Calder at large: The ashes of laughter

By PETER CALDER

It's hard to know what more Auckland could have done to make Frank McCourt feel at home. A night's rain was overflowing the drains downtown and the sky bulged with the threat of more.

The man who grew up in a Limerick slum in a house whose floor was under water (and worse) in winter was delighted.

"I feel like settling down here," he said, deadpan, to a Herald literary lunch at the Carlton Hotel, "and not raising a family."

It was as sly a dig as might be imagined from the author of Angela's Ashes - not so much a book as a phenomenon - and its sequel 'Tis, which he was in town to promote.

Frank McCourt loves a joke, but it's always ultimately at his own expense. It might have been a wet week for us, but where he comes from they call this a drought.

Likewise he recalled for us his military experience (posted to Germany, which seems a sensible place to be, since the war was in Korea at the time). "I trained German shepherd attack dogs," he recalled, "a perfect preparation for my future profession of teaching."

It was the constantly bubbling stream of humour that carried the reader through the unimaginable pain of the childhood recalled in Angela's Ashes. The same humour sustains the reader through 'Tis, the story of the boy from Limerick making good in New York. And there's no doubt the man sitting in the Royal Suite (as long as the lane he grew up in, with a grand piano and all) has a ready wit.

"I did a sports arena in Florida - 5600 people. You'd think I was a rock star. I'm going to change my costume - tight black trousers and leather vest, smear Vaseline on my chest like Michael Flatley, purple my hair up or something."

And so on, fast, furious, funny. But the eyes are ... sad. Grey and slightly glazed in the creased and kindly face, they seem infinitely doleful. They don't enjoy - don't even seem to get - their owner's best one-liners. As he sits before a roaring fake log fire, he seems still to see the young Frankie he was, scrabbling in the cobblestones for coal fallen from the drays.

Yes, there was pain aplenty, he admits, and rage as well at the humiliation. But the process of writing healed much of it.

"Even when I was writing [Angela's Ashes] I don't think I understood how much the rage and the pain had depleted and exhausted me. I was a timebomb. I would pick fights with people and I would knock them down, until I learned the beauty of walking away. I was a mess. How could I not be?"

A 30-year career in the classroom taught him much about anger.

"I taught Lower East Side kids who came from drug-ridden families with mothers who were on the streets," he says. "And the kids were angry, and I thought they were angry with me. They weren't; I was just the man.

"My anger dissipated over the years because I was learning from them, I was learning something about myself."

The paradox of Frank McCourt is that he left his past behind by remembering it, in the finest detail, and putting the results on paper. But it makes you wonder what the long-suffering Angela, Frank's mother, who so wanted to forget, might have thought of Angela's Ashes.

"She wouldn't have liked it," he says. "And not only because of the business of her and her cousin [who gave the penniless mother shelter in return for sex]. Like everybody else from these circumstances, you were ashamed of it. We didn't walk tall when we walked out of the slum. It took me a long time to get over the shame too - the shame of being poor. But I got over it."

That recovery is traced in 'Tis, published here last October, but whose author has only now got to this end of the world. It is, in many senses, the second half of the book Angela's Ashes was meant to be; the last few pages are a moving explanation of the first book's title.

It was, he says, "a story I wanted to tell, the immigrant story, the coming-to-America story," and it disappoints him not at all that it has had mostly indifferent reviews. He recognises the truth of Robert Louis Stevenson's dictum that sequels are "doomed to disappoint," but 'Tis has sold 25,000 in hardcover here already and his presence in town won't do any damage to that figure, he knows.

"The public," he says, with self-mocking portentousness, "has spoken."

McCourt is so quick to endorse the Alan Parker film of Angela's Ashes that the response might seem more reflexive than sincere. A stern and rather self-important movie quite drained of the book's impish energy, it depicts a Limerick where the grime is clean and everyone has $50 haircuts.

"I suppose they could have done a lot more," he agrees. "People don't know what poverty is like."

Slum life is sordid, says one who would know, as he recalls the man whom he helped deliver coal.

"His legs were abscessed and putrid and his wife would clean him every day. The pus mingled with the blood and coal dust - and the stink of everything."

Odd memories for one now feted, even worshipped, on five continents. Angela's Ashes (book and film) and its sequel have kept him on the road for four years. And the 69-year-old says he's "reaching the end of it now."

"I was a high school teacher for 30 years and nobody paid me a scrap of attention. Now they ask my opinion on everything. I got a call from Gourmet magazine in New York - would I like to write for them. I said: 'Have you read Angela's Ashes? What am I going to write about: tea and bread?'

"Architectural Digest wanted me to write something. I ask them what they think I know about architecture? And they say: 'You've just moved house, haven't you? That'll do.'

Another McCourt made it into print between Frank's two books. His younger brother Malachy wrote his own memoirs, a stream of barroom chatter called A Monk Swimming (the title, the most amusing part, comes from a misheard phrase in the Hail, Mary - "blessed art thou amongst women").

There was speculation that the book caused a rift between the brothers. Frank says he doesn't see much of Malachy or of another brother, each of whom live within a dozen Manhattan blocks, but seems to bear Malachy no ill will.

"He said himself: 'Frank has long coat-tails.' He jumped on to America's favourite form of transportation - the bandwagon. A Monk Swimming would never have been on the bestseller list if it weren't for Angela's Ashes.

"I wasn't pissed off with him. I was pissed off because his publishers tried to pass the book off as a sequel to Angela's Ashes. It's not. I'm the only one who can write a sequel. It's my life. He had his own story."