The Outsider

“Angela’s Ashes” ends with 19-year-old Frank McCourt, born in the United States but raised in Ireland, coming back to his future on a ship from Cork. As he stands on the deck looking at the lights of America twinkling in the darkness, the ship’s wireless officer comes up to him and says, “Isn’t this a great country altogether?” And McCourt concludes that wondrous book with a chapter containing one word: “ ‘Tis.”

Like a literary trick out of James Joyce, the end was a beginning in disguise. In “ ‘Tis,” that one-word chapter becomes a book about what happens to McCourt in that great country he sees shimmering like a mirage in the distance. But while “Angela’s Ashes” is a book in which things fall apart, a child’s eye view of the social boneyard of Limerick and of a fractured family’s struggle for survival, it is told with grim comic brio that makes it paradoxically uplifting. The story in “ ‘Tis,” though not so dark, is also not so grand. If its predecessor was a song of innocence, this book--in some ways more an extended epilogue than a sequel--is a song of experience, a story filled with the compromise and puzzlement of adulthood made all the more ambiguous because it takes place in what always remains for McCourt a foreign land.

He arrives in New York in 1949 as a virtual immigrant but without the immigrant’s clarity about the task at hand because he seems to have a claim from being born here before his parents uprooted him at the age of 4 to return the family to the Old Country. He feels like an alien, impeded in his clumsy pursuit of the American Dream by infected eyes, rotten teeth, scant formal education. Can he make his way and his mark? Will these Protestant straight-ahead citizens allow him to succeed without renouncing the dual citizenship that is his glory and his tragic predicament? Will the price of admission in America be the renunciation of all that Irish doom and laughter, the genius for friendship and the skylarking conversation? These are the issues in “ ‘Tis.” As McCourt says at one point in the narrative, “I’d like to be Irish American or American Irish though I know I can’t be two things at once. . . .”

Thanks to a drunken priest and a boss in the local Democratic Party (the Irish American employment agency in New York), he gets a job, soon after debarking, at the Biltmore, cleaning ashtrays and mopping floors and enviously watching the young Americans his age with their fresh good looks, arcane flirtation rituals, white teeth and college textbooks. He rents a room and subsists on bananas, the cheapest food he can find. The disillusion that sets in at the very onset of his new life will give way to wry knowledge but never really leave him: “New York was the city of my dreams but now I’m here the dreams are gone and it’s not what I expected at all.” He wants it all, this prodigal life he sees all around him, but from the beginning he so devalues it by his mordant and cutting irony that when it finally comes to him, its worth has been depleted.

After being drafted, he is stationed in Germany, still digging out of the rubble, where his experiences combine “Sgt. Bilko” and “Catch-22.” He is trained to handle a truculent German shepherd in the K-9 corps but then is made company clerk. Like other GIs, he trades coffee and cigarettes for sex in squalid encampments of refugees, but unlike the rest of them he is a despairing observer during his own copulation. At one point, he is sent with others on an errand to Dachau, and in the cognitive dissonance he accepts and finds himself saying an Our Father at the door of an oven, knowing that his tenuous Christianity was implicated in the horror.

Back in New York after his discharge, McCourt still continues his picaresque life. He feels fortunate to find a job unloading trucks for $75 a week. Yet he has trouble with women and can’t bring his future into view. He becomes a sleepwalker in the city, with the rich life around him exceeding his grasp in a way that causes him to wonder, “What am I doing in the world at all?” This question haunts “ ‘Tis.” It is never really answered, only tabled.

He wangles his way into NYU’s education school despite his lack of a high school diploma. He strives upwardly there but as always is undone by his Irishness, which ineradicably asserts itself in his brogue and in his face, which he feels looks like a map of the old country. He is ever the naif, always being slapped down by a world more sophisticated than he. In an English class, for instance, he timorously speaks up when the professor refers to Jonathan Swift as a great English satirist, pointing out that Swift was actually Irish.

“Does that mean,” the professor replies in one of those put-downs that continues to echo through a life, “that if I’m from the Virgin Islands I’m a virgin?”

McCourt goes on to a teaching career, eventually rising from a zoo-like vocational school on Staten Island, where he is initially warehoused because of his Barry Fitzgerald voice, to celebrated Stuyvesant High. By all outward measure, his life is a success, but it doesn’t feel that way. McCourt remains stuck in the in-betweenness that is his birthright, unable to claim and occupy a piece of ground of his own and victimized by obscure wants he cannot satisfy. When he is poor, he wants to be comfortable. When he is comfortable, he wants to be footloose like his bohemian brother Malachy, a singer and wit about town. When he’s doing manual labor, he wants to teach. When he’s teaching, he wants to write books. When he’s single, he wants to be married. When he finally marries a blond goddess who represents all the illusory Protestant promise of America, he stays out late at bars until he loses her. For McCourt, as for Oscar Wilde, there are two types of tragedy--not getting what you want and getting it.

McCourt seems less in control in this book and at times is powerless to keep himself from becoming the stage Irishman, crying in his beer, milking sentiment until it becomes false, mistaking talk for thought. He uses his outsider’s status to make some palpable hits on aspects of American social life, particularly the class distinctions that divide people in and out of the workplace. But at times his sharp observations stumble into banality: “No one dies in America, they pass away or they’re deceased and when they die the body, which is called the remains, is taken to a funeral home where people just stand around and look at it and no one sings or tells a story or takes a drink and then it’s taken away in a casket to be interred. They don’t like saying coffin and they don’t like saying buried. They never say graveyard.”

If “ ‘Tis” sometimes becomes tedious when telling how McCourt became a stranger in a strange land, it is profound when dealing with his unappeasable past. The authors of that past, his father and mother, play a role in this book. But they are no longer those larger-than-life figures from “Angela’s Ashes”--the one shaping his sons’ imaginations with stories of Ireland’s greatness and its foul betrayal, the other a pillar of long-suffering love, endurance and survival. Here they are diminished, cut down by life, condemned to live out the aftermath of their primal drama.

McCourt’s mother arrives for a visit in America and stays, becoming more isolated and dispossessed although she is in the midst of her reunited children. The father arrives for a visit from Northern Ireland, still spreading moral chaos and deceit among his children. Claiming to have succeeded at Alcoholics Anonymous, he euchres Frank into a drunken spree that reopens old family wounds and then leaves on the next boat home.

There is no resolution for the McCourts, but there is at least a truce with life. When their mother finally dies, he and his brothers have her cremated and wait for a time to repatriate her in accordance with her final wishes. Not long afterward, word comes that their father has died. Frank alone of all the children travels to war-torn Belfast for the last rites. On the day of the funeral, three IRA gunmen are killed running a British barricade, and McCourt imagines them as providing his father the “escort of his dreams . . . and he’d envy them their manner of going.”

In 1985, three and a half decades after his arrival in America, Frank joins with his brothers, Malachy, Michael and Alphie to take their mother home to Limerick. They stand in the graveyard there, dip their fingers in the urn brought from the New Jersey crematorium and scatter what is left of her to the wind. Thus “ ‘Tis” ends where this unique memoir first began--with Angela’s ashes. And Frank McCourt completes the book he lived all those years and only just recently got around to writing.

“ ‘Tis” has those elements that made “Angela’s Ashes” such a success--the narrative brio, the fierce sympathy for human tic and torment, the intuitive feel for character and above all the love of language and that very Irish understanding that words are our only weapon in our long quarrel with God.