LIMERICKMAN Frank McCourt's greatness as a writer is only now beginning to emerge. He may have proved himself a literary genius with the publication of Angela's Ashes. Certainly, apart from a little local difficulty in Limerick, he has been acclaimed as such all the way from the groves of Plassey to those of the Ivy League.
But one best-seller doesn't make a best-selling author. The acid test is book number two. Admittedly, the phenomenal success of Angela's Ashes was unique, making it an impossible act for even McCourt to follow.
But by any standards of success other than his own, his second book's performance is well-nigh miraculous. Have you noticed that the hardback edition of 'Tis has been in The Sunday Times top 10 best-sellers for no fewer than 35 weeks? Today, almost a year after its publication, it ranks 5th.
Is that, considering the over-exposure of Frank and the depression rained on the international public by the film of the first book, arguably not an even greater achievement than even Angela's Ashes? 'Tis indeed.
But McCourt, for all his magic, is not infallible. In 'Tis he recalls using nursery rhymes to stimulate the creativity of his upper-crust students in Stuyvesant High School. For a whole class period there was a heated discussion of Humpty Dumpty.
Who says it's an egg? I ask.
Of course it's an egg. Everyone knows that.
Where does it say it's an egg? . . . I'm not destroying. I just want to know where you get the idea that Humpty is an egg.
Because, Mr McCourt, it's in all the pictures and whoever drew the first picture musta known the guy who wrote the poem or he'd never have made it an egg.
All right. If you're content with the idea of egg we'll let it be but I know the future lawyers in this class will never accept egg where there is no evidence of egg.
In fact, as an eagle-eyed Mid-West journalist testifies, there is just such evidence. Ron Kirwan, who specialises in McCourt controversies, highlights out a passage in Lewis Carroll's book 'Alice through the looking glass' in which a sheep in a shop sold Alice an egg. The closer she got to the egg, the larger and more human it looked--until "she saw that it was Humpty Dumpty himself."
So McCourt got it wrong? Well, not quite. As Kirwan observes, Carroll can be read not only as a fairytale but as satire. Perhaps the salient point isn't that Humpty Dumpty is--or is not--an egg but that appearances can be deceptive.
McCourt, in short, was trying to get his pupils to think, not to jump to conclusions. The lad from the lanes who taught in New York may have lacked a high school diploma but he was and is an egghead, however hard-boiled.
