Frank McCourt opened his wildly successful memoir Angela’s Ashes with a passage that served as a sort of ironic disclaimer for the tale he was about to unfold:  

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 eight hundred years.

And that is as good a description as any of the three-hundred-and-fifty pages that follow, right smack in the tradition of Sean O’Casey’s warts-and-all autobiography. The only item on this list that doesn’t show up in Angela’s Ashes is the pompous priests; in fact the priests young Frank comes in contact with tend to be rather humane. They are made up for, though, by the hysterical religiosity of the Limerick citizenry as McCourt presents it. His grandmother, for instance, insists that God has to be hard, “otherwise you’d have all kinds of babies clamorin’ to get into heaven, Protestants an’ everything, an’ why should they get in after what they did to us for eight hundred years?” The teacher who prepares young Frank and his schoolfellows for their First Communion is just as bad:

Talking about First Communion makes the master all excited. He paces back and forth, waves his stick, tells us we must never forget that the moment the Holy Communion is placed on our tongues we become members of that most glorious congregation, the One, Holy, Roman, Catholic and Apostolic Church, that for two thousand years men, women and children have died for the Faith, that the Irish have nothing to be ashamed of in the martyr department. Haven’t we provided martyrs galore? Haven’t we bared our necks to the Protestant ax? Haven’t we mounted the scaffold, singing, as if embarking on a picnic, haven’t we, boys?

Angela’s Ashes, published when McCourt was sixty-five, nearly half a long century after he left Limerick, was born from one emotion and one only: rage. That rage was so powerful, so sore, and so immediate that by main force it lifted an amateurish and not very skillful writer into the ranks of the literary elite—for a few years, anyway. It is rage in the real Irish tradition of Swift and Shaw, although McCourt lacks the wit, erudition, and detachment necessary to deepen that rage and make it mean something lasting.

McCourt claims intermittently through Angela’s Ashes and its sequel, ’Tis, to feel love for his parents, Angela and Malachy, but if it is love it is of an oblique sort, more a sadness at the lack of love than love itself. More obvious than his love, and more overt, is his hatred. Here is his parents’ first meeting, at a Brooklyn party at the outset of the Great Depression: “With Angela drawn to the hangdog look and Malachy lonely after three months in jail, there was bound to be a knee-trembler.” A knee-trembler is the sexual act performed up against a wall; the result of this particular knee-trembler was the infant Frank, and a marriage that was to bring nothing but misery to the wretched couple. McCourt’s tone in discussing all this, as the knee-trembler remark indicates, is almost pure snideness. Many a reader will find the snideness entirely appropriate; still, as a literary device it gets tired, and it is not, finally, sufficient.

Malachy McCourt (senior, that is; Frank’s brother and occasional collaborator is also named Malachy) is such a classic Irish drunk that one wonders whether his son isn’t in fact laying it on a little too thick. His drinking and shiftlessness mess things up for him and his young family in America and cause them to leave New York and try their luck back in Ireland—a disastrous move, as it turns out. In Limerick he drinks up the dole every week and drinks up his paycheck, too, on the exceedingly rare occasions that he bestirs himself to earn one. He is suspected of selling the body of his dead daughter and drinking the proceeds. He drinks while arranging the funeral of Frank’s baby brother, leaving brown Guinness stains on the little white coffin. He drinks while his children and wife starve. With the outbreak of the Second World War he departs for England, like so many other Irishmen, to earn big money in the munitions factories, but he drinks up that easy cash too, and from that time on is effectively separated from the family.

It’s not enough that he’s a hopeless alcoholic, for we might be able to drum up some sympathy for that affliction. He is also a sentimental slob, drunkenly teaching his little sons patriotic Irish songs and making them swear to die for the martyred motherland. And he’s a snob, too fine to pick up bits of coal in the road even if his family is perishing from the cold, or to carry parcels in the street: “he never carries anything, parcels, bags, packages. If you carry such things you lose your dignity.”

In short he’s the stage Irishman at his very worst, and the martyred Angela, who puts up with him for so many years, is nearly as infuriating, in spite of the fact that she contrives, admirably, to keep her family together. Why does she let her husband get his hands on any money at all? Why doesn’t she kick him out for good?—for as hard as it might be to support her family on her own, it would have to be easier without him. Why does she keep expecting him to reform? Why doesn’t she herself look for a job—any job, however menial?

Frank McCourt is still furious at his parents, with good reason, and his fury at them is part of and entirely wrapped up in his disgust with the culture that helped to form them, the prewar slum culture of Catholic Ireland. Now that Limerick, a mere sixty years on, has become one of the hippest and most prosperous spots on the planet, McCourt’s scenes of not-so-long-ago poverty and ruinous labor, straight out of Germinal or Sons and Lovers, seem quite incredible. Socially, too, it was—if McCourt is to be believed, and not all of his compatriots think that he is—a stupefyingly ignorant society, xenophobic and suspicious.

Dad doesn’t talk to anyone in Mam’s family and they don’t talk to him because he’s from the North and he has the odd manner. No one talks to Uncle Tom’s wife, Jane, because she’s from Galway and she has the look of a Spaniard… . People in families in the lanes of Limerick have their ways of not talking to each other and it takes years of practice… . You can always tell when people are not talking by the way they pass each other. The women hoist their noses, tighten their mouths and turn their faces away.

Narrow focus on the wrongs perpetrated by the English has paralyzed industry and confidence. The cult of masculinity, centered on drinking, destroys the social fabric. (In a grotesque travesty of a coming-of-age rite, boys are taken on their sixteenth birthday to the pub for their first pint.) McCourt’s deep contempt for the entire male population of Ireland is always on the simmer:

In fine weather men sit outside smoking their cigarettes if they have them, looking at the world and watching us play. Women stand with their arms folded, chatting. They don’t sit because all they do is stay home, take care of the children, clean the house and cook a bit and the men need the chairs. The men sit because they’re worn out from walking to the Labour Exchange every morning to sign up for the dole, discussing the world’s problems and wondering what to do with the rest of the day.

Angela’s Ashes is written on one note, a sustained note of almost hysterical anger that carries the narrative along briskly enough. But when McCourt continues his story with ’Tis, that note is no longer appropriate or adequate. ’Tis tells of McCourt’s emigration to the United States at the age of nineteen, his misadventures in New York and elsewhere, his education at New York University, his early years as a teacher, and his failed first marriage. It is a diffuse story that demands a certain amount of introspection that the author, whether because he won’t or can’t, doesn’t provide. The rage is still there, but this time we don’t really understand its genesis. Is it because America isn’t all he dreamed it would be? In that case, so what? Is it because the country didn’t greet the young man with wide open arms and shower him with riches? Well, did he really expect it to?

McCourt had a few setbacks in his early years; life can never be easy for a new immigrant, even in booming postwar America. But looked at objectively his progress seems to have been pretty smooth. He began with menial jobs, then, thanks to his American passport (he had been born in the United States), joined the military, serving for a short stint in Germany. This entitled him to take advantage of the GI Bill. He had never attended high school, but he was lucky enough to come across a generous and broad-minded administrator at New York University who allowed him to matriculate there, on the sole condition that he maintain a B average for the first year—not exactly a bum deal. Not only that but the prettiest girl in his class, Alberta (called Mike) Small, the blonde Episcopalian girlfriend of a football star, found the young Irishman (despite the rotten teeth and chronically infected eyes that made him so self-conscious) attractive enough to date, sleep with, and finally marry.

But in spite of this run of what most people would call good luck—or at any rate hard work rewarded—McCourt tells his story as one long litany of gripes. He hates his first job in New York, sweeping and emptying ashtrays at the Palm Court in the Biltmore Hotel: hates, especially, the ignominy of having to clean up after rich college boys who scatter cigarette ash as they chat about Hemingway and Camus with their dates. He joins the army and hates it, hates being made a dog trainer in the canine corps. Three weeks later, he is angry to be separated from his dog and made a clerk. Stateside again, he doesn’t like his new job in a warehouse. Once at NYU he resents the lowly status of the education school, his own choice, and wishes he were studying something a little more glamorous. Even the WASP goddess is a disappointment: she likes to spend her weekends antiquing, doing laundry, and engaging in other bourgeois activities; she even has the nerve to chew Frank out when he goes boozing with the lads and doesn’t come home to dinner until two in the morning. McCourt, in short, is terminally pissed off.

I drank my beer and wondered what kind of a country is this where cops keep telling you to move on, where people put pigeonshit in your ham sandwich, where a girl who’s engaged to be engaged to a football player walks away from me because I’m not wearing a tie… where college students eat and drink to their hearts content and moan about existentialism and the emptiness of everything, and cops tell you once again, Move on.

What kind of a country? Any and every kind of a country, unfortunately. It’s not so much America he doesn’t like, or Ireland either for that matter, but the manifold injustices of life itself. If Angela’s Ashes was fueled by anger, ’Tis is driven by mere self-pity, a fatally unattractive attitude and a pathetic basis for autobiography. To make it worse McCourt has no distance on his youthful envy and resentments; he is still, it seems, completely in their thrall.

Geraniums have no fragrance, they live forever and the taste makes you sick though I’m sure there are people over there on Park Avenue who would take me aside and spend an hour persuading me of the glories of the geranium and I suppose I’d have to agree with them because everywhere I go people know more about everything than I do and it’s not likely you’d be rich and living on Park Avenue unless you had a profound knowledge of geraniums and growing things in general.

The vast majority of ’Tis is in this vein, with its whining, its faux-naïf pose, the breathless run-on sentences used to the exclusion of almost every other stylistic device. There are a few nice moments in the book: McCourt deals well with the old age and death of the impossible Angela, and some of his teaching experiences are both interesting and moving. But ’Tis does not hold together; the life it describes is not especially interesting, nor is it recounted with much insight or intelligence. In fact, the reader has to wonder just why McCourt considered the tale worth the telling—aside, of course, from the fat advance he was no doubt offered on the strength of Angela’s Ashes. By the end of ’Tis, one is in heartfelt sympathy with the long-suffering Mike (by that time Mrs. McCourt) who, fed up with her husband’s everlasting bellyaching, finally asks him what the hell he would do with himself if he weren’t Irish. What, indeed?

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