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MCCOURT’S MEMOIR AWASH IN TALES OF IRELAND, BOOZE

If ever a man could personally testify to the evils of drink, it’s Frank McCourt. As a survivor of what he calls the worst kind of “miserable childhood . . . the miserable Irish Catholic childhood,” McCourt traces most of that misery to the demons rum, stout and whiskey, which were consumed in profligate quantities by his father, a stereotypically “shiftless loquacious alcoholic” Irishman.

Every page of McCourt’s new memoir, “Angela’s Ashes” (Scribner), seems to reek of strong drink, and worse, as McCourt recalls in comically agonizing detail his father’s marathon benders. The book is so full of dispiriting tales about his down-and-out boyhood in Limerick, concluding with his father’s “Irish divorce” (abandoning his wife and four sons), that it could easily serve as a temperance manual.

And yet here was McCourt, cheerfully partaking along with the other guests at a recent Chicago sendoff for his memoir, which was held not in a bookstore, library or any traditional literary forum but in Cullen’s Bar & Grill, 3741 N. Southport Ave. Having set down so many sobering memories on paper, the author allowed that the pub party was indeed a contradiction, as was his own reluctance to take the pledge of abstinence.

McCourt blithely dismissed that possibility, explaining, “I feel a great responsibility to the children of employees of breweries and distilleries.” Then he added: “I should run a mile from the stuff, but I can take it in moderation.”

According to reports out of New York, where McCourt has lived since coming to America in 1949, he’s been a fixture at the Lion’s Head Pub, part of a two-fisted typing-and-drinking fraternity whose membership over the years has included Jimmy Breslin, Norman Mailer, Pete Hamill and Joe Flaherty. As a teacher in the New York public schools, McCourt said he always felt “like the downstairs maid” among the journalists and novelists. But after being doubly blessed by “Angela’s Ashes”–with critics’ cheers and instant best-sellerdom–he’s no longer just the “fellow with the odd manner” around the Lion’s Head, but at the age of 66, “one of the boys.”

Like McCourt himself, “Angela’s Ashes” is a bundle of contradictions, as uproarious as they are grievous, whether the young Frankie is pushing his baby brother around Limerick, dumping loose coal and turf into his pram; his “pious, defeated” mother is begging a sheep’s head for their Christmas dinner; or his soused father is rousing the boys in the middle of the night to sing “Kevin Barry” and other patriotic Irish songs.

When he took the stage of the Mercury Theater, adjoining Cullen’s pub, to recite from “Angela’s Ashes,” McCourt was accompanied by a bagpiper and drummer playing “Gary Owen.” He read with tragicomic gusto from his memoir, recalling the misery of growing up in Limerick not only with a drunken father but “pompous priests,” “bullying schoolmasters” and “the odor of piss wafting in from the outdoor jakes where many a man puked up his week’s wages.”

Though this was McCourt’s literary coming-out party in Chicago, he’d been a familiar figure on local stages during the ’80s. Billing themselves as “A Couple of Blaguards,” he and his younger brother, Malachy, re-enacted their Limerick boyhood in story, song and verse for audiences at the Royal George and other theaters.

McCourt’s book, like the brothers’ autobiographical revue, has been almost universally greeted by reviewers as “lyrical and charming,” McCourt said. “Always lyrical and charming,” he repeated, derisively. “That’s how they like to describe Irish writers. It’s like poor old Sam on the plantation, simple-minded and very musical, singing `Old Man River.’ But what gives Irish writing its distinctive flavor is not the charming stuff but the darkness.”

Despite its associations with cheerful, bawdy Irish verse, Limerick was no Glocca Mora, an idyllic village in the midst of an emerald landscape, but a “gray place with a river that kills,” McCourt said of the foul and poisonous River Shannon.

As much as anyone else, McCourt added, it was probably John Ford and his Hollywood stock company who cast the Irish in such a false and deceiving light. Even more misleading were Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald as Fathers O’Malley and Fitzgibbon in “Going My Way,” which he also saw as boy in Limerick. “We were always taken by the sweetness of American priests,” said McCourt, whose gray hair, melodic accent and beguilingly gruff manner would easily qualify him for the Hollywood holy order. “We could never imagine a priest like Bing Crosby in Ireland, somebody who would get out and play ball with the boys and sing at Christmas.”

McCourt was born in Brooklyn, but his parents returned to the old country when he 4. His sister had died in infancy and his father was unable to find work because of the Depression and his incorrigible drinking. If anything, however, Ireland was even more depressed, and depressing, than America. The McCourts lost two more children, twin brothers, and when his father found work, which was rarely and briefly, he’d spend all his wages in the pubs.

“It was the culture,” McCourt said of the Irish dependence on fermented spirits. “For the men in our economic class, there were only two outlets, sports and the pubs. If a man drank too much, it was what was called a good man’s failing. That was the one thing the church never denounced in Limerick. They denounced sex, dancing and Hollywood movies, but I never heard a priest get up and denounce drinking.”

McCourt’s mother, Angela, is the nominal heroine of his memoir, eternally on the dole, pathetically trying to clothe and feed her sons. But it’s the blackguard father, also named Malachy, who obsesses McCourt, and who commandeers center stage in his memoir, long after he’s abandoned his wife and family.

McCourt was 11 when his father left Ireland for England, during World War II, to look for work, and he didn’t see him again until 1963. His father showed up in Brooklyn, where the family was then living, McCourt recalled, “saying he hadn’t had a drink in three years. But as soon as he arrived, he went wild, boozing all over Brooklyn and destroying any hope of reconciliation with my mother. . . . He died in 1985, and I went to all the time and expense of going back to Belfast for his funeral–don’t ask me why.”

McCourt’s memoir ends with him landing in the U.S. when he was 19. Quickly bringing his expatriate saga up to date, he said: “I got a job as a houseman at the Biltmore Hotel, going around with a mop and broom. Then the Korean War broke out, and I was drafted and sent to Germany for two years, training dogs. When I got out, I had the GI Bill but no high school education, but I managed to talk my way into NYU.” After college, he taught in New York schools for 26 years, until his retirement in 1988.

An English teacher, McCourt said he was learning how to write along with his students. “As they were writing about their families and lives, I started writing about mine. There was an accumulation of material in my drawer, and in ’94 I had to get it out of my system.It was seared into my memory, festering and gestating. If I hadn’t finished it, I would have died howling with despair.”