Sense and Sensibility

Frank McCourt and his “High Heart”

There were no rainbows in Frank McCourt’s Ireland. No twinkling-eyed Irish priests. No babbling brooks. No shillelaghs. There were songs, of course, romantic and pitiful and merry. And there were stories, of course, stories of honor, fealty and defiance that were so rich and hearty they were good enough to eat. They had to be; because in McCourt’s childhood, stories were the only sustenance he knew.

McCourt, who spent the last years of his life in Roxbury, Conn., wrote three memoirs and a children’s book, but he will inevitably be remembered for the first one, “Angela’s Ashes,” published in 1996. The haunting, harrowing memoir, which described the author’s impoverished childhood in Limerick, Ireland, squashed tired clichés about Ireland and replaced them with a bitter, astringent reality of grinding poverty.

 To Tolstoy’s proverb about happy childhoods being alike, he added a Celtic twist, now immortalized in the book’s chilling second paragraph:
 ”When I look back on my childhood, I wonder 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.”

In a literary landscape larded with wretched childhoods — a trend McCourt could reasonably lay claim to igniting — it was a daunting assertion. But the memoir that followed — a sour casserole of deprivation, drunkenness and dejection — more than confirmed the claim. “People everywhere,” McCourt wrote, “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.”
 In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani acclaimed the work as “stunning,” written in “prose that’s pictorial and tactile, lyrical but streetwise,” and applauding McCourt’s emotional restraint. “There is not a trace of bitterness or resentment in ‘Angela’s Ashes,’ though there is plenty a less generous writer might well be judgmental about.” Petter Finn, in the Philadelphia Inquirer, called it “spellbinding,” and commended McCourt’s ability to “swerve flawlessly between aching sadness and desperate humor.”

The book went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award and put McCourt, a former teacher at New York City high schools, on the literary map. McCourt was a lyric and fulsome story teller, and was generous with his talents, appearing frequently in Litchfield County schools and at the Litchfield County Writer’s Project. He seemed to thrive in the limelight; for several years, he and his brother, Malachy, performed something of a stand-up routine lampooning their childhood deprivations as an absurd twist of fate.
 Two memoirs followed: “‘Tis,” a more acerbic story of McCourt’s early years in the United States, bilious with envy; and “Teacher Man,” a beguiling string-of-pearls about his often trying, troubling and hysterical years in the New York City school system. While critics recoiled at the bitterness of “‘Tis,” “Teacher Man” gathered equivocal praise — Phillip Lopate in the Los Angeles Times saw it as “the best book in the trilogy.”
 What few critics could deny was McCourt’s mesmeric storytelling ability; his stories may seem rehearsed, but like a Catskills comic, he had a million of ‘em.
 In all the books, a singular McCourt style emerges. “To me, he extends the way of words of Oscar Wilde,” said James Mullan, who started the Irish Studies Department at Fairfield University. “He had the true, magical trick: To make of that which is horrendous that which is humorous.”
 McCourt brought what Mullan called a “high heart to what other people would kvetch or whine about.”

McCourt’s unflinching eye was both comic and compassionate. His style was lyrical, wry and witty. But most of all, it is McCourt’s heart — still intact after a sordid, pitiful, disillusioned youth — that keeps his work buoyant and unforgettable. In “Teacher Man,” he tips his hat to that past, recognizing its legacy of resilience and wisdom. As he put it: “My life saved my life.”