Memoirist McCourt discusses writing, newfound fame

Frank McCourt's account of a famously damp and miserable childhood in Ireland is larded with hunger and penury, garnished with cold and pain and alcohol.

Published after a portion of it caused a sensation in the pages of The New Yorker in the spring of 1996, it has become the book of the year. Its readers are legion, both low-born and high-brow. Step into a cafeteria, a waiting room, a boardroom, a bus: Someone is reading "Angela's Ashes."

McCourt, 67, has won a Pulitzer Prize, been lionized, lauded, trotted about, gone from being a retired New York high school teacher to a celebrity.

These days, McCourt is doing the Famous Authors reel, from book-signing to lecture to interview.

Earlier this year, at an appearance at Loomis-Chaffee School in Windsor, Conn., McCourt took some time out from his speaking schedule to talk about "Angela's Ashes," his life before and his life since.

Perhaps because of the setting, perhaps because there are arrayed before him three students, three springlike girls who might be mistaken for the Three Graces if the Graces were named Michelle and Leah and Megan and worked for a school paper, McCourt talked about being a teacher.

In most of the years between the end of "Angela's Ashes" and the beginning of fame (he is recently retired), McCourt taught. After the Army and a G.I. Bill ride at New York University, he taught for 30 years, mostly at the high school level, longest and most notably at Stuyvesant High School, an exclusive public high school in lower Manhattan.

It was there, in part, that he honed his stories. "Maybe 10 percent were stories I had told before, as a teacher," he says, his voice whirring and buzzing its Irishness. "It's not that I told the stories before, but when you're teaching English, the kids are asking about your life, and the stories begin to coalesce ... and when you're teaching, you have to be direct and clear or you lose the class."

There is nothing finer in the art of conversation than watching an Irishman warm to a story, and that is what is happening as he speaks.

"You talk about the best things that ever happened to you, like falling in love, you never forget that. Well, something significant happened. Or I made it happen." His face is flat and circular like a grandfather clock, and he is, inexplicably, wearing socks festooned with tiny Christmas trees. The Three Graces are mesmerized.

"I was teaching at a vocational high school on Staten Island, McKee Vocational. The kids were all in auto mechanics, machine shop, sheet metal" - he says these words plain, with no hint of derision - "and these kids had no interest whatsoever in going to English class." McCourt had available to his juniors two novels, "Silas Marner" and "Giants in the Earth," "which I think is the dreariest novel ever written. It's about a bunch of Swedes, and their main occupation is thinking about suicide."

"So I said to the class one day - this is a class of auto mechanics and sheet metal - I said to the kids, 'We're going to read Shakespeare.'"

McCourt buys 35 copies of "Five Plays of Shakespeare."

"So they have the books, and they're walking around with them, and people are very suspicious, 'Hey, yo,' in the hallways, 'What's that?' 'It's a book.' 'What is it?' 'Shakespeare.' And suddenly, I think the kids began to feel a little exalted, because they were carrying Shakespeare. ... And their friends began to look at them very strangely

" ... Because you were carrying Shakespeare, because you were carrying a book, period.

"We acted it out. I told them there would be no tests, no exam. Everybody would pass. Just come to class and participate."

He goes on, about how Shakespeare caught fire. And 10 or 11 years pass, and the Shakespeare students plan a reunion, and they invite their old teacher. "It's a big room, at a steakhouse. And I walked into the steakhouse, and they all came running toward me, young men and women now, reciting. And I stood in that doorway, and I wept."

He talks about the first version of "Angela's Ashes," written 30 years ago. "Here is the paradox, the irony. I was telling the students, 'Write simply, write honestly, just tell your story.' ... Then I would go to write my own story, and I was imitating people, Hemingway and Faulkner and most of all Joyce," he says. "I hadn't yet found the voice of the child."

And about the explosion of memoirs - it's nothing new. Generals have always written their memoirs. But now it's ordinary people, cousins to the "fat women from Alabama" who populate TV talk shows.

And about his parents: his father, for whom "it was the drink" and the Depression, and his mother, who "married the wrong man" - milder sentiments than those in the book.

And about the last time he saw his father, in 1974 in Belfast, and how he had "a polite conversation" with him. "If I hadn't been a teacher, I think I would have kept the anger longer."

As he left to speak to a colloquy, resuming the Famous Authors reel, McCourt took a brief tour of Loomis-Chaffee. The grounds of the school, that fine day, fairly quivered with spring, its lushness straining to burst through a proper New England discretion about seasons. All in all, in river and brick and bird and lawn, the sense at Loomis-Chaffee was of a place that had taken God's general notion of spring and improved upon it.

Frank McCourt, of Limerick and Manhattan, is taking in the scene. He turns to his guide. "Do people go mad here?" he asks, straight-faced. "From the serenity?"

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