Frank McCourt—writer, teacher, racounteur—has died, and the world is a little less, well—Irish for it— the irony being that McCourt was as American as anyone for as Irish as he was. And in the last 13 years of his life, since the publication of his first memoir Angela’s Ashes, McCourt celebrated the “second act” of his American life (which F. Scott Fitzgerald famously denied could exist) with a gusto that made up for its unfortunate brevity.
I discovered Frank McCourt when I picked up Angela’s Ashes shortly before a vacation to Ireland several years ago. I didn’t really know what it was about except it was a famous book by an Irish writer and thought it might be good background material for our trip.
I read its iconic opening line, "Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood," and I was hooked. Memoir is one of my favorite forms and McCourt is, to my mind, one of the best that ever was. His distinctive stream-of-consciousness passages of quoteless dialogue pulled me in to his world at a visceral level, and his uncanny ability to capture the thoughts and feelings of every age of that miserable childhood from four on up walking a razor’s edge of heartbreak and humor opened my eyes to a whole new level of what memoir could be.
McCourt showed me that a life, any life, when explored with achingly funny honesty and a sense of amazement at the absurdity and wonder of it all, transcends experience to become not simply a chronicle of one life, but a chronicle of life, this one-go-round take-it-or-leave-it proposition.
McCourt followed Angela’s Ashes with ‘Tis, the sequel that covers his life as a young to middle-aged man in New York from 1949 into the ‘70s, and Teacher Man, which chronicles his 30-year career as a teacher in New York City schools. Though not as dramatic as the narrative of his childhood in Ireland, I found ’Tis to be perhaps even more poignant, as McCourt perfectly captures the awareness of those moments in adult life when you know you will never again be who you were.
My favorite passage of his is a sentence (and yes it’s all one sentence) from ‘Tis set on the docks with a mid-20s McCourt on lunch break with a fellow dockworker, an older black man who befriended him.
It’s ham and cheese slathered with mustard and we wash it down with a quart of Rheingold passing the bottle back and forth, and I have a sudden thought and a feeling that I’ll never forget this hour on the pier with Horace with seagulls circling for what might come and ships strung along the Hudson waiting for tugboats to dock them or push them out to the Narrows, traffic rushing behind us and over our heads on the West Side Highway, a radio in a pier office with Vaughn Monroe singing “Buttons and Bows,” Horace offering me another chunk of sandwich telling me I could use a few pounds on my bones and his surprised look when I nearly drop the sandwich, nearly drop it because of the weakness in my heart and the way tears are dropping on the sandwich and I don’t know why, can’t explain it to Horace or myself with the power of this sadness that tells me this won’t come again, this sandwich, this beer on the pier with Horace that makes me feel so happy all I can do is weep with the sadness in it and I feel so foolish I’d like to rest my head on his shoulder and he knows that because he moves closer, puts his arm around me as if I were his own son, the two of us black, or white, or nothing, and it doesn’t matter because there’s nothing to do but put down the sandwich where a seagull swoops in and gobbles it and we laugh, Horace and I, and he puts in my hand the whitest handkerchief I’ve ever seen and when I offer it back he shakes his head, keep it, and I tell myself I’ll keep that handkerchief till my last breath.
And I’m sure he did.
Thanks, Frank—for everything. I’ll miss you.
