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"Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." So goes Angela's Ashes, the best-known work of Pulitzer-winning author, Frank McCourt, who died yesterday.
Yet it could be said that the worst childhood of all is that of the Irish Catholic childhood of the misery memoir, a genre that Frank McCourt practically recreated for our times.
His account of living in the back lanes of Limerick before the war, sharing an outside lavatory with an entire street, watching his little brothers die in childhood, seeing his mother begging for a bed from the Society of St Vincent de Paul and retreating to the upper part of his house whenever the river Shannon flooded the ground floor, was a compelling read.
The story may have lost nothing in the telling, it may have been one-sided - which is, after all, the privilege of autobiography - but it had the saving grace of being written with vigour, humour and the self-deprecation which is the default mode of Irish prose.
But, for all the literary merits of Angela's Ashes, it spawned a genre that is still with us whereby authors wallow in the horrors of their own past. It gave authors a monetary incentive to pick their own sores. And it gave rise to that section of bookshops that is now devoted to autobiographical grief and which accounts for some nine per cent of the British books market.
Angela's Ashes had a pernicious effect on Ireland. It was published when Celtic Tiger was going strong, and it created something like a collective false memory syndrome, whereby the genuinely bleak aspects of living in a poverty-stricken country (and the chief problem with Ireland before the war was not that it was priest-ridden, but that it was poor) crowded out other, more positive, elements of life during the hard times. As a friend put it, "the poor looked out for each other". One Dublin man I know, whose childhood was as hard as Frank's, said reflectively: "When I look back at it all, I think of all the good times." Well that wouldn't sell.
The Irish misery memoir predated Frank McCourt, though he gave it a modern spin. The genre was mercilessly sent up in Flann O'Brien's genius spoof, the Poor Mouth, published in 1941.
But if you want autobiography that describes Irish poverty in all its fullness, yet is wholly redemptive, do yourself a favour and read An Only Child, by the wonderful writer, Frank O'Connor. He had it tough too. But unlike McCourt, he makes the reader rejoice in the resilience of the human spirit.
