Frank McCourt was born on August 19, 1930, on Classon Avenue on the edge of the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, to Irish parents, Malachy McCourt (1901–1986) and Angela Sheehan (1908–1981). His parents had emigrated to New York to make a better life. It was not to be, largely because his father, Malachy, usually spent his scant labourer’s earnings at the local bar. Beaten, the family returned to Limerick when Frank was four, and the pattern repeated itself.
Three of Franks’s six siblings died in early childhood.
Their father, Malachy, from Toome in County Antrim, was often without work, but drank with the little money he did earn. When Frank was 11, his father left to work in the factories of wartime Coventry in England. He sent little money to the family, leaving Frank’s mother to raise four surviving children, often by begging. At home, the staple meal was tea and bread, which his mother jokingly referred to as a balanced diet.
Frank’s schooling ended at 13, when the Christian Brothers rejected him. He then held odd jobs and even stole bread and milk in an effort to provide for his mother and three surviving brothers, Malachy, Michael (San Francisco), and Alphie (Manhattan).
When he was 19 he left Ireland in October, 1949, on the MS Irish Oak that was supposed to stop in New York City but instead went up to Albany, NY. He took a train into New York City with a priest he had met on the ship, who got him a room to stay in and his job at New York City’s Biltmore Hotel making about $26 a week and sending $10 of it to his mother in Limerick.
In 1951 he was drafted during the Korean War and was sent to Bavaria, Germany, for two years initially training dogs, then as a clerk. Upon his discharge from the US army, he returned to New York City, where he held a series of jobs on docks, in warehouses, and in banks.
Using his GI Bill, Frank talked his way into NYU by claiming he was intelligent and read a lot and was allowed in on one year’s probation provided he maintained a B average. He graduated in 1957 with a Bachelor’s degree in English. 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, he picked it up and ate it.
He developed an idiosyncratic teaching style that found a somewhat more receptive audience at the elite 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 recognised 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 made fitful stabs at writing on the side. 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.
In 1977, Frank 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 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 three decades later, he said, he had worked through his awkward, self-conscious James Joyce phase and had gotten beyond the crippling anger that darkened his memories.
A Note to Myself
“After 20 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.” The result was Angela’s Ashes, published in 1977.
Critics, enchanted by his 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. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Limerick University, and curious tourists can now take Angela’s Ashes tours of the city.
In 1999 Alan Parker translated the memoir to the screen, with Emily Watson as Angela, Robert Carlyle as Malachy Sr, and three actors in the roles of Frank McCourt as a small, medium-size and grown boy.
However, 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 fully evident, he was taken to task by many critics for being bitter and self-pitying, a marked contrast to the stoic tone of Angela’s Ashes.”
With Teacher Man, he rallied. Although criticised as lumpy and episodic, the book was praised for its humane inquiry into the role of the teacher and the possibilities of education.
Frank McCourt’s first two marriages ended in divorce. In 1994 he married Ellen Frey McCourt. She survived him, as did his daughter, Maggie McCourt of Burlington, Vt., and three grandchildren. He died in Manhattan on July 19, 2009. The cause was metastatic melanoma.
Biblio
* Angela’s Ashes (1996)
* ‘Tis (1999)
* Teacher Man (2005)
* Angela and the Baby Jesus (2007)