McCourt Still a Dreamer

Frank McCourt is wearing an orange button-down shirt, gray pants and a blue blazer--all standard fare for a featured author, especially when you're the speaker at a Graduate School of Education Fundraiser. McCourt, looks, unmistakably, nice. Actually, he looks like he could be my grandfather, without much of a problem. He's even got the sneakers, shining out amid a sea of loafers and lace-ups in the affluent audience.

But it's the sneakers that do it. It's the sneakers--gleaming white symbols of American prosperity--that are so irreconciliable with the picture of the bare-footed toddler that has flooded bookstores' shelves for the past three years on the cover of Angela's Ashes. It's the sneakers that are so unlike the scuffed lace-ups that he wears in the photograph on the front of his latest book, 'Tis, as he grins out at the world from his new home in New York. And so, as McCourt patiently waits for his turn to speak, I struggle--unable to reconcile the image of the comfortable American retiree before me with the stories I have read. I struggle, that is, until he begins to speak.

Frank McCourt is a storyteller. He has an accent seemingly unaffected by a half-century in the United States, a brogue so rich and textured that it fills the room completely and envelops his listeners. He cracks jokes--smart, pointed and wickedly funny. He talks about "long-legged Episcopalians" with "apocalyptic bosoms," the seven deadly sins, and the "explosive creativity" of the American adolescent. (His plan for exterminating Saddam Hussein is to "drop 1,000 American Adolescents with boom boxes in Baghdad or Teheran.") And he talks about how taking attendance at McKee Vocational and Technical High School sounded like "light opera: Adinolfi, Buscaglia, Cacciamani, DiFazio, Esposito, Gagliardi, Miceli."

McCourt's ear for dialect is so flawless that I didn't notice he was reading from his second book. His talent first appeared in Angela's Ashes, the hugely successful childhood memoir that won a Pulitzer Prize. 'Tis is the sequel to that story, beginning with McCourt's journey to America on the MS Irish Oak in 1949, and ending in Belfast, 1985. In between, we experience first-hand the trials and triumphs of an American immigrant, from his days sweeping the lobby of the Biltmore hotel to striding down the halls of Stuyvesant as a respected teacher.

McCourt writes with the same mix of humor and sadness that sustained him through Angela's Ashes, but this time a sharper edge of anger and resentment accompany his stories. The maturing McCourt loses the playfulness and innocence of childhood, replacing it with his father's fondness for drink, an acute social awareness, and a searing sense of ambition.

Perennially jealous of the college students he sees on the subway ("It must be grand to be a student with nothing to do but listen to professors, read in libraries, sit under campus trees and discuss what you're learning.") McCourt talks his way into New York University by giving an admissions officer a sampling of his reading list, heavy on Dostoyevsky and Melville, with a smattering of Tolstoy.

After gaining his degree, he becomes a teacher, teaching, as he counts it, an estimated 33,000 lessons to 4,000 students.

And while we learn in 'Tis that his students learned something about similes, metaphors and five-paragraph essays, it seems that McCourt taught them a far more important lesson--that of the strength and resilience of the human spirit. When asked how he "survived poverty," McCourt said that he did it with a sense of humor, storytelling and "the dream that we were going to get out of that lane-- to get to America by hook or by crook."

'Tis serves as a reminder, in this age of cynicism, that there is still an American dream. McCourt, at age 66 and after finding the strength to write from the voices of three African-American writers, ultimately achieves that dream with the publication of Angela's Ashes. But the undercurrents of anger and resentment that reverberate through the book show us the raw underbelly of that dream: the humiliation, the loneliness, the despair and the jealousy. McCourt's second novel does not exist as an extension of his first book, devoid of any meaning. Rather, it shows us that the American dream--romantic though it may be--is still very much what his brother Alphie calls a "tormenting dream."