Sir, - While the critics of Frank McCourt yowl like a lynch mob, the rest of us may be forgiven for detecting in the tone of these hysterical attacks, the sulphurous whiff of lazy journalism, provincial ignorance, and sheer bloody-minded begrudgery. Rehashing the standard chargesheet, Pat McGoldrick's piece (An Irishman's Diary, February 1st) was a classic of the genre.
This is what they would have us believe about McCourt. The blackguard profited from the immoral earnings of a wicked book that defamed not just his own mother but Mother Ireland herself. Angela's Ashes is an aesthetically inferior book, whining and self-pitying in its portrayal of a poverty-stricken childhood which, as everybody knows, was not half as bad as he likes to make out. For good measure, McCourt stands accused of desertion, treachery, lying through his teeth, getting above himself, winning the Pulitzer Prize when he'd no business to be winning anything of the kind and, worst of all, of becoming, in McGoldrick's phrase, "a bloody millionaire".
Criticism like this hardly warrants a point-by-point response; it's enough to say that millions of people who have read Angela's Ashes (including the Pulitzer judges) consider it an accomplished and deeply affecting work characterised not, as his critics would have it, by self-pity, but by stoicism, irony, and great good humour. At the risk of aligning myself with the naysayers, I would rank it highly in Cyril Connolly's famous category of "good bad books"; and the way things are shaping, it's a fair bet that Angela's Ashes will survive, in print and frequently read, decades after many more highly-esteemed contemporary titles have disappeared from the bookshelves.
Maybe what really bugs people about Frank McCourt is simply that in times of prosperity and sophistication we don't want some damn Irish-American reminding us of the way we were and making a killing in the process. In the logic of the begrudger, this makes Angela's Ashes a bad book. Sensibly, the reading public have decided otherwise. - Yours, etc.,
Bert Wright, Hillside, Dalkey, Co Dublin.