Frank Mccourt

BIO

Frank McCourt taught in the New York City public schools for twenty-seven years, the last seventeen of which were spent at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. After retiring from teaching, Frank and his brother, Malachy, performed their two-man show, A Couple of Blaguards, a musical review about their Irish Youth. In September 1996, Scribner published Frank's childhood memoir, ANGELA'S ASHES, which spent 117 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. After more than sixty-five printings, there are over 2,325,000 copies in print in North America alone. The book is available in eighteen countries. Frank McCourt was the winner of the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) Award in Biography/Autobiography, The Boston Book Review's Non-Fiction prize, the ABBY Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Time Magazine and Newsweek chose ANGELA'S ASHES as the best nonfiction book of 1996. The hardcover of ANGELA'S ASHES spent 23 weeks at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. The Alan Parker film of ANGELA'S ASHES, starring Emily Watson, was released to wide acclaim in 1999.

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INTERVIEW

February 19, 1997

BRC: It's a pleasure to have a writer as our guest who is now said to have done for Limerick what Joyce did for Dublin. How can you keep your balance in the face of such an outrageous comparison?

FM: How do you know I have kept my balance? I haven't had time to stand back and become an egomaniac. I take humility pills. There is no comparison between Joyce and me. He had a planned approach to his writing. He was an intellectual. I don't have much time for Portrait of an Artist. How would YOU like to spend an evening with Stephen Daedalus?

BRC: Do you have the feeling that you waited 30 years for this moment, and that you might as well bloody enjoy it?

FM: Oh yeah. Now there is what publishers call "momentum.." Might as well enjoy it. I was haunted by the first book. Now I'm haunted by the second....the miserable 20s. I wasn't equipped to handle America --- or women. Poverty robs you of self esteem, and that makes you angry. I always got into fights --- drunk or sober. And I had no experience with women --- so I got married three times.I like getting letters now. People tell me it helps them with understanding alcoholism....what they call "the Irish problem."

BRC: We're are now 7 minutes into this conversation, and you haven't blamed the Church yet.

FM: I could blame the Church and my parents --- blame blame blame. I used to think the priests were bright. Now I see they were mediocre. The Church is an ingenious institution. It sets up the sins --- then says, if you do it, come to us. As children, we were in a state of terror over Mortal Sin. Sometimes I was afraid to go to sleep for fear of waking up in Hell! I don't think kids believe this any more. Also, the priests lacked compassion --- they never came into the slums. They'd come when someone was dying. For the last rites. Or, once a year, to take up a collection. They preached poverty, but they never embraced it. Spiritually, emotionally, psychologically, they dominated.

BRC: Could you tell us more about the sequel to Angela's Ashes?

FM: I'm working on it. It's about my 20s. Maybe it will go to the birth of my daughter in 1971. But it could go all the way up to tonight.

BRC: Do you have a permanent e-mail address?

FM: Yes. It's FRANKM6940 --- on America Online. Not that I ever look at it! I'm afraid of computers....

BRC: Frank, I loved your book. I was curious if you've ever considered writing any fiction.

FM: Yes. I'd like to write a novel and a play before I die. I will have to write fiction because of some former wives.

BRC: You talk a great deal --- and compassionately --- about your father's drinking. Did he pass this on to you? And if so, how did you break the cycle (if you did)?

FM: First of all, I was teaching. Try to face 5 classes of adolescents with a hangover --- they'll eat you alive. My three brothers don't drink any more --- and they were in the bar business. I take two or three glasses of wine now.... but I don't want to waste the morning. I was never an alcoholic, though. I don't have those demons.

BRC: What singlemost thing accounts for the wonderful sense of humor that emerged from such dire poverty in your early years?

FM: A sense of absurdity about the priests, the schoolmasters, the people who handed out the dole. What was the alternative --- whining? When you have nothing --- no TV, no radio, no music --- you have only the language. So you use it. We were street kids --- we saw the absurdity and laughed at it. And we were fools; we were always dreaming. Bacon and eggs --- we dreamed of that. We laughed at diets! We heard Americans did that! Seemed ridiculous. We'd sit at dinner, still hungry as always, and say, "I don't want anymore" --- as if we had enough. Just saying that sent us into stitches.

BRC: There are hardly any women in your book --- your mother, your aunt & grandma, & a few girls your age that you meet in odd places. Where were all the girls in Limerick? Why didn't you know many?

FM: That's that I'd like to know --- where were the girls? Girls were sins. We had nothing to do with them. I met some in my late teens....but it was too late then., I was on my way to America. You'd go to dances but you were afraid to do anything, because you might sin.

BRC: Do you feel that the way you experienced poverty as a child is still a reality in Ireland today?

FM: No. It's a booming economy now. It has drugs and fornication and divorce --- it has everything. And U2 and Van Morrison and Sinead. And traffic jams. There are poor people, but it's not as desperate. More social services. Kids don't leave school at 13.

BRC: When you see a movie like IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER, you don't don't have to be Irish to want to kill British judges and soldiers. Where are you on Irish independence?

FM: I think the English should get out. There can be no agreement while the English are there. They're getting out of Hong Kong this year. Ireland is next. They say the sun never sets on the British empire --- well, baby, it's setting.

BRC: Did anyone have compassion? I saw no sign of it in priests, brothers, nurses, family, etc.

FM: Not true! There are two kind priests --- once when I was looking for my father.... and I stole food...and another at the end when I was weeping over Theresa... and there was an encouraging schoolmaster. It wasn't unrelieved cruelty.

BRC: If someone, perhaps the Angel on the Seventh Stair, had told you that one day you would be a famous author, what would your reaction have been?

FM: I would say, "The Devil sent you." I could never believe I would be #1 on the NY Times. I thought this would be a modest book, kindly received and forgotten. Now there might be Cliff Notes --- and kids looking for the deeper meaning.

BRC: Do you still have your Irish accent and do you go back to visit Limerick and the places you wrote about?

FM: Still have the accent. I was back a lot last year because of the book. You can buy the audio of the book --- I did it. It's in all fine bookstores.

BRC: Over the years, you took tons of notes....you had your memories ready to go, it seems. As you ended your 30 year teaching career, were you itching to write? And how hard was the book to write? Flaubert speaks of weeping as he wrote the death of Bovary --- were you affected by your own writing?

FM: I was madman when I was writing. I sat in a room alone, writing in longhand, weeping and laughing. Hard to deal with my father abandoning us.... and the babies dying. Those gave me tears... but tears of sorrow mingled with tears of laughter. That's very Irish. But yes, it was very hard to write about my father and mother. It was...grinding.

BRC: Might there be a movie in the works based on the book?

FM: Yep. David Brown and Scott Rudin will produce it. I'll be involved, but I won't write it.

BRC: Were you always planning on writing Angella's Ashes, or did you decide to do it late in life?

FM: Not that book as such, but I thought I'd write about growing up.... I thought it might be a play about my mother dying. The miracle was discoveriong the voice of a child -- that just happened. I wrote three or four pages....and then I wrote one sentence: I'm in a playground in Brooklyn, I'm 4 years old --- and I was on my way.

BRC: Were any of your friends in Limerick able to make it out of poverty?

FM: Yes! Most of them went on. Many died from TB. Or alcohol..... But others did very nicely --- their children go to college. It's just sad that so many fell by the wayside in England. They worked hard jobs and just didn't know how to take care of themselves.

BRC: How did you get by when you first came to America? How did you start teaching?

FM: It was a while. I had a lot of menial jobs. The Biltmore Hotel. A hat factory. Then I was drafted. When I got out of the Army, there was the GI bill. I walked past New York University. I had no high school education, but they let me in. If I had a B average, they said I could stay. I finished collrege in 3 and a half years and became a teacher.

BRC: I taught screenwriting for a decade at NYU. My feeling was that although I was good at it, no one got more out of my classes than me. Did you feel that way?

FM: We have that in common. As I was supposedly teaching writing, I was really learning. They asked about my life, I told them stories --- I was dropping seeds, beginning to remember anecdotes. And then it began to coalesce. I had the material, but not the tone. Still, the teaching was a big big cause. It brought it all together. And it gives me satisfaction to have written this book --- as if I've told my students: see, it wasn't all blather.

BRC: I think the thing that really struck me was the daily annoyances, like the constant flea bites and not being able to wash. How did you live with conjunctivitis and all that itching without going crazy? Did it become routine?

FM: It does become routine. You shrug it off. You see people in Africa with flies swarming --- they shrug it off. You never get used to lice --- they were hard to kill. We were cold and hungry. We'd see movies about America and gape. We knew we'd get out somehow....we knew we couldn't give in. Conjunctivitis stayed with me till my 50s. I have no eyelashes on my lower eyelids. On a windy day, the world gets to me!

BRC: My grandmother grew up in a poor setting --- not much to eat, etc. She now keeps an over-stocked refrigerator and is compulsive about grocery shopping. Is your refrigerator always full, too?

FM: No, it's a very empty place. My attitude toward food is like my father's: I can take it or leave it. I have developed a peculiar dish: Irish toast. Toast soaked in whiskey. The toast gets soggy. You throw it away. And then you drink the whiskey!

BRC: So much death in your history, and no one really seemed to explain it to you when you were a child. How did you make sense of it and deal with it?

FM: I didn't make sense of it. It just happened. Like my father's alcoholism. Making sense is an American idea. We just accepted it --- and that was what the Church taught us. Remember, the Church had all the answers. My two brothers and sister were up in Heaven, nice and warm, drinking tea.

BRC: Do you ever feel now like a "fish out of water" --- an Irishman when you're in America, and a Yank when you're in Ireland?

FM: No. I'm a New Yorker. That's all I am. As Scott Fitzgerald said, "When you leave New York, you're camping out." But I'm still haunted by Limerick and seduced by Ireland.

BRC: Did you ever forgive your father, your mother and those relatives who were so cold?

FM: I don't forgive anyone because it doesn't occur to me. It's pompous to go around forgiving people. I hope I'm not pompous. To say you forgive is to put yourself above others. I'm a big big sinner.

BRC: We have now committed the sin of overstaying our welcome. We have loved this, and hope to see you again long before your next book.

FM: That gives us plenty of space!

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