storbarnsförälder

For March, aka Sad Irish Literature Month, I figured I would only have time to read one sad Irish literature, so I looked for the saddest one I could find already on my shelves. This seemed to be a copy of Frank McCourt’s memoir Angela’s Ashes, which is about him growing up in dire poverty. It also fit the bill because the copy on my shelf used to belong to my aunt Birdie, who passed away several years ago.

Contrary to the popular blurb, this book is not just about young Frank growing up poor in a dysfunctional family in Limerick; the first couple of chapters are in fact about him growing up poor in a dysfunctional family in Depression-era Brooklyn. One of the things that is dysfunctional about his family is that his father is a severe alcoholic of the “drinks all his wages in one evening between getting paid and coming home” variety, on the occasions he manages to have a job, which isn’t often. At various points in time, being on the dole helps them keep body and soul together; at other times, he drinks the dole money between getting it and getting home too. This really highlighted the shitty gender politics of the nuclear family man-as-breadwinner model; Frank’s mother, Angela, had her own problems but probably would have been able to keep a job for more than three weeks if it’d been at all acceptable for her to go work at a factory or wherever, but she had to stay home to mind the ever-shifting number of children (it wasn’t always necessarily increasing; over the course of the book, Angela has eight pregnancies, resulting in seven live births, and four children are alive at the end of the book). This is exacerbated by the fact that Malachy McCourt, Frank’s dad, has ideas about Male Pride and Dignity, which always seem to equate to reasons he should be allowed to be useless in certain ways (one of which is not carrying things, which was a new one to me, but another was that his wife certainly couldn’t accompany him on the dole line to make sure the money made it home because that would be humiliating), no matter how badly he fails at fulfilling the traditional male role of getting some money from the jobsite to the house.

While the subject matter is relentlessly depressing–deaths, diseases, religious guilt, casual violence, everything you’ve ever heard about how mid-century Ireland was fucked up–the book is also extremely funny. McCourt writes from a first-person present perspective, thus giving us the anecdotes from the point of view of however young he was when the thing happened–so, usually, a very confused small child’s understanding. This is occasionally heartbreaking as very few people have any patience for young Frank’s questions, which of course does nothing at all to stop him from continually winding up having to take care of his whole family at distressingly young ages. (Eventually some neighbor or relative shows up and illustrates for us that little Frankie wasn’t doing nearly as good a job as he thought he was.) There’s excellent use of callbacks as little Frankie slowly adds concepts to his understanding of the world, like what “affliction” means or that a great way to call someone a snob is to say that they wouldn’t give you the steam of their piss. He also doesn’t use quotation marks with dialogue, which is how you know he is writing serious Joycean literary memoir and not just making jokes, no matter how absurd some of the anecdotes get. (Some people have questioned the veracity of this book, and maybe that’s just because it makes a lot of individual people and mid-century Ireland in general look bad, but also some of this stuff is so absurd that even if McCourt isn’t lying it’s hard not to suspect he’s maybe talked himself into remembering things a little colorfully, at least in certain instances.)

As Frank grows from an innocent child afraid he’ll be sent to the fires of Hell for laughing at a story about Emer winning Cuchulainn in a pissing context to a practiced street thief and embezzler, we see him slowly crawl back up out of the poverty his father had sunk them into, and back to the level of poor they were at the beginning of the book in Brooklyn, which had seemed bad enough at the time. He eventually embezzles enough money to make it back to New York, and that’s where the book ends; it has two sequels but as much as I liked this I’m undecided as to if I want to read them.

At the end of the day, poverty memoirs about growing up in fucked-up places are hardly the rarest kind of literature, but I can also see why this one sticks out and got adapted into a movie and a stage play and won a Pulitzer and all that stuff. It’s very engrossing.