Frank and Ellen McCourt in 1997, at Charles Fort, with Kinsale, Co. Cork in the background. ROLLINGNEWS.IE
By Orla O’Sullivan
“When I first met Frank McCourt, I thought, ‘This is the man who wrote ‘Angela’s Ashes,” dancer Jean Butler said at a tribute event a week from last Sunday. “Then I thought, ‘this is the man who lived “Angela’s Ashes.”
She was speaking a week from last Sunday at a benefit at the Sheen Center on Bleecker Street, Manhattan for the inaugural Frank O’Connor Creative Writing Summer School, which begins at NYU tomorrow.
It’s 20 years since McCourt published his tragicomic, Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir of growing up too poor to have a toilet in Limerick City.
McCourt's “tenacity, honesty and grace” inspired a dance that Butler, of Riverdance fame, created in his honor and performed before an audience of about 200 people.
Many prominent figures in the arts honored McCourt, who died in 2009, included former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins; McCourt’s brothers and fellow writers, Malachy and Alphie; and his widow, Ellen.
Sadly, as noted yesterday online https://www.irishecho.com/2016/07/tributes-paid-to-alphie-mccourt/and in today’s Irish Echo, it turned out to be Alphie McCourt’s last public appearance. The youngest of Angela’s children died suddenly at his home last Saturday, July 2, at age 76.
Alphie McCourt, who died last Saturday, with his
brother Malachy McCourt, right, at an event last year.
PHOTO: PETER MCDERMOTT
Gabriel Byrne, fresh from his final, Broadway performance of “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” was also among the notables. Calling Eugene O’Neill’s work “maybe the best American play ever written,” Byrne drew a parallel between the playwright and McCourt. “It takes tremendous courage to write about your family,” he said.
An adult student of McCourt’s from a memoir-writing course spoke of how he saved her family. Russian immigrant Elena Gorokhova (“A Mountain of Crumbs,” 2010) provided a fresh voice for Irish audiences and gave a moving account of how the writer challenged her when she expressed disappointment in her teenage daughter: “a stranger” to her by not being more Russian. Inviting Gorokhova to imagine her daughter dead, McCourt revitalized the mother-daughter relationship and provided Gorokhova with the spur to write.
McCourt, who taught high school in New York City for decades, saw himself first as a teacher, said the evening’s host, novelist Joseph O’Connor, now Frank McCourt Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Limerick. (For more on the Summer School, go to frankmccourt.ulfoundation.com.) McCourt gave the title “Teacher Man” to one of two other memoirs written after “Angela’s Ashes.”
The most entertaining tribute came in absentia from Bill Whelan, Riverdance composer, in Limerick. The “fellow laner” grew up around the corner from McCourt’s marginalized street.
“As sons of Limerick, we are not used to much praise, unlike our Cork brothers…” Whelan wrote in a letter read by O’Connor. “I looked for a good Limerick phrase… ‘He wasn’t the worst of them.’”
