Frank McCourt, the Pulitzer prize-winning author of Angela’s Ashes, died yesterday. Frank McCourt was also my high school English teacher at Stuyvesant High School during my senior year.
What was Mr. McCourt (as I knew him back then) like as a teacher? The answer is tremendously entertaining. In all of my years of education, there is no class I ever looked forward to as much as Mr. McCourt’s Creative Writing class. Mr. McCourt was brilliantly funny, with a dry and sarcastic wit which reminds one of Bob Newhart, but with an Irish brogue. Mr. McCourt had a talent for saying things that were on the edge of being either serious or a joke, and you couldn’t tell which.
I wish I could recall more of the specifics, but high school was a long time ago and, sadly, there are only a few things I still remember from his class. Some of his other students say he told a lot of stories about his miserable Irish childhood, but all I have are some vague recollections of him mentioning how hard his life was when he was a kid, and these brief anecdotes evoked nervous laughter because we couldn’t tell if he was being serious or not. I figured they were gross exaggerations until I read Angela’s Ashes years later and discovered how truly miserable his childhood really was.
I do remember one class where he read from the Book of Genesis and made sarcastic comments. “And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day,” he read from the Bible, and then he commented, “back then, God would just walk around.” Perhaps it doesn’t sound funny in writing, but he had a talent for saying things like this in a such a way that they were hilarious when you heard them.
It was the first time anyone had ever read the Bible to me; who knew there were actually some interesting stories in there? Mr. McCourt was dismayed that so few of his students had read the Bible. He said the Bible is an extremely important influence on Western literature, and to understand what the literature is about you have to know what’s in the Bible. Several years later, remembering Mr. McCourt’s advice, I finally bought my own copy of the Bible, and one day I still plan on reading it from cover to cover.
In retrospect, mocking the Bible was probably not prudent behavior for a public school teacher. I could imagine a teacher getting fired for doing that.
Mr. McCourt was certainly a great performer, but did I learn anything in his class? That’s a tough question. In his Creative Writing class, I wrote a rather mediocre play, but I was only seventeen, so the production of a great work of literature was probably beyond my capabilities. In his Senior English class the next semester, he made us read The Horse’s Mouth by Joyce Cary. I was in my Lord of the Rings phase at the time, so I just didn’t get Cary. Once again, I’m going to plead the ignorance of being only seventeen years old. I’ve put The Horse’s Mouth on my short list of books to read; hopefully I will be able to appreciate as an adult what I didn’t get as a high school kid.
Whether or not I learned much English, I am grateful that I was able to have such a brilliant and memorable man for a teacher, and I offer my heartfelt condolences to his family.
