Book Forum
The books for this month are a holiday gift list: books to broaden the library and the mind, to provide pleasure and enjoyment, to give to oneself and others.
LITERATURE
Angela's Ashes: A Memoir, by Frank McCourt. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1996, 364 pp., $24.00; $13.00 (paper).
A century has passed since Leo Tolstoy wrote the first line to Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion.” Today, the word “dysfunctional” is often used to describe the unhappy family. However, as a clinical descriptor this term is sadly imprecise and trendy. Unlike a true medical diagnosis, it is a conveniently blurry label that sweeps across a broad array of human experience and clinical findings, suggesting an emotionally chaotic family lacking love, attention, and nurturing. At the most pathological extreme, psychiatrists encounter such families wrought in the chaos of addiction, physical and sexual abuse, and premature death. Angela's Ashes looks through a child's eyes at a family crippled by alcoholic havoc. In the second paragraph, the author recalls, “When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while.” An unnerving beginning, don't you think?
Frank McCourt is the oldest son in a family collapsed in poverty, gut-wrenching hunger, squalor, and paternal alcoholism. His was virtually a childhood where nightmares walked in daylight.
The story begins a month after Black Tuesday, the beginning of the Great Depression. The place is Brooklyn, New York. A young Angela Sheehan arrives by ship from Ireland and soon, at a neighborhood party, meets Malachy McCourt. Frank McCourt describes him as having a hangdog look from the 3 months he had just spent in jail. Angela is attracted to the hangdog look, and the reader soon recognizes that life with Malachy McCourt will never be plain vanilla. After what the author calls a “knee-trembler,” a child is conceived; there is a walk up the middle aisle, and drunkenness, debt, destitution, and more children follow.
Four years into the marriage, there are five children. Then the youngest dies. The cause seems multifactorial: infectious disease, malnutrition, parental ignorance, and neglect. Angela's relatives know she is married to a man beyond control and recommend the family return to their native land. The immigrant dream has failed. Money is sent from Ireland for the family to return.
What follows is a chronicle of a family barely holding on to a rim of survival in Limerick, Ireland, from roughly 1934 to 1948. Malachy McCourt seems never to hold a job more than 3 weeks. His alcoholism, even by the tolerant norms of early twentieth-century Irish society, is “beyond the beyonds.” Addictive irresponsibility creates unpredictable havoc for his family. Destitution and the deaths of two more children result. At age 10, the author is hospitalized with typhoid for more than 3 months in the Fever Hospital at the City Home. While hospitalized, the young Frank McCourt meets 14-year-old Patricia Madigan, who is dying of diphtheria, and is introduced to poetry and Shakespeare. He tells Patricia that Shakespeare's words are like having jewels in your mouth. It seems the author never forgets the cadence and prose of eloquent language. Some of this book's most touching incidents occur outside the family setting, when the author is hospitalized, at school, or during moments of early love.
Pride and whiskey are a bad blend, and Malachy McCourt had too much of both. He was a selfish, shameless alcoholic who, when either righteously sober or pub-crawling-gutter-gliding drunk, intimidated his wife and children, demanding “dignity and respect.” Habitually, after drinking the paycheck or charity dole, he would return home to a hungry family with the kiss of whiskey on his lips, singing melancholic Irish ballads and awakening the children to have them swear they'll “die for Ireland.” He was an idler who chased the love of whiskey and sang of the sufferings of Ireland without ever incorporating the connections. A mindfulness to the Gaelic proverb: Is milis d ¢l é ach is searbl d ¡oc e (It is sweet to drink but bitter to pay for) would have served his family better.
What unfolds, in an appallingly predictable way, are the effects of Malachy's severe alcoholism underpinned by ironclad character pathology. His world is painted in black and white with clear, egosyntonic, categorical absolutes. His hatred for the English, his perceived ancient foe, reaches back 800 years. He possesses a fondness for delivering final judgments. Malachy's pontifications are forever bold, but his deeds are wanting. When he speaks, his words often reek with the garlic we label axis II. (It appears that only when sober and with his children is he capable of transcending himself. He becomes the genuine Irish storyteller and spinner of tales that would make Scheherazade wink.)
Young Frank McCourt likens his father to the Holy Trinity—a man with three identities: the one who quietly reads the newspaper in the morning, the one who tells the stories at night, and the bad one with the smell of whiskey. Freud had awareness of the likes of Malachy McCourt when he commented that the Irish were the only people who could not be helped by psychoanalysis (1).
The author is a writing teacher at Stuyvesant High School in New York City. Angela's Ashes is his first book; it earned him the Pulitzer Prize. At the time of this writing, the book has stood solidly on the New York Times Book Review bestseller list for a year. It is more than a memoir of alcoholic devastation in a family; it also provides, in astonishing detail, an accurate portrayal of the lives of the poor in the Ireland of the 1930s and 1940s. This is an Irish story without blarney or impish shenanigans. The author deftly ties together everyday family life and neighborhood happenings. His attention to detail is impeccable, and his language forges strong images.
The narrative uniqueness of Angela's Ashes is the point of view. It is a continuous, present-tense tale told from the viewpoint of a small child growing to young adulthood. Emotionally seared memories are retold in the echoing voice of a child who stood invisibly, watching attentively—much like a psychiatrist. The tone is conversational, and the language is forthright, unvarnished, and captivating. This is a memoir that reads like a well-crafted novel.
Angela's Ashes is also available on audiocassette. The audio version is slightly abridged without omitting important incidents. The cassettes are ideal for psychiatrists wishing to listen while commuting, and they provide a slightly lesser alternative for those with little time who want to experience the essence of the book. The cassettes offer the advantage of hearing the author narrate his own story in a buoyant Irish lilt.
The Two Cultures, by C.P. Snow. New York, Cambridge University Press, 1993, 150 pp., $10.95 (paper).
Stones From the River, by Ursula Hegi. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1994, $26.00; $13.00 (paper).
Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination, by Frederick Burwick. University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996, 275 pp., $49.50.
HISTORY
Rebels: The Irish Rising of 1916, by Peter De Rosa. New York, Doubleday, 1990, 560 pp., $25.00; $14.00 (paperback published in 1992 by Fawcett [Ballantine Books]).
MacDonagh and MacBride And Connolly and Pearse Now and in time to be, Wherever green is worn, Are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.
The House of Percy: Honor, Melancholy, and Imagination in a Southern Family, by Bertram Wyatt-Brown. New York, Oxford University Press, 1994, 454 pp., $30.00; $17.95 (paper).
A History of Clinical Psychiatry: The Origin and History of Psychiatric Diseases, edited by German Berrios and Roy Porter. New York, New York University Press, 1995, 480 pp., $65.00.
Tho' it is hardly understood Which way my death can do them good, Yet thus, methinks, I hear 'em speak: “See how the Dean begins to break! You plainly find it in his face. That old vertigo in his head Will never leave him till he's dead. Besides, his memory decays: He recollects not what he says; He cannot call his friends to mind: Forgets the place where last he din'd; Plyes you with stories o'er and o'er; He told them fifty times before.”
PSYCHIATRIC TOPICS
Charcot: Constructing Neurology, by Christopher G. Goetz, M.D., Michael Bonduelle, M.D., and Toby Gelfand, Ph.D. New York, Oxford University Press, 1995, 376 pp., $55.00.
Writing at the Margin: Discourse Between Anthropology and Medicine, by Arthur Kleinman. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995, 308 pp., $40.00.
Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal, by Rachel N. Remen, M.D. New York, Riverhead Books (Berkley Putnam Publishing Group), 1996, 336 pp., $22.95; $12.50 (paper).
The Body of Myth: Mythology, Shamanic Trance, and the Sacred Geography of the Body, by J. Nigro Sansonese. Rochester, Vt., Inner Traditions International, 1994, 347 pp., $24.95 (paper).
Axiom I: A myth is an esoteric description of a heightened proprioception. Axiom II: The organizing principle of extended myth is recapitulation. Corollary: The rhetorical technique of archaic myths is pleonastic. Axiom III: There are three categories of myth: esoteric descriptions of the first, second, and third worlds during heightened proprioception. [These three worlds are stereognosis, perception, and cognition. Stereognosis, the first world, is the source of visceral proprioception, the proprioceptions of the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems, and all the body below the nostrils associated with taste and touch. Perception, the second world, is chiefly sight, hearing, smell, and all external sensation from the region between the brow and the mouth. Cognition, the third world, is principally thought, intellect, or the “sixth sense,” and the head above the brow.] Axiom IV: The proper nouns of authentic myth are of two kinds: 1) mantras derived from phons and 2) words descriptive of meditation. [A “phon” is a proprioceptive sound. A “mantra” is a word derived onomatopoetically from the phon. There are mantras that correspond to phons representing the three worlds, i.e., a dull roar for the first world, a clicking for the second, and a whine for the third.] Axiom V: The ethical component of an archaic mythicoreligious system derives from the attempt to control reincarnation. [The author asserts that the struggle to control the birth-death cycle has led to the development of ethical systems, through religious tenets, to regulate it.]
