Frank Mc Court: Angela’s Ashes

Frank Mc Court’s childhood in Limerick, Ireland was so dire, reading his memoir, Angela’s Ashes, you’ll be grateful you ever had a full egg all to yourself.

The bleak stories seem to spill over one another with Mc Court’s run on sentences and dialogue meant to evoke the Irish cadence of speaking over one another (and not necessarily listening). This style of writing works well to convey desperate nature of the lives of the Mc Court’s but leaves very little in the way of respite.

Memoirist and writing professor, Theo Nester teaches her students not to take the reader “on a forced march of your horrible life.” Without much solace, Mc Court does this very thing.

One could argue that the reader many find comedy in the way Mc Court writes dialogue but I found the scenes to be chaotic. Mc Court’s use the present tense gives the reader too much intimacy, heightening this sense of tragedy as if the reader too, is in these scenes of despair. Without solace, the reader wonders if Mc Court and themselves will ever survive.

One also could argue that the McCourt’s find solace, as many do, in religion, which is a constant presence in the memoir. Yet Mc Court’s Catholicism is chaotic. At his baptism, his father and godfather show up drunk. Mc Court’s mother drops him into the baptismal fount. Mc Court’s father begins arguing with the priest and is thrown out of the church. Mc Court’s aunts suggest it would be best to put up the child for adoption. (18-19) Mc Court’s Catholicism is confining and constricting. The Mc Court family is often excluded from the church because of their poverty. When his father offers his son for altar service, the priest slams the door in his face, the Jesuits will not allow the Mc Courts into their school because they are too poor and Mc Court’s mother is subjected to humiliation in order to receive aid from the St Vincent De Paul Society.

“I’m seven, eight, nine going on ten and still Dad has no work,” (145) Mc Court writes and the reader had never been more grateful for a sentence that saved pages of reading the same sodding stuff.

Solace isn’t found in the memoir until nearly halfway through the book when Mc Court begins to get paid to read to Mr. Timoney. He reads Johnathan Swift to Timoney and a world opens to him. It is nice to have a sixpence for a bit of bread but Mc Court says he’d read to Timoney “money or no money.” (178) When Timoney is taken to the City Home, ‘where they keep old people who are helpful or demented” Mc Court tries to get in to read to him but they won’t let him.

Solace is found in the strangest of places. At ten years old, Mc Court contracts typhoid and is placed in a hospital. He finally receive three meals a day for the first time in his life.  Mc Court and a 14 year-old girl, with diphtheria, Patricia Madigan are the only patients on their floor. Patricia calls to him from her room down the hall. They form a friendship and exchange books through the janitor, Seamus. It is the first time Mc Court reads Shakespeare which he says is “like having jewels in my mouth when I say the words. If I had a whole book of Shakespeare, they could keep me in the hospital for a year.” (196) Patricia reads him poetry in the evening which he memorizes to say back to her in the morning. It is a sweet scene of support and consolation between two traumatized children. Yet it is all snatched away when the nuns who run the hospital find out. They separate the children and place Mc Court on the floor above where he is the only patient in a room of 20 beds.

On a craft level, I feel the reader needs to see more bits of solace in a memoir to give them a break from the tragic. Whether it’s faith, literature or a friendship, the reader needs to see and hear it more often to feel there is some hope for the protagonist and themselves. In my own memoir I try to do that both with faith and how books gave me an escape.