few hundred copies and I might be invited to have discussions with book clubs. Instead it jumped onto the best-seller list and was translated into thirty languages and I was dazzled. The book was my second act.
In the world of books I am a late bloomer, a johnny-come-lately, new kid on the block. My first book, Angela’s Ashes, was published in 1996 when I was sixty-six, the second,’ Tis, in 1999 when I was sixty-nine. At that age it’s a wonder I was able to lift the pen at all. New friends of mine (recently acquired because of my ascension to the best-seller lists) had published books in their twenties. Striplings.
So, what took you so long?
I was teaching, that’s what took me so long. Not in college or university, where you have all the time in the world for writing and other diversions, but in four different New York City public high schools. (I have read novels about the lives of university professors where they seemed to be so busy with adultery and academic in-fighting you wonder where they found time to squeeze in a little teaching.) When you teach five high school classes a day, five days a week, you’re not inclined to go home to clear your head and fashion deathless prose. After a day of five classes your head is filled with the clamor of the classroom.
I never expected Angela’s Ashes to attract any attention, but when it hit the best-seller lists I became a media darling. I had my picture taken hundreds of times. I was a geriatric novelty with an Irish accent. I was interviewed for dozens of publications. I met governors, mayors, actors. I met the first President Bush and his son the governor of Texas. I met President Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton. I met Gregory Peck. I met the Pope and kissed his ring. Sarah, Duchess of York, interviewed me. She said I was her first Pulitzer Prize winner. I said she was my first duchess. She said, Ooh, and asked the cameraman, Did you get that? Did you get that? I was nominated for a Grammy for the spoken word and nearly met Elton John. People looked at me in a different way. They said, Oh, you wrote that book, This way, please, Mr. McCourt, or Is there anything you’d like, anything? A woman in a coffee shop squinted and said, I seen you on TV. You must be important. Who are you? Could I have your autograph? I was listened to. I was asked for my opinion on Ireland, conjunctivitis, drinking, teeth, education, religion, adolescent angst, William Butler Yeats, literature in general. What books are you reading this summer? What books have you read this year? Catholicism, writing, hunger. I spoke to gatherings of dentists, lawyers, ophthalmologists and, of course, teachers. I traveled the world being Irish, being a teacher, an authority on misery of all kinds, a beacon of hope to senior citizens everywhere who always wanted to tell their stories.
They made a movie of Angela’s Ashes. No matter what you write in America there is always talk of The Movie. You could write the Manhattan telephone directory, and they’d say, So, when is the movie?
If I hadn’t written Angela’s Ashes I would have died begging, Just one more year, God, just one more year because this book is the one thing I want to do in my life, what’s left of it. I never dreamed it would be a best-seller. I hoped it would sit on booksellers’ shelves while I lurked in the bookshop and watched beautiful women turn pages and shed the occasional tear. They’d buy the book, of course, take it home, loll on divans and read my story while sipping herbal tea or a fine sherry. They’d order copies for all their friends.
In ’Tis I wrote about my life in America and how I became a teacher. After it was published I had the nagging feeling I’d given teaching short shrift. In America, doctors, lawyers, generals, actors, television people and politicians are admired and rewarded. Not teachers. Teaching is the downstairs maid of professions. Teachers are told to use the service door or go around the back. They are congratulated on having ATTO (All That Time Off). They are spoken of patronizingly and patted, retroactively, on their silvery locks. Oh, yes, I had an English teacher, Miss Smith, who really inspired me. I’ll never forget dear old Miss Smith. She used to say that if she reached one child in her forty years of teaching it would make it all worthwhile. She’d die happy. The inspiring English teacher then fades into gray shadows to eke out her days on a penny-pinching pension, dreaming of the one child she might have reached. Dream on, teacher. You will not be celebrated.
You think you’ll walk into the classroom, stand a moment, wait for silence, watch while they open notebooks and click pens, tell them your name, write it on the board, proceed to teach.
On your desk you have the English course of study provided by the school. You’ll teach spelling, vocabulary, grammar, reading comprehension, composition, literature.
You can’t wait to get to the literature. You’ll have lively discussions about poems, plays, essays, novels, short stories. The hands of one hundred and seventy students will quiver in the air and they’ll call out, Mr. McCourt, me, me, I wanna say something.
You hope they’ll want to say something. You don’t want them to sit gawking while you struggle to keep a lesson alive.
You’ll feast on the bodies of English and American literature. What a time you’ll have with Carlyle and Arnold, Emerson and Thoreau. You can’t wait to get to Shelley, Keats and Byron and good old Walt Whitman. Your classes will love all that romanticism and rebellion, all that defiance. You’ll love it yourself, because, deep down and in your dreams, you’re a wild romantic. You see yourself on the barricades.
Principals and other figures of authority passing in the hallways will hear sounds of excitement from your room. They’ll peer through the door window in wonder at all the raised hands, the eagerness and excitement on the faces of these boys and girls, these plumbers, electricians, beauticians, carpenters, mechanics, typists, machinists.
You’ll be nominated for awards: Teacher of the Year, Teacher of the Century. You’ll be invited to Washington. Eisenhower will shake your hand. Newspapers will ask you, a mere teacher, for your opinion on education. This will be big news: A teacher asked for his opinion on education. Wow. You’ll be on television.
Television.
Imagine: A teacher on television.
They’ll fly you to Hollywood, where you’ll star in movies about your own life. Humble beginnings, miserable childhood, problems with the church (which you bravely defied), images of you solitary in a corner, reading by candlelight: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens. You there in the corner blinking with your poor diseased eyes, bravely reading till your mother pulls the candle away from you, tells you if you don’t stop the two eyes will fall out of your head entirely. You plead for the candle back, you have only a hundred pages left in Dombey and Son, and she says, No, I don’t want to be leading you around Limerick with people asking how you went blind when a year ago you were kicking a ball with the best of them.
You say yes to your mother because you know the song:
A mother’s love is a blessing No matter where you go Keep her while you have her You’ll miss her when she’s gone.
Besides, you could never talk back to a movie mother played by one of those old Irish actresses, Sarah Allgood or Una O’Connor, with their sharp tongues and their suffering faces. Your own mother had a powerful hurt look, too, but there’s nothing like seeing it on the big screen in black and white or living color.
Your father could be played by Clark Gable except that a) he might not be able to handle your father’s North of Ireland accent and b) it would be a terrible comedown from Gone With the Wind, which, you remember, was banned in Ireland because, it is said, Rhett Butler carried his own wife, Scarlett, up the stairs and into bed, which upset the film censors in Dublin and caused them to ban the film entirely. No, you’d need someone else as your father because the Irish censors would be watching closely and you’d be badly disappointed if the people in Limerick, your city, and the rest of Ireland were denied the opportunity of seeing the story of your miserable childhood and subsequent triumph as teacher and movie star.
But that would not be the end of the story. The real story would be how you eventually resisted the siren call of Hollywood, how after nights of being dined, wined, feted and lured to the beds of female stars, established and aspiring, you discovered the hollowness of their lives, how they poured out their hearts to you on various satin pillows, how you listened,