Frank McCourt – cancer is a disease you can’t walk away from

When I interviewed Frank McCourt and Mary Gordon in Seattle in 1998, he took issue with the idea that alcoholism is a disease.

Cancer is a disease. You can walk away from the bottle. A disease is something you can’t walk away from.

He died today at 78 of metastatic melanoma.

Here’s the interview:

Neither Frank McCourt nor Mary Gordon had childhoods anybody would envy, but as McCourt points out, “the happy childhood is hardly worth your while.”
The pair of New Yorkers shared the stage last night as part of the Seattle Arts & Lectures series at the Fifth Avenue Theatre.

The reasoning behind their joint appearance is obvious: Both have written acclaimed memoirs published addressing the travails of Irish Catholic upbringings.

In Gordon’s The Shadow Man, she writes of her Jewish father who converted to Catholicism and became rabidly anti-Semitic. He died when she was 7, leaving her in the care of largely Irish Catholic relatives who were suspicious of her dark good looks and ready to criticize any evidence of  “the Jew” in her.

“Mary’s book is about mental and spiritual suffering,” McCourt said. “My suffering was monetary. We were lacking for food, shelter and clothing. If I was particularly demanding as a child, my mother would say, `The next thing you’ll be wanting is an egg,’ as if it were a golden chalice.”

Gordon’s book is her seventh and has been followed by another, the novel Spending. McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes came out of nowhere and made him a star at 65.

“Not a star,” he protested.
Just then, on cue, a waitress came by. Beaming at him and ignoring Gordon, she said, “I loved your book.”

Angela’s Ashes describes a woebegotten Irish pair who met in
New York and were forced to marry thanks to a pregnancy. He was a “shiftless, loquacious alcoholic” who married a “pious, defeated
mother moaning by the fire,” the Angela of the title.

Breaking with the usual pattern, they couldn’t make it in New York and
were forced to return home. Their failure made their relatives bitter. “If you’re a Yank come home to Ireland you’re supposed to do it in
good clothes and be able to throw the odd dollar around. We came home
broke.”

The story of an Irish family awash in alcoholic misery is too familiar
to be interesting. What makes McCourt’s book a classic is the writing,
which is deeply Irish in its rich cadences and free
from self-pity. There’s sky in this book, high-flying humor and scrappy
energy.
McCourt took on the bleak world as he encountered it, survived the
extreme poverty that killed a sister and two brothers and lived to tell
the tale boundlessly well.

Why wasn’t he writing earlier?
He raised droopy eyebrows.

“I taught in high school, five classes a day and 170 kids. It wears you out.”

Retiring 10 years ago freed him up, along with the death of his mother.

“I couldn’t have written the book while she was alive.”

Gordon didn’t fit into her family because of what her relatives
perceived as her Jewish heritage and didn’t fit into the Jewish
community either. In order to be a Jew, your mother, not your father,
has to be Jewish.

“I wasn’t enough of anything for anybody. It’s a wonderful position for a writer.”

Although his brothers in New York quickly merged into the Irish community, McCourt stayed aloof.

“I didn’t feel all that Irish, maybe because I was teaching.” Having his high school students read James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man revealed to McCourt how Irish Catholic he really was.

“They didn’t know the seven deadly sins,” he said, still amazed. “I
had to write them on the blackboard. Without a consciousness of sin,
how can you have a good time?”

Although McCourt thanks the Catholic Church for pounding the
consciousness of sin into him, neither he nor his brothers have
anything to do with the Church as adults.

“My mother despaired that none of us married a nice, Irish Catholic
girl. She’d visit and look at her grandchildren with disapproval,
saying, ‘I’m tripping all over these Jews and Protestants.’ “

Gordon, on the other hand, is still a Catholic and has raised her children in the faith.
Asked if they practice it, she shook her head.

“They don’t practice the piano either. They don’t like to practice
anything. But I think the Church offers something you can’t find
elsewhere. There’s such an emphasis on success in this culture. The
Church is a home for the non-successful. It casts no blame on them.”

Gordon’s youth was not saturated with alcohol, as McCourt’s was.
Although his brothers all had problems with alcohol and don’t drink
today, he never had a problem himself and isn’t particularly forgiving
of those who don’t overcome it.

“Cancer is a disease. You can walk away from the bottle. A disease is something you can’t walk away from.”

Just as Gordon was faulted for looking like her father, McCourt was
faulted for looking like his father, with what his mother’s relatives
called “the odd manner” and the “sneaky, Presbyterian smile,”
although his father was as Catholic as any of them.

Both writers are riding the crest of a wave of popularity for memoirs,
although McCourt resents the anti-memoir backlash that has risen of
late. “I don’t mind them going after the whiners,” he said, noting
that some are dismissing memoirs out of hand.
Gordon thinks writing the memoir was tougher than writing a novel, in
that it explored painful, private areas, but easier as well.

“Writing a novel is like being Bugs Bunny running off a cliff. There’s nothing underneath you. You have to write the cliff.”

“I’d like to try that,” said McCourt.

“You will,” she said, giving his shoulder an affectionate pat.

He didn’t. William Grimes obituary here.