Another great one gone

Frank McCourt is dead. Rico says this is a sad thing, for those who loved literature and the Irish. William Grimes has an article in The New York Times on the man:

Frank McCourt, a former New York City schoolteacher who turned his miserable childhood in Limerick, Ireland, into a phenomenally popular, Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, “Angela’s Ashes,” died Sunday. He was 78 and lived in Manhattan and Roxbury, Connecticut. The cause was metastatic melanoma, said Mr. McCourt’s brother, the writer Malachy McCourt. Mr. McCourt, who had taught in the city’s school system for nearly thirty years, had always told his writing students that they were their own best material. In his mid-60s, he decided to take his own advice, sitting down to commit his childhood memories to paper and producing what he described as “a modest book, modestly written.”
In it he a childhood of terrible deprivation. After Mr. McCourt’s alcoholic father abandoned the family, his mother— the Angela of the title— begged on the streets of Limerick to keep him and his three brothers meagerly fed, poorly clothed, and housed in a basement flat with no bathroom and a thriving population of vermin. The book’s clear-eyed look at childhood misery, its incongruously lilting, buoyant prose and its heartfelt urgency struck a remarkable chord with readers and critics.
“When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all,” the book’s second paragraph begins in a famous passage. “It was, of course, a miserable childhood: The happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood. People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and all the terrible things they did to us for 800 long years.”
Angela’s Ashes, published by Scribner in 1996, rose to the top of the best-seller lists and stayed there for more than two years, selling four million copies in hardback. The next year, it won the Pulitzer Prize for biography and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Two more installments of his life story followed: ‘Tis (1999), which described his struggle to gain a foothold in New York, and Teacher Man (2005), an account of his misadventures and small victories as a public-school teacher. Both, although best sellers, did not achieve anything like the runaway success of Mr. McCourt’s first book, which the British director Alan Parker brought to the screen in 1999.
Not to be outdone, Mr. McCourt’s younger brother Malachy, an actor, brought out two volumes of his own memoirs: A Monk Swimming (1998), which also made the best-seller list, and Singing Him My Song (2000). Then, when it seemed that the McCourt tale had been well and truly told, Malachy’s son Conor gathered the four brothers, got them talking and filmed two television documentaries, The McCourts of Limerick and The McCourts of New York.
It was Angela’s Ashes that loomed over all things McCourt, however, and constituted a transformative experience for its author.Speaking to students at Bay Shore High School on Long Island in 1997, he said, “I learned the significance of my own insignificant life.”
Francis McCourt was born 30 August 1930, on Classon Avenue in Brooklyn, where his Irish immigrant parents had hoped to make a better life. It was not to be, largely because his father, Malachy, usually spent his scant laborer’s earnings at the local bar. Beaten, the family returned to Limerick when Frank was four, and the pattern repeated itself.
Three of Mr. McCourt’s six siblings died in early childhood. The family’s circumstances were so dire, he later told a student audience, that he often dreamed of becoming a prison inmate so that he would be guaranteed three meals a day and a warm bed. At home, the staple meal was tea and bread, which his mother jokingly referred to as a balanced diet: a solid and a liquid.
When Frank was eleven, his father went to work in a munitions factory in Britain and disappeared from the picture. Frank stole bread and milk, which became the family’s principal means of support. After dropping out of school at thirteen, he delivered telegrams and earned extra income writing letters for a local landlady.
In 1949, Mr. McCourt, at 19, gathered his savings and boarded a ship for New York and a new life, which began unpromisingly. At the Biltmore Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, he was put in charge of the sixty caged canaries in the public rooms. Thirty-nine of them died, whereupon Mr. McCourt taped the lifeless bodies to their perches. The ruse did not work.
A series of laboring jobs followed, interrupted by the Korean War. Drafted into the Army, Mr. McCourt served as a dog trainer and later a clerk in West Germany. Despite his lack of formal schooling, Mr. McCourt won admission to New York University, where he earned a degree in English education in 1957. A year later he began teaching at McKee Vocational High School on Staten Island, an eye-opening experience that he recalled, in often hilarious detail, in his third volume of memoirs, Teacher Man. In his first week, an unruly student threw a homemade sandwich on the floor, an act that astonished Mr. McCourt not so much for its brazenness as for the waste of good food. After appraising the sandwich with a connoisseur’s eye, he picked it up and ate it.
Mr. McCourt developed an idiosyncratic teaching style that found a somewhat more receptive audience at Stuyvesant High School, where he taught creative writing after earning a master’s degree in English from Brooklyn College in 1967. He had students sing Irish songs to break down their resistance to poetry. After discovering a sheaf of written excuses from past years, he recognized an unexplored literary genre and asked students to write, say, an excuse letter from Adam or Eve to God, explaining why he or she should not be punished for eating the apple. He even had students test themselves. “When they wrote their own tests, they asked questions they wanted answers to and then they answered them,” Mr. McCourt told the journal Instructor. “It was grand.”
On the side, Mr. McCourt made fitful stabs at writing. He contributed articles on Ireland to The Village Voice. He kept notebooks. But at the Lion’s Head in Greenwich Village, where he became friends with Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin, he felt like an interloper, he said. They were writers. He was just a teacher. “I had no idea he had the ambition, much less the ability to carry it off in such spectacular fashion,” said Mr. Hamill, who first met Mr. McCourt at the Lion’s Head in the 1960s.
In 1977, Mr. McCourt and his brother Malachy, who was acting and bartending in New York, cobbled together a series of autobiographical sketches into a two-man play, A Couple of Blaguards, which opened Off Off Broadway at the Billymunk Theater on East 45th Street. They performed a revised version at the Village Gate in 1984 and again at the Billymunk in 1986 and took their show to several other cities.
This excursion into the past, along with his nagging sense that a writing teacher should write, motivated Mr. McCourt to undertake his childhood memoirs after he retired from teaching in 1987. An early attempt, when he was studying at New York University, had fizzled out but, forty years later, he said, he had worked through his awkward, self-conscious James Joyce phase and gotten beyond the crippling anger that darkened his memories.
“After twenty pages of standard omniscient author, I wrote something that I thought was just a note to myself, about sitting on a seesaw in a playground, and I found my voice, the voice of a child,” he told The Providence Journal in 1997. “That was it. It carried me through to the end of the book.”
Still, his plans were vague. “I didn’t know what I was going to do with it, but I had to write it anyway,” he said in another interview. “I had to get it out of my system.” A persistent friend demanded to see what Mr. McCourt was writing, then turned the pages over to a literary agent, Molly Friedrich, who submitted the incomplete manuscript to Scribner. It was bought immediately.
Critics, enchanted by Mr. McCourt’s language and gripped by his story, delivered the kind of reviews that writers can only dream of. But the book was ultimately a word-of-mouth success. An instant celebrity, Mr. McCourt did his utmost to resist becoming the designated spokesman for all things Irish, “from agriculture to the decline in the consumption of claret in the west of Ireland,” as he once joked.
In Ireland itself, the reaction was mixed. “When the book was published in Ireland, I was denounced from hill, pulpit, and barstool,” he told the online magazine Slate in 2007. “Certain citizens claimed I had disgraced the fair name of the city of Limerick, that I had attacked the church, that I had despoiled my mother’s name, and that if I returned to Limerick, I would surely be found hanging from a lamppost.”
Time healed at least some wounds. Mr. McCourt was awarded an honorary doctorate by Limerick University, and curious tourists can now take Angela’s Ashes tours of the city.
In 1999, the British director Robert Parker translated the memoir to the screen, with Emily Watson as Angela (who died in 1981), Robert Carlyle as Malachy Sr. (who died in 1985) and three actors in the roles of Mr. McCourt as a small, medium-size and grown boy.
For the Irish Repertory Theater, Mr. McCourt devised a history lesson disguised as an evening of storytelling and singing, titled The Irish... and How They Got That Way. It opened in 1997 to less than rapturous reviews. His second volume of memoirs, ‘Tis, which began with his arrival in New York, also encountered rough weather from critics still giddy from the memory of Angela’s Ashes. Although his storytelling gifts were in full evidence, Mr. McCourt seemed bitter and self-pitying, a marked contrast to the stoic tone of Angela’s Ashes, putting off many readers.
With Teacher Man, Mr. McCourt rallied. Although criticized as lumpy and episodic, the book was praised for its humane inquiry into the role of the teacher and the possibilities of education.
Mr. McCourt’s first two marriages ended in divorce. In 1994 he married Ellen Frey, who survives him, as do Malachy, of Manhattan, and his other brothers, Alphie, of Manhattan, and Mike, of San Francisco; his daughter, Maggie McCourt; and three grandchildren. “I think there’s something about the Irish experience— that we had to have a sense of humor or die,” Mr. McCourt once told an interviewer. “That’s what kept us going— a sense of absurdity, rather than humor.
“And it did help because sometimes you’d get desperate,” he continued. “And I developed this habit of saying to myself, ‘Oh, well.’ I might be in the midst of some misery, and I’d say to myself, ‘Well, someday you’ll think it’s funny.’ And the other part of my head will say, ‘No, you won’t — you’ll never think this is funny. This is the most miserable experience you’ve ever had.’ But later on you look back and you say, ‘That was funny, that was absurd.’ ”