Living 'Angela's Ashes' was more painful than book, movie

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

The worst thing about the movie "Angela's Ashes" isn't that it's a bad film. That it's too long and grim and plodding and depressing, and that it's an indictment of the Catholic Church in Ireland and the Irish themselves doesn't matter. It's only a movie. It'll be gone from conversation and the big screen in a few weeks and relegated to video stores a few months later.

The worst and saddest thing about "Angela's Ashes" is that it's immutable. Frank McCourt's childhood is real. It isn't invention. It happened, and nothing can change this. He lived the hunger and cold and poverty and humiliation depicted in the film. His world was as bleak and plodding and depressing as this way-too-long movie. But a movie's a movie. It ends in a few hours. McCourt's childhood lasted years.

His book, "Angela's Ashes," for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, was tragic, but it had a spirit that the movie does not. In print, McCourt mixed triumph with tragedy. That's what drew people into his tale. The story was heartbreaking, but the voice that told it, the voice of the child he was, rang out with hope.

Now that hope - for a better life, for money in his pocket, for all that he didn't have as a kid - has been realized. This is the happy ending. It doesn't get any better. McCourt, by profession a schoolteacher, is rich and famous. He's won all kinds of prizes. He has a new book out, "Tis." He has a musical revue, "The Irish and How They Got That Way." He has seen his life made into a movie. And he has a wife he loves and more money than he'll ever need and more people waiting on his every word than he ever imagined.

And yet, despite all this, despite hitting the biggest jackpot the world can give, he can't do the one thing he'd forfeit every cent he's made to do: Go back and change the past. Go back and give lie to the beginning of his book, which says there are no happy childhoods, and make his happy.

That would be the real grand prize: To breathe life back into baby Margaret and the twins, Oliver and Eugene. To put milk in the icebox and bread on the table and coal in the fire and joy in his mother's eyes and take the bottle out of his father's hands and find him at work, not at a bar. To have warm clothes and shoes that fit and teeth like an American and eyes that weren't always red and scabby and a mother and father and all his brothers and his sister smiling and happy beside him.

But the past can't be changed no matter how you will it. There's no going back except in your mind, where the alternate versions of everything play and replay, the mind the only place where you can make things right again.

Just days before he won the Pulitzer Prize, I had lunch with McCourt. He talked about his father and the last time he saw him. And there was within him still, despite the book and all the introspection required of him to write it, the unanswered question that he knew would always elude him. Why? Why couldn't his father hold a job? Why didn't he quit drinking? Why was the drink more important than the family he loved? Why did he walk away?

We all have our whys. We all try to figure out why people do what they do. Childhood dogs everyone. My aunt never had a happy Christmas because she couldn't let go of all the unhappy Christmases of her youth. Why did her father leave? Why was her mother more forgiving of strangers than she was of her family? Why was her mother never nice to her?

For a writer, there's satisfaction in digging though the past and dragging things out and inspecting them and finally nailing the emotion. But it doesn't stay nailed. It floats back up. McCourt knows this.

I wonder if while watching the film he wished it different, the way you do when you've seen a movie and know the end but beg for it to try to change.

"Open the door, Rhett," I think each time I see "Gone With the Wind," after Scarlett has miscarried and is calling for him. But he doesn't hear her, not ever, though if he did everything would be different, and isn't that what we want?

"Don't stop at the bar, Dad. Don't drink your week's pay. Come home to Mam and me."

Most of us can bear our own pain. We grow accustomed to carrying it. But we never get used to witnessing or remembering the pain borne by the people we love.

It is this that weighs us down, all of us, best-selling authors too.