Frank McCourt, a return to "Angela's Ashes"

In no way is my blog turning into an obituary column and I may have been "commanded" not to write about you know who when he died, but I must dedicate my writings today to Frank McCourt. A school teacher and Author who still no matter how many times I read his writings, (the only books besides Dickens and Austen I have read more than once), I still laugh and cry and come away feeling that I have just talked to a very special and wonderful person.

Frank McCourt was 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." He died on July 19, 2009, at the age of 78.

The poignancy of his writings always stick with me - because his story was not a story of extremely well written fiction - but rather a sad, gut wrenching and often hilariously humorous journal of his young life.

"When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all," the book's second paragraph begins, in a now 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."

I swear that last line will be included with other literary quotes from great writers.


I assume most of us can look back at our childhood and remember what we imagined was one filled with horror and deprivation. I know I grew up in a home filled with mental, physical and psychological abuse - an alcoholic father who died when I was 14and who I tried to help in my own childish way and a mother who felt religion would somehow save us all. But no way in hell could it ever compete with the unbelievably horrific up-bringing he and his brothers against all odds survived.

I often thought Charles Dickens wrote about it in "Oliver Twist", Frank McCourt lived it.

In it Mr. McCourt described a childhood of terrible deprivation. After his 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.

"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 Robert Parker brought to the screen in 1999.

Born in New York

Francis McCourt was born Aug. 19, 1930, on Classon Avenue on the edge of the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of 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 4, 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 11, 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 13, 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. Finding a job at the Biltmore Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, he was put in charge of the 60 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.

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.

“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.’ ”


These are the lessons you get from reading any of Frank McCourts writing - his example of what people are capable of with the will to live and the ultimate spirit of human survival. The lesson to remember that time really does heal all wounds and the ability to remember that in time all life's hardships (or what we consider) will seem "funny and absurd."

I truly think that "Angela's Ashes" should be part of the mandatory reading curriculum and help the young of today to reflect on what life could have been like, next time they don't get the latest release of Play Station, or IPOD, or when their sneakers are not as cool as other kids.

For us adults, perhaps when we look back on our lives - to count on the fact that as Frank McCourt said: “I learned the significance of my own insignificant life.”

As in Shakespear's Hamlet: "Goodnight sweet Prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest."



Til later