Frank McCourt
AT the age of 77, Frank McCourt believes he is entering into his fourth act in life. The film script of Teacher Man has just been written and he is embarking on writing his fifth book, following the recent publication of Angela and the Baby Jesus. He spoke to ANNE SHERIDAN about why he'd like to have his ashes scattered over the River Shannon and why no one can argue with his interpretation of his life story
A LADY with a Southern Californian twang and a glamorous splash of red lipstick cups her husband's face with her hands. "Frank, you're freezing. Will you have a hot toddie?" she asks.
He looks at her incredulously and shakes his head in a child-like fashion. In a day full of promotional activities for his new book, Frank McCourt returns to the warm lobby of the Clarion Hotel, after posing for photographs overlooking the River Shannon.
"Out in the Atlantic Ocean great sheets of rain gathered to drift slowly up the River Shannon and settle forever in Limerick," he wrote in the opening pages of Angela's Ashes.
And now, even in the absence of rain, he is still memorised by the scene. His gaze drifts towards the Shannon, as he touches the liver spots on his face and his thoughts turn to mortality.
"I wouldn't like to be incapacitated, or handicapped, or die of a slow disease. I don't want to be beholden to anyone or have anyone wiping my mouth if I'm drooling. I'd just like to go. I don't want funeral services or memorials. Let them scatter my ashes over the Shannon and pollute the river."
He shouldn't even be here, he tells me - he should be six feet under with worms crawling up his nose. But perhaps there is a reason why he has been allowed to live to such a great age.
"If you live past 65 you're responsible to the rest of humanity to pass on your insights, that's why you're allowed to live a little longer. So if I'm here, there's a reason I'm here."
Dressed in an old brown jumper, a green shirt and dark pants, Frank remains unusually quiet in the presence of his second wife, Ellen, who chats giddily with Frank's press officer about her new reversable jacket and does a little twirl in front of the bar.
"Frank, we're off to Brown Thomas. See you later," she cries out. "But you won't be long," he questions sternly, and the girls laugh, and head on their merry way.
It has been a tiresome day for the author, where one interview is slotted in after another. That night he willing be launching his new book, Angela and the Baby Jesus, in O'Mahony's, where eleven years previously one of his former classmates famously tore up Angela's Ashes in front of him.
"Yes, it's hectic but there's nothing as fascinating as me talking about me. Although after this I won't want to talk about myself any more," he says.
His fourth publication could see the author finally put his past to bed and his next book, a novel, will see a departure in his previous endeavours.
His children's story focuses on his mother, Angela, who stole the Baby Jesus from St Joseph's Church as she feared he would be cold at night. She is the real author of this story, he says, and Frank is but the ghost-writer, chanelling her story through to millions of children this Christmas.
While he was back on his home-turf last Friday for little more than a day, the city is again raking up memories for the author whose fortune has been made by that miserable, Irish Catholic childhood.
His umbilical cords with Limerick, though it is no longer home, keep him "drifting back" in an attempt to disentangle his childhood.
"There's something about coming back to Limerick that's very moving - I've had such a turbulent relationship with the city. The city doesn't know it. It's what I had to write about when I finally started writing after teaching for 30 years. I had to get it out of my system, but you never do. People say it's a catharsis, but it's not. Look at me - I'm back here again."
At the age of 66, McCourt was launched into the literati stratosphere with the publication of his first book - the Pulitzer Prize winning Angela's Ashes. Literally overnight, his life changed and suddenly he became "a big-shot and a celebrity."
"My life is like something out of a movie. I wrote Angela's Ashes and boom, my life changed overnight. I have money for the first time in my life," he says bursting into life.
It still takes him by surprise that the little boy from the backlanes of Limerick has become a best-selling author, albeit a controversial author in his home town. But success, as they say, does not always bring happiness.
"Like everyone else I think I succumb to misery and emotional gravity from time to time. The world gets me down and certain parts of my life are not completely satisfactory. But I have a lot to be thankful for."
The Limerick he depicted in that book, and many have argued with that depiction, is dead and gone, and in its place "a riverside city" has been resurrected.
Like thousands of other Yanks who come here in search of their ancestry, Frank himself is still trying the navigate the past and reconcile it with the present.
"I'm looking around like someone who just landed from Mars. There are foreign voices every. I'm looking at the construction everywhere, but at the same time moaning inwardly because the Savoy cinema is gone, the Central is gone.
"I wander around in this state of awe over the changes in the place. I delight at the new atmosphere and freedom; it seems like a very youthful city - buoyant, optimistic, bursting with energy. I envy the people who are young and growing up in this city. I would have loved to have grown up in a city like this."
But had he grown up in the city of today, there would have been no Angela's Ashes, or 'Tis, or possibly Teacher Man. Nonetheless, he is confident that he would have found inspiration from somewhere.
"I wouldn't have the same material, but there's always material. I'm sure there are contradictions within the city, and there are tensions. There's despair, there's a high suicide rate in Ireland...These are all symptoms of what's going on in society. If you're observant enough you will find something. Or feel it. First of all you feel it and then you write about it."
After 30 years of teaching English and literature in New York schools, Frank set out to disprove the old mantra that "those who can do, and those who can't teach." Likewise, he takes pleasure in revoking F. Scott Fitzgerald's belief that "there are no second acts in American lives." He refused to settle for a one act existence and now believes he's entering into life's fourth act. Growing up in Limerick was the opening act, cutting it in the land of opportunity was the second, and finally sitting down to write Angela's Ashes brought him into his third act.
His story of triumphing over adversity is surely one that Hollywood will find hard to resist, and McCourt's "second act" as a New York teacher could reach the big screen before long.
The film script for Teacher Man, his third book, has just been written by the Oscar winning Ronald Bass of Rain Man fame.
Simultaneously, McCourt is approaching writing his first novel, which will focus on the modern woman, and will hone in on Irish-American women and their relationship with men. He has also begun to rewrite a play he wrote several years ago - The Irish and How They Got That Way.
The temptation to sit on his laurels, or "on the beach in the south of France" and ponder his new found wealth and good fortune, has never been an option. He needs to keep "the writing muscles alive."
"I enjoy it, I'm very lucky in that sense. I wouldn't have been satisfied if I hadn't written Angela's Ashes, that was the one thing I wanted to do. I would have died howling if I hadn't written it and asked God for just one more year."
Yet his natural aptitude as a teacher has not yet left him. His advice to "aspiring and despairing" writers is to find their own style. "If you don't," he warns, "you're dead.
"There was only one Muhammad Ali in the ring and other people tried to imitate him, but it didn't work. Don't try to write. Just scribble, scribble, scribble. If it demands it, it will be born. It will come."
Home: New York
School: Leamy's school, Limerick; New York University and Brooklyn College
Family: Second wife Ellen, children, three grandchildren
Favourite authors: PG Wodehouse and James Joyce, who had a liberating affect on me
Favourite food: Italian
Favourite holiday destination: New York, because I don't get to visit home that often
Favourite motto: I tried to be respected but failed
Life lesson: Get rid of your fears, whatever they are
On Angela's Ashes: Every little detail didn't actually occur. Of course you embellish and of course, you have fill in the blank spots of conversation. I keep quoting Gore Vidal, who said a memoir is your impression of your life.
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