Frank McCourt died yesterday, and much of New York mourns him, including my own household. I first met Frank more than a decade ago, when we were on several panels together at the Key West Literary Seminar on the memoir. I had written Unafraid of the Dark the year before; he had written Angela’s Ashes, and having a much better time with his publisher than I was having with mine. It was a heady thing to be hanging out in Key West with people like Calvin Trillin and Annie Dillard. Meeting Dillard was a double delight; not only did I love her essays, but her husband is Robert Richardson, author of the fabulous Emerson: The Mind on Fire. I spent a good part of one evening talking to Richardson about our Unitarian connections, while Annie Dillard (an Episcopalian!) recruited my husband and others for a game of beach volleyball I’m not sure they ever got to play.
Frank was as hilarious in person as his books, and charmed all of us that weekend. It was perfectly obvious why his students loved him. He was himself, and shame on you if you didn’t appreciate him. He had nothing to prove to anyone, that seemed plain, and he brought to all his encounters in my presence a sense of delight and wonder that he was there at all. I got to hang out with him again a couple of years later at another writers conference, this time in Sun Valley, Idaho. It’s my husband Bob that has a picture of himself whitewater rafting with Frank, Anne Lamott and her son Sam, and some other people; being a non-swimmer I was having none of that. My own memories are far more earthy—-hanging out each night after the day’s panels and workshops, listening to Frank and his wife Ellen sing these incredibly bawdy drinking songs, or watching a limerick throw-down among Frank, WS Merwin and Peter Matthiesen. Those evenings rank as some of the funniest spectacles of my adult life. These three men, in particular, managed to create rhymes using the names of body parts I didn’t know could be rhymed.
At a conference when many equally famous writers greeted me with a studied indifference, Frank McCourt was warm, curious, and open. We had a good time, and promised to keep in touch, but like so many other people who connect only briefly, we drifted away. I only saw him in passing a few years later, after I had become a minister and learned that he and Ellen lived only a few blocks from the congregation I served. I was picking up my sons from school, and he was walking along 77th St. We recognized each other, and spoke for a moment or two, and I introduced him to my boys. I ran into Ellen just the same way, but we were always on our way somewhere else, or traveling for the holidays, and the fragile connection we once made faded.
Now Frank is gone, too. I had hoped to see him again in connection to the public high-school-in-formation that we hope will bear his name. Both Bob and I have been active with others in working toward its creation, so that we might lift up not only a good man and a fine writer, but also the two professions–writing and teaching–to which he devoted most of his life. Rest well, Frank; I’m convinced you’ll keep God laughing.
I loved listening to an (old) interview w/him on Fresh Air today. And your post reminded me how much I loved YOUR book. Not sure I got the chance to tell you.