Frank and Malachy McCourt: Poor brothers, rich memoirs

This Week’s Winner

Simon Louis Errol E. Torres, 23, is a graduate of UP with a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy, and a teacher in the making. He is taking up education units at the Enverga University in Candelaria, Quezon. He wants his future students to understand Jack Kerouac and Kurt Vonnegut by heart. He reveres Batman over Superman.

One’s brilliant, the other radiant.
One portrays a shattered innocence, the other a corrupted senescence. One suckles you through his shirt of rags and slime beneath his fingernails, the other through urban idiosyncrasies and transient glitters on his feet. One brags a Pulitzer, the other a famous brother. One from a guy named Frank, the other Malachy. They are hymns of poverty, of despair, of rare happiness, of constant helplessness. They are scars that never heal, forever lurking in their respective dreams.

I read Frank McCourt’s incredible memoir Angela’s Ashes when I was 18. I borrowed the book from a friend. I surprised myself and reached and savored the bittersweet emotion of its last page in less than a week, the fastest considering my plump schedule as a student back then and weak fascination for pleasure reading. It was bliss. It was my turning point for further lists of classic titles and contemporary masterpieces. I can vividly recall the joy while each movement in the story strums the nerves that connect my heart to my eyes. Yes, guilty as charged, I was teary-eyed.

The book is a haunting account of the author’s impoverished childhood in Limerick, Ireland. It describes poverty beyond mere sympathy, beyond unpredictable statistics, beyond Bono and Angelina Jolie. It is personal. Through the author’s youthful eyes disguised as written words, I walked Limerick’s chockfull alleys and ransacked its gloomy pubs. I was able to view and feel the sores on his feet, the scabs, the nosebleed, the nauseating smell of rancid lavatories, the pinching emptiness in the intestines, the madness over a crumb of bread, the disillusionment, despair, anger and longing in the same breath for a father, pity for a helpless mother. Poverty has never been real as I flipped and swallowed each page.

Frank McCourt’s history is an excellent and an inimitable read. Most people brag about the woes of their early years but McCourt removes the melodramas and hums his story with subtle but fierce humor and wit. A smile tries to hide the tears. Yet, like the waves that you cannot refrain from touching the sand, tears showed themselves and kissed my cheeks. The heart, indeed, can see anything that’s concealed.

And like a faithful husband, where poverty lingers, religion is always there serving as a fountain of strength amid escalating burdens, seems to hold the answers to man’s every predicament. However, Frank saw it as a house of straw and gently mocks the infectious folly of his society. In his initial mumblings, he said, "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. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." He exposed the rigid wickedness of priests and the inanity of authorities. He travails human weakness and exploitation. He humors us with common and obvious foolishness that we barely notice we’re laughing at ourselves. His writing is a sharp chisel that formed my emotions to something soft and jelly-like. It touches my heart as if my own life was right before my eyes. Since then, like a silent stalker, I’ve always looked for McCourt each time I pass book sales and libraries. I was craving. However, last year, as if heaven’s way of having fun, it was rather his brother Malachy’s book that landed on my hands.

A Monk Swimming is no Angela’s Ashes, neither is Malachy his brother Frank. It is a different plate of literary mush. Malachy never pretends to be writing anything remotely resembling his elder brother’s book though at times he flashes back at their family’s tragic life as luridly told by Frank. Malachy tells the amazing story of his life in New York after his arrival in 1952. Armed with a savage humor and a gift for storytelling, he recounts the days he carved out his name as a hard-drinking wit and raconteur, as a bartender then as part-owner of an Eastside joint named Malachy’s, as an off-Broadway actor performing the works of Brendan Behan and James Joyce, and as a regular on America’s The Tonight Show. He even made me run to our local video rental store to see if he was really the priest in Brad Pitt’s Devil’s Own.

He charmingly recalls his rebellious and numerous misguided adventures. From the notorious Tombs prison in New York City, to poolside arrests in Beverly Hills; in the company of gold-smugglers in Zurich and whores in Calcutta; from Paris to Rome, and to Limerick once more, he fled again until he was compelled to finally face his evils.

Skin-deep, A Monk Swimming is a familiar marketing instinct that capitalizes on someone else’s fame. In the book’s acknowledgment, Malachy actually thanks his brother Frank for "opening the golden door." It doesn’t take a genius to decipher what he means.

But despite such initial motive, Malachy’s memoir stands squarely and triumphantly on its own feet. It is seductive, juicy, darkly funny, and a truthful reflection of life in a jungle-like city. His slang maps his intimacy with the place; his wisecracks, an ironic glimpse of its dangers and uncertainties. He was a rat in a labyrinthine city sniffing for the cheese, reflecting our utmost wish to escape the compact and constipated feel of loneliness and getting lost in the way.

Like most memoirs, both Frank and Malachy’s look back to a distant past, re-open wounds like revisiting souvenirs inside a shoe-box. They face something that most of us would rather bury in our backyards or flush down the sink. Like brave warriors in a battlefield, the brothers sneak through the dark corridors of their memories and drag into light the pain, tears, hardships, and perpetual sufferings of their past lives.

Their tipster father who abandoned them was the ghost writer in their memoirs; often nowhere to be found in the scenes in their lives, yet he pushes them to be strong, to be independent, to live what most our countrymen now plea: the American dream. Their longing that turned to hatred for their negligent father was the mystical energy that impelled their pens to write and cast red flames at the center of their hearts.

Normally, when we are going through pain, we often feel as if the pain will last forever, that scars will not heal. But the cycle of life tells us that there is always opportunity for renewal. Hope is free and always there. Though life may seem a system of dark paradoxes, there is also, in the words of Andre Gide, "a quiet everyday radiance that mankind always had difficulty noticing and setting a value on." Life is an adventure and we must learn from it. If we always get what we want and know where we’re going, how to get there, and what we’ll see and experience along the way, then it isn’t an adventure. It is only from adventures that we learn the things that are of great significance, where we can be exposed to the new and unknown.

Memoirs often show us that kind of hope: the hope to survive. Reading scenes in an author’s life reminds us of ours. Like a reassurance, it is a hint that we’re not alone, that there is much pain than our own, that like Malachy and Frank, we will carry on. As I read and write praises about their books, I can see the brothers’ furrowed hands gently tapping my back and saying, "You will survive Simon… You will move on."