ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, March 12, 1997 TAG: 9703120095
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW YORK
SOURCE: BETH GARDINER ASSOCIATED PRESS
Frank McCourt found a literary cure for the pain of his tough Irish childhood.
More than 55 years have passed since the damp Irish afternoon when little Frankie McCourt went scavenging for bits of coal and cardboard so his mother could build a fire for Christmas dinner.
Frank, then a scrawny, underfed 9, already knew how to look near ruts in the road for a few precious pieces that might have fallen from a passing truck. He was an old hand at hunting for bits of food on the sidewalks outside neighborhood pubs, and sometimes even ventured indoors to look for his alcoholic father.
Now 66 and the author of an achingly bittersweet memoir of his childhood in the slums of Limerick, McCourt says he's just begun to understand how profoundly the poverty of his earliest years shaped him.
And he finds he can't stop writing about it.
``I knew I had to do it,'' he says in a soft voice, its lilting cadences still unmistakably Irish. ``I had to write something about that period, that slum in Limerick. ... I had to recapture it.''
``Angela's Ashes,'' published by Scribner last fall, has topped best-seller lists and drawn accolades from critics, who recently named it a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award.
It's also made McCourt, a first-time author who taught English for 17 years at New York City's Stuyvesant High School, the talk of the literary world.
``Just to be able to publish a book ... to get a Library of Congress catalog number, that was my ambition,'' he says with a satisfied grin. ``I thought it'd be a few weeks in the fall, and then I'd retire into my well-deserved obscurity.''
McCourt's elegant memoir tells a heart-rending tale: three siblings dead in just a year, constant struggles with ``the hunger'' by those who survived, and a maddeningly irresponsible father who drank away his paycheck on the rare occasions he found work.
But the gentle sense of humor that bubbles through its pages sets ``Angela's Ashes'' apart from the stacks of tell-all memoirs crowding bookstore shelves.
McCourt ``deals with the terrible by being funny,'' says longtime friend Dennis Duggan, a Newsday columnist. ``He tells stories better than almost anyone I know. ... He takes no prisoners, including himself, and I think people like that sort of thing.''
McCourt's younger brother, Malachy, who figures prominently in the book and now works as an actor in New York, agrees.
Frank, he says, ``can weave a tale out of anything.'' As boys, the two ``made up whatever was missing in our lives, we just pulled it out from our imaginations. ... The humor was there all the time.''
So filled with heartbreak it's almost painful to read, McCourt's story is also impossible to put down. Told in the voice of a young boy, it pulls readers along through the sheer power of language.
``My father and mother should have stayed in New York where they met and married and where I was born,'' the tale begins. ``Instead, they returned to Ireland when I was four, my brother Malachy, three, the twins, Oliver and Eugene, barely one, and my sister, Margaret, dead and gone.''
Life on Brooklyn's Classon Avenue had been hard for the McCourts, but it was nothing compared to the unrelenting misery of Limerick. Soaked through by a damp that ``created a cacophony of hacking coughs, bronchial rattles, asthmatic wheezes, consumptive croaks,'' the McCourt boys went hungry while their father spent the food money on pints of Guinness.
Frank's mother, Angela, for whom the book is named, sang Irish love songs when her husband brought home a paycheck and begged food from the St. Vincent de Paul Society when he didn't.
``She was there. She's the one we circled around. She kept the family together,'' McCourt says now, the sun streaking through the window of his modest Gramercy Park apartment.
Although it doesn't come across in his gentle memoir, the years of deprivation left him overwhelmed by anger.
``You carry it with you. You carry the shame, and the rage,'' he explains. ``All you know is that you're poor, and your clothes are raggedy and your shoes are broken and you have scabby eyes and your teeth are rotting in your head, and your father's a drunk. ... It holds you back.''
The sadness is there in McCourt's face, but it's eased by his impish grin, a throaty laugh and the mischievous glint that lights up his eyes when he lets loose a string of expletives. With a slight build and a head of white hair that refuses to lie flat, he looks every inch the retired English teacher.
While ``Angela's Ashes'' came together in just over a year of solid writing, McCourt says he'd been ``scribbling'' bits of it for decades. The story began to gel one afternoon as he watched his year-and-a-half-old granddaughter playfully knocking books from a shelf in his cramped living room.
``I stumbled on it. I found the child's voice,'' he recalls. ``I didn't know the kid was going to start speaking. And I felt very comfortable with that, looking at it through the eyes of a child, because then, I knew, you have to tell the truth.''
Now that the stories that simmered inside him for more than half a century have begun to boil over, McCourt says he's consumed by the need to get it all out on paper. With interview requests still pouring in, he's already brooding over his next project.
``Where's the second book? That's the haunting question. ... I wish I could say, `I did it. I'll take the money and I'll go off and I'll sit ... in some warm climate.' ... But no, I have to write the second book. I have to write it.''
His second installment will pick up where ``Angela's Ashes'' leaves off, with Frank's arrival back in America at age 19. ``That's what book No. 2 has to be about - the effects of that childhood on a young man,'' he says.
While McCourt knows his New York-to-Limerick-and-back-again tale is quintessentially Gaelic, he says his new status as an Irish-American celebrity makes him a bit queasy.
``Yeah, I'm a major Mick,'' he jokes. ``But I don't want to be sucked into the Irish ghetto. I don't want to be Irish-dash-American. I don't want to be anything but a human being. ... I just want to get up in the morning and have a cup of coffee with my wife.''
LENGTH: Long : 116 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS. ``Angela's Ashes'' has turned retiredby CNBEnglish teacher Frank McCourt into a critically praised author.
color.