Putting the Ghosts of the Past to Rest at Long Last

NEW YORK — “Excuse me,” an attractive young woman said to Frank McCourt, “I loved your book. I just finished reading it last night.”

“What took you so long?” he replied cheerfully. Eleven months after “Angela’s Ashes” (Scribner), his memoir of a dreadful Irish childhood, became a bestseller of extraordinary durability, McCourt has perfected a response to almost every possible compliment, question, request for a favor or offer of one.

“If I were 30 years younger, I’d be dead of whiskey and fornication,” he whispered as the woman walked away from the barroom table where the author was knocking down a glass of cranberry juice.

The burdens of fame have come late to McCourt, who struggled for more than 30 years to find the right voice for his searing remembrance of life in Limerick. The book has transformed an unknown high school English teacher with a blistering anger at Ireland and the Roman Catholic Church into an internationally celebrated author who has at long last made peace with the land where he grew up in appalling poverty and squalor.

The breakthrough in his long struggle to write about his childhood came in 1994 when he was watching his granddaughter, Chiara. “She was about 2 years old,” he recalled. “I was watching her develop a vocabulary and I was fascinated by how clearly she spoke. How she grabbed words and memorized them. Rendering a scene through the eyes of a child without any emotional overtones is much more powerful than giving your own emotions. It’s almost cinematic.”

And so McCourt junked the third person, past tense and the moralizing that had marked his previous writing efforts and set down his tale of woe through the eyes of Frank McCourt the child. The author retreated to a small house in the Pocono Mountains, where early in the morning he “scribbled” his story into a notebook. He would read passages aloud to his third wife, Ellen Frey, a publicist who grew up in Palos Verdes. He edited the book while typing his longhand notes into a word processor. The manuscript was finished in 14 months. McCourt said that the writing went smoothly, but his wife recalled that the creative process was accompanied by tears on more than one occasion.

The result of his labor is a simple and moving narrative of astonishing power. The book is chock-full of memorable scenes of a childhood full of hunger and disease. McCourt, the oldest of seven children, was born in Brooklyn to Irish immigrant parents who couldn’t make a go of it in America.

After the death of young Frank’s infant sister, Malachy and Angela McCourt made a disastrous decision to return to Ireland, where economic conditions were even grimmer that the Depression-era U.S. The family quickly descended into desperate poverty. McCourt’s father was seldom able to find work and quickly drank up his wages when he did. Mother and children were reduced to begging for charity while living in a tiny flat next to a smelly privy used by a dozen families. Life was a parade of arrogant priests, cruel teachers and tyrannical petty officials.

“Even though the Irish have a reputation for being a poetic, mercurial race, they weren’t,” McCourt said. “There was a lot of poetry and ballads sung about Ireland’s long, glorious struggle, but you find very little love poetry or erotic poetry. Everything was inhibited. Even dancing was frowned on by the church. Drink was the only release.”

In a season of memoirs, this one about poverty, alcoholism and mutilated lives in a foreign country struck a nerve. “Angela’s Ashes” has captured the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Award. Paperback rights were sold for $1 million, though a paperback edition won’t been seen until hardcover sales slow down. The book is No. 1 on the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times nonfiction bestseller lists and going strong after 40 weeks on the former and 47 on the latter. “Angela’s Ashes” has so far been published in 22 countries and achieved bestseller status in Ireland, Germany and Great Britain.

Producers David Brown (“Cocoon”) and Scott Rudin (“Reckless”) have purchased the film rights. The producers have rounded up a screenwriter, Laura Jones, and are casting about for a director. Dinner with Frank McCourt has become an item at charity auctions and the author has lately given up on the idea of responding to all of his fan mail. McCourt has even put in an appearance as himself on the TV soap opera “One Life to Live.” (His actor brother, Malachy, has a recurring role on the series as an Irish terrorist.)

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It is a wearying thing, being a 66-year-old publishing sensation. McCourt, a gentle, white-haired man with mournful eyes and a pleasing brogue, is very tired. He has spent almost a year publicizing his book and responding to the not-unwelcome demands of his unexpected fame.

His immediate future involves more touring for the book (Oslo, Helsinki, Moscow, Munich, Amsterdam and Paris are next up) and writing a sequel that will cover his life in America. In the meantime, McCourt is happily savoring life’s small luxuries.

“You don’t feel like getting into a hot subway, so you stick your hand out and get a taxi,” he said rather triumphantly. He jokes about casting Julia Roberts as his long-suffering Irish mother and grapples with New York’s answer to water torture--passing the muster of a Manhattan co-op board.

“Now that I’m a big-ass author I need a bigger place,” he said, mocking himself. McCourt and his wife are making the move to a two-bedroom apartment near Central Park. Not one with a view--”I’m not that significant,” he said.

The long interval between the childhood described in “Angela’s Ashes” and the apartment on the Upper West Side had more of the pain of McCourt’s early years than the joy of his late-blooming success. “I was damaged goods,” he said, eating a bowl of potato leek soup at a tavern near his old place in Manhattan. “Anybody who grew up in the Irish Catholic Church was f----- up. And it takes you a long time to get over it.”

McCourt has been getting over it for most of his life. Returning to America at 19, he got a job at the old Biltmore Hotel here, where one of his tasks was to feed and clean the cages of the hotel’s canaries.

“After a night of boozing on 3rd Avenue, I’d forget about the canaries and go off and have a sleep,” he said, telling how he slept so often the canaries soon expired from neglect.

“I got worried about losing my job, so I glued the birds to their perches so they could be seen by the boss, Mr. Carey,” he said. “So then I had my first St. Patrick’s Day in New York. I was off for the weekend and when I came back there was a note on my time card to report to Mr. Carey.

“He said: ‘What did you do to the birds?’

“I said: ‘What birds?’

“He said: ‘Thirty-nine canaries dead in their cages.’

“I said: ‘They must have died while I was off.’ And he said: ‘What did they do? Get up and glue themselves to their perches before they died?’ ”

That was the end of the job.

“Luckily enough, the Korean War broke out and I was sent to Germany,” he said. The fact that McCourt thought of being drafted into an army at war as a stroke of good fortune speaks volumes about his early years.

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Two failed marriages and a career as a high school English teacher later, McCourt was a failed writer thinking about ending his retirement and going back to teaching full time to make ends meet. Then came “Angela’s Ashes,” and now even McCourt’s anger at the church seems to be on low boil--some of the time anyway. (“There was no voice ringing out against poverty and social injustice. The sermons were always about toeing the line and sins of impurity and dogma and meditating on the wounds of Christ.”)

The book has also been a tremendous success in Ireland, where McCourt has been treated as a long lost son despite his corrosive view of life in Limerick during the 1930s and ‘40s. He was greeted in the Emerald Isle with flattering newspaper profiles and TV appearances. The city fathers turned out to welcome McCourt for the launch of the book in Limerick. Six hundred people, including neighbors and classmates McCourt hadn’t seen for decades, showed up for a book-signing at O’Mahoney’s bookstore.

The boy who quit school at 13 to support his family has also been invited to return to Limerick as a writer in residence at the state university. The book appears to have transformed his lifelong love-hate relationship with Ireland.

“I used to go back to Ireland with a chip on my shoulder. It’s all gone now,” said the man who regularly walks to a newsstand on 42nd Street to get pick up a copy of the Limerick Leader. “I think Limerick and I have come to terms at long last. The church has lost its influence completely. And not a minute too soon.”

But neither his reconciliation with Ireland nor the phenomenal success of “Angela’s Ashes” has wiped out the pain of his childhood, like the death of his twin brothers Eugene and Oliver from pneumonia before he was 8, and Eugene’s funeral, when McCourt had to go to the pub to plead with his father to come home.

“Dad is sitting at the back of the pub with a man who has a dirty face and hair growing out of his nose. They’re not talking but staring straight ahead and their black pints are resting on a small white coffin on the seat between them,” he wrote. “I know that’s Eugene’s coffin because Oliver had one like it and I want to cry when I see the black pints on top of it. . . . The man with Dad lifts his pint and takes a long swallow and when he puts his glass down there’s a hollow sound in the coffin. Dad nods at me. We’ll be going in a minute, son, but when he goes to put his glass on the coffin after the long swallow I push it away.”

These are events that McCourt is doomed to recall again and again. “I was thinking about it this morning. I started to cry. To think of my mother’s suffering.”