Booknotes

Mr. FRANK McCOURT, AUTHOR, "ANGELA'S ASHES": That would, yeah.

McCOURT: Well, I've been asked a million times. It's--well, it doesn't look like me anyway. That kid looks too well fed.

McCOURT: I don't know. Somebody--something Scribner’s came up with. Some urchin from some strange place. It does look like--a little--it could be me. It looks like some lane in Limerick--but he looks too--even--but I never had bare feet. My mother always made sure that we had shoes even though they were falling off our feet. But we —other kids went around barefoot, but we didn't. We were too snobbish.

McCOURT: No. I had no idea at all. There was some dispute about it. My wife said that it's wrong to put some unknown kid. She wanted them to put me on it. But they decided they--and people like it in general. They--it gives the flavor of the book--cunning, furtive kid on the street.

McCOURT: Write this book?

McCOURT: First of all, I always wanted to be a writer, but I didn't know that I wanted to write about this lane in Limerick, this slum. Because anybody that comes from those circumstances doesn't want to write about it. You're ashamed of it. You don't have any self-esteem. So it wasn't till I somehow began to gain some approval or acceptance from my students in New York or from friends of mine. In social circles, I start talking about growing up in Limerick and--I suppose some of the stuff I told them was amusing and they'd laugh because the whole--poverty is so absurd.

Some of the stories I told them were so absurd. They'd laugh and they'd say, `You should write this. When are you going to write about'--I've been hearing this for years. `When are you going to write a book? When are you going to write a book?' But no more insistent than the little voice in my head, `Write the damn book.'

And I've tried it over the years. I wrote a version of it in 1969, I think, called, "If You Live in the Lane." But it was derivative, imitate--I was imitating everybody. O'Casey and Joyce and Henry were in and Evelyn Waugh--imagine me writing like Evelyn Waugh. I tried to be smart-ass, upper-class British writer. That didn't--none of it worked until eventually I found my own way.

McCOURT: In New York, East 15th Street--four--15th and Fourth Avenue. But that wasn't the only one I taught. I think I was in three different high schools; McKee Vocational in Staten Island, Seward Park on the Lower East Side, briefly in Fashion Industries high school on West 24th Street. And then in Stuyvesant High School.

McCOURT: A total of 20--well, close to 30 including substitute teaching.

McCOURT: Well, this--that version I did, "If You Live in the Lane," in 1960--no, it's not--it goes way back--it goes way back to my 20s when I started jotting things in notebooks, things that my mother said that--sayings from the neighbors, because there was a lot of funny stuff despite the poverty. There was a lot--there were--we had a lot of eccentrics wandering around in Limerick who, if they were here, they would be locked up today, yesterday. But there were characters all over the place.

McCOURT: Oh, God. That's my mother in the middle. That's when my brother Mike got married. He's the one to my mother's right. I--or--my brother Alphie's on the left. Mike, Malachy and myself and my mother. That was Mike's wedding about 30--I don't know--32 or 33 years ago. His first wedding.

McCOURT: Malachy--the bear--the bearded one is in New York. He's an actor. He's writing a book. And Alphie--Mike runs a bar and restaurant out in San Francisco, Seal Cove Inn, and Alphie--Alph--they all went into the bar business. People used to say, `Well, when are you going into the bar business?' I said, `When my brothers become teachers.'

Alphie--Alphie--he--we had great hopes for him because he's the only who had any kind of education. He went to secondary school in Ireland, came over and we all thought he was going to go up to Colum--he went to Columbia briefly. And we thought he'd become a lawyer or something like that, but he--instead, he opened a Mexican restaurant. The only Irishman you ever met that opened a Mexican restaurant.

McCOURT: Oh, no, it's gone now.

McCOURT: Los Panchos. It was very popular in the Upper West Side.

McCOURT: That's my mother.

McCOURT: I think that was...

McCOURT: Mm. Some bar in--on Third Avenue. We would take her out occasionally. She loved going out because she enjoyed the good time. You can see she was a large woman. That--of course, that was because she was sedentary. But she loved parties.

McCOURT: Seven.

McCOURT: Four.

McCOURT: Well, she had six children in five and a half years and--that were--including twins. And three of them died in that five and a half years. Margaret, the little girl, and the twins. She--Margaret died in Brooklyn and the twins died in Ireland, so they died of--probably bronchial pneumonia or something like that--something preventable. And that's what--the death of the little girl, I think, drove my father crazy because he was mad about her. And I know that. I remember the kind of attention he'd pay her which he didn't pay us. He was very good to us. He was a very kind gentleman when he was sober, but --and--my mother went into a deep depression. Now if that--if the death of the little girl drove them into a depression and drove him to the bottle, you can imagine what it was like, then, when the twins died in Ireland.

McCOURT: Margaret died in 1934, I think. And the twins in '35. Oliver died in May of '35 and Eugene November '35. And in the meantime, my mother got pregnant again. The month that Oliver died.

McCOURT: I'm the oldest.

McCOURT: Yeah.

McCOURT: Oh, God. That's my father. I don't know who he's holding there.

McCOURT: Oh, Fiona! Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's Malachy's granddaughter. That was taken in Belfast just before he died, I think. Yeah. He'd lost all his hair and he had an accent that was indecipherable. You'd need subtitles to hear him. So that's in Belfast where he died. He made his way--well, he went off to England during the war and knocked around there and got into trouble drinking. Made his way back to his father's farm, where my grandmother was, and then wound up in Belfast on a pension.

McCOURT: In his coffin in 1985. Before that I saw him in 1971 when Belfast was erupting. It was the worst summer they'd had.

McCOURT: Eh, inconsequential. I never saw him. If I did see him, it was kind of a formal conversation. It was very hard to get into an intimate conversation with him. And you-- if I were to look at this from the outside, I would have said to myself, `Well, why didn't you go back and talk to him?' But I think-I had a feeling that there was no point in it or that he wouldn't come through. He was so blocked in everywhere. He'd say, `Well, how's your mother?' And, `How's your brothers?' And--rawr rawr rawr rawr--and that was it and then he'd look out the window and he'd drink his tea and there was no getting through to him.

McCOURT: I was when I was a kid.

McCOURT: I think I was close to him.

McCOURT: In the hospital...

McCOURT: ...when I had typhoid fever. This--and this is a national characteristic, I think, of the Irish, this poetic, mercurial, flamboyant race. We don't go around saying, `I love you.' The word `love' was something that was reserved for God or babies, `I love you darling,' it --you talk to babies or maybe horses that win. But not for--not for personal relationship. I used to think when I was a kid when people said, `I love you,' that was only for something on the screen at the Limerick cinema. We never heard it. I never heard a mother saying, `I love you,' to her child.

And my brother Malachy once had an experience. He was nine. I think this may have changed the course of his life somehow emotionally. He was in the kitchen, he was nine years old, and he said to my mother--he was overwhelmed for some reason, and he said to my mother, `Ma'am, I love you.' And she looked at him--and then later on, he's there at the kitchen fiddling around and her friend Brady Hannah comes in from next door and my mother says, `Brady, do you know what he just said to me?' `What Angela?' `He told me he loved me.' And the two of them had a good laugh and I think Malachy sank through the floor. So you had to be careful about telling people you loved them.

McCOURT: Oh, God. Yeah, that's the Mungret graveyard where we took my mother's ashes to be sprinkled. It's an old medieval abbey outside Limerick. So she died in--she died in New York and we had her cremated and we took her back there. She used to say, `I want to be buried with my own people in Mungret.' And -I said--she was a large woman as you saw from that earlier picture, I said, `Do you know the cost of transporting your body to Ireland?' So we cremated her anyway and took her back and five or six days of grief and celebration.

McCOURT: 1981. December of '81. Oh, yeah. Oh, my--that's the can of ashes that we were sprinkling. It was a very strange occasion because there were--Malachy was there and our wives were there and a group of friends. And I think we'd all drifted away from--I--what I remember mostly was our awkwardness at what--I mean, usually we're not caught short for words. But --I think Malachy and I felt a bit awkward at--on this occasion because we simply didn't know what to do. Usually you have a priest taking care of it, but --there was a pause, we sprinkled the ashes, then I'm the oldest son, so I'm the chief mourner, I suppose, so I just started saying, `Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.' And that was it. And we blessed ourselves and climbed back over that gate again because that's a national shrine now and you can't get in. But we had to climb over the gate.

The same gate. That's me and my daughter Maggie. Yeah.

McCOURT: And Sheila Brown, right. Yeah.

McCOURT: She's a friend of our--Brian Brown's wife. And they have--own a kind of a normal castle or keep.

McCOURT: I haven't had time to reflect on it since last September, how to be--because I've seen--I know people who are public because I used to hang around the Lion's Head Bar in New York and I knew Pete Hamlin and people like that who'd been public for years and years and years. And I'd see them come and go and I'd be on the periphery of that crowd. And the--I was what they called in America `only a teacher.' Only a teacher. They're journalists and writers and poets. I'm only a teacher. And I was -- I was always on the periphery. In a sense, I was like my father, an outsider.

Now people look at me--oh, they look at me. It's like Ralph Ellison's book, "Invisible Man," the people don't see you until you--I wrote a book. I taught for 27 years and nobody paid me a scrap of attention, then I write a book about slum life and I'm an expert on everything.

McCOURT: Oh, Conor, yeah.

McCOURT: He's doing a--he...

McCOURT: That's Mike, my brother. He's the third in line for the immense McCourt fortune. And he's the one in San Francisco. He's out there with his wife, Joan and he has four kids. And Conor is a cop in New York who's become the family chronicler, archivist, video man. He's very enthusiastic over capturing the history of the family. He's done a video.

McCOURT: Yeah? Oh, yeah! Yeah.

McCOURT: I think you know everything, Brian.

McCOURT: I think you have the goods on me here.

McCOURT: This is last year.

McCOURT: This was at the Grand Ticino restaurant in New York, the night my book was launched. Again, the same--Alphie, Mike, Malachy and myself. Same lineup from the wedding picture 30 years before. That was a--that's-they all--that's one of those rare occasions, I think, when we were all together because usually when we got together--there were fireworks or a brush fire.

McCOURT: I don't know, old grievances. But they--the book seems to have healed a lot of that stuff with the result that we all went to Limerick in October for the launching of the book in Ireland. It was the first time we'd have been in Ireland together for over 40 years because Mike is out in San Francisco. And even though three of us live in New York, sometimes we don't see each other for long periods of time.

McCOURT: Ellen, my wife. Oh, that's outside the Redemptorist Church in Limerick. We were--that's when we were there last year. That's when the four of us got together. We went up to the Redemptorist Church with, I think--Ellen was getting the tour of our--of my slum childhood.

McCOURT: 1994.

McCOURT: Third.

McCOURT: I've married different states. Rhode Island, North Carolina and finally and blissfully, California.

McCOURT: In the Lion's Head Bar. But we--it was arranged. It wasn't just one of these things were I wandered in off the street. She had a friend, Deb--Deborah and--who was going with a guy named Jerry Pointer and who is a friend of mine, and they arranged it. It was like a matchmaking. And it worked. Although, Ellen was a little wary of me, considering my history and I don't blame her.

McCOURT: Well, I'd been married twice before and I'd been a bit of a wanderer. And...

McCOURT: One from the first marriage. Maggie. She's in Santa Cruz in California.

McCOURT: I don't care. I'm--I suppose I'm out. I'm--suppose I'm excommunicated. No, I'm not because I was never married--if you're not married within the church, what you do doesn't matter. It's simply committing the sin of adultery. So I haven't transgressed on holy matrimony. If I got married in the church, then they take it seriously. So I'm not ex--oh, yes, I am excommunicated for something I did in the 1930--in my 30s. I went to Trinity College in Dublin, which was a--forbidden Catholics by the Archbishop John Charles McQuaid. Any Catholic who goes to Trinity College is excommunicated automatically. That's been lifted now.

McCOURT: He was just--he was a tyrant because Trinity College was regarded as a nest of Protestantism and atheism and Freemasonry. But I went there anyway to get a PhD.

McCOURT: Institutional Catholicism?

McCOURT: I have no time for it. I know individual priests and nuns who are doing, literally, God's work, but the church--the church has to catch up. With what, I don't know, but it has to catch--it's dying. I just read--there was one little statistic last year in Limerick that caught my eye in “ The Irish Times” that they beatified the founder of the Christian Brothers, Edmund Rice and the pope--beatified him. That last year one person joined the Christian Brothers in Ireland as compared with 39 ten years ago. So that's a dying order--teaching order. And that shows you how few people want to go into the church anymore.

McCOURT: No.

McCOURT: My father wanted me to be an altar boy and made me learn the Latin, made me learn all the responses. He knew the Mass backwards and forwards, the priest part and the boys' parts, so he trained me and I memorized all the Latin and he made me kneel on the kitchen floor in Limerick and (speaks Latin). And he takes me around the corner then to the--St. Joseph's Church and the sacristan there who took care of the church just looked at me and said, `We don't have room for him.'

My history is a history of having doors shut in my face. Now they're flinging wide open. I can't--there isn't a door shut against me anymore. Only good things happen to me.

McCOURT: It's a mystery.

McCOURT: It's a mystery to me. Yeah. Today I read a review in The New York Review of Books and that's a genre slightly to be feared because they can trot out some very acerbic reviews. There were--it was an enthusiastic review by a man named Neil Aitchison. And I thought I'd get a mixed review from them because they're not known for their enthusiasm. So you have The New York Review of Books, you have The New York Times and all kinds of--Time magazine book of the year, Newsweek, Los Angeles Times and I'm a bit taken aback because I thought it was a kind of a simple narrative in the tradition of what they call the `shaneky' in Ireland, the old storyteller.

So they find--it amazes what the reviewers are finding in the book. It's a comment on De Valera's Ireland and on Catholicism. And they're finding how--what a consciously clever writer I was, which I didn't know about.

McCOURT: De Valera, the prime minister of Ireland, who I think kept the country back 50 years behind its time. Which is all right because--one time George Bernard Shaw was asked, `On the last day of the world, where would you like to be?' And Shaw says, `Ireland.' `Why?' `Because the Irish are always 50 years behind the times.'

McCOURT: New York.

McCOURT: Brooklyn. I think--I'm not sure if I was born in Brooklyn or Manhattan. Mother would never tell me. She always shied away from that.

McCOURT: I don't know. Because I was ill--I--was conceived beyond the sheets and so I was the cause of sin. I used to say, `Frankie was the cause of marriage.' They had--it was a shotgun wedding and I was what appeared five months after their wedding.

McCOURT: It did, yeah, because one of my friends told me I was a bastard. And there was no way of getting around that. He said I was doomed. And it was a sin that could not be washed away with the baptism of water. So I'm doomed. I'm excommunicated because of Trinity and I'm doomed because I'm a bastard.

McCOURT: They--my mother would give lip service and she would--she believed in it, but she didn't go to church that often. I think she had confession before she died. They do--you know, you're in a coma and they bring in a priest and you mumble something. The thing--it's less formal and it's less rigid than it used to be. You can go into the church now and make a general confession. I--just say, `I confess,' but in my time, you had to go in and detail your sins. Which kept us all in a state of terror because, you know, an adolescent boy is constantly finding himself irresistible and that's sin of impurity. And that was one of--the big boy--one of the big sins in Limerick. So I think I was in a constant state of impurity and terror of the priests to--it reached a point one time where the priest didn't believe that I was in the proper state of repentance and told me, `Get out of this confession box and don't come back till you're truly sorry.' And I walked out of there, I felt I was doomed. If I'm hit by a truck now, that's it; eternity in flames.

McCOURT: Oh, yeah. A number briefly. But they--I have a special file now. I have all kinds of files from my—the mayor and I have--there's one called `negative stuff,' and I have a special file for priests and nuns. And they all like--oh, that's the bishop--that's not the bishop, that's the mayor of Limerick, Mr. O’Hanlon. When I went back to Limerick last year, oh, I was received with open arms. They lit— the city was so proud of me.

McCOURT: Catholic Limerick, yeah.

McCOURT: Yeah. Six hundred people showed up at O'Mahony's bookshop that night, waving books and--and inviting me out for a pint. But this time when I went back --there were--were little change--sea change...

McCOURT: ...a little opposition. Yeah.

McCOURT: Yeah. For the launch of the paperback. Another tour of Ireland and by now they've read the book and there were some vocal critics.

McCOURT: Yeah, they did. The same bookshop, O'Mahony's, where I was received with wild acclaim last October, there was a line--another line for the signing of books and a woman at the head of the queue said, `You're a disgrace. Leamy--your—Leamy’s National School, the thing you said about them boys.' I said, `No, I didn't.' I said, `Where did I say that?' `You did!' I said, `Show me in the book.' And then they hustled her off.

Then another woman says there's a bit of a hassle behind me, she says, `You're going to get a bit of a hassle.' So this grim-looking character comes up, he takes a picture, he's about my age, he takes a picture out of his pocket, it's the picture of the school--the class picture from the book, puts it down on the table, `Do you know what that is?' I said, `Yeah. That's the class picture from Leamy’s.' He said, `Now where am I in that picture?' I said, `I don't know.' So for--all he said--`You don't know? How grand we are coming back from America.' Now he says, `You're a disgrace to Ireland. You've besmirched the fair name of Limerick and you've destroyed your mother's good name. And here's what I think of your book,' and he tore it to pieces, the paperback.

That's the lane in Limerick.

McCOURT: Yeah. Yeah.

McCOURT: Nineteen--I don't--1940s, late '30s through the '40s.

McCOURT: It starts, I suppose, with my mother and father meeting--this is just the time ends, 1929 to 1949, so that's 20 years. Except I was born in 1930 in New York and taken to Ireland in 1934. And I left then again in 1949. So it's mainly the story of me and my family from 19--from our arrival in Ireland to my leaving in 1949.

McCOURT: Oh, yeah. The--I didn't know I'd be writing another book. I wanted to write "Angela's Ashes." Now I want to write the second book because I think the things--I want to show the effects of poverty on--the emotional effects on a human being. It happens to me--being--I'm the one--I'm the expert on me, I suppose. But it--because of my teaching career in New York and because of my dealings with all kinds of kids, poverty, drugs, divorce, I want to show the psychological damage done to a young man by the poverty and --that very tyrannical church and the crazy nationalism that we were all subjected to in de Valera's Ireland where he was pouring more money into preserving the Irish language than he was into the slums of Ireland.

McCOURT: Now it's at--the population's about--overall, about four and a half million.

McCOURT: North and south. Yeah.

McCOURT: Have I been in? I've been in all of them. Every--I've been in all--I've been--no, I've been in all of them, yeah. I was going to exclude Derry, but I've been in Derry.

McCOURT: The Irish thing? Now?

McCOURT: This--it's a kind of trinity of nationalism and--of Catholicism and immigration. This is--these are the characteristics of the--each nation, I think, has certain characteristics. Another characteristic of the Irish, which I thought was disappearing, was the drink. That's how it's referred to: `the drink.' Not drink, not alcohol, the drink. When I was there last week, I noticed it. It's still--the swilling that goes on is unbelievable. And I don't know where they get the money. It's a booming economy, so--but it's always--they always seem to have the money for the drink. And it's destroyed so many people, so many families.

McCOURT: Yeah, moderately. I just don't have the capacity for it.

McCOURT: They don't. Three brothers don't drink anymore. They all had problems with it, and they gave it up. Well, they went into the bar business and they were their own best customers I suppose for a while.

McCOURT: I think--I've tried to figure that out. There was nothing else in a country that was completely uncluttered. Compare the Irish with the Italians, say, with --rich culture down there in Italy--architecture and music --and wine and joie de vivre. We didn't have that. We had a kind of a gentleness--grimness in the northern country.

There was --there's plenty of poetry, song, love--of the landscape of nature and of women. That love poetry died for a long time in Ireland. But in recent times as--the--after the family thing something happened to the Irish soul.

McCOURT: I didn't want any--I didn't want any effective Broadway actor fiddling around with it. Broadway actors always pause. There's always--there's these meaningful pauses. I just wanted to do it myself because I think I could invest it with what I meant it to have.

McCOURT: It wasn't easy but...

McCOURT: At Scribner's.

McCOURT: They have their own recording facilities.

McCOURT: A week. Well, that's not as bad as a friend of mine, Donal Donnelly who did "Ulysses." It took him 15 months.

McCOURT: They put me in a room and I sat there. And I read what they gave me to read. There are parts --that are omitted from that I'd like to go back and put in. But there's also a full and unabridged version coming up from Recorded Books some time...

McCOURT: I did that, too, yeah.

McCOURT: No, I did it long after this.

McCOURT: That took me a month. And that was--hard because they were very precise. You--I think they can hear your hair growing those technicians and those recording people. The slightest intake of breath that might interfere with the word, I had to go back and do it again. But it's very efficient now. They do it just right away and go back over it.

McCOURT: OK. (From audiotape) `Two days later, Dad returns from his cigarette hunt. It's the middle of the night but he gets Malachy and me out of the bed. He has the smell of drink in him. He has us stand at attention in the kitchen. We are soldiers. He tells us we must promise to die for Ireland. "We will, Dad. We will." All together we sing "Kevin Barry." (Singing) `On Mt. Joy one Monday morning, high upon the gallows tree, Kevin Barry gave his young life for the cause of liberty. Just a lad of 18 summers, sure there's no one can deny. As he marched to death that morning, how he held his head on high.'

There's a knock at the door, Mr. MacAdory. "Awe, Malachy, for God's sake it's 3:00 in the morning. You have the whole house woke with the singing." "Awe, Dan, I'm only teaching the boys to die for Ireland." "You can teach them to die for Ireland in the daytime, Malachy." "'Tis urgent, Dan. 'Tis urgent." "I know, Malachy, but they're only children, babies. You go to bed now like a decent man." "Bed, Dan? What am I to do in bed? Her little face is there day and night, her curly black hair and her lovely blue eyes. Oh, Jesus, Dan, what will I do? Was it the hunger that killed her, Dan." "Of course, not. Your misses was nursing her. God took her. He has his reasons." "One more song, Dan, before we go to bed." "Good night, Malachy." "Come on, boys, sing." (Singing) `Because he loved the motherland, because he loved the green. He goes to meet a martyr's fate with proud and joyous mean. True to the last, oh, true to the last, he treads the upward way. Young Roddy McCorley goes to die on the bridge at Toóme today.'

"You'll die for Ireland, won't you, boys?" "We will, Dad." "And we'll all meet your little sister in heaven, won't we, boys?" "We will, Dad."

McCOURT: That's--that takes place in Brooklyn after my sister died. She was 21 days old when she died. And --he went demented. And --it was a habit of his to get us up because he was a frustrated patriot. He was born in the wrong time. I think he would have been very happy if some--if he had --fought the English and been caught and hanged. He would died singing "Roddy McCorley" or "Kevin Barry." But he--this was his way of continuing his--the excitement that I suppose he felt when he was in--fighting in The Troubles in Ireland.

And he would drag us out of bed in the middle of the night and make us sing all these songs at--and I--my mother was appalled. Everybody was appalled, but we enjoyed it because it was very--it--we'd sing. It was--and we'd get out of bed in the middle of the night. We'd sing and he--this was --a connection with the father that--any excuse for making a connection with him was wonderful.

McCOURT: Eighty-five.

McCOURT: I think towards the end he stopped maybe in the last few years in Belfast. He had the pension. He didn't go out that much anymore. He drank his tea.

McCOURT: The dole is unemployment. And he was always on the dole. You--it--most people--most of the working--and so-called working men were on the dole. You'd get about 19 shillings a--which was about $3 a week in American terms in those days. It was not enough to keep a family going.

McCOURT: He'd go down--all the men would go down on Thursday morning to the--what they call the Labor Exchange to get their money. Unlike America, if you're going on unemployment, you only have to send in a statement, I think, once a week or something like that. But you had to appear at the Labor Exchange every morning in Limerick in case there might be work. And everybody use to laugh all the--there was never going to be any work. And you'd sign. This was to make sure that you weren't working.

So you get your money on Thursday and all the men would go down. It was a big day. And you'd see--and it was in a lane in Limerick. And you'd see women clustered at both ends of this--it was an open-ended lane. Women waiting for the men to head them off before they went to the pubs. And he--my father was a--was very, very conscious of his dignity, but he didn't want my mother there at all. He wanted to be able to go to the-- Labor Exchange, get his money and then go home which he did often. But often, he went to the pubs. And he'd just drink the whole damn thing. So my mother threatened him. She said she was going to go down to the Labor Exchange and get the money from the man, the clerk which she did. And he was shamed forever because a woman came into the Labor Exchange and took the man's dole. That's not what a woman is supposed to do. Well, she wanted to make sure her children were fed. That's not what a woman is supposed to do.

McCOURT: And he lost his dignity.

McCOURT: '41--the end of--the end of 1941.

McCOURT: England. He went off to work in the--factories in England in Coventry.

McCOURT: Once or twice he sent a few pounds. It wasn't enough. It was just a gesture. I don't know. Maybe somebody persuaded him to send the money back but we--he left us to starve.

McCOURT: Waiting for the telegram boy, that--the telegram boys on Saturdays used to deliver the telegrams to the families whose fathers were in England. And most of the families like the Mehanes or the Downes across from us would get their telegrams. Solid, steady men sending their money home from England. And we'd wait all day on Saturday. And we hope and hope and hope. And we knew then that--you could hear the engines always ringing in England--6:00 in the morning, noon and 6:00 in the evening. But you knew--bong, bong, bong--when the engines rung in the evening and the telegram hadn't been delivered. That was it. You're going to face another week of starvation practically.

McCOURT: You--just--you never felt--you were -never satisfied and you never had the full feeling. And we always--we used to make up such --fantasies. There was a bush that grew in Limerick out in the country-- a little green-green leaf and a little red berry which was--were really inedible. We wasn't--we used to call that bread and cheese. And we'd eat this--we'd eat these leaves and little berries and image they were bread and cheese. And I thought sometimes someday I'm going to have a big bread and cheese sandwich. That was my dream.

One time my mother did get some money. She got a job as a charwoman. She got some potatoes and a bit of corned beef and jelly and custard. And this--we had this on a Sunday. And she said, `We're not going to eat all of this today. Now we'll save some for tomorrow.' And there were about four potatoes leftover--boiled potatoes and some of the jelly and custard. I remember counting--one of my early crimes, you know? And she put it in the windowsill. She had a little curtain like a larder.

So I came home one Monday from school. There was nobody in the house. And I look--went over and looked. I said, `I'll eat one potato or a half.' And I couldn't stop eating the pot--I ate the four potatoes and all the jelly and custard. And boy did she kill me. She knocked me around the place that night. And my brother hated me. It was the biggest crime I ever committed.

McCOURT: Oh, I did. I--finally I had the experience of being full when I came to the States, going into Horn and Hardart's when I got a job.

McCOURT: That was an automat the old automat where you put nickels in to take your food out of these little compartments. I stuffed myself. But heaven--I experienced culinary heaven when I was drafted into the Army and sent to Germany where I was stationed in Bavaria where they had the quartermaster cooking school. G.I. Joe.

McCOURT: That was 1951. Oh, boy. Yeah. I...

McCOURT: It--two years in Bavaria, south of Munich in a little village called Lenggries up in the Bavarian Alps. I had a great time.

McCOURT: '49.

McCOURT: Oh, boy, that's another story of thievery. I had a—what--I worked in the post office delivering telegrams. Then I worked in Easton's Wholesale Newsagents which is like the Irish Barnes & Noble. And then I--in the meantime I got a job with this old woman writing. She was a money lender, a shark--a loan shark. And...

McCOURT: Ms. Finucane. And she needed somebody. I was delivering a telegram. And she said, `Are you in anyway smart?' Well, I said, `I can read and write.' She says, `Half the people above the lunatic asylum can read and write. Can you write a letter.' `Of course I can write a letter.' And she hired me to write threatening letters to dilatory customers. I was to threaten them that if they didn't pay up they'd go to jail. Oh, and I threatened with all kinds of things. I let my imagination run wild. And I was very successful. She'd pay me threepence for each letter and sixpence if it was successful.

McCOURT: I suppose the Irish money was much more powerful than it is now. It would be about maybe 30 cents for each letter and then 90 cents if it was successful. And...

McCOURT: Yeah. And that they all said it was a horrible thing. Who would write a letter like that to their own class of people? A person like that should have their fingernails pulled out and be boiled in oil. There were all kinds of--and I'm one--and I was listening to all of this and I just--I felt awful that I had to write these threatening letters. I felt, but I felt so powerful at the same time that my letters were so--they were so effective.

But I made the money. And then I was putting it away in the post office savings account, even to the extent where she'd give me money for stamps to mail those letters. And I would keep the money for the stamps and stick the letters under doors. So all of this was going into the post office for my fare to America.

McCOURT: Well, she died. She used to send me out on Friday nights for a bottle of sherry to the pub, and when I came back she was dead in the chair. So she had her purse and I stole from her purse. And she had money upstairs in the trunk under the bed along with a ledger that she kept all the...

McCOURT: Right. Yeah. With the--her purse had dropped to the floor. And--but I verted my eyes from her because I was terrified. But still the main thing in my life was to get to America. And I think I would have robbed somebody's grave to go there. I had to get out of Ireland.

McCOURT: No, I didn't. I just walked away. Nobody knew. I used to go in the back door. Nobody knew who I was. So I got the fare to America.

McCOURT: Well, it was 59 pounds altogether to come to America. And I was saving, saving, saving. I was also--I also worked for Easton's News Agency. Part of our job was to--this is my experience as a censor of magazines. We had to go through the magazines and make sure--if something had escaped, the censors in Dublin, we were responsible in the local Easton's for offensive material. One of the--there was a “John O’London's Weekly” that had a page on birth control. And the call came down from Dublin. `Did you send out “John O’London's Weekly”?' `Yes, I'll'--`Well, go get it and tear up page 16. It's about birth control.' We had to go running all over the city, cycling and running, walking and in the van, rush into these news agents and tear out page 16.

McCOURT: Yeah, Mike is missing. Mike is in San Francisco.

McCOURT: Conor.

McCOURT: Yeah. Yeah.

McCOURT: Yeah.

McCOURT: Yeah.

McCOURT: I think he and I were talking over a year ago about this family stuff. I was interested in getting a whole composite picture. And he came to Ireland in May 1996. I was over there with my wife, Ellen. We were on combination of promoting the book--prepublication. So Conor came over with his video camera and did some footage over there. And then he continued in New York. And he's been toiling away at it ever since and getting better and better.

McCOURT: He--yeah, he rides a bike. Right. He's the terror of the upper Westside drug dealer that--what they--the Dominicans don't know he's--he's fluent in Spanish. So when they’re talking about, `Mira, mira. The drugs are--in a garbage can.' Conor knows what they're talking about. He goes over and grabs the drugs and he grabs them. So I--they--he's very--colorful, very effective cop.

Mr. MIKE McCOURT: Basic time, it was a very short time really but for that--I remember my father vaguely. And then it came time to--but the sun was always shining. We were always playing in the streets up there. There were always games out in the streets and stuff. And everybody--everybody was in and out of everybody else's houses. We all knew each other. In fact, this little scar I have up over here was clocked on me by one Agnes Hannon. She dropped a rock on my head, you know? And she lived right next door to us. But she was--she threw a rock over the wall. And guess who was on the other side of the wall? Me.

And--but it was like--it was one--it was--the thing about it was there was kids all over the place at that time. It was a very busy little place. And like I said, the only thing I always remember it was--it was always warm up there. There was always warm days it seemed to me anyway.

Man: What about the rain?

McCOURT: Huh?

Man: Ireland is supposed to be famous for the...

McCOURT: Yeah, but --I think there was a--probably--What?--1939, '40, I suppose, when they--I even remember reading about it. The beginning--the beginning of War World II they were saying, `What a long, hot summer--warm summer it was all over Europe.' And it seemed to be that way then.

Mr. ALPHIE McCOURT: What comes to mind is she was a sweet singer, a good speaker. She had uncommonly good speech. And she was a reader which is an affliction we all caught--an addiction, affliction, whatever you call it. We all ended up with the same thing. She was, as I said, from outside of Limerick from Mungret. I remember she didn't have an easy life. I know that, but she always--she was a great woman for a party, certainly in her latter years. I was born at home in Barrack Hill. As far as I know, that's the family history. It was a turbulent time. We didn't have a great deal.

Man: What's your saddest memory you have?

Mr. MALACHY McCOURT: The saddest memory is the twins, the death of the twins, Eugene and Oliver. They were very charming pair of kids. I remember them well, although I wasn't much older. I was a year older. But--so we were exposed to death very early. It--the finality of it was not apparent at that time because they always tell us, you know, `They're very happy and they're gone to heaven and they're playing with the angels and with the baby Jesus. And they have everything they need,' and all that. And we would say, `Well, why can't they have their--why can't they come back?' (End of videotape)

McCOURT: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

McCOURT: I'm 66. Malachy's 65. Mike is 60. And Alphie is 56.

McCOURT: In the family?

McCOURT: No, unless they're talking behind my back, but they've all embraced it enthusiastically.

McCOURT: I think it did because now Malachy's writing a book. He was approached to write a book, and he's doing a thing on--on his experiences in New York. It affected their lives because it brought us altogether and it--and then the next generation of kids. There--they know more about --what we came from because--we talked intermittently down the years about it--and humorously. I think--we didn't burden them with the whining about our poverty. But now it's--I think it's between the two covers and they can read it. And I think they're very proud that the tribe is--has some prominence now.

McCOURT: I think it'll come out in the spring of 1999. I'm trying to get to it. And it's about the--my life in New York. But mainly what I discovered, what I learned as a teacher--I stood in front of those classes for --over 27 years talking, exhorting, evoking and learning mostly. I used to say to them in Stuyvesant High School in September and January when we get these new classes in. I said, `By the end of this term there's one person in this class who will have learned the most and that's me because I want to learn.' And I would learn something from each time--for instance, we did "Hamlet." Each year if you do it over and over, it just keeps--the poem, the play keeps revealing itself. And they by their--by my admission to them that I was almost illiterate and that I really knew as much about a poem as they did because they had the idea if you read a Yeats poem or T.S. Eliot, the teacher knows what it means. The teacher doesn't know. You can only-- guess.

They thought the teacher--I said, `No, we don't know. The poet himself sometimes is puzzled by what he has written.' So we--I think it helped them realize there's no end, there's no conclusion, there's no ultimate answer. We're all in the same boat.

McCOURT: Initially, it's...

McCOURT: Initially at Stuyvesant, --it was Jewish, bright kids from the upper Westside and all around New York. And then slowly there was an Asian incursion, if you want to call it--Chinese and a lot of Korean kids and --a few more exotic Sikhs and Pakistanis coming in. But all--not like the usual New York high school which is--largely African-American and Hispanic because Stuyvesant High School is a special school where you have to take an examination to get in. Seven hundred openings every year and 14,000 kids taking the exam.

So you had the cream of the crop. In one way it was easy to teach, but in another way, you had to stay on your toes. There was no such thing as giving those kids busy work. Oh, yeah, busy work. They'd know. They knew. They knew. They could see right through you. So I was forced willy-nilly to be honest with them. And that's--I think that's the main thing I gained out of it. To be honest with the kids at Stuyvesant and in previous schools like Seward Park where you had the mixture of Chinese, Dominicans, and so on. There I learned, I think, to speak clearly, directly, simply--tell the story simply because you had to reach such a wide variety of--of kids.

McCOURT: A few of them, yeah.

McCOURT: Yeah, a few of them.

McCOURT: All over the place. Last--in Washington. I've ran into--San Francisco. One night in San Francisco there was 16 showed up at a reading. And I think--I always had this --uneasy feeling when I was teaching. So--supposedly, teaching writing. I had this uneasy feeling they're sitting there and they're saying, `Oh, yeah, you're telling us how to write. Why don't you write?' And they would say after some of my stories, `Oh, Mr. McCourt, you should write a book. You should write a book. You'd write a good book.' So now I've written the book.

McCOURT: Mostly in Pennsylvania...

McCOURT: ...in a house. Milford, Pennsylvania.

McCOURT: Because we--Ellen and I rented a house down there a few years ago and then we got married there on the banks of the Delaware. Then we decided this is where we wanted to be so we bought a house.

McCOURT: No, I live in New York. I have an apartment in New York. But we lose no opportunity to run to the Delaware River.

McCOURT: In the morning like my father. I've--I have a lot of his early morning habits.

McCOURT: Sometimes seven, eight, some--I'll make coffee and give it to Ellen in the bed. I'm a very good husband. Everybody should have me for a husband if they want coffee in the morning.

McCOURT: It depends on how it's coming. Some days I just want to put a pin through my brain because it's so difficult. But on a--on certain good days I would write nine or 10 pages...

McCOURT: ...handwritten.

McCOURT: No, if it's coming, it's coming. And I stay with it. I'm not like Anthony Trollope who used to write 3,000 words every single morning before he got on his horse and inspected post offices. I couldn't do that. I didn't have a set amount.

McCOURT: I have a--it is an arm chair and I have a board and I put it on the arms of the chair and I put a notebook on that and I write in pen. I write the text on the right-hand, make notes on the left page as I go along. And then I type it into the computer.

McCOURT: Oh, the last word was written the day before the manuscript was due...

McCOURT: ...extremely...

McCOURT: That was--the manuscript was due on November 30th. I told them because I know I pick out certain dates. November 30th, 1995, I said I'd have-- it in there because that's the birthday of my idol, Jonathan Swift, so I said I'd bring it in. The night before I called Ellen at work. I said, `When you come home, I'm going--I'm not going to write the last word till you come home.' And she came home, and I had the notebook and I wrote the last word and we had champagne. And the next day I delivered the manuscript.

McCOURT: Yeah.

McCOURT: Well, it won't help me to write my next book. All the millions in the world, that's the main--I had to do this. Now I have to do that. Why do we burden ourselves like that? I could sit back now for the rest of my life and roam the world and see--and--faraway places. But I have to write a book.

McCOURT: Oh, that's--oh, that's my--I had a house in Brooklyn in Cobble Hill. That's my daughter Maggie when she was three years old.

McCOURT: Oh, she's great. She's 26 now. She has a little girl. She's out in Santa Cruz. Maggie's going to school. Oh, god. Malachy and myself at Yeats' grave. Yeah. `Cast a cold Eye on Life...'

McCOURT: In Sligo, yeah.

McCOURT: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

McCOURT: Malachy and I did a show called "A Couple of Blaguards" about growing up in Ireland and then our adventures in Limerick and--in America, rather. And we did it in Sligo at the Hawks Well Theater in 1985. Oh, God, me in the Army, Ft. Dix, New Jersey, with my old girlfriend, Emma McManus and my mother visiting the recruit.

McCOURT: No, I--no. I just feel sorry for his wasted life--my father's wasted life. If it wasn't for the drink, he would have been the perfect father.

McCOURT: His--what he had in his head, the stories, the legends, his sensitivity to Irish history, his yearning, I think--his yearning to have been--for--his yearning for a part in the struggle.

McCOURT: Who named the book?

McCOURT: I did. Well, I intended to go all the way up to her death in 1981 when she was cremated and I--we took the ashes back. But I had the--and I thought I was going to go that far but my editor Nan Graham said--I took it up to the age of 19, and she said, `That's good. That's the kind of--born in America, you go to Ireland and you return. The odyssey is complete.'

McCOURT: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

McCOURT: Oh, my brothers are the same, yeah.

McCOURT: Yeah, we-- no. We're pretty profligate with our emotions.

McCOURT: Thank you, Brian.