Fighting Irish

Our infatuation with all things Irish is a hopeful sign in post-modern America.

Rumors that the Irish Republic has considered changing its name to "Frank McCourt" are without foundation. Yet in the present craze for everything Irish, not least Mr. McCourt's memoir-turned-cottage-industry, Angela's Ashes, something odd is going on.

The mania for Ireland that has spread over American culture in the late Nineties isn't as strange as would be a mania for, say, Guatemala or Bulgaria. After all, 14 per cent of Americans claim Irish ancestry. On the other hand, most of the folk who have been devouring Irish books, TV series, tours, and dance shows are not of that number. Of the friends and acquaintances who have enthused to me about Riverdance or Lord of the Dance, Angela's Ashes or A Monk Swimming, none is Irish even in part.

The craze commenced with Riverdance, Michael Flatley's extravaganza of Irish jigs and reels rechoreographed as if for the Rockettes, performed by men in black hot pants and women in black brassieres. First seen in the U.S. at Radio City Music Hall in early 1996, Riverdance begot Lord of the Dance, currently being performed by several cloned troupes in America and Europe. The franchise deal has allowed Mr. Flatley, by now a superstar, to retire, a very rich man, to Monaco.

Angela's Ashes, concerning Mr. McCourt's impoverished childhood in Limerick, appeared later the same year and has resided near the top of the New York Times best-seller list for 107 weeks. In June of this year it was joined there by A Monk Swimming, a sort of sequel by McCourt's younger brother Malachy, which picks up where Ashes left off. The youngest McCourt brother, Alphie, is at work on his own memoir, while middle brother Michael has startled the literary world by declining to follow suit. Visitors to Limerick can take a McCourt Tour of the locales described in Ashes, just as visitors to Dublin tour the real-life settings for Ulysses.

And the proprietors of the McCourt Tour can be assured of good business: in the past four years, tourism to Ireland from the U.S. has doubled. When they go, no doubt a large portion of those American tourists carry in their suitcases still another best-seller: Thomas Cahill's How the Irish Saved Civilization, in which Cahill explains how Irish monks preserved the classics after the Roman Empire expired.

Naturally Hollywood has cashed in on the phenomenon. If the details of Ireland's political discontents remain as opaque as ever to most Americans, that's not because we haven't watched enough movies about twentieth-century Irish history, from Michael Collins, with Liam Neeson as the outstanding martyr of the Troubles, to The Devil's Own, with Brad Pitt as an IRA heartthrob on a shopping trip to New York for surface-to-air missiles.

Another cinematic theme-working-class Irish Americans residing in outer-borough New York City or in South Boston-was first explored in The Brothers McMullen and Good Will Hunting, and this season has been taken up mightily by television. There's Costello on Fox: a gruesomely vulgar and unfunny sitcom, sure to be a hit, about an Irish-American bar girl in South Boston. It will soon be joined by a couple of dramatic series, on NBC and CBS, both about Irish-American brothers: a trio in Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan (cop, priest, criminal) and a quartet in Boston (cop, cop, cop, fireman).

Broadway has been equally awash in Eire, notably the doted-upon Beauty Queen of Leenane (frustrated love in a small Irish town); also St. Nicholas (about an Irish drama critic), The Cripple of Inishman (a differently abled Irishman goes to America), not to mention The Irish . . . and How They Got That Way (a revue by the inevitable Frank McCourt).

What's it all about, Alphie? Why can America not get its fill of Ireland? Yes, Angela's Ashes is a terrific book, though technically it falls into the already overfull publishing category of the Misery Memoir. No miserable aspect of life for a poor Limerick boy goes unnoted by Mr. McCourt. Yet the misery is told with great charm and humor and in a voice that comes through as distinctly as if you were listening to a soundtrack. McCourt does this not the easy way, with heavy dialect, but in little things like the Irish habit of employing the definite article where we wouldn't. "I thought," Frankie recalls after he sees his father sobbing in a pub at the death of Frankie's baby brother, "if you're a man you can cry only when you have the black stuff [before you] that is called the pint." It's that wonderful the in front of pint that makes you hear Ireland.

Malachy McCourt's book falls short of his brother's, being mainly a string of stories all more or less summarizable as follows: Arr-here's-another-crazy-thing-I-did-when-I-was-a-lad. And, apart from The Brothers McMullen, it's downhill from there, reaching the bottom of the Guinness barrel with Costello.

If it is not strictly artistic achievement we are drawn to in Ireland and the Irish, what then? An English friend of mine has a theory. He points to Jonathan Foreman's article in NR about Hollywood's recent tendency to make movie villains English ("Big Bad Brits," April 20). More than any other nation, England represents the great tradition of rules and standards that contemporary Americans have been led to fear and despise. In the Irish, says this Brit, we find the antithesis of that tradition. As Thomas Cahill puts it, the Irish in our imagination "are wild, feckless, and charming, or morose, repressed, and corrupt," but in any case "not especially civilized."