FROM LIMERICK LANES TO SUPERHIGWAY – ASHES WAR ENTERS NEW ERA!
(PRWEB) September 16, 2000
PRESS RELEASE
FROM: TREATY STONE PUBLISHING.
ASHES POUR FROM LIMERICK LANES TO CYBERSPACE
American e-book publishing giants Greatunpublished.com have this week launched the electronic edition of Limerickman Gerard HannanÂ?s controversial national bestseller Â?ASHESÂ? which was written and published in response to Frank McCourtÂ?s international multi-million sales ANGELAÂ?S ASHES.
According to Kathy Lindenmayer, Assistant Editor at Greatunpublished, Â?I can say unequivocally that Mr. Hannan is the first Irish author whose book is for sale globally as both an e-book and paperback title and we are very excited and thrilled about the launch.Â?
Hannan, who is about to embark on a short American promotional tour opening with a speaking engagement at the College Of Charleston in October has confirmed his excitement at the prospect of global sales for his book.
Â?Since the outset of my campaign to have the other side of Frank McCourtÂ?s story told I have never dreamed that an opportunity like this would come along,Â? he said this week.
Hannan is also hoping that his second book Â?TIS IN ME ASSÂ? will also become available at Greatunpublished later this month.
ASHES is available in paperback or electronic form at http://www.greatunpublished.com
ENDS
CONTACTS:
Gerard Hannan
Limerick: 061 315668
Mobile: 087 4186081
Kathy Lindenmayer (Assistant Editor)
Greatunpublished.com
USA Â? 001 -8435790000
____________________________________________
FURTHER INFORMATION:
What other papers have had to say on this debate:
There was an old town…
By Paul Daffey /Evening Standard
Two families were feuding over ascendancy in the drug trade. A member of one family was walking along a footpath when a car sidled up to the kerb. A member of the opposing family jumped out of the car and stabbed the pedestrian in the stomach – with a pitchfork.
The weapon of choice threw a rural twist on an urban tale. It was emblematic of an Ireland that, in the final decades of last century, was wrangling with itself over the shift from rural backwater to urban dynamism.
The pitchfork incident could have taken place in Dublin or Cork, maybe even the light-spirited Galway, but somehow this seemed unlikely. Right or wrong, it did suggest merit behind Limerick’s reputation as Stab City.
It is a reputation that Limerick hates, largely because it is distasteful, but also because the sobriquet was applied 30 years ago and the city has changed since then.
In the ’70s, the development of high-tech industries and the University of Limerick, which specialises in science and technology, brought a measure of wealth and vitality to the city. But it also created an income gap, with residents of rugged housing estates resenting the new order.
Crime and violence were the inevitable result. The rest of the country gained the impression that stabbings were frequent. It titillated some to think of Limerick, with its reputation for inwardness and pious Catholicism, as a bloody frontier.
Violence in Limerick lessened in the ’90s after, among other things, the formation of “combat poverty” groups with funds from the European Union. EU money was also put towards restoration of the town’s fading buildings.
The Civic Trust, formed in the late ’80s as the first restoration body in Ireland, was instrumental in giving the worn city a facelift that impressed the rest of the country, although not enough to stop the stabbing slurs and the tittering.
Limerick is proud of its recovery but, after years of scorn, it is defensive. When the Angela’s Ashes phenomenon broadcast the city’s folly to the world, it became too much for some.
Frank McCourt’s depiction of the squalor in the city by the River Shannon in the 1930s and ’40s raised the hackles of one resident so much that he bothered to write a retort. Ashes, Gerard Hannan’s memoir of a rosier childhood in Limerick, has hardly set sales records but the author considers its publication a success.
Described disparagingly in the Limerick Post as a bookseller and part-time disc jockey, Hannan was reported in that newspaper as saying that Angela’s Ashes should be reclassified as fiction.
“I think it has been a successful campaign because there are people out there now saying this (the book) is not 100 per cent accurate. This is the object of the exercise, so mission accomplished.”
His crusade also includes talkback sessions on his radio program. A good percentage of callers support his sunny view of the city’s past. The dissenters, according to the Limerick Post, get cut off, an act the newspaper describes on its website as that of a schoolyard bully. The fact that he only polled 65 votes in recent local elections only adds to their scorn.
“He can hardly be said to represent the views of the people of Limerick,” the Post says. “While he accuses McCourt of holding up our city of the past to ridicule and condemnation, he, in the guise of being Limerick’s champion, is only exposing our modern-day Limerick to mockery.”
Frank Larkin, the public relations officer for Shannon Development, says half the city claims the poverty in the book is exaggerated. “People felt it reflected poorly. They claim they had happy childhoods and were happy in Limerick. You have that dichotomy of discussion. But there’s certainly a contrast between what Frank McCourt described and today.”
He says Alan Parker, the creator of the Angela’s Ashes movie, barely filmed in Limerick because the city now lacks the requisite decay. “We weren’t able to come up with any of those buildings and lanes because there weren’t any left. They had to go to Dublin and Cork to find rundown buildings and derelict lanes…nothing against the people of Dublin and Cork.”
Larkin is unable to put a figure on Angela’s Ashes importance to the city, although he admits it has become a huge selling point. Other attractions include castles, cathedrals, Georgian architecture, the Limerick Expo in March and the International Marching Bands Festival, also in March, which attracts 40,000 people.
The city’s push – and for that matter Ireland’s push – to improve the poor quality of mid-range restaurants has spawned the International Food Festival, which is held annually, and the Good Food Circle of Restaurants. We tried only the Mogul Emperor in Henry Street, where the food was much like Indian food anywhere in the Western world.
Limerick might be trying to improve its culinary standing but it has no doubts about its sporting prowess. The city thumps its chest about being Ireland’s sporting capital. It is, at best, a dubious claim, but one that receives support every autumn when Limerick hosts the battles between Munster and touring rugby sides from the Antipodes. Munster, the province that takes in the six counties in Ireland’s south-west, attacks the touring teams with a fervor that inevitably attracts “Gael force” headlines. In 1978, the attack was so effective that Munster defeated New Zealand, a feat that was barely believed across Europe, and less so in New Zealand. The victory remains an Irish side’s only win over the All Blacks and it is not surprising that each player was guaranteed free pints for life.
At a humbler level, Limerick soon will be the home of Ireland’s first 50-metre swimming pool. In recent years it has hosted the World Medical Games and the UK and Ireland Corporate Games. The World Soccer Cup for Lawyers is also on the list of achievements, although it must be said a city is trying too hard when it celebrates playing host to thousands of lawyers.
The city has every right, however, to claim a rich history. Its city charter, drawn up in 1197, is the oldest in the British Isles, which includes Ireland and Britain, and King John’s Castle is a feature of the Heritage Precinct. The castle, built at the beginning of the 13th century, was the stronghold of the British empire in western Ireland and its presence is a reminder of Limerick’s struggles under a hated foreign power. The Heritage Precinct also includes the Castle Lane project, which is the reconstruction of a street from two centuries ago.
Downriver are the docks, which are undergoing a makeover not seen since the Vikings sailed up the Shannon in the ninth century. A handful of pubs in the city centre have also been refurbished. Some are modern and gleaming, but I preferred those with a traditional touch, such as WJ South’s on O’Connell Street. South’s is where Uncle Pa Keating bought the 16-year-old Frank McCourt his first pint. It looks like your average poky Irish pub from the street but opens out generously inside. It was a local for the men from the lanes of Limerick; now the clientele ranges from young professionals to older regulars. The floorboards and decor have been tastefully scrubbed up and Pa Keating would probably wonder where all the sawdust on the floor had gone. The bulldust, though, remains as thick on the ground as ever.
The Limerick banter is fun. Wit and irony are staples and all sentences are delivered with a delightful lilt. The accent is less distinctive than the sing-song carry-on in neighboring Cork but, since the publication of Angela’s Ashes, the language of Limerick is among the most distinctive in the world. Which, if anyone were in any doubt, just goes to show that the pen is mightier than the pitchfork.
Struggles of the artist
When you’re Jewish, Irish or Palestinian,
The question of identity is a troubling one.
Gary Younge /Guardian Newspaper
Josephine is on line four.”You alright Ger?” she calls out to Limerick’s late night radio DJ Gerard Hannan. She doesn’t need to say who she is. Hannan recognises her voice. Like Whispering Phyllis, Giggling Breeda, Peg, who sings a song over the phone once a week, and Jim from Oola, who likes to play the listeners tunes from his gramophone, Josephine is a regular who punctuates Limerick’s late-night airwaves with local banter.
It is the night of the premiere of the film, Angela’s Ashes, the Pulitzer prize winning story of Frank McCourt’s impoverished childhood in Limerick, and Josephine is in the mood for reminiscing. Josephine says she used to play bingo with Angela and she cannot recognise her in the wan character portrayed in the book. “She had big, fat jaws and her body was as fat as mine,” she says. “I’m the same age as Frank McCourt and I don’t remember cobblestones or anything like that.”
And so it goes on, all night, most nights. With Hannan’s encouragement – he has already made a name and is fast making a career out of criticising the book – Limerick’s older citizens call to complain that their story has not been told. “Poverty is nothing to be ashamed of but he has misrepresented the innocent people of this town,” says Hannan. McCourt was born in America, came to Limerick as a young boy and left for the States as a young man.
“He came here from America, he didn’t like it and then he left. But a lot of people stayed and made a life there and there was a great spirit that is not reflected in Angela’s Ashes which is the fruit of bitterness and begrudgery. When they [the older citizens of Limerick] look back on their childhood they did not see themselves as miserable, Irish Catholics. It’s a beautifully written book. But it’s not about the real Limerick. My problem with it is that he should have called it what it was: a work of fiction.”
But this is more than a battle between fact and fiction. Some accuse McCourt of straying from the truth by exaggerating his impoverished upbringing in the lanes; but even more are annoyed by the fact that he remained too faithful to real life by putting local people’s real names in the book and relating accounts of his mother’s sex life. Many will argue, in the same sentence, that he was both too honest and not honest enough.
What is at stake here is the question of authenticity. It is a faultline that goes beyond the pages of Angela’s Ashes and the streets of Limerick to the arbitrary codes and signifiers which define identity. It is the yardstick we use to determine who is and who is not eligible for inclusion in the panoply of tribes which are available to us such as class, religion, race, ethnicity and region. It provides the parameters for describing who we are, and often what we can say.
The consequences of these issues are far from academic. In Israel a debate is raging over who, for purposes of immigration, qualifies as a Jew. When the country’s law of return was passed in 1950, anyone with even one Jewish grandparent had an automatic right to Israeli citizenship. Now that people of Jewish descent are pouring in from eastern Europe there is a move afoot to redefine what it is to be a Jew. “These are not people who are suffering from anti-semitism or who have any connection to the Jewish people,” said Yuli Edelstein, the deputy speaker of the Knesset. If they do change the rules it could mean that people who were sufficiently Jewish to be gassed by the Nazis will not be Jewish enough to enter Israel.
You can hear it in John Prescott’s tortured accounts of his own social standing. A few years ago, when he was deputy leader of the opposition, he provoked great intrigue by describing himself as “middle class”. Last year, when he was on a higher salary and wielding greater power as deputy prime minister, he had returned to the toiling masses. “Make no mistake about it. I’m proud of being working class,” he says. “I’m not changing my attitude or culturing my voice or even getting my grammar correct.”
Last year, critics of the intellectual Edward Said raised doubts about his credentials as a refugee as a means of trying to discredit his entire body of work on the Middle East. “I had never had much respect for the intellectual integrity of Professor Said,” said a spokesman for the former rightwing Israeli government. “This proves that my suspicions were not groundless.” The attack put Said in the Kafkaesque situation of brandishing documents to prove that he is in fact who he has always said he was.
But there was more at stake, he believed, than his own integrity. “It is an attempt,” said Said, “to pre-empt the process of return and compensation for the Palestinians. It is a way of furthering the argument that the Palestinians never belonged in Palestine… If someone like Edward Said is a liar, runs the argument, how can we believe all those peasants who say they were driven off their land?… It is part of the attempt to say that none of this actually happened.” Undermine Said’s authenticity, went the logic, and you undermine the credibility of the Palestinian cause.
And so it goes on. To have had the real Limerick experience you have to have stayed; to be truly Jewish you must have suffered from anti-semitism; to be working class you need bad grammar. Each assertion reveals an attempt to establish the idea that identities are fixed, universal and cohesive when in fact they are fluid, varied and disparate.
None of which is to say that the complaints about Angela’s Ashes are not understandable. McCourt has dismissed his detractors’ complaints by insisting that Angela’s Ashes is “a memoir, not an exact history”. But, since the lives of Limerick’s working class rarely make it to the international stage, it is not unreasonable for them to want to see themselves portrayed accurately and sensitively.
It is a constant irritation to those on the margins that they are often ill-represented by those who make it into the mainstream. “We who survived the camp are not true witnesses,” wrote Primo Levi of his time in a Nazi concentration camp. “We, the survivors, are not only a tiny but an anomalous minority. We are those who through prevarication, skill or luck never touched bottom. Those who have, and have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned wordless.”
The burden of representation on those who do emerge from desperate circumstances is a heavy one. But that is no excuse to try to deny the validity of their voice. In the case of Angela’s Ashes there is, of course, no such thing as the Limerick experience but, instead, several Limerick experiences.
Nobody voted for McCourt so he is under no obligation to represent anyone. The story that McCourt told is not Limerick’s but his own.
Angela’s Ashes Rakes Up A Storm
Alex Renton/London Time Out
There’s a cruel joke going round Limerick about the movie that’s to
open in the city next Wednesday. “Worse than the film of an ordinary
miserable childhood is the film of a miserable Irish childhood, and
worse yet is the film of the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.”
This will mean little to anyone who has not read Frank McCourt’s
Angela’s Ashes, but the millions who have ploughed through the
1990s’ best-selling example of tears ‘n’ smiles Irish ghetto
literature will spot the parody of the book’s first paragraphs.
Some people in Limerick are utterly fed up with Angela’s Ashes and
its story of the McCourt children who lived in the city’s slums
(excepting those who died in the family’s communal bed) in the
middle of this century. There are those who don’t believe Frank
McCourt’s memoir, and those, such as Brendan Halligan, editor of the
Limerick Leader, who wish Angela, the Ashes and everyone else would
just go away. The book is a ghost haunting modern Limerick life: “It
overshadows everything.”
Arguments over the veracity of McCourt’s account have, in the three
year’s since publication, caused endless fuss. The Limerick Leader
is well-used to receiving letters that point out flaws in the
McCourt children’s saga, and the filming has touched nerves again.
“Frank McCourt’s book,” said a recent editorial wearily, “generated
more controversy in Limerick than anything since the opening of the
interpretative centre in King John’s Castle.” And that was more than
six years ago.
Nearly 200 Limerick people have undertaken to demonstrate outside
the screening, in defence of their city’s good name. That’s hardly
surprising – for Limerick, her cruel streets, hard-hearted
shopkeepers and hypocritical clergy, is the chief villain, the prime
child abuser of Angela’s Ashes.
Brendan Halligan says: “It is difficult to understand how a gloomy,
depressing and backward look at a make-believe Limerick would
necessarily show today’s real Limerick in a kindly light,” he wrote,
opposing the campaign to get the film to come home. “Good riddance
to it.”
There’s no question that Limerick has changed since McCourt’s day.
The Irish boom and economic aid from Brussels have seen the city’s
slums transformed – indeed the city is quite proud that Alan
Parker’s team were unable to find a suitable tenement “lane” for
filming in Limerick, (they had to build their own slum in a car park
in Dublin instead). John O’Regan, who organises Angela’s Ashes tours
at £4-a-head for fans who arrive weepily from across the world,
enjoys showing off the business centre and apartment blocks that now
dominate the old red-light district of the Shannon docks. Even
Sutton’s Coalyard, outside which Angela and her sons scavenged for
fuel, is now Jury’s Inn, a “posh” hotel.
But it is not the fact that Parker and McCourt’s Limerick maligns
today’s Limerick that will cause the demonstrations outside the
Dooradoyle Omniplex on Wednesday. Those will be staged by the people
who simply don’t believe the story told in Angela’s Ashes. “A few
fanatics and self-publicists” is how sensible Limerick dismisses
them (though sensible Limerick asks not to be named – it’s a small
city). But the anti-McCourtists include men who were at school with
McCourt. Men like Paddy Malone, who, when Frank McCourt returned to
Limerick for a book-signing, asked the author if he remembered him
and then ripped the book in half, shouting: “You’re a disgrace to
Ireland, the Church and your mother.” Malone is now threatening to
sue McCourt.
There is, in fact, a mini-industry in getting at Frank McCourt. Two
contemporaries have published their own accounts of their happier
Limerick childhoods, while a local bookshop owner and disc-jockey,
Gerard Hannan, has published Ashes – a “true story of two brothers
growing up in the Limerick Lanes”. Next week he will publish a
sequel to that book, just as McCourt has published ‘Tis, his own
sequel to Angela’s Ashes. The new book is cheekily titled ‘Tis in Me
Ass – authentic Limerick street slang, apparently. Hannan, whose
hounding of McCourt has taken him from US TV news to Melvyn Bragg’s
South Bank Show, says he is simply attempting to right a grievous
wrong done to Limerick’s reputation and history. “You will have been
led to understand that I am a two-headed lunatic,” he says gravely.
“But there are hundreds of people behind me, and I have letters from
across the world to prove it.”
Such disputes are part of the territory – an almost inevitable
after-effect of making money out of live history is that others who
were there too will stand up to argue about what really happened.
And, of course, McCourt has many defenders. His editor at
HarperCollins, Philip Gwyn Jones, follows the common argument that
McCourt’s story is a memoir, it doesn’t claim to be autobiography.
Behind the subjective reporting is greater truth. “People come up to
Frank, who were either there, or knew someone who was at that time
And say, “Oh, Frank, you’ve got it all wrong: Mrs. So and so didn’t
live at number 7, it was number 5.” Maybe he did get little facts
wrong, but it is a work of non-fiction, and he has written it as
true as he can remember. Of course we support Frank’s interpretation
as plausible and authentic. But the truth looks different to every
different pair of eyes. That’s the nature of historical truth.”
The problem for the pro-McCourt camp is that their man’s mistakes
are just the one’s that are likely to cause maximum offence among
the people of Limerick, and the guardians of the truth. Queuing at
that Limerick book-signing was another contemporary from the
Limerick Lanes, Willie Harold. Mr. Harold, now dead, appears in the
book at his first confession, telling a priest how he has sinned,
looking at his sister’s naked body. The problem is, Mr. Harold never had a sister. Many older Limerick people are incensed at the
portrait of Angela herself. There’s no doubt that Mrs. McCourt would
not like her son’s portrayal. Shortly before she died, in 1981, she
was taken to see Frank and brother Malachy perform a stage show
about their early lives. She stormed out, shouting: “It didn’t
happen that way. It’s all a pack of lies.”
Other stories have emerged that throw doubt on McCourt’s
reliability. The clergy of 1940s Limerick – where “you couldn’t
throw a brick without hitting a priest” – come particularly poorly
out of the book. Recently McCourt told the Los Angeles Times that
the film-makers weren’t allowed to use any of Limerick’s churches,
because local clergy, led by the Bishop of Limerick, opposed the
film. When the Limerick journalists investigated this claim they
found that only one church, that of the Redemptorists, had refused
to co-operate with filming. The Bishop’s office had gone out of
their way to help – a fact that the film’s producer’s confirmed.
No one in Limerick denies that there was awful poverty in the city
60 years ago, but further investigation has led them to wonder just
how poor the McCourts really were. Some people have pointed out how
fat Angela and some of the children were, while the Limerick Leader
dug up photographs of McCourt in his boy scout’s uniform. Scouting
was expensive and usually for middle-class boys – “Is this the
picture of misery?” asked the newspaper.
Perhaps the most sensible verdict comes from another Limerick
contemporary, a John Conran who lives now in Birmingham. He wrote to
the Limerick Leader after reading McCourt’s book, to say how much he
had enjoyed it. ” I lived in Limerick at the time. I had nine
sisters and one brother. I did not feel all that misery. I enjoyed
my schooldays at St Munchin’s CBS. We had the Shannon and the hills
on our doorstep. The problem with the McCourts was not Limerick, the
Church or the priests. The father was an alcoholic. He failed in New
York, the promised land. He would fail in any city – and did.”
John O’Regan, who on his Angela’s Ashes tours daily watches people
from all over the world weep as they remember the sufferings of
their own childhoods, says he knows Frank McCourt was not lying.
“I’ve seen enough people to know that Frank spoke for all of them.
What he wrote was his truth: Angela’s Ashes is a mirror of those
times.”
Additional reporting by Gita Mendis
Rising from the ashes
Anne Molloy/Irish News
Frank McCourt wrote in Angela’s Ashes that there was only one thing
worse than “a miserable Irish childhood” and that was “a miserable
Irish Catholic childhood.”
It was such strong and ultimately disparaging statements that made
McCourt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel unforgettable and for it’s
detractors unforgivable.
For the three years since its publication Angela’s Ashes has
continued to cause rancor in his childhood home of Limerick where
there is a clear division between those who would like to pillory
the McCourts and those, like the former mayor, who want to give them
the freedom of the city.
“Lies, lies, lies, lies,” decried one Paddy Malone, who attended the
same school as the young McCourt, and claimed that Frank
“prostitutes his mother” in the book.
Another self-appointed McCourt opponent is Radio Limerick presenter
Gerard Hannan who sees Angela’s Ashes as a straightforward attack on
the city and its people and is publishing his own riposte Â?Tis in Me
AssÂ? a play on McCourt’s second autobiographical work Â?Tis.Â?
McCourt has at times tried to distance himself from the continuing
row and said that the book was not about the city “it was about
poverty.”
But that is too much of an oversimplification by the author as a lot
of the anger from McCourt (and his younger brother Malachy) is
directed not at their alcoholic father but their downtrodden mother.
McCourt implies that Angela takes the boys to live at her cousin’s
home and sleeps with him in return for a roof over their heads when
Malachy finally deserts them, apparently for good.
The adolescent Frank makes it clear (as does his brother Malachy in
his own autobiography A Monk Swimming) that he cannot deal with the
situation and it would appear that they never forgave their mother
for this (though this does not mean they didn’t love her) and they
seem to have made their peace with their father before he died.
To outsiders this seems strange because Malachy (Snr) would appear
to have been at the root of most of the McCourt’s difficulties ñ or
as one Limerick contemporary has pointed out “we were just as poor
but the difference was our father didn’t drink.”
Malachy McCourt (portrayed by outstanding British actor Robert
Carlyle in the film) was originally from Toome in Co Antrim and was
often decried by his wife’s family as the next best thing to a
Presbyterian, particularly because of the way his hair stood up: “He
had Protestant hair.”
He would be pleased to know that in some respects little has changed
in the intervening 50 years as an article about the film in the
Limerick Leader assured its readers recently.
“The specter that haunts Limerick is not that of Angela or any other
Limerick person but of her alcoholic Ulster husband.”
The geographical pinpointing of the source of the problem is
revealing in itself and goes a long way to rebuff the notion that
modern Limerick is at peace with itself and its new found wealth.
It’s often the hurry to forget the bad memories of an impoverished
past that reveals the insecurity of the nouveau riche.
Many of the older generation in Limerick (as elsewhere in Ireland)
are not keen to talk about the difficulties of past times and the
younger are too busy making money to care.
As Frank McCourt said: “My mother hated me uncovering the past: the
only place for confessions is to a priest, she thought: she wanted
curtains drawn over all the poverty and sordidness.”
And he admitted that writing the book was “similar to cleaning out
the sewers, dredging up that stuff.”
But he didn’t just sit down and write the book after he retired from
teaching in America, he was scribbling bits for years though he
didn’t complete it sooner “because all those years I was too busy
marking other people’s essays. And the timing wasn’t right. My
mother had to die and I think I had to grow up. And it took me a
long time.”
The fact that he waited until his mother’s death before publicising
their life together at least indicates that McCourt was not
indifferent to his mother’s feelings despite what his detractors
would have us believe.
When it came to filming Angela’s Ashes last year in Limerick there
was some nervousness on the part of director Alan Parker, who was
aware of the vocal opposition in some parts of the city to the book.
“It’s an exaggeration to say that there was enmity towards us making
the film in the city where it is based, but I think it’s fair to say
that there was some trepidation on our part, a feeling that we were
not entirely welcome but that could have been my own personal
paranoia.”
Parker, in his personal diary of the filming, is however critical of
the churches in Limerick who refused to let them film though he
admits they were treated “cordially”. Interior church scenes were
eventually filmed in Dublin and Parker does reveal the problems for
Churches of having a “hundred film crew noisily go about their
business particularly for a film which takes place in a period
before Vatican II.”
He also reveals the truism of the old adage of never working “with
animals or children” as AngelaÂ?s Ashes involved working with dozens
of children who portray not only the McCourts but their
contemporaries at different stage over a 15-year period.
“I have to say that these were the most difficult scenes I’ve ever
directed with young children, and I’ve done a considerable amount of
filming in this area. Although a shrieking child might be what
you’re after for the scene, you have to keep reminding yourself that
it’s not just the illusion of film and that, close by, behind the
set, stands the real mother of this small child, suffering
considerably herself as her offspring cries real tears for the
camera.”
Parker, whoÂ?s numerous films include that other Irish-based success
The Commitments, however is generous in his praise of Newry actor
Michael Legge who portrays Frank McCourt as an older adolescent.
“He has great subtlety and application and, as with all good actors
who make things look easy, there is a fierce intelligence at work.”
See you in court, McCourt
For local radio host/journalist and author
Gerry Hannan ‘Angela’s Ashes’ is a vicious slur on his city
Rob Brown/The Guardian (UK)
Frank McCourt must have done scores of interviews to plug ‘Tis, the
sequel to Angela’s Ashes, his global bestseller about growing up
dirt poor in the priest-ridden, rain-sodden slums of Limerick. But
all these encounters put together could not have been anywhere near
as painful as the prime-time television appearance he made back in
his native Ireland recently.
It wasn’t Pat Kenny, host of The Late Late Show, who gave him a hard
time. The trouble came from a member of the Dublin studio audience.
“You have been peddling lies about Limerick,” the man bellowed into
the microphone. “You are a liar, a self-confessed liar.” McCourt
could only raise his arms to the heavens and appeal to his accuser
in his strange but weirdly soothing mid-Atlantic accent: “I don’t
know why you’re so obsessed with me. Why don’t you get a life and go
and do something?”
His plea fell on deaf ears, for a large part of Gerry Hannan’s life
is now devoted to stirring up controversy around McCourt. His
personal crusade to “set the record straight” will crank up a gear
next week when the movie version of Angela’s Ashes rolls on to
cinema screens. Hannan, who combines local broadcasting with running
a second-hand bookshop in Limerick, has even penned two books as
direct ripostes to McCourt’s memoirs. The first was called simply
Ashes. The second, due for release next week, is even more
opportunistically entitled ‘Tis In Me Ass, an expression straight
from the language of the Lanes, the now notorious backstreets on the
north side of Limerick where McCourt endured his miserable childhood.
The main outlet for Hannan’s literary vendetta isn’t his books ñ
which will never rival their targets in the bestseller lists ñ but
the late-night phone-in programme he presents on Limerick 95. The
radio station provides a regular platform for critics of McCourt,
who seem to be both numerous and vocal in the author’s native city.
No one is getting terribly worked up about ‘Tis, which tells of
young Frank’s escape from Limerick to America and what he found
there. Hannan’s tribute to “the people who didn’t run off to America
but instead stayed at home to help build a city” doesn’t pack
anywhere near the same animus as Ashes, which was a far more pointed
attack on Angela’s Ashes.
According to his arch critic, McCourt’s upbringing wasn’t anywhere
near as brutal as he makes out. “When you read Angela’s Ashes, it’s
misery, misery, misery all the way,” says Hannan. “That’s not how it
is remembered by anyone else who lived there. Of course there was a
lot of poverty and suffering, but there was also a great spirit to
the place. People helped each other through the hard times.” For
him, the situation was best summed up by an elderly listener who
called in to say: “Ger, everyone loves Frank McCourt except the
people who knew him. And everyone loves Angela’s Ashes except the
people who know the truth.”
Angela’s Ashes is a particularly searing account of the author’s
childhood in the Lanes of Limerick, depicted as a living hell where
he and his brothers (those who didn’t die in the cot) begged for
food while neighbours looked on with cruel indifference and the
local Catholic clergy humiliated the most wretched members of its
flock.
The book, which won the 1997 Pulitzer prize for biography, begins
with this now famous opening passage: “When I look back on my
childhood I wonder how I survived it at all. It was, of course, a
miserable childhood: 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.”
Ger, as his fans affectionately address him, seems a bit of a local
hero in Limerick. When we met up in the city’s Bewley’s café
(Dublin’s famous coffee house has become a fast-growing chain),
several people came up to tell him what a grand job he was doing or
to alert him to some local injustice he should sort out on the
airwaves. Hannan claims to have received a hero’s welcome after his
showdown with McCourt on The Late Late Show. “I think they wanted
his head brought back to Limerick on a plate,” he recalled, beaming.
He admits to having got a frostier reception at the University of
Limerick, which conferred an honorary degree on McCourt two years
ago. “I know it annoys the intelligentsia to see some little
gobshite stand up to the great author, but I’m only concerned about
the common people and they’re on my side.”
Being only 40 himself, Hannan cannot draw upon his own experiences
to contradict McCourt’s recollections of the 1940s, far less the
1930s. But several of his relatives are contemporaries of McCourt,
and it was they who first raised his suspicions about the book. His
late uncle Martin, who went to school with Frank McCourt, fed him a
lot of the background information for Ashes, which was billed as
“The real memoirs of two boys from the Limerick Lanes”. Paddy
Hannan, his 74-year-old father, was particularly affronted by
McCourt’s portrayal of his mother, Angela, whom he remembers as the
angel of the Lanes. “He makes her out to be good-for-nothing. Anyone
who cuts their own mammy down like that deserves nothing.”
McCourt is also accused of scandalising the family of Teresa Carmody
by telling the world that he had sex with her just days before she
died of tuberculosis. McCourt maintains that she never existed and
that the name was made up.
Such explanations have failed to silence his detractors, including
those on the local newspaper The Limerick Leader. At one point it
published a half-page of photographs showing McCourt as a member of
St Joseph’s Boy Scouts. Pointing out that this particular scout
troop was regarded as the Elite of Limerick, the headline asked: “Is
this the picture of misery?”
McCourt, a handsome, snow-haired figure who penned his memoirs after
teaching for many years in New York high schools, tried to laugh off
such assaults. “Begrudgers,” he told the Boston Globe. “Where would
Ireland be without them?” He dismissed the complaints as
“peripheral”, describing Angela’s Ashes as “a memoir, not an exact
history”. He has owned up to one falsehood. In the book, schoolmate
Willie Harold is depicted walking to his first confession
“whispering about his big sin, that he looked at his sister’s naked
body”. Willie Harold never had a sister, a point he brought to
McCourt’s attention when, in the advanced stages of cancer, he
queued at a book-signing to set the record straight. McCourt claims
to have settled the matter amicably by granting his old chum a free
copy. It is impossible to verify this, as Harold has since died.
He’ll have to do a lot more than sign a free copy to silence Gerry
Hannan, who is plainly basking in the limelight of his vendetta. In
the back office of his bookstore he has a fat file containing all
the stories his claims have generated on both sides of the Atlantic.
He also got to vent his spleen on The South Bank Show when it
profiled Frank McCourt recently. Is he obsessive? Gerry Hannan
doesn’t think so. “I’ve got a lot of other things in my life, but I
do have a tremendous sense of loyalty to my listeners, who inundated
me for weeks and weeks with their heartfelt complaints about Frank
McCourt.”
Whatever, the feud will enter a new chapter as Alan Parker’s film of
Angela’s Ashes hits the screens. The producers of The Late Late Show
would doubtless be keen to stage a second bout. Whether McCourt will
allow himself to be ambushed again is highly doubtful. Hannan, who
was carefully primed by an RTE researcher for his first ever
appearance on prime time television, is certainly up for a rematch.
“I don’t just want to eyeball him in a television studio,” Hannan
told The Independent. “I want Frank McCourt to take me to court,
where the truth about his book will come out for the whole world to
see.”
Limerick, Rising From ‘Ashes’
A bittersweet memoir is luring people to this once-grim Irish City.
They’re in for a surprise.
By K.C. Summers/The Washington Post
Limerick’s Windmill Street is a postman’s nightmare. Its small,
two-story stucco row houses are numbered 25, 2, 41, 1, 42 . . .
there are three No. 1′s alone. But the house I’m looking for doesn’t
seem to have a number at all. Painted pale yellow with a green door,
its only distinctive feature is a stuffed Garfield the Cat stuck in
the upstairs window.
It’s an ordinary house in an ordinary city, so unexceptional that no
one would give it a second glance. Yet millions of people know it
intimately, because it’s one of the places Frank McCourt, author of
the best-selling memoir “Angela’s Ashes,” lived when he was growing
up poor and desperate in the slums of Limerick, Ireland, during the
1930s and ’40s. This is what it was like on the McCourts’ first
night in this house:
Dad and Mam lay at the head of the bed, Malachy and I at the bottom,
the twins wherever they could find comfort . . . Then Eugene sat up,
screaming, tearing at himself . . . when Dad leaped from the bed and
turned on the gaslight we saw the fleas, leaping, jumping, fastened
to our flesh. We slapped at them and slapped but they hopped from
body to body, hopping, biting. We tore at the bites till they bled.
We jumped from the bed, the twins crying, Mam moaning, Oh, Jesus,
will we have no rest!
It’s hard to reconcile the misery depicted in McCourt’s book with
that Garfield up in the window. But in a way, the stuffed cat says
it all. The terrible days of life in Limerick that McCourt wrote
about so eloquently is gone, and good riddance to them. Yet it’s a
measure of how moving his book is — and how much things have
changed in Ireland — that people are coming back to Limerick to see
how it was.
Frank McCourt, with his evocative, funny-sad memoir, has done the
unimaginable: He’s turned Limerick into a hot tourist destination.
This is a bit like drawing tourists to the United States to spend a
week in Toledo. Unfairly or not, Ireland’s fourth-largest city has
long had a reputation as a gritty, somewhat grim place, with few
attractions for visitors beyond its proximity to Shannon
International Airport. People tended to use it as a starting and
ending point when they visited Ireland, but few spent any time there.
It’s easy to see why. This isn’t the Ireland of leprechauns and
blarney stones; it’s a working city — computers, manufacturing –
without the slick trappings of tourism. Which is precisely why it’s
worth visiting. It hasn’t been Disneyfied. There is no Frank
McCourt T-shirt shops. The little yellow house on Windmill Street
hasn’t been turned into an Angela’s Ashes B&B; Yet.
“Angela’s Ashes” long ago went from being merely popular to
something of a cult object. It’s been widely praised for its
luminous prose, selling close to 2 million copies in little over a
year, and topping the bestseller lists since its publication. It’s
won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award,
and was voted Book of the Year for 1997 by the American Booksellers
Association.
The book is not for the squeamish. In fact, as McCourt says, it’s a
wonder that he survived to tell the tale. He was born in New York of
immigrant parents who moved the family back to Ireland when he was
4. Big mistake. They had already lost one child in New York, and two
more would die in Limerick. The father drank away his wages (when he
worked at all), the mother begged for charity and the children
mostly fended for themselves as the family moved from one squalid,
flea-ridden flat to another. A number of villains emerge: members of
the Catholic clergy, sadistic schoolmasters, callous social workers
and — not the least — “the gray city of Limerick and the river
that kills.”
It sounds horrible, depressing, nothing you’d willingly want to read
about — much less visit. But people are. “Throngs of them,” sighs
the bartender at the venerable W.J. South pub, newly famous as the
favorite watering hole of Frank McCourt’s father. “Busloads of them.”
“Oh yes indeed, it’s been quite popular,” says Breda Bourke,
supervisor of the Limerick tourist information office. “It started
off with Americans and now we’re getting a lot of inquiries from the
Germans and the Japanese. It’s very, very popular. It’s bringing
people to the city that we might not otherwise have.”
Liam O’Hanlon, chairman of the Limerick Tourist Trade Association,
has led walking tours of the city for years. Until recently, his
routine was unvarying: King John’s Castle, St. Mary’s Cathedral and
other highlights of Limerick’s medieval district. “It was the
historical things that people were interested in,” he says. “Now,
suddenly they’re walking in with `Angela’s Ashes,’ wanting to know
where the lanes are. They expect to see what Frank McCourt has
written about — but what he’s written about no longer exists.”
Well, not exactly. In addition to South’s pub, quite a few sites
from the book remain, including the Leamy National School, the
People’s Park, a slew of exquisite old churches where the young
Frank frequently sought refuge, and the St. Vincent de Paul Society
town house where his mother, Angela, queued up for charity. But as
O’Hanlon emphasizes to visitors, the slums McCourt described so
unflinchingly are gone, cleared away during the 1950s and ’60s.
The Irish economy is booming, thanks in part to the recent influx of
European Union funds, and Limerick is no exception. An urban renewal
project begun in the 1980s has had dramatic results. Construction is
everywhere — hotels, apartment blocks, pubs, restaurants. Blocks of
once-elegant, 19th-century Georgian row houses are being lovingly
restored. There’s an undeniable air of prosperity. On a bright fall
weekend, the downtown streets are jammed, the shops and restaurants
packed.
Down by Arthur’s Quay on the banks of the Shannon, there are posh
stores, antiques shops and a gleaming new tourist information
center. The prestigious Hunt Museum, with an impressive collection
of antiquities, recently moved here from its former digs on the
outskirts of the city. Lovely old churches abound, and they’re not
even locked, should you be seized by a sudden desire to confess your
sins.
When the walls of Limerick were torn down and the city was rebuilt
in the mid-18th century, this area became the city’s focal point. By
the time Frank McCourt was knocking around town, the elegant
Victorian buildings had become tenements and Arthur’s Quay was known
as a desperate place.
Everyone in Limerick knows these houses are old and might fall down
at any minute. Mam often says, I don’t want any of ye going down to
Arthur’s Quay and if I find ye there I’ll break yeer faces. The
people down there are wild and ye could get robbed and killed.
Now the pendulum has swung again, and the upscale shopping mall
there is full of Nike-clad teenagers and their equally well-dressed
elders. You can buy a boombox, or a bottle of fine wine, or a
hand-knit sweater to die for. In Quinnsworth’s, a supermarket as
bright and garish as any Giant or Safeway, I wandered down aisles
stocked with 12 different kinds of marmalade and more brands of
chocolate than I even knew existed. There I bought a bag of Odlums
flour, which a local had recommended to me as “quite brilliant”
(“brilliant” being the Irish word for anything great). I was hoping
to re-create the taste of Irish bread when I returned home.
Ah. Irish bread. I’d become be sotted with it during my stay. Truth
to tell, I’d been pleasantly surprised by Irish food in general. Of
course, a “full Irish breakfast” can be a somewhat alarming sight
first thing in the morning, with lots of fried everything. But many
places serve fresh ingredients now, and the seafood, especially, is
delicious. At dinner that night, I headed back to Arthur’s Quay and
feasted on fillet of sea bream with crispy leeks and a smoked salmon
butter sauce at a cool neighborhood restaurant called the Green
Onion. Not all my meals in Limerick were as memorable as that one,
but it’s safe to say that Irish dining has successfully made it into
the ’90s.
It wasn’t just the food and the shops that drew me back to the
narrow streets of Arthur’s Quay again and again. It was the history.
Limerick is oozing with it. You can be walking down the street,
thinking about that hand-knit sweater you just tried on, then look
up to find yourself passing a 13th-century castle. England’s King
John ordered this fortress built in 1212 to guard the entrance to
the city. Today, you can climb the tower’s steep stone staircase,
peer through the narrow slitted windows and imagine yourself
shooting arrows at the passersby below. (Hard to get a good angle!)
When you finally reach the top, you can stride across the
battlements for commanding views of the city, and scan the
approaching traffic on the Thomond Bridge. Except instead of varlets
on horseback, there are cars whizzing by, and people on bicycles.
From the castle, it’s a short walk to St. Mary’s Cathedral,
Limerick’s oldest surviving building. Built in 1172, it’s famous for
its 15th-century choir stalls, made of dark oak with fanciful
carvings. Outside, there are towering old trees, a wonderful,
atmospheric cemetery with crumbling Irish crosses, and a bench where
you can ponder your puny existence.
As a backdrop to all this, the River Shannon is a constant — and
increasingly lovely — presence. For years the city turned its back
on the river, and has only recently rediscovered it. Now there are
waterfront parks and benches and monuments, and rowing sculls and
boathouses. It’s a delightful scene on a quiet Sunday morning, with
people riding by on bicycles, and strolling couples admiring the
swans — yes, swans — gliding on the river.
Above all, there are kids. Most adults of childbearing age seem to
have at least two or three children attached to them. The streets of
Limerick are clogged with rosy babies in strollers, pudgy toddlers,
freckle-faced grade-school kids in parochial school uniforms,
exuberant packs of teenagers.
It’s a far cry from the vision of the city summoned by Frank
McCourt. And still . . . Remnants of his Limerick remain, in mute
testimony to harder times.
Tour guide O’Hanlon is used to getting a bit of flak from the
residents of Limerick. The first time he visited the former McCourt
house on Windmill Street, he says, a woman came out of her house
with her hands on her hips. “She saw that I had the book and she
asked if I’d read it. I said I had. `Isn’t it filth?’ she asked.” He
shrugs. You run into that kind of attitude a lot on the “Angela’s
Ashes” circuit.
Just a few blocks away on Hartstonge Street, past rows of Georgian
town houses and offices and something called the Victoria Club
Leisure Complex, is a somewhat forbidding, Gothic-looking red-brick
building with a crenellated roof. This was Leamy’s National School,
home to cruel and/or demented schoolmasters and legions of barefoot,
underfed students.
There are seven masters in Leamy’s National School, and they all
have leather straps, canes, blackthorn sticks. They hit you with the
sticks on the shoulders, the back, the legs, and, especially, the
hands. If they hit you on the hands it’s called a slap. They hit you
if you’re late, if you have a leaky nib on your pen, if you laugh,
if you talk, and if you don’t know things.
They hit you if you don’t know why God made the world, if you don’t
know the patron saint of Limerick, if you can’t recite the Apostles’
Creed, if you can’t add 19 to 47, if you can’t subtract 19 from 47,
if you don’t know the chief towns and products of the 32 counties of
Ireland, if you can’t find Bulgaria on the wall map . . .
The school houses offices now — a tailor shop, a brass plaque
company. Inside, it’s carpeted and renovated, with not a trace of a
classroom remaining. A man with a tape measure around his neck comes
out of the tailor’s, sees us and rolls his eyes. Have there been a
lot of “Angela’s Ashes” pilgrims poking around? “There have.” Has he
read the book? “I haven’t.” (Nobody in Ireland says “yes” or “no.”)
“A lot of people in Limerick are a bit sour over it,” he explains,
adding, “The book’s got it all wrong. ‘Twasn’t like that. Not atall.”
Right next door is another “Ashes” landmark: the four-story,
red-brick town house of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, where
Frank’s mother, Angela, queued up for charity.
Mam goes to the St. Vincent de Paul Society to see if there’s any
chance of getting furniture. The man says he’ll give us a docket for
a table, two chairs, and two beds . . . She wipes her eyes on her
sleeves and asks the man if the beds we’re getting are secondhand.
He says of course they are, and she says she’s very worried about
sleeping in beds someone might have died in, especially if they had
the consumption. The man says, I’m very sorry, but beggars can’t be
choosers.
The society is still a source of clothing and furniture for
Limerick’s poor, but “it’s much more user-friendly today,” says
O’Hanlon. “You don’t find people queuing up outside anymore.”
Onward, to the People’s Park, where Frank took his small brothers to
distract them from their hunger. Even on a rainy day it’s inviting,
with well-tended rose gardens, a fanciful Victorian drinking
fountain and the greenest grass I’ve ever seen. I end up coming back
here several times during my stay — it’s such an appealing place,
full of all manner of kids, guys kicking soccer balls, dog-walkers,
mums with prams, people on benches. On the facing Pery Square, a row
of striking Georgian row houses with elaborate fanlights is being
renovated.
Down Barrington Street, past doctors’ and solicitors’ offices with
lovely painted doors — Limerick has great doors — is Barrack Hill,
site of another McCourt residence.
We move to Roden Lane on top of a place called Barrack Hill. There
are six houses on one side of the lane, one on the opposite side.
The houses are called two up, two down, two rooms on the top, two on
the bottom. Our house is at the end of the lane, the last of the
six. Next to our door is a small shed, a lavatory, and next to that
a stable.
Roden Lane, where the McCourts shared that single lavatory with the
rest of the block, is gone now, but St. Joseph’s Church, where the
young Frank received his First Communion and Confirmation, is a
looming presence. That’s where Frank applied to be an altar boy, and
there, visible through the white wrought-iron fence, is the door
that was slammed in his face.
Perhaps Frank found more comfort in the massive, century-old
Redemptorist Church on South Circular Road, a dark and beautiful
refuge, with flickering votive candles, an intricate mosaic-tiled
floor and eye-popping, elaborately gilded alcoves. Farther north, on
Henry Street, is the huge Franciscan Church where Frank prayed to
his patron saint, Francis of Assisi. With its huge pillared front it
looks more like the Supreme Court than a place of worship, but
inside it has the same welcoming feeling and lovely smell of incense
and candle wax. Old women click their rosary beads as shoppers pop
in, genuflect and say a quick prayer. Anyone raised on modern
ecclesiastical architecture and streamlined statuary will never want
to leave.
You can’t escape “Angela’s Ashes” in Limerick. Everyone has an
opinion about the book, and is only too eager to share it. Store
clerks, waitresses, taxi drivers, people in pubs — if they aren’t
related to someone in the book, they went to school with them or, at
the very least, know one of the characters.
Sabine Sheehan, a desk clerk at Jurys Inn on Lower Mallow Street, in
the dockside area where the young Frank once scrounged for bits of
coal, watches all the “Ashes” hubbub with amusement. She’s a
descendant of Ab Sheehan, Angela’s brother, and her stepmother is
related to one of the masters at Leamy School. “The book’s prompted
a lot of peoples’ memories,” Sheehan says. “People say he has no
right to dredge all this up, but I wouldn’t agree. That’s the way
’twas, and that’s the way ’twas.”
What people think of the book depends on their age, says Liam
O’Hanlon. “Younger people have no personal knowledge, and accept the
book as one person’s recollections of his childhood as he remembers
it. What he’s writing about is just another part of Limerick
history. But there are a lot of people in Limerick in their late
sixties who see the book as a challenge to a way of life that they
remember with rose-tinted glasses. He’s confronting them with what
they don’t want to hear.”
Indeed, while opinion about the book is divided, the naysayers may
have the edge in Limerick. When McCourt comes back to the city for
book tours, irate residents are there to meet him, challenging his
memory and questioning his anecdotes. “Every time he comes to
Limerick and puts his head above the parapet, there’s someone firing
at him,” says O’Hanlon.
“There’s a lot of begrudgery about it in the home town,” agrees
Eddie Daly, a clerk in O’Mahony’s bookstore on O’Connell Street,
where a table in front is piled high with something called “Ashes,”
a copycat memoir by Gerard Hannan. “That book was written as a
retort to `Angela’s Ashes,’ ” Daly says, “but it doesn’t have the
same feeling. Hannan has an ax to grind.”
While “Angela’s Ashes” continues to sell well, Daly says, “it’s
probably selling better on a nationwide basis. A lot of people in
Limerick are still a bit tender. But that’s the Irish — we’re a
nation of begrudgers. You see one of your own doing well, you want
to give him some slag.”
But even if you can’t look at “Angela’s Ashes” objectively, Daly
adds, “you still have to admire it as a fine piece of work. Times
were hard, but such was the situation for the vast majority of
people in Limerick at the time. I’m a native myself, and I really
enjoyed it. The humor is amazing. He’s a great storyteller.”
If the bone-crushing poverty of Frank McCourt’s Limerick is gone,
certain things in Ireland are eternal. On a rainy fall afternoon,
waves of mist roll in from the River Shannon, down the Dock Road and
through the streets and lanes. It’s a perfect day to wander into
South’s pub and curl up with a pint.
South’s seems ageless with its ancient mahogany wood, marble bar,
etched-glass partitions and cozy alcoves called “snugs,” but “Och,
’tis changed,” says a guy nursing a Guinness. In McCourt’s day, he
says, it was a third of the size. ” ‘Tis an old establishment. There
were terrible characters from the docks, before. It’s all different
now.”
But it doesn’t take long to find someone who grew up with Frank McCourt.
“The lanes were full of rats,” Jerry, a South’s regular, is saying.
“Full of rats they were. We’d wait for the full moon to come out.
We’d put our boots on and tuck our pants legs in our boots, and a
gang of us would go out. I’d kill about 80 on a good night — hit
‘em with a stick. That was our entertainment.”
Has he read “Angela’s Ashes”? Big grin. “I’m waiting for someone to
give it to me.”
George, over on the next stool, went to school with Frank’s brother
Malachy — they had the same master, “Hoppy” O’Halloran. “You’d be
frightened for your life,” he said. “He’d run after you with a big
stick. He’d bring you up and give you six slaps. Really hard, now.
He’d leave Malachy in charge when he went away. Now Malachy, he was
a very clever fellow . . .”
Times were tough, they say, but happy. “You could leave your door
open,” Jerry says. “There were very good people in the lanes — very
neighborly. Everyone looked after one another. They were grand
people. You could always get food from someone. You could get a bun
and a bit of tripe . . .”
“I didn’t like what Frank said about where we were living,” George
says. “It’s not true. We weren’t that badly off. I wish him luck,
but I don’t agree with the stuff he put in that book. But he’s got
his money now.”
“Frank’s a decent enough fellow,” Jerry says. “I don’t begrudge him
his success. He survived, and that’s it in a nutshell, isn’t it?”
LIMERICK BURNS OVER ‘ANGELA’
By Mike Meyer /Chicago Tribune
Michael O’Donnell is not your average tour guide.
Gerard Hannan is not your average bookshop
owner. Frank McCourt is not your average memoir writer. Yet the
three men’s fates have crossed in Limerick, an average Irish town.
And none of them, city included, were prepared for the attention
that “Angela’s Ashes” would bring them from outside the community,
and the controversy it would create from within.
I spent the first weeks of January touring the great writers’
environments of Ireland — Joyce and Shaw’s Dublin; Heaney’s Ulster
coast; Yeats’ Sligo. Remarkable about each of these areas was the
preservation of ambience; you could feel what the land coaxed out of
these men and onto the page. Yet Ireland treasures and promotes its
writers beyond the postcard stand, as well, and you’ll find ample
sections of Irish Literature, Irish History and Irish Politics
fronting bookseller’s shelves, including the works of Frank McCourt.
As I traveled, McCourt’s name increasingly cropped up in the Irish
Times and Independent national newspapers more than any other writer
did. More than Bono even, who weighed in frequently with editorials
about forgiving Third World debt or U2 receiving the freedom of the
city award in Dublin in March. For the top half of January, McCourt
vied only with Gerry Adams for most-mentioned celebrity, due to the
premiering of the film version of “Angela’s Ashes.” On the film’s
opening day, it was the Independent’s front page story, right
underneath a headline declaring “Pope planning to step down next
year.”
Another writer’s stomping grounds had turned tourist attraction, I
figured, and so I headed to Limerick for the film’s opening and to
walk the streets that had etched themselves for half a century in
McCourt’s mind.
But as I made my way south to Limerick, another set of stories about
“Angela’s Ashes” began to appear in the UK and Irish press. They
told of a Limerick writer/bookshop owner/popular radio host who
publicly challenged the accuracy of McCourt’s memoir and, thus, its
merits for receiving the Pulitzer for non-fiction. The stories began
small, but as the film’s premier drew nearer, they ballooned to the
point where the man became a household name and saw himself being
discussed at the premiere press conference by director Alan Parker
and star Emily Watson. Within a week, Gerard Hannan had become both
bete noir and celebrity, Limerick’s second-most-famous writer.
Arriving in the city, I walked across the Sarsfield Bridge over the
River Shannon. The description of the river was the only passage I
remembered from “Angela’s Ashes,” about how his mother could hear
the river sing. The water surged quick under my feet, slicing the
town in two, running the color of Guinness, all black flow and tan
swells. It sang a song of urgency, and the first thought that struck
me as I looked at Limerick was: This is a very pretty place.
A footpath edged the bank and I followed it west toward the ocean. A
pair of swans swam calmly toward me, and past. There were no ashes
here, only tranquility and the opposite bank lined with luxury
hotels. I asked a few passersby what they thought of “Angela’s
Ashes” and about the controversy, but their responses were
noncommittal. “Good book, oh yeah, we listen to Hannan’s show.” This
did not make good copy. Drastic action was needed.
I checked in at the gleaming modern tourist information center at
Arthur’s Quay Park on the southern bank of the Shannon. The smartly
dressed agent behind the desk provided me with a Web address to find
current information, outlined the historical sites of King’s Island,
and pointed me to shelves full of curios of the “Kiss Me I’m Irish”
ilk to carry back home. Nary a mention of Limerick history or
“Angela’s Ashes.” I pulled out my dogeared copy of the book and
started plotting the street names McCourt mentions onto my city map.
The going wasn’t easy. Limerick has changed, and with it, her place
names. I approached the agent again. “I sort of had more of a
walking tour in mind,” I told her. “Something about true Limerick
past, like King John’s Castle over there and the Treaty Stone.”
“Yes, you can do that,” she said, “or take the `Angela’s Ashes’
tour.” She phoned the St. Mary’s Development Center, sponsor of the
Limerick walks. Though it was late in the winter day and the sun
would set at 4:30, tour guide Michael O’Donnell agreed to lead a
walk. He showed up within minutes with a Radio France reporter in
tow who was in town to cover the premiere of the film.
O’Donnell pumped my hand and began talking as we walked. “Frank
McCourt said to me, `Mick, I just wrote a book. I never dreamed this
success would happen.’ But we get people who come all the way here
to Limerick just to take the `Angela’s Ashes’ walking tour. From
England, from America, all the way from America, can you believe it?
But that’s the powerful effect the book has had on people.
Twenty-six languages it’s in, sold four million copies.”
We stood on Arthur’s Quay, a flat green park fronting the Shannon
where once stood the lanes, a maze of poverty and damp. O’Donnell
raised his voice above the traffic din.
“Of course, people want to see the Limerick from `Angela’s Ashes,’
but it doesn’t exist. The city has changed so much, and I’m proud of
that.” O’Donnell walked quickly, belying his age of 65. He flicked
out a Major and lit it in one quick mo
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