Remembering the Full Frank McCourt

Frank McCourt was a reporter's dream. Sure, he was a great writer. With the Pulitzer prize-winning Angela's Ashes, his wrenching account of a "miserable Irish childhood" in the slums of Limerick, he established himself as one of the premier memoirists of our time. And he was a warm and intelligent man in the bargain. But if you ever had to cover him as journalist, you felt like you'd used up all your good luck for a month. And "cover him" isn't entirely accurate, because that implies some degree of labor, and with McCourt—who died Sunday at the age of 78, of metastatic melanoma—it was always no sweat. In all of our encounters (two trips to Ireland, a long day in New York City, and numerous phone interviews), I always suspected that if I left him alone in a room with my tape recorder, I could come back two hours later and transcribe what he had said in my absence and the story would've written itself. He wasn't a blabbermouth. He was simply the most eloquent person I've ever interviewed. (Story continued below...)

In the summer of 1997, I followed him on a book tour of Ireland. It was a hectic week, with stops in Galway, Sligo, Dublin, Cork, and every small town in-between big enough to boast a bookstore. Throughout the week, in store after store, he was unflappable, agreeably chatting, signing books, and answering questions from reporters, fans, and the merely curious. But the fifth stop was Limerick, his hometown, and it made him uneasy. Driving in that morning, he'd said, "It's Limerick you worry about. Limerick is where the experts are."

Sure enough, at O'Mahony's bookstore, there was Billy Campbell, little Frankie's boyhood friend, all grown up and wearing an L.A. Dodgers cap and looking bored when asked whether McCourt got it right in his book. "Accurate enough," he murmured. Then, as if he was afraid he'd sounded stingy, he said, "Frankie has the gift. He brought it all back. There's a lot in there we hadn't remembered." Then a man walked up to the table where McCourt was signing books, threw a yellowed photograph on the table and said, "Do you know what that is?" Of course—it was the photograph of his class at Leamy's National School, the picture in the front of his book. "Which one am I?" the man demanded. McCourt couldn't say. That provoked a tirade. "You've insulted the fair name of Ireland, you've besmirched the fair name of Limerick, and you've insulted your poor dead mother. Here's what I think of your book." Thereupon he tore his copy in two.

McCourt's voice took on a hard edge when he began to address the crowd a few minutes later. "I can do no more than tell the truth," he began. "People who think I have insulted Ireland or Limerick or my family have not read the book!" An ovation drowned out whatever he said next. Then he began to read, and the rancor evaporated from his voice.

"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. 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." As it had every time he read it on the tour, that line got a big laugh, but the mood of the Limerick reading was different from all the others. The bleak passages that McCourt picked to read far outnumbered the funny stories, beginning with the ingredients of his childhood—"the poverty; the shiftless, loquacious, alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters." He stopped reading and told of going through his mother's things after she died. "She kept a sort of diary, and the very first thing she wrote in there was 'I must have been the most unfortunate creature God ever made.' " Hearing that—and maybe it was hearing it in Limerick, the city where the story took place—I finally understood that to McCourt, Angela's Ashes, for all its art, was first and last the marrow of his life and the life of his family.

If he had a weakness, it was his vulnerability to those charges that he had embroidered the truth, or merely made things up. I teased him about it, partly out of a reporter's reluctance to be taken in, partly to see how many ways he could find to answer the question. How did he remember so much? And so far back? After all, the earliest memory in Angela's Ashes takes place when he's 3, five decades before the book appeared. "We had nothing, no television, no radio, nothing to get in the way," McCourt said at one point. "We read by the streetlight at the top of the lane, and we acted out the stories. [My brother] Malachy and I would do P. G. Wodehouse, still do. But otherwise there was no secondhand material. You saw the various habits and conditions of your neighbors. The uncluttered life is the key to a good memory." 

But my favorite explanation, because it so perfectly captured his blend of self-effacement and self-mockery, came after the dust-up at the Limerick bookstore, when McCourt admitted that he had erred at least once, a mistake he discovered on a previous journey to his hometown. It had happened at yet another book signing, he said, when a man approached and introduced himself as Willie Harrell, one of the boys that little Frankie McCourt grew up with. "Weak and leaning on a stick and looking like he was 100 years old," Harrell congratulated McCourt on a fine job of writing. Then he leaned across the table and said, "In your book you give me a sister, and Frankie, I had no sister." McCourt shook his head at the memory. "This was true. Somehow or other, I invented a sister for him who had none. But we chatted awhile, and finally Willie says, 'Frankie, I'd love a copy of your book. But I'm on the pension these days, and I was wondering, could you see letting me have a copy?' " And McCourt, still embarrassed, said of course he could. "That's fine, then," Willie said, "you let me have this book, Frankie, and we'll be forgetting about the sister."