'Angela's Ashes' was all poverty and childhood misery, but Frank McCourt's new book, 'Teacher Man', offers a lesson on the empowering possibilities of education, writes James Ryan
Yarn-spinner par excellence Frank McCourt is back, this time with an account of his career as a high-school teacher in New York City. And what an assortment of tales he has to tell. Funny, insightful and affecting, his stories are, for the most part, based on encounters he had in the schools in which he taught English over 30 years: McKee Vocational and Technical High School, in Staten Island; New York Community College, in Brooklyn; Steward Park; Stuyvesant; Washington Irving and the High School of Fashion Industries, all public high schools in Manhattan.
McCourt's notoriously miserable Irish childhood forms the backdrop to his struggle to become a teacher. His formative years spent in the stranglehold of that unholy trinity - poverty, Catholicism and de Valera's grand plan - provide all the obstacles necessary to make that struggle a truly heroic one. And so it is. The badly scarred 19-year-old McCourt arrives in New York, clutching the suitcase bought for him by his mother, who is of course now an international icon of demoralisation thanks to Angela's Ashes, translated, as it is, into more than 40 languages. McCourt is tough, intelligent and resourceful, characteristics he allows others to attribute to him throughout the book. He, however, sees himself as stumbling constantly and often falling under the weight of his miserable childhood baggage: low self- esteem, resentment by the bucketload and anger. In this way he sets up an engaging dynamic, presenting himself as a man who is, on the one hand, publicly ebullient - at least in the classroom and in the bars of Third Avenue - but privately morose, a man bound for glory despite the obstacles: a true hero, albeit by his own reckoning.
The obstacles occasionally seem contrived, just thrown in to offset what might otherwise seem like unabashed bragging. Take his teaching test, "the last hurdle" for his teacher's licence. He arrives at the school in Brooklyn, "hungover and suffering", an hour late for the test. Observed by the examiners, including the chairman of the school, he delivers what will become a typical McCourt classroom performance, an energetic, anecdotal lesson, allowed to proceed more or less in whatever direction the students choose to steer it. No reinforcement of key concepts. No summary. Just the sort of lesson examiners dislike. And so McCourt can be found heading for the subway afterwards, berating himself. "What's the use? Teacher my arse. I'd be better off on the docks and the warehouses, lifting, hauling, cursing. At least I'd be with my own people."
But guess who is running after him, "calling from a half block away"? The chairman. "He was out of breath. 'Look, I'm not supposed to even talk to you, but you have the makings of a fine teacher. So when you get your results and you're looking for a job, just call me. Okay?' " This cocktail of triumph in the wake of abject failure makes for great storytelling. The only trouble is it's a formula on which McCourt relies too much.
Faced with the task of teaching a room full of vaguely hostile adolescents, McCourt typically begins to regale them with tales from his Limerick youth. He introduces them to the strange world of medieval religion, notably the sinister-sounding seven deadly sins. Pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy and sloth. It works. They're hooked. They demand more. He provides more. And on it goes until he realises what every teacher realises at some point: it's a concerted ploy by students to delay the lesson. They rapidly find out what you like to go on about, then cynically create opportunities for you to do so. McCourt describes this process to a tee, his sitcom humour percolating through at every turn, his iconoclasticism never far from the surface.
Racial tension, ever present in the classrooms of the public schools in which McCourt taught, occasionally flares into argument. Insults and accusations follow. McCourt's efforts to become the honest broker frequently fail because he is identified as belonging to the Irish camp. His account of these spats and the conflicts they reflect in society at large is both convincing and insightful. These public schools are primary agencies of racial integration and McCourt, as well as being a keeper of the peace, is obliged to take on the challenge of helping students deal with prejudice. Here his own experience as an immigrant comes into play. He identifies with his students, he understands their various predicaments, their parents' aspirations, their own hopes and dreams. And, most importantly, he enjoys working with them, maybe not always, or even most of the time, but enough to keep him in there trying to make a difference.
McCourt's brooding dissatisfaction with the general order of things makes him tolerant, constructively tolerant for the most part, of his students' innate dissatisfaction with that order - and, indeed, their overt disregard for it. This is obvious in his hilarious, though sometimes terrifying, account of the time he brought 29 black girls and two Puerto Rican boys to Times Square to see a movie called Cold Turkey. Practically every step of the six-block walk to the subway involves some sort of confrontation with the public. Once on the F train to 42nd Street, some of them begin to snigger at "an obese white woman". "What you little bitches looking at?" she snaps, to which the "smart, trouble-making" class leader Serena replies: "We never seen a mountain getting on a train before." A physical fight, spurred on by chants of "Go, Serena, go", is just about averted by McCourt.
Out on 42nd Street, they gather at the windows of the pornography shops, "where they postured like the half-naked figures on display". And it gets worse. But like Sydney Poitier in To Sir with Love, McCourt keeps his cool and in the long run earns their approval. The result is not 31 highly socialised, upstanding US citizens but a few young people who acknowledge that his belief in them has prompted them to begin believing in themselves. In this way McCourt, for all his tall tales and off-beat classroom antics, is offering his students a type of education diametrically opposite to that which he was subjected to in his youth. It is tolerant, good-humoured and empowering.
Teacher-training gurus, particularly those concerned with classroom dynamics, would do well to listen to what McCourt has to say. His analysis of the different personality types that make up an average class makes theorising seem dull and pedantic. "Joey is the mouth. There's one in every class, along with the complainer, the clown, the goody-goody, the beauty queen, the jock, the intellectual, the momma's boy, the religious fanatic who sees sin everywhere, the brooding one who sits at the back staring at his desk, the happy one, the saint who finds good in all creatures."
Thirty years teaching in New York City has provided McCourt with a mine of rich anecdotal material. But Limerick won't be beaten, and in the end the most memorable yarn in Teacher Man is located right outside Todd's on O'Connell Street. It is a story he used to quieten his restless students, but one which is just as easy - if not more appropriate - to imagine him telling to his boozing buddies in one of those dark Third Avenue bars. There, with all the swagger and ease of a seasoned, high-stool raconteur, rather than a high-school teacher, McCourt might leave down his beer and ask if he ever told them the one about the day a woman drove up alongside his mother in a big motorcar and offered to buy his brother.
"When I grew older and heard her tell that story for the hundredth time, I said she should have sold Malachy so there would have been more food for the rest of us. She said: 'Well, I offered you but the woman wasn't a bit interested.' "
James Ryan, currently writer-in-residence at UCD, teaches history at Newpark School in Blackrock, Co Dublin. His most recent novel is Seeds of Doubt (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). Teacher Man, by Frank McCourt, is published by HarperCollins, £18.99