Mccourt Says Writing His Sequel Is Terrifying

It's downright disconcerting. Frank McCourt may be approaching his 68th birthday, but the elfin face of an impoverished 10-year-old Irish waif still peers warily from beneath the shock of white hair.

And he may be flush with success from his Pulitzer Prize-winning, 2-million copy bestseller, "Angela's Ashes," but like any writer facing a deadline, he's tortured by the thought of the memoir's unfinished sequel.

"I'm struggling with it, and I'm in a state of terror," McCourt confided yesterday in a conversation at his Seattle hotel. "It's all there - in notes and in m' head. I just wish I could say I was finished with it."

The new book - which Scribner plans to bring out sometime next year - begins quite literally where the earlier book leaves off: The new title, " 'Tis," is also the one-word final chapter in "Angela's Ashes" - young Frank's reply to a shipboard companion who muses upon the twinkling lights of America, "Isn't this a great country altogether?"

If the purpose of the award-winning bestseller ("Angela's Ashes" also won a National Book Critics Circle Award) was to explore his impoverished childhood in soggy Limerick, Ireland, says McCourt, then the upcoming memoir aims to show the effects of that poverty on his subsequent life.

McCourt was in Seattle for last night's joint appearance at the 5th Avenue Theatre with novelist Mary Gordon in the next-to-last program in Seattle Arts & Lectures' 1997-98 season. Among other topics, McCourt and Gordon - who wrote her own book about a problematic father, "The Shadow Man: A Daughter's Search for Her Father" - discussed the challenge of transforming one's own life into a work of art, the memoir.

McCourt's early life may have been scarred by wrenching poverty, but his adult years seem to have been marked by a more-ordinary course of gradual enrichment, even before the stunning success of "Angela's Ashes." The bestseller has brought him unexpected financial security, and McCourt appears to enjoy a close relationship with the three younger brothers who shared his grim childhood - his book is dedicated to them. He also is proud of a 30-year teaching career in New York high schools ("If I have a cause, it's the cause of the teacher").

There also has been fatherhood, even if it meant enduring the frustrations of raising an errant Dead Head ("When Jerry Garcia died, there was at least one man who did not grieve"). Yet the cause of those concerns, his 26-year-old daughter Maggie, has now given him two grandchildren, and McCourt himself is embarked on an even more-fulfilling adventure: a later-life remarriage a few years ago.

Speaking in a mellow baritone and the Irish inflections that make the audio version of "Angela's Ashes" such a joy to the ear, McCourt said the book that has inspired his newfound celebrity was a long time coming, but it was inevitable.

"Way back in my mid-20s I started making notes," he said. "I would just jot things down: lists of street names, songs, peculiar turns of speech, jokes, whatever.

"When I finished this book, it was a great relief, but I simply had to do it. Some, like Mother Teresa, are born with a gene to help the poor, and some are born with a gene to write. I was born with a gene to tell my story, and I just had to."

You sense, too, that Frank McCourt feels good just to have shown that he could: "It gives me a very keen satisfaction that after listening to my blather all those years, former students are now seeing that I wrote a book, that I did have it in me."

Some daft ideas

McCourt retired from teaching in 1987, and with the success of "Angela's Ashes" he is besieged with writing offers, some that cause him to smile and shake his head, others that seem just daft. In May, for instance, Rolling Stone's 30th anniversary edition will publish his piece about being the father of a Dead Head. The same month, Reader's Digest - "Can you imagine two more diametrically opposed magazines?" - will publish his essay on teaching.

"Someone else wants me to write the introduction to a book about baseball," he added. "Well, I know about as much about baseball as I do about cricket, which is bugger-all."

But the most disconcerting request came from Gourmet magazine. Gourmet!

The mind reels: From the ample evidence McCourt presents in "Angela's Ashes," he was raised on stale bread crusts and weak tea. And what reader will ever forget two of the most poignant scenes in the book: famished young Frankie licking the greasy residue from a page of the Limerick Leader, the newspaper that had held his uncle's fish-and-chips; or preparing to fork into a quivering hunk of fat: the Christmas dinner his pathetic mother begged from well-stuffed local priests.

Family bitterness

But perhaps the harshest aspect of "Angela's Ashes" is McCourt's portrait of a family riven by petty hatreds and hostility, by religious and cultural prejudices that seem almost Balkan in their intensity.

"Grandma won't talk to Mam anymore . . . Mam doesn't talk to her sister, Aunt Aggie, or her brother Uncle Tom," McCourt writes. "Dad doesn't talk to anyone in Mam's family and they don't talk to him because he's from the North and he has the odd manner. No one talks to Uncle Tom's wife, Jane, because she's from Galway and she has the look of a Spaniard . . . People in families in the lanes of Limerick have their ways of not talking to each other and it takes years of practice."

These, remember, are his and his brothers' closest relatives in the world - the same ones who decline to help them, even when their alcoholic father fails, time after time after time, to bring home from the pub even the most meager remains of his rare income.

Fear of reaching out

"Something happened to the Irish character in the Great Hunger, during the 1840s," said McCourt. "They began to go inward - though there's a stereotype of the Irish as outgoing, friendly and hospitable. But it produced a fear of reaching out, of showing emotion. All that coldness has its roots in fear."

Only one fear seems to grip Frank McCourt these days: that unfinished sequel to his wondrous first book.

"Time is short," he says with a rueful grin. "I'll be keeling over one of these days, and I don't want to leave an incomplete manuscript. I still have a few things to say."