FOR a long time it looked as if emigration had been a pure loss to Ireland. All those people gone, and nothing to show for it, but cashed postal orders, Then we began to get the most unexpected dividends from it. We got the never to be repeated pleasure of the English players from Irish families in the Charlton Ireland soccer team.
We got Michael Flatley and a new way of trading the earnestness of Gaelic League Irish dancing for a share of the glitz of the contemporary entertainment industry. And now we're getting our first Irish Dickens, back from the America to which he emigrated as a boy.
Well we're not getting Frank McCourt himself back, but we're getting his memoir of childhood, Angela's Ashes. And with this book, a quality that has been missing from the native mix is added. The quality is sentiment. Big, strong, unashamed sentiment. The thing Irish people run away from, afraid of their own hearts, calling it sentimentality.
Angela's Ashes is an account of growing up in, the lanes of Limerick city, in the 1940s, at a time when drink and TB and snobbery were lacerating the families of the poor, such as the McCourts. But Angela, the mother of the title, is married to a fellow who has no chance of a job - in his opinion, because he's from Northern Ireland - and who goes on terrible binges when he gets his hands on money. This tips the family from poverty into destitution. This memoir is the first bulletin our society has received from that destitute underworld. The voiceless at last find voices. For that alone it is of value.
Think of the way we measure our own complaints by murmuring "Sure, there's always some one worse off," or "Sure, it's bad, but it's not the worst." What Angela McCourt lived was the worst. They were at the bottom of the bottom, the McCourts. What she had to do to keep her children from the orphanage, after her husband disappeared to England, was terrible.
She had always contrived a survival based on the favours of the Vincent de Paul and the dispensary doctor and coal picked from the road and shops that could be persuaded to give tick and, at the worst, the publicly inflicted humiliations of the men who disbursed public assistance.
But after her man went off, to drink the wages of the factory in Coventry, her son saw her, in her dirty grey coat, waiting with a small crowd outside the Redemptorist priests' door to beg for any food that might have been left over from their dinner. When she and her boys were evicted from their hovel, she had to move to a cousin's house, and had to go upstairs with him at night (the children could hear), to repay him.
BUT perhaps this was not even the worst for Angela, who had seen her tiny daughter dead, and then her little twin boy, and then his twin brother - children snatched by the fevers of the slums, and buried in their charity coffins by a father staggering with drink.
"Oh, for crying out loud!" people will say. "Not another moan! Not another wallow! Not another unhappy childhood in an Ireland that's dead and gone!" That's what an abstract of the story can make it sound like. But reading it is as easy as listening to a play. And it is suffused with tenderness for the father and mother, sitting companionably drinking tea over the fire - when they had a fire - talking away through the clacking of their badly fitting paupers' false teeth.
The father fries bread early in the mornings and tells his son stories. He holds the babies in his lap. And all around the family there is the rich world of neighbours and pubs and priests and schools and dockets for boots and de Valera and England's war and the strange ways of the people above the stratum of the lane dwellers. The schoolroom scenes are tragi comic masterpieces.
The despairing schoolmasters amuse themselves. "Good, Clohessy. You're a good boy. You may be slow and forgetful in the sir department and you may not have a shoe to your foot but, you're powerful with the Sixth Commandment and that will keep you pure." And the attendance guard will get you if you go on the mooch. "Don't be tormentin' your mother, by. That's wan thing the guards won't put up with, the tormentin' of mothers..." Angela's Ashes is funny. Funny and painfully funny.
But the reason some people will hate it is the sentiment. At one point the son, thinking about the father, says "If I were in America I could say I love you, Dad, the way they do in the films, but you can't say that in Limerick for fear you might be laughed at. You're allowed to say you love God and babies and horses that win but anything else is a softness in the head."
The helpless vulnerability of the parents, and their child like hopefulness, make them all the more heartbreaking. Over and over the father lets Angela down. The family live with cold and dirt and fleas and hunger and sudden terrifying illnesses. But they are together: six of them to the bed. They make a little paradise when the fire is bright and they have a passing luxury - sausages or butter for the potatoes, and cigarettes.
The deaths of the children would bring tears to a stone. And the cruelty of the system to the bright children of the very poor! Individuals shine in the darkness, but Frank McCourt was turned down for an altar boy, and turned down at secondary level even by the Christian Brothers. No wonder the last chapter of Angela's Ashes is an exclamation of joy in America.
IT IS America they're going to pick on, the critics of this book. They're going to say it is, Irish American, not Irish. Schmaltzy. Embarrassing. But I think myself that in some hands sentimentality is powerful and an instrument of the truth. Tolstoy's Resurrection, for instance, is sentimental in the most profound way.
I think the sentiment in Angela's Ashes is something the reader will be the richer for opening towards. Irish literary critics are unlikely to like it. But this is popular art, not high art. It isn't suited by the procedures of conventional criticism. Anyway, we are much better supplied, in Ireland, with high art than with popular art. The note of frank emotion that Angela's Ashes sounds has been missing.
I hate emigration. But I have to acknowledge that this author was lucky to get out of an Ireland which had no use for him or his family. As for the getting out itself well, one thing that was a little bit of help was his reading, in his job as a "Smart Boy" in Eason's of Limerick, a certain newspaper. "We distribute The Irish Times, a Protestant paper, run by the freemasons in Dublin," his boss told him. "We pick it up at the railway station." We count it. We take it to the newsagents. But we don't read it. I don't want to see you reading it. You could lose the Faith You could. But you could also become a writer, and in the end give Ireland back more than it ever gave you.