‘Angela’s Ashes’ Ignites Celebrity Status
Frank McCourt came to Washington recently to talk about all the bad things that had happened to him in the past 12 months. It took only a few minutes.
The one truly annoying moment occurred just the other day in Limerick, the Irish city where McCourt spent his childhood and which he so successfully captured in his best-selling autobiography. One of the men in the autograph line showed McCourt the same photograph of a 1938 class of school kids that appears in “Angela’s Ashes.”
“You know what that is?”
“It’s the school picture,” said McCourt.
“Which one am I?” the man demanded.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, how grand we are now!”
Then the man said, “You’ve insulted the fair name of Ireland, you’ve besmirched the fair name of Limerick, and you’ve insulted your poor dead mother. Here’s what I think of your book.”
And he tore the paperback in half.
Everybody else has pretty much liked the book.
“Angela’s Ashes” recently has been on the Publishers Weekly best seller list for 42 weeks. There are more than a million copies in print in this country, and more elsewhere.
Popular success on this level is amazing in itself. Throw in the critical adulation McCourt has received, and it’s nearly unprecedented.
“Angela’s Ashes” won the National Book Critics Circle award and the Pulitzer Prize. In the current issue of the aggressively highbrow New York Review of Books, critic Neal Ascherson practically anoints it a classic and predicts the following sentence on the book’s first page will become a sort of proverb: “Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.”
Most of the rest of the book is similarly quotable.
In the third paragraph, the writer stakes out his territory, warning that he is working in an area full of cliches but still drawing the reader on: “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 800 long years.”
People love this stuff. Most writers, they come to town and a few hardy souls go to hear them. For McCourt, 500 people paid the Olsson’s bookstore chain $5 each to attend a reading at the National Press Club. It had been sold out for weeks. McCourt is holding up to his new fame reasonably well.
“I’m always quoting Yeats, who said that in moments of joy the Irish are comforted by the fact that tragedy lurks around the corner,” the writer says over a cup of tea in his hotel.