Frank McCourt: Battles of a class warrior

Irish poverty behind him, Frank McCourt found life almost as tough when he taught in New York schools. John Freeman talks to the bestselling memoirist

Frank McCourt may be smiling these days, but the darkness within keeps leaking out. After publishing his two bestselling memoirs about growing up poor in Ireland and moving to America, Angela's Ashes and 'Tis, McCourt has just released a third. Teacher Man (Fourth Estate, £18.99) chronicles the three decades he spent in New York City schools. "I once had the kids write each other's obituaries," says the 75-year-old author during an interview at his publisher's office in Manhattan."I called it getting even."

He explains: "They were vicious to each other. They had burnings, and jumping out of windows, and landing on wrought-iron railings. For themselves, they always arranged nice deaths - lying in state, surrounded by their loved ones."

It is stories such as these that make Teacher Man such an unusual read, since McCourt freely admits that, as an educator, he was making things up as he went along. He gave to teaching his own black (and bleak) spin. "I knew I had to find my own way of teaching," says McCourt, dressed today in a crisp dress shirt and jeans, his brogue still present. "I certainly couldn't be telling them about grammar or analysis or whatever."

So he told stories instead. On his first day of class, at McKee Technical and Vocational School, on Staten Island, in 1958, the young teacher learnt to keep the students quiet by telling them about his poor childhood in Ireland. Then he returned the favour by asking them to write down the best excuse note they could think of. Nowadays, creative-writing classes call it workshopping, but back then it was unheard of, and McCourt was forever on the verge of getting fired. "They didn't know I was working things out with them," he says, "by answering those questions about growing up in Ireland. I was in a fog and slowly climbing out of it."

It was also not an easy time to be a teacher. When McCourt began work, New York was a tough place. Gangs squared off in rumbles that made West Side Story look like an exercise video. "They were mean, and brutal: the racism. Even the Irish and Italians used to fight. If there was a black gang, they weren't even considered as a worthy opponent. If they dared come out of Harlem or Bedford-Stuyvesant, the Irish would beat them brutally. But the Italians and Irish had respect for each other."

But it wasn't just racial hatred in the air. "It was a fairly rigid society," McCourt remembers: "This was still post-Second World War, Eisenhower was in office, the country was fairly prosperous, but there was this sense that the enemy was out there. And then Vietnam comes around. Those kids were the ones who were going to go off and come back in body bags."

He explains that "When you graduated from college, if you became a teacher you were exempt. So we had half a dozen teachers at Stuyvesant [his next school] who were there only because of Vietnam. They were not particularly interested in teaching. And they were always complaining. They are in the best school in the city, and all they did was complain. I thought I was in heaven."

It took McCourt ten years to get as far as Stuyvesant, which is still one of the best schools in the city, and free. McCourt himself had to arrive through the back door in 1968, coming in as a substitute teacher, and eventually becoming a full-time faculty member. Within a few years, he was so popular there were waiting lists to get into his class, and stories about him in The New York Times. All told, he figures he taught some 11,000 students.

Yet, in spite of this success, the largest section of Teacher Man focuses on his years at McKee, when he was learning, and he and the students were on a similar plane. Like them, McCourt had always been an underdog, even after he came to America. "I thought everything would be different in America," he says. "It wasn't." He had worked on the docks and taken his fair share of knocks. It wasn't hard for McCourt to imagine how the children felt, cooped up in school.

"I understood what I would be like in that class," he says. "I hated school in Ireland." McCourt knew he had to resort of desperate measures to reach certain kids. One, he recalls, had a developmental disability and wore his hood everywhere. McCourt won him over by putting him in charge of a few thousand jars of paint in an art room. "I had to give him something to keep him busy," McCourt says, wincing. "And then he was off to Vietnam and I never heard from him again."

At McKee, McCourt first began to write down memories and stories he worried he might lose. But at Stuyvesant, where the students were so earnest that, if assigned a 500-word essay, they would turn in double that, he began to think more about writing. His attitude about teaching changed slightly, too. "I used to tell the kids this is for me now," he says, not at all joking. "That I was going to learn more than they would. That would make them sit up. It was a challenge."

Occasionally, the students would complain that they had a harder time of writing, because they hadn't been raised poor in Ireland. He always disagreed. "You don't have to go fight bulls in Spain like Hemingway to write something great, or go off to war. It's right under your nose."

Thanks to his two memoirs, a Pulitzer Prize, the film version of Angela's Ashes, and the fact that he still spends part of his time in New York, not all of McCourt's students have disappeared from right under his nose, more than ten years after he retired. "Oh, I hear from them," he says, raised eyebrows suggesting a large volume of correspondence. "I meet them in the street. Some of them are sending me books and manuscripts."

McCourt knows he is in part to blame - or to thank - for the explosion of memoirs, but he thinks the culture was going in that direction before he began his second career at 66. "It's in the air. It was happening with daytime talk shows where you see these people on Jerry Springer, these pathetic people telling their stories. And now you see it with reality television. People want real-life stories."

As with so many bestselling memoirs, from Mary Karr's The Liar's Club to James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, there have been questions about the veracity of McCourt's memoirs. Some people in Limerick claimed he made up whole sections of Angela's Ashes. He shrugs that off today. "I always think of something Gore Vidal said. He said a biography is an attempt to adhere to the facts. But a memoir is your impression. These books are my impression of what happened - and I cannot remember every conversation word for word, so I recreate some to get the sense of how it felt then. It's a story." Besides, he adds, "I have three brothers who will take me to task if I depart from what we call our history."

It's not hard to see why McCourt has become a target. Angela's Ashes spent 117 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, was translated into 27 languages, and then filmed. McCourt went on to write 'Tis. Suddenly, he was rich.

McCourt, who has homes in New York and Connecticut, began Teacher Man as a novel. Then he returned to New York from Rome, where he was working, and ran into the Newsweek critic Malcolm Jones. "I said, 'Malcolm, I am trying to write this novel about teaching. But I am struggling - I can't decide whether it should be a novel or a memoir.' 'Memoir,' he yelled. So I said, 'OK, Malcolm,' and I went home and reverted to the memoir."

McCourt is now quite used to recognition on the street. He finds fame flattering, but it hasn't really turned his head. "I had all these brothers of mine in the bar business, on the Upper East Side, all these glamorous people coming in ... Movie stars and the like," he remembers. He turned that life down so he could teach. "I didn't want to be looking back at that: a series of adventures in bars."

"On the last day of my teaching career, I was sitting in my apartment, having a glass of wine, thinking, 'I'm glad I did it.' That I had been somehow useful, that I had learnt something." McCourt knows that his path is not for everybody. He recalls how one of his least popular lessons at Stuyvesant was to ask students to imagine coming home from college to tell their parents they had decided to become a teacher. "Oh, they were in an uproar over that one. 'Only a teacher': that was the phrase. And you get the pathetic salary. There wouldn't be a parent in the world who would be pleased with that news."

Biography: Frank McCourt

Frank McCourt was born in Brooklyn in 1930 to Irish immigrant parents, who returned to Ireland in search of work. Once there, they sank into poverty and three of seven children died. McCourt left school at 13 and at 19 returned to the US and worked at odd jobs. He resumed his eduction at the end of the Korean war, and tuaghat for 27 years in the New York City school system. After he retired that he wrote his childhood memoir, Angela's Ashes, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize for Biography. He has written two other memoirs: 'Tis and now Teacher Man (Fourth Estate). McCourt lives in New York City and Connecticut.