DOUBLE FEATURE
Just why I would remember having read two kindred books at about the same time – February 1999, at this particular time when we have are marking the 2nd Anniversary of the downing of the Trade Towers in New York City, puzzles me.
I can't explain why that should come to mind unless it could be that I have been thinking how we, as a people, have shared in such a large fund of miseries over many years and survived to become and even better than we wee before in some strange way.
Life itself is largely a series of disquieting incidents. So often we are living soap opera. The difference being, of course, that a series of dire events is compressed into a time limit of just a few days or weeks on the popular radio-TV format. It real life it takes years and the stress and trying circumstances seem less ominous even as we live through each of them.
BOUND FOR GLORY – of and about Woody Guthie and ANGELA'S ASHES, by Frank McCourt. Those two book of which I write, are so very much alike, and, at the same time so different from each other,
I was reading the Guthie book when friend Nora Howell offered me a copy of the then “best seller” McCourt hit. I kept Woody as my “upstairs” book and Angela was my “downstairs” book for that week. The writers were both men who grew up during the years of the Great Depression, through the Roosevelt era and into early phase phases of World War II. That was, essentially, my own time , so we were had been hardened against pretty much the same things and I found ready comparisons and contrasts along the way. We each saw them in a difference light, of course.
The one lived in Oklahoma and Texas and the other In Ireland for the most part - having been born in Brooklyn and migrated back to Ireland when things got tough here. Both had miserable home living conditions.
Each writer undertook the task of telling of his childhood years and passage into manhood. Both made an attempt to be completely honest and both succeed in a way, yet I sense things were being held back from time to time - the better things, too, I fear, largely because both books depend on this situation of abysmal poverty which is to be kept in the forefront at all times.
I have many memories of doing without things during the Depression years but, compared to either of these boys, we had it very nice all the way, it seems. I can understand the poverty depicted but that people would actuality choose to live in filth and squalor is beyond my comprehension. For dramatic purposes they choose to dwell on the bad things and let the good things ride, I fear.
Guthie impressed me with his sense of what is dramatic and how to key it to a climax. McCourt will probably become best known for writing a lengthy book without using a single set of quotation marks. This freak quality hurts his story, at times and confuses honest readers.
It is good to read the two books concurrently to realize the differences between Ireland and Oklahoma, and how the people lived in relation to those different circumstances.
By comparing the troubles met by the people in these two books of my own era, I have had a life '- thus far, at least, which can only be termed as being “a piece of cake”.
A.L.M. September 13, 2003 [c656wds]
