| ||||||||||
|
Mood:
 sadBy RINKER BUCK, The Hartford Courant Baltimore Sun July 19, 2009 Frank McCourt, the Irish-American storyteller who parlayed the miseries of a Limerick upbringing into an extraordinary late-life literary blooming, died of cancer Sunday in New York City.  McCourt, 78, had spent the past 13 years buoyantly touring the globe on reading tours and writing two sequels to his 1996 best-seller, "Angela's Ashes," which sold more than 5 million copies and was translated into more than 20 languages.He had been undergoing treatment for skin cancer in recent years and been released in early June from New York's Memorial Sloan Kettering Center to recuperate at his Roxbury home. Two weeks ago he was diagnosed with meningitis, a frequent complication of patients whose immune systems are compromised by cancer treatment, and McCourt was moved to a New York hospice where over the past few days family and friends from around the world had gathered at his bedside. During the past decade McCourt had become a familiar, popular figure and a kind of permanent cultural resource around Connecticut. In 1999 he spent $1.2 million of his "Angela's Ashes" proceeds on a converted, eight-room barn on Roxbury's Tophet Road, in the heart of the Litchfield County arts community, comfortably settling in and making friends with neighbors such as Bill and Rose Styron, Arthur Miller and Candace Bushnell. At Marty's Café in nearby Washington Depot, McCourt loved to dawdle over coffee and swap tales with friends, astonishing tourists who dropped in and saw the famous writer holding court. He considered his public speaking prowess inseparable from his role as a writer and accepted several invitations a year to appear at charitable fund-raisers and writing workshops at Connecticut's community college campuses. His name on the marquee of the Warner Theater in Torrington or Hartford's Bushnell guaranteed a sellout audience. In private conversations, as well as before audiences, McCourt was an effortless, comic entertainer. The essence of his storytelling success was an exacting verbal parody. Whether he was mimicking a British aristocrat defending the persecution of the Irish, or the unctuous "droning" of Irish Catholic priests, McCourt's intonation and timing were both flawless and fatally sarcastic. Most of all, McCourt loved to lampoon himself, an appealing self-depreciation that took the edge off his mordant stereotypes of others. His stories about working at the Biltmore hotel in New York, where he was assigned to feed the birds in the lobby (the birds died), or of training U.S. Army dogs in Germany (the dogs would only attack him), reduced his audiences to tears of laughter. McCourt's life, in a way, was one long rehearsal for "Angela's Ashes." Long before the book catapulted him to international fame, McCourt was well known in New York literary and theater circles for performing a hilariously madcap version of his Limerick stories, a "Couple of Blagards," with his brother Malachy. He also enjoyed a devoted following among high school students in New York, where, as a creative writing teacher, McCourt relieved the tedium of weekly classes by entertaining his classes with the tragicomic tales of his Irish youth. It was only after quitting teaching in the early 1990s, encouraged by family and friends, that McCourt found the time and discipline to turn 30 years of performing his Limerick tales into the written jewel of a first memoir, published when he was 66. McCourt was born in 1930 in Brooklyn, N.Y., the outcome, as he describes in the opening pages of "Angela's Ashes," of a "knee-trembler" sexual encounter between his immigrant parents after a boozy Thanksgiving Day party. With humorous detail, McCourt described how his mother's American cousins, Delia and Philomena, who "were large women, great-breasted and fierce," tracked down McCourt's father in a bar and verbally cudgeled him into marriage, inauspicious beginnings from which the family never recovered. Unable to find work in Depression-era New York, the McCourts moved back to Limerick when Frank was 4, sinking even deeper into poverty and the unending litany of woes that became the narrative material of "Angela's Ashes" -- alcoholism, unemployment and the inventive, minor crimes that the teenage McCourt indulged in in an increasingly pathetic attempt to support his family. McCourt returned to the United States when he was 19, worked at odd jobs until he was drafted into the Army, used the G.I. Bill to get a college degree and then taught for 30 years in New York City schools, material that he used in his two successful sequels to "Angela's Ashes," "'Tis" and "Teacher Man." "Angela's Ashes" won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997, numerous other literary awards and spent 117 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, making McCourt a wealthy man and a popular figure on the national reading circuit. Ultimately, the book broke past its obvious audience of the Irish diaspora around the world because of McCourt's willingness to take on big themes with universal appeal -- the oppressiveness of religion in poverty-stricken countries, for example, or the backwardness of rote education and bullying teachers. McCourt was also critically acclaimed fort his use of humor to leaven the bleakness of his stories, and the lyrical quality of his writing. Few readers could fail to visualize the misty dreariness of Limerick in this early paragraph of "Angela's Ashes." "Out in the Atlantic Ocean great sheets of rain gathered to drift slowly up the River Shannon and settle forever in Limerick. The rain dampened the city from the Feast of the Circumcision to New Year's Eve. It created a cacophony of hacking coughs, bronchial rattles, asthmatic wheezes, consumptive croaks." Especially after the fame of "Angela's Ashes," McCourt became well-known in publishing circles for his selflessness toward other writers, quietly supporting the work of struggling novelists and giving freely of his time at writers' conferences. This was a reprise of his wildly popular teaching style at Manhattan's prestigious Stuyvesant High School, where McCourt would push students beyond the standard creative writing exercises by asking them to compose each other's obituaries, write excuse notes from Adam and Eve to God, or read from a cookbook as if it were poetry. Many of his students went on to successful careers in journalism and publishing. Paul Golub, now the editorial director of Times Books at New York publisher Henry Holt & Co., says he was not one of those students who remained personally close to McCourt, but his experience taking McCourt's creative writing course at Stuyvesant in fall 1979 remained unforgettable. "The class was always hilarious and one exercise I remember was McCourt asking us to write about what we had for dinner last night," Golub said. "He wasn't interested in the typical vague writing but understood that everything was details, details, details -- who bought the chicken, who cooked it, how it was cooked. He would make us read Mimi Sheraton's restaurant reviews in The New York Times so that we could conceive of the idea of writing descriptively about food. It was in Mr. McCourt's class that I first heard that mashed potatoes could be 'satiny.' Before I took Mr. McCourt's class, my writing was very labored. But after he was done with me my writing was fluid and less self-conscious. He liberated me to become myself." Connecticut organizers of book events were surprised by McCourt's accessibility and unpretentious approach toward public appearances. "Because of his 30 years of teaching, Frank knew exactly how to reach through to people and, because he was so hilarious, he was a big draw for our events," says Davyne E. Verstandig, the director of the Litchfield County Writers and Artists Project at the University of Connecticut's Torrington campus. "He thought of himself as a local person and not an international celebrity. His support for our events was a huge gift for us and he always liked to say, 'I would have done it even if you didn't pay me money.'." McCourt's influence went beyond writing, however, and he was considered prescient because two favorite themes of his books -- the lack of creativity in teaching, and the corruptions of organized religion -- peaked as issues shortly after "Angela's Ashes" was published. McCourt, for example, frequently criticized former President George W. Bush's "No Child Left Behind" educational initiative, because he felt the emphasis on standardized testing discouraged teachers from truly developing students' minds. The low pay and high workloads most teachers faced, McCourt often said, guaranteed that schools would continue to be mediocre. In his books, McCourt delivered a searing, if often comical portrait of Roman Catholicism, which also came to be regarded as prophetic. Many conservative Catholics objected to McCourt's depictions of Catholic priests as alcoholic, sanctimonious and sexually aggressive. But, coincidentally, ironically, he was living and writing in Rome in spring 2002 when the Vatican summoned U.S. bishops to Italy to confront the crisis in the American church over the sexual abuse of boys by priests, which only seemed to confirm McCourt's anticlericalism. In an interview with The Courant that year, McCourt said that European Catholics had become largely agnostic in recent decades. But he realized that American Catholics were different when, after a morning of writing, he would stroll down to St. Peter's Square and mix with the tourists from back home. "I realized down there at St. Peter's Square the other day that this is a huge crisis for American Catholics because it's not really about religion," McCourt said. "This crisis in the Church is about identity. In a mixed, assimilated society like America, religious belief is the thing that sets you apart and gives you identity, so people still take their religion seriously. But now that motive is being removed because this isn't a very comfortable identity anymore." Before his health deteriorated this spring, McCourt had been planning to return to Limerick to live for several months, writing, lecturing, helping to raise money for local schools and arts institutions. He had even told his hometown newspaper, the Limerick Leader, that he had "unfinished business" with the Irish city and might find another book to write about it. He seemed comfortable with the role he had played in the 13 years since the startling success of "Angela's Ashes." "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," McCourt told the Leader. "So if I'm here, there's a reason I'm here." And, to the end, there was that wonderful Irish smile and self-deprecating humor. When he died, McCourt said, "I don't want funeral services or memorials. Let them scatter my ashes over the Shannon and pollute the river." | ||||||||||
| Speak to me | ||||||||||
Powered by DeadJournal.com