Limerick mourns death of ‘Angela’s Ashes’ author _ but debate over book smolders on

Even in death, McCourt’s ‘Ashes’ divides Limerick

DUBLIN — Bitterness over Frank McCourt’s memoir “Angela’s Ashes” still smolders in his hometown of Limerick. Residents of the western Irish city have never agreed whether his Pulitzer-winning account of childhood survival amid soul-crushing poverty was more fact than fiction.

Limerick City Hall opened a book of condolence in memory of its most famous writer Monday, the day after McCourt’s death and 13 years after “Angela’s Ashes” put the city by the River Shannon on the literary map.

The vocal minority who have long branded McCourt a self-promoting liar kept a respectful silence — but observers wondered how long this restraint would last.

“The book was a delight and 80 percent true,” said Tony Browne, a Limerick amateur historian who has found himself caught between two verbally warring camps in his past career as a local radio host. “Some people will keep saying it’s all lies. They’ll go to their deathbeds still in denial.”

Official Ireland offered united condolences for the 78-year-old writer, who at age 19 left behind a Limerick that — through a combination of wretched housing, sanitation, sickness and hunger — had claimed the lives of three young siblings.

“Limerick is very proud of, and will never forget, Frank McCourt,” said the mayor, Kevin Kiely, who plans to attend the U.S. funeral service and expressed hopes that McCourt’s family would set aside some of the author’s own ashes to be scattered on the Shannon. McCourt himself once expressed that hope — later adding the barb that he hoped his ashes would pollute the river.

For many locals, McCourt’s memoirs have forever tarnished their own families’ reputations and their parents’ sentimental memories of a happy, harmonious Limerick.

The Limerick Leader — which in the past published criticisms of McCourt, once reprinting pictures of him as a smiling Limerick boy scout and asking “Is this the picture of misery?” — led the public eulogies Monday.

It reprinted pictures of McCourt’s last visit to the city in August 2008, when the author admitted to mixed feelings about the impact his book had on local sensitivities.

“I’ve had such a turbulent relationship with the city,” the newspaper quoted him as saying. “It’s what I had to write about when I finally started writing after teaching for 30 years. I had to get it out of my system, but you never do. People say it’s a catharsis, but it’s not. Look at me — I’m back here again.”

The author’s younger brother Malachy said last week that, even from his Manhattan death bed, McCourt was ruminating on “his unfinished emotional business with Limerick.”

The split in Limerick has long pitted a pro-McCourt majority — which views “Angela’s Ashes” as an honest portrait of the poverty and smothering conservatism of bygone Ireland — against a vituperous minority. The critics charge McCourt with portraying his own family as poorer than it really was, and blackening the names of their own dead relatives, particularly by placing them in immoral sexual situations with McCourt himself and his late mother, Angela.

The leader of the critics, former bookshop owner Gerard Hannan, published two anti-McCourt books that became Limerick best-sellers in their own right. The first, “Ashes,” openly questioned McCourt’s accounts and denounced him as a snob. The second — timed to coincide with McCourt’s sequel “‘Tis” and titled “‘Tis in Me Ass” — lauded those who stayed in Limerick rather than emigrated to America.

The Associated Press was unable to reach Hannan, who was not picking up his home or cell phones Monday.

Michael O’Donnell, a 70-year-old Limerick guide who since 1998 has run “Angela’s Ashes” walking tours of the city, said he grew up in the same tenement conditions as McCourt and considers the late author “a brilliant and courageous man. He shone a spotlight on a reality that people wanted to keep buried.”

“Having come from that background, I can tell you that Frankie wrote the truth,” said O’Donnell, whose tours today emphasize the city’s wholesale redevelopment and relative prosperity — leaving no trace of the northside Limerick slums, called “the lanes,” central to the book.

In August, O’Donnell took McCourt, his wife and about 15 American tourists on his tour. Although McCourt had been traveling frequently to the city, at times teaching writing at nearby University of Limerick, it was his first time on the “Angela’s Ashes” tourist experience that his writing had spawned.

“Frankie was concerned he might get some lip from the begrudgers,” said O’Donnell, using an Irish term for people who resent others’ success. “But the response he got was overwhelmingly positive. Everywhere we went it was ‘Welcome home Frank, you’re looking good, what are you writing next?’”

O’Donnell said McCourt had told him of plans of spend six months at a time in Limerick as he worked on a book about his post-”Angela’s Ashes” experiences — including the occasional hostility he suffered in book signings and on talk shows.

But Browne said the true source of local resentment was simply that McCourt had risen from his poverty and succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

“People didn’t want their past being revealed, and they really didn’t want Frank McCourt making any money out of it,” he said. “I remember people laughing at the idea of Frank writing a book at all. Their noses were completely out of joint when he won the Pulitzer Prize. There’s a few people here who really do hate him, but it’s just jealousy.”