. You wonder why you
remember a particular thing where somebody else doesn't.

Frank:
Do you think memory is an Irish thing? You know the definition of Irish
Alzheimer's — they forget everything but the grudge. [But] you go to
an Irish party, everybody knows songs going way back to 1798.

Jim: I mean it's, that's the point of "Ulysses," isn't it? I mean remembering everything like the streets in Dublin.

Frank: It's all we had.

Kirsten: The nostalgia.

Frank:
Compare Italian Catholicism, Irish Catholicism…. You go to Italy,
they have monuments, buildings, they have art, they have the materials
for art, paintings, sculpture, music, symphony orchestra. We didn't
have anything but the tin whistle and the fiddle.

Naomi: And it rained all the time, so we were always indoors.

Frank:
When you have nothing, you remember everything. The tin whistle, the
fiddle and the mouth. These are the symphonic instruments of the
Irish…. And now with this new medium in America. People like the
Sheridans came, Neil Jordan. Who was there before them? There's "The
Quiet Man" — green fields, Maureen O'Hara and "Here's a stick to bait
the lovely lady." That was Ireland. And now you have a few months ago
"Veronica Guerin" came along. People were horrified. The Irish tourism
bureau was horrified. "This is not Ireland."

Naomi: I
think Americans like to kind of hang on to these images. And the Irish
here. They want somewhere they can go back to where things are green …

Frank: Yes, the green …

Jim:
Blacks from the South, Irish from the west of Ireland, Italians from
below Naples, Poles and Jews — that's basically the population of
American cities. In the Irish case, they were people who lost their
language and their identity in the first generation. So there's an
anger here. When I go around, everybody is saying, "When are you going
to do something about the famine?"

Kirsten: For us,
Ireland was this idyllic place that didn't have any conflict. It had so
much conflict in reality, but for us it didn't have any conflict. Then
coming over here, I suddenly became completely aware of money, and I
was 5. It was a total double-edged sword because on the one hand, it
was very exciting and you're in this Spanish neighborhood and it's mad
and there's junkies and transvestites. On the flip side of it, it's
unsafe and vulnerable and shaky. So you kind of grow up quickly.

Naomi:
As hard as it was, [Mother] still loved it and she said she used to get
a lump in her throat when she was coming back from Ireland. You can get
to the point where the city drives you mad and then as soon as you
leave, you're like, "Oh, I miss New York."

Jim: When I
first went back [to Ireland] I noticed that the guys at the pub were
saying, "What do you want to drink? Get this bastard a drink here." I
said, "Why are you calling me names?" And he said, "You were in America
too long." [His daughters laugh.] The toxic nature of the language in
Dublin is about the political realities — look, I'm buying this guy a
drink, but he's not necessarily on my side. [Frank laughs.]

Frank:
When I first came here, I couldn't understand the directness. The Irish
are like the blacks off the plantation, they use what you call
circumlocution. You had to talk in a roundabout way, you had to pluck
the forelock, tweak your cap and so on. You had a way of dealing with
the language which was roundabout and the outsiders would call it
lyrical and poetic. But it had its practical use.

Jim: I
even think it's lying. I try to figure a little thing where the
landlord came to the farm and the guy says, "You know, you're only
allowed five pigs," and he'd pick up a pig and say, "This is a sheep,
sir." And the landlord would laugh, but they'd let the guy way with a
lie, with the means of control.

Kirsten: When I came over
here I had a huge mistrust of language. A huge mistrust. I don't
believe it for a second, and I've been much more visual person.

Frank: But you have to use it anyway. That's your living.

Kirsten:
Yeah, but dialogue wouldn't be my strong point. I just don't believe
it…. [In life,] the plot points are tiny. They're like a whisper.

Jim:
But drama has a structural organization that's very limited, and real
life has one that's unlimited. So when we did the film and we were
trying to put into a box the experience, we didn't have any plot
points, so we had to go back and invent a voice-over, which we took
from Naomi's script.

Kirsten: When Dad started writing
about Frankie, I wondered how did I not see this all along? It's like
just when you feel things are perfectly focused.

Frank: Did you think it was too weak without Frankie?

Kirsten:
Yeah. Too episodic. My dad kept going, "We should do the story, we
should do our story, we should do our story," and we'd write it and
people would laugh, but it never came together.

Jim: It must be something in the Irish, where a child dying is as worse as you can get.

Frank:
It wasn't until after [my mother] died that I began to think about what
she'd gone through having six children in 5 1/2 years and then three of
them dying within a year and a half. When I became a father, if I heard
[my daughter] sniffling in the middle of the night, I was rushing to
the crib. And then I began to realize what she'd gone through. It's
unbearable.

Jim: Think of it on a national level then.
When the famine happened, that happened on a psychic level for the
whole race. And that's the foundation stone.

Frank: That
hasn't been dealt with in Irish literature…. The pain is there and
now there are historians, what they call revisionist, who say, ah well,
you're paying too much attention to the famine. You can't pay too much
attention to the famine. I met Iman and she's Somalian. She says when
she gets off the plane in Somalia, the first people she meets are Irish
aid workers and what is it about the Irish that makes them flock to
wherever there's hunger. Even though a lot of them are young and they
don't understand, they do it anyway. The pain is still there.

Kirsten: It seems only when you leave Ireland that you can express it. I don't know of anyone in Ireland who articulates it.

Jim:
I'm thinking about what you said about language, Frank. If you go back
in history, there was a tax on windows and a tax on chimneys. So the
Irish used to put the slate on the chimney, board the windows, and sit
with the door open in the hovel looking out. And that's Irish vision.
Smoke-filled interior, nothing outside except white light…. Any means
of expression is like defusing a bomb. Because when you can express it
verbally it means you're not illiterate and mute and a rage-aholic. The
rage comes from not being able to express yourself.

McCourt:
When I came here, I didn't know you could think for yourself. It took
me a long, long time to get over the catechism and the ritual, which is
gorgeous and powerful. [But] you're dealing with a new Ireland where
the young are thinking for themselves, they can travel.

Naomi:
When I was growing up it was kind of like the end of the church's power
anyway. When we were there when I was a kid it was still very
prevalent. But by the time I'd gone back after having been in America,
you could feel it starting to lose its power.

Frank: From what you know from the young Irish filmmakers, what are the subjects?

Naomi: Maybe they're concentrating more on relationships than on Ireland as a theme — about relationships within their lives there.

Frank: When you were making [the film], were there moments when you felt you were being edited out?

Naomi:
I wrote about us all going to Central Park and we got into one of those
boats and we went out on the lake. It was so ridiculous. Everyone else
is floating by in these boat rides, and we were going around in
circles. And me dad was screaming, "You take oar and go the opposite
way." And Kirsten was standing up and me mom was going, "Jesus, sit
down!" We ended up like that, turning around and around and everybody
else just drifting passed us …

Frank: You couldn't do anything simple in a relaxed way.

Kirsten: No.

Frank: You had to be dramatic.

Kirsten: Yeah.

Frank
McCourt wrote "Angela's Ashes," which received a Pulitzer, and " 'Tis."
He is working on a book about his years as a teacher.

BOOK REVIEW

Many lessons to teach, more to learn

* Teacher Man, A Memoir; Frank McCourt; Scribner: 258 pp., $26

November 11, 2005

By Phillip Lopate, Special to The Times

*

FRANK
McCOURT'S first book, "Angela's Ashes," won the Pulitzer Prize and the
National Book Critics Circle Award and sold millions of copies. "
'Tis," its thin, disappointing sequel, managed to sell millions more.
Now comes "Teacher Man," the third of McCourt's memoirs. One might be
forgiven for wondering if this very winning Irish American author's
recollecting act is getting a bit old, his blarney running stale. Yet
"Teacher Man" is, in fact, the best book in the trilogy, an enthralling
work of autobiographical storytelling.

Perhaps this enthusiasm
will make better sense if I confess that I was in the tiny minority who
thought "Angela's Ashes" overrated. Yes, young McCourt's childhood
travails in Limerick, Ireland, were engaging, but they had the
over-rehearsed quality of anecdotes too often told. What's more, their
author had taken such pains to re-create the myopia of youthful
confusion that the book read more like fiction than autobiography; I
missed the double perspective of reflection on prior experience that
classic memoirs supply. There was one final problem: Because children
are presumed innocent, the boy protagonist of "Angela's Ashes" tended
to be bathed in a victimized, self-approving aura.

These defects
have been corrected in "Teacher Man," which shows the adult McCourt
committing follies aplenty and describing them with wry retrospective
insight. He is more than willing to look back on his own embarrassing
past and portray himself in comic terms as an insecure Irish schlemiel.
McCourt is not only self-deprecating, but he's also savvy about it: "If
self-denigration is the race," he writes, "I am the winner, even before
the starting gun."

As the book begins, McCourt is 27 and about
to embark on a career as a New York City high school teacher. His
education courses have ill-prepared him for the realities of the
classroom. Worried that he is rising above his station, he soon
discovers the low esteem in which secondary school teachers are held in
this society and tries to advance himself by getting a doctorate (never
managing to write his dissertation ) and teaching in community
colleges. Yet he always returns to the high school classroom, partly
because he is a screw-up and partly because he has a genuine gift for
working with adolescents.

What he discovers, at first haltingly
and then with confidence, is the age-old secret of how to teach: "You
have to develop your own style, your own techniques. You have to tell
the truth or you'll be found out." Most important, "Find out what you
love and do it." As an example, he allows students to head him off from
a grammar lesson by asking about his childhood, encouraging them to
think of him as a human being. He teaches the art of the excuse note,
drawing from his students' samples: "Here was American high school
writing at its best — raw, real, urgent, lucid, brief, lying."
Deciding that what really matters to teenagers is sex and food, he
focuses on food, getting his class to read favorite family recipes
aloud to musical accompaniment, holding gourmet picnics in the park and
comparing restaurant critics' prose. These assignments might fall flat
if copied by another teacher; the point is for each teacher to work
with his or her enthusiasms and translate them into educational
practice.

Anyone who has ever faced a classroom of yawning,
slouching adolescents will recognize the accuracy of McCourt's
descriptions and applaud his honesty. About one teenage boy, he writes,
"I look back at his cold stare and wonder if I should try to win him
over or destroy him completely." At another point, he confesses: "My
head feels hot and I want to shout, Why are you so damn stupid? … Why
can't you just look at this sentence and, for once in your miserable
teenage existence, make an attempt to learn." Out of frustration, he
submits to dubious impulses; he slaps a rude kid with a magazine and
asks students to write 150-word suicide notes. But always, he
sympathizes with the kids as individuals embedded in difficult,
complicated lives. And always, he bonds with them against the
higher-ups, the department heads and principals. Having immigrated and
started at the bottom, he is a fellow underdog. "I disliked anyone with
power over me," he explains, "bosses, bishops, college professors, tax
examiners, foremen in general."

After decades of subverting the
rigid curriculum with personal inventions that often land him in
trouble, McCourt finally gets a job at the elite Stuyvesant High
School, where a benign department chair tells him: "Teach whatever you
like." He is in heaven, or should be, but he continues to be ingenious,
as he puts it, at making himself miserable. Even when his creative
writing classes become wildly popular, he has "the nagging doubt I was
teaching under false pretenses." Maybe the students are there because
he's an easy mark?

What gives "Teacher Man" its spine is the
tight focus on day-to-day teaching. For an activity that consumes so
much labor and funding, education is consistently under-reported. To
publishers, its glamour is nil, unless it can be used to reflect a
topical crisis. Here, McCourt mocks his lover June's ambition to work
for a year in the schools and write a scathing indictment that will
become a bestseller. He stays in the trenches for more than three
decades, teaching, by his count, 33,000 classes; when he details the
day-to-day grind and satisfactions he knows the score. With "Teacher
Man," McCourt deserves to join that small coterie of classic pedagogic
memoirists, including Sylvia Ashton-Warner, John Holt, Herbert Kohl,
James Herndon and Jonathan Kozol.

While aware that students
think that "[b]elow the belly button the teacher is dead," McCourt
knows it takes a whole human being, sensually as well as intellectually
awake, to make a good teacher. Lest one think this book is only about
teaching, he interjects juicy, bittersweet vignettes about his
relations with women, his experiences working on the docks, his divorce
and reentry to bachelorhood, and his misadventures at the fringes of
the New York and Dublin literary scenes, including a priceless portrait
of Edward Dahlberg as a pompous windbag. In the end, McCourt became a
literary lion — just reward for a man who has certainly paid his dues.

One
of the curious dynamics in "Teacher Man" is McCourt's lingering
ambivalence toward self-analysis. Willing to call on his Catholic
school training to confess his sins, he admits, "I had no talent for
introspection." At one point, his first wife, Alberta, insists that he
go into therapy to save their marriage; McCourt gives a hilarious
account of himself as a shy Irishman, desperate to show "how reasonable
and balanced" he is, failing to compete with garrulously neurotic New
York analysands. There is a more self-scrutiny in this book than in
McCourt's previous ones, but his literary technique is still prone to
comic schtick and manic stream-of-consciousness reveries, developing
insights through controlled irony.

"Teacher Man," a slender
book, may strike some readers as more casual, less burnished than
"Angela's Ashes"; that work will doubtless continue to occupy a
respected place in the literature of the memoir. But it seems that
McCourt is still learning on the job, as he did in the classroom, and
his latest effort marks a considerable advance in honesty, complexity
and humanity.

*

Phillip Lopate is the author of "Being With Children" and "Waterfront."