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Childhood poverty not worth the price of Angela’s Ashes
by Kevin Cody
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Angela’s Ashes author Frank McCourt says he learned about "natural writing" from Huckleberry Finn. Photo by Kevin Cody |
"I came from a town in Ireland where the cupboards and everything else was bare, except the language," Frank McCourt said.
The author of the 1996 best seller Angela’s Ashes was explaining how he was able to remember his childhood in such detail. He spoke to Distinguished Speaker Series subscribers at the Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center two weeks ago.
"Kids today talk about what they saw on television or heard on the radio. We talked about our adventures. We were on the street, up to no good. That’s a kid’s job," he said.
"Today, sons and daughters are up in their room, and if they’re silent, their parents worry. The child might be writing a poem. Parents feel more secure if the stereo is shaking the walls."
McCourt said he learned to tell stories under his street’s single lamppost. He and his friends would gather to brag about all the Englishmen their dads had killed as members of the old Irish Republican Army.
"We were pro war. We wanted the Germans to beat the shit out of the English, until we saw the American war movies. Then I wanted to be an American GI, to walk through the streets of Paris with a rifle over my shoulder, my helmet strap hanging loose. You never saw a German with a loose helmet strap. I wanted the French girls to be mad for my body. I wanted to avenge 800 years of Irish suffering."
"We didn’t spend 19 hours in front of the television watching the Super Bowl. We’d walk up to Nestor's Sports Shop and stare at the soccer balls, the rugby balls, and the hurling sticks. Then we’d move on to the butcher shop for a pig’s bladder or a sheep’s bladder. We’d stuff it with grass and play rugby. Or we’d go up to Staple lane after dark and listen to the couples leaning against the wall and girls saying, ‘No, no, no.’ We’d be on the other side of the wall with the sheep’s bladder full of water. That would be the end of the romance. It was great fun until we grew older and we became the victims.
"Occasionally, a book came into the neighborhood. Nathan, who lived at the top of the lane would get it after his father, mother and older siblings passed it down. I discovered ‘natural writing,’ listening to Huckleberry Finn under the street lamp. Until then, I didn’t know you could write the way you talk, that you didn’t have to write like the Victorians -- Thackeray and Dickens. You get into one of their long sentences and you don’t have the energy to come out. I learned about James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans under that street lamp."
Later in life, McCourt said, he was influenced by James Joyce, whose stream of consciousness writing "liberated the novel." In Angela’s Ashes the characters’ thoughts are often indistinguishable from his spoken words.
He said his appetite for books was reinforced when he was 11 years old and the Carnegie Foundation opened a children’s lending library in Limerick.
"We could only have one book every two weeks, and we had to have clean hands," he said.
"Kids today are in front of the TV from the age of three. Their parents say it’s Sesame Street, it’s educational TV. The children would be better off staring at the wall. Think about their dreams. Do they have any original images? All their dreams are from Disney.
"Thank God, if he gave me nothing else, he gave me the dream of getting out.
"Robert Browning said, ‘A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or else what is heaven for.’"
McCourt said his dream was to go to America because he had been born in Brooklyn. His father brought his family back to Limerick, where he and his mother were born, when McCourt was four.
"We knew there was nothing for us in Ireland. Some of my friends went to England to work in construction. Others joined the Royal Air Force.
"We heard about diets in America. The Americans were afraid of fat. That was something we couldn’t get our minds around. If we said ‘Mary’s a fine fat girl,’ it was a compliment."
"The passage to America was such a huge sum, it was impossible to think of. My mother raised the six of us on 19 shillings a week, about $4. Rent was 13 shillings. That left barely enough for a balanced diet — tea and bread, a liquid and a solid."
He was 19 when he arrived in America.
"I was timid, with infected eyes, teeth that looked like a Welsh coal mine, and no education.
"’Do I detect a brogue?’ people would ask. I wanted to congratulate them on their alertness."
McCourt used his gift for language to talk his way into New York City College, despite the fact that he lacked a high school diploma. After a series of mostly demeaning jobs ("Work is death with dignity," he said, quoting Dylan Thomas), he became a teacher at Stuyvesant High School in New York, a position he held for 27 years, until the publication in 1996 of Angela’s Ashes.
"I never sat down to write Angela’s Ashes. My high school students, as soon as I opened my mouth, wanted to know where I was from. I taught five classes a day — 33,000 lessons, 11,000 students."
"I thought no one would want to read about poverty in Ireland. But my students seemed interested."
One of his students’ favorite stories, he said, was how he stole money for his passage from a moneylender.
"They liked the idea that their teacher was a thief," McCourt said.
In 1997 McCourt received the Pulitzer Prize for biography. A film based on the book was released last year, and last year’s sequel Tis: A Memoir became a best seller upon its release.
"A friend at Time magazine told me he could never write his childhood memoirs because he grew up happy. So who would want to read it?" McCourt said.
Nevertheless, despite Tolstoy’s observation that happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, McCourt doesn’t recommend an unhappy childhood, even for aspiring writers.
"Poverty does horrible psychological damage to kids. The stubborn among us recovered. But some didn’t. Some drank, some got tuberculosis."
McCourt said readers often ask him if the Irish fondness for exaggeration didn’t influence his stories of childhood poverty.
"My brother Malachy accused me of pulling my punches. If I wrote like the French writer Proust and went into all the details, readers would have puked," he said. ER