Angela’s Ashes [excerpts]

1930 – 2009

Frank McCourt was born in Brooklyn — he would later, much later, memorably describe the scene of his conception in his memoir — but he grew up in Ireland. His parents were both Irish immigrants, and they moved back there, to Limerick, in an effort to stay ahead of McCourt’s father’s drinking problem. They didn’t succeed. Malachy, Frank’s father, worked intermittently as a laborer, but he drank constantly.

McCourt was the first of seven children whom their mother Angela cared for indomitably. But even she was no match for the grinding poverty that Malachy’s drinking brought upon the family, and for the cold and damp of Limerick. They became so poor that three of the children — twin brothers and a baby girl — died of disease and malnutrition. «It was, of course, a miserable childhood,» McCourt famously wrote in Angela’s Ashes, in a passage that’s worth quoting in full. «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 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.»

Although he kept a journal and dabbled in journalism and the theater, McCourt spent most of the next 30 years teaching English and creative writing in New York City schools for a modest salary. He had a natural flair for it. On his very first day in the classroom, one of his young charges threw a sandwich at another kid. McCourt picked it up and ate it in front of the class, while the students watched, stunned. He had taught his first lesson: an object lesson in what it means to survive starvation.

The result was his memoir Angela’s Ashes, which appeared in 1996, when McCourt was 66. The book told the story of his early years in a voice purged of anger and bitterness and self-pity. In an extraordinary act of forgiveness, he wrote about his father with humor and even compassion. Angela’s Ashes was published quietly, as the personal memoir of an Irish childhood. «My dream was to have a Library of Congress catalog number, that’s all,» McCourt said. But it became first a critical sensation, then a runaway best seller. In 1997 McCourt won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

•  Chapter One    

¤  Read another excerpt ↓ from Chapter 4

 →http://www.bookbrowse.com/excerpts/book_number/202/angelas-ashes ←

◊  Frank McCourt reads ↓ a passage from chapter #13

One day at the library, the librarian gives Frank a book called  Butler’s Lives of the Saints. The librarian, Miss O’ Riordan, is so impressed by Frank’s supposed religious zeal that she writes to congratulate Angela on her son.

… It’s raining so hard one day, Miss O’ Riordan, the librarian says, «Don’t go out in that rain or you’ll ruin the books you’re carrying.  Sit down over there and behave yourself. You can read all about the saints while you’re waiting.»

There are four big books, Butler’s Lives of the Saints. I don’t want to spend my life reading about saints, but when I start I wished the rain would last forever. Wherever you see pictures of saints, men or women, they’re always looking up to heaven, whether there are clouds filled with little fat angels carrying flowers or herbs giving praise. My uncle P. says he can’t think of a single saint in heaven he wants to sit down and have a pint with.

The saints in these books are different. These are stories about virgins,  martyrs, virgin martyrs, and they’re worse than any horror film at the Lyrics Cinema. I had to look in the dictionary to find out what a ‘virgin’ is. I know the Mother of God is the Virgin Mary, and they call it that because she doesn’t have a proper husband, only poor old Saint Joseph. In the Lives of the Saints the virgins are always getting into trouble and I don’t know why.

The dictionary says, «‘virgin’ = woman, usually a young woman, who is and remains in a state of inviolate chastity.» Now I have to look up ‘inviolate chastity’. And all I can find here is that ‘inviolate’ means not violated and ‘chastity’ means chaste, and that means pure from lawful unlawful sexual intercourse; now I have to look up ‘intercourse’. And that leads to ‘copulation’; the union of the sexes in the act of generation. I don’t know what that means, and I’m too weary going from one word to another in this heavy dictionary which  leaves me on a wild goose chase, from this word to that word, and all because the people who wrote the dictionary don’t want the likes of me to know anything. All I want to know is where I came from, but if you ask anyone, they tell you, «Ask someone else to send you from word to word.»

All these virgin martyrs are told by the Roman judges they had to give up their faith and accept the Roman gods, but they say, «Nay.» That’s how virgin martyrs talk, «Nay.» And the judges have them tortured and killed. My favourite is Saint Christina the Astonishing, who takes ages to die. The judge says, «Cut off her breast.» And when they do she throws it at him and he goes deaf and blind.  Another judge is brought on the case, and he says, «Cut off the other breast»– the same happened. They tried to kill her with arrows, but they just bounced off and killed the soldiers who shot them. They tried to boil her in oil, but she rocks in the bag and takes a nap for herself. Then the judges get fed up and have her head cut off – that does the job. The feast of  Saint Christina the Astonishing is the 24th of July and I think I’ll keep that for myself, along with Francis of Assisi, deceased the 4th of October.

The librarian says, «You have to go home now. The rain has stopped.»  And when I’m going out the doors she calls me back. She wants to write a note to my mother, and she doesn’t mind one bit if I read it. The note said:

◊  Angela’s Ashes   ↓   Movie  CLIP