Alphie McCourt | True Stories of Ireland & Brothers Malachy & Frank McCourt

March 27, 2009

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors! Its my great honor to have as my next guest on the show the great memoirs of Alphie McCourt of the well known McCourt family; Frank McCourt, Malachy McCourt and Alphie McCourt, all memoirs and all successful at that. Welcome to the show Alphie McCourt.

Alphie McCourt: Thank you!

Dr. Kent: It’s a book called A Long Stones Throw, give me in a nutshell where this book starts, where it finishes and what it does in between.

Alphie McCourt: It starts in New York City then I spend some time on between the two borders of Canada and the united states because of a glitch in my Visa and it comes back to New York and then carries on to my time in the Army and time on the east side of Manhattan and then I go back to Ireland and come back again and spend some time in California before coming back to new York and settling in New York.

Dr. Kent: Talk about New York City at that time. It was a different place.

Alphie McCourt: It was a different place. New York in the 1960s, the united states in the 1960s, was a different place in my own view I think it was probably the last period of real prosperity in the united states when people were free to develop and articulate even to protest the causes. Of course it was a very turbulent time for everyone and for me personally being in my 20s it was a turbulent time.

Dr. Kent: I’m so intrigued by your whole family. I’ve now read books by your brother Frank, Maliki and by you now. How did you all become so gifted in story telling, in writing?

Alphie McCourt: Well Frank has been writing all his life. I think he wrote his first book Ashes to Ashes under various titles. I think he probably wrote it three times before he spent his life writing that book and he has been writing all of his life. He has the real gift of writing. Maliki has a different style of all the others, entirely spontaneous. He has a gift of writing and the gift of talking. He can as I said turn the world on its ear. He has a great sense of the absurd. As for myself, I’ve been reading more than writing bits and pieces all my life, but I’ve always wrote a lot. My mother was a great reader and my father was conscious of sound and story always. So I guess it comes, whatever it is, comes from the parents.

Dr. Kent: And we in this country, we love Irish culture and I don’t know what it is exactly about it. Maybe it’s some of the absurd things that we hear, the wild stories, some of the beautiful culture and music. Why do Americans feel so obsessed about Ireland?

Alphie McCourt: Well I think the Irish have a way, the best of the Irish have a way of taking everything seriously and taking nothing seriously and they think that’s the only way you can really survive and get through. If you take everything seriously you’re done for and if you take nothing seriously then you’ll last. So I think you have to find the path and always have some perspective. It is said about Irish people that we have a great sense of tragedy and a great sense of [inaudible] that an Irish, I cant quote it exactly but the saying is “In times of great joy an Irishman is consoled by the fact that around the corner lurks great tragedy.” That verse is a consolation in times of great joy, you know because we all lurk, we all have the guilt you know. If you have great joy you know that somewhere down the line you have to pay.

Dr. Kent: That’s true; we always want the one and the other. We want the dark and the light. So tell us about in this book A Long Stones Throw you talk about your early childhood and some of the difficulties. Talk about your struggles.

Alphie McCourt: It was peculiar the way we grew up because I described it to someone recently because we were white people among white people, Irish people among Irish people and more or less Catholics among Catholics. Why even so, we were essentially excluded. We were looked down upon and regarded with contempt. I suppose if we have lived on [inaudible] Drive we would have had enough to eat and we could’ve just melded in but the fact that we lived in a large town in a small city, I guess we were early in the genteel life what they call it inner city children. We were they and they were we and our we stunk because we were not clean enough we weren’t respectable. And that was the stigma. You can endure hunger and deprivation and all of that, but the stigma is a terrible thing. Plus the fact that our father was as I said, our father who worked in England and left and never came back, never kept in contact, never hardly wrote or sent money or anything else. If we had contact with my father we would’ve been better off but with no contact with the father, the stigma of poverty combined with the stigma of no father was horrendous.

Dr. Kent: Now you have so many themes running through your book, including that one of course and then also you have Christianity, you have sports, all of these things and then you have New York. You have a different, this grammatically different culture. How did all of these worlds collide in your youth and young adulthood?

Alphie McCourt: It was a very difficult adjustment in the sense that I was not an ordinary immigrant because the ordinary immigrant are not English speaking so the Irish have had the advantage of being English speaking so you kind of have one foot in the door, but its though to get in the door because you still have the you know, you can tell by looking at you still and you have the accent and you have a certain bearing which stamps you as an immigrant. Plus the fact that I was the only one of my family to go through high school, secondary school. So that opened certain doors for me. I had the opportunity here to go to the university and all that but I could never seem to buckle down to it.

I never really got into it, I don’t know why and I don’t attempt to analyze it. Its just the way it turned out, I couldn’t commit myself to that kind of academic endeavor. I guess I was hungry for the excitement of New York and hungry for the glamour of New York. They used to tell us when we were kids that presumption is the expectation of salvation without taking the means necessary to obtain it. that’s a very weighty statement so I guess I was looking to have the glamour to have whatever you’re supposed to have without really doing the work necessary to obtain it. Plus I think I felt overshadowed. I have three brothers, my brother Michael is one who lives in San Francisco and a formidable character in his own right. It’s agreed that probably he’s the best storyteller in the whole family. He hasn’t written a book and probably never will, he doesn’t have to. So I guess I felt somewhat overshadowed by the brothers.

Dr. Kent: As the youngest of the brothers, did you get doted on by your mother?

Alphie McCourt: While things improved once Frank came over here and went in the Army and they do the allotment when you give up your pay and the government matches it with an equal amount of money, so our situation improved. Maliki did the same when he came and Michael did the same so I guess from age 12 on it was more or less better off.

Dr. Kent: That’s something I remember very well from your brother Frank McCourt’s biography where he talked about visiting home. He would send the money home and then he talked about visiting home. What was it like to have your big brother be in a foreign land and talk about the military and all of this?

Alphie McCourt: Frank is ten years older so when he would come home I guess I was about 14 and he was 24 so I was still looking up to him and America was and still is I think the promised land, where dreams come true, and having him come home and having Maliki come home and Michael come home in the splendid uniforms all striped and well scrubbed and clean and well fed and all of that, it was tremendous because this was still the 1950s and it was still shall we say the American century for America was the promised land. I couldn’t get enough of them when they came home because they represented, it was a kind of generosity and a love about them when they came home. It wasn’t to be found in our limited 1960s.

Dr. Kent: You also detail in your book some personal struggles with alcohol and I guess my question about that is I hear so much about Ireland and so much of it revolves around alcohol. What’s your experience with that and how have you come out on top?

Alphie McCourt: I remember the 1980s I think we did a survey in Europe about alcohol consumption and I think the Irish came in number five after the French, Germans, Italians and such, so we were lower down the scale when we got to consumption, but maybe when we drink we become more demonstrative, more inclined to drink and sing and dance and fight or whatever and maybe we tend not to drink moderately – two or three drinks. You know what they say, you tend to carry on once you start and I was like that. Once I started I carried on, it didn’t mean I drink every day or two days, but when you begin to measure the amount that you drink, then you know that you’re in trouble with it.

The pub is the place, the pub is the social center so ideally the men, and when I was growing up would go there at night for a couple pints and that was about it, but when you come over here the bar is different even though they call it a pub. You can stay there 12 hours. In New York the bars are open until 4:00 in the morning so you can really spend your whole life, it’s very easy. There’s a fellowship there you might not find outside and its very tempting once you get into it, you get stuck with it. There used to be that show on TV about it.

Dr. Kent: Well I love this discussion because like so many others as I said before one I’m fascinated by just your voice, by the Irish accent, I’m fascinated by your childhood in Limerick and about this pub. There’s so much mystery surrounding it. What’s the response been to your book and what was the response, do you remember the first response of your brothers’ book. What was it like when he hit it big?

Alphie McCourt: About Frank’s book?

Dr. Kent: Yeah, and it’s come way down to your book since.

Alphie McCourt: Yeah its funny how it’s all developed in the course of its now I think 12 years; it’s like we’ve gone around the world. When Ashes to Ashes came out it was kind of a whirlwind because we brothers all went together to Ireland for the launching and then in 1996 and then in 1997 Frank was awarded by the university of Limerick so we went back to Limerick and oh man it was enormous, they had a three story book store there. People were going around getting all of us to sign the books. There was some resentment among some people because of my mother [inaudible] but he told the truth and you can’t dispute that. Because people didn’t want to see their native place, our town to be depicted as a place of which it was at that time of misery and begrudgery and all the rest of it. That’s the way it was, he told the truth.

Dr. Kent: It seems as if all three of you tell the truth very well in your books. Continue to tell me the story of how your memoir came about.

Alphie McCourt: Of course when Frank’s book was number one, Ashes to Ashes, his came about and my brother Maliki came out with his book A Monk Swimming so every child in the street was asking me when is your book coming out? I would say next year or now they would say are you writing a book and I would say sure I am isn’t everyone? Everyone writes a book these days. So time passed and well I began to get the idea maybe I should articulate my own memory and my own point of view and try to establish my own place in the family. So did, I went away for four days to Pennsylvania to seclusion as the grandiose calls it. I was in this small house for four days and shut myself off from everyone and every thing and I wrote half of it in four days. That was the childhood part, the growing up part. That was the easy part, it just flowed out, I enjoyed it and I enjoyed writing it and I enjoyed reading it. The second part was more difficult, it took only a few years.

Dr. Kent: I recall hearing your brother Frank McCourt speaks once he read from his book, Teacher Man. He talked about it being a brutal process to write that book, he said it took him three years. It’s a very difficult thing to pull these memoirs out. It’s not like writing fiction.

Alphie McCourt: No and people ask me and maybe asked him I don’t know, if I kept a diary or a journal and I didn’t and people are in disbelief so while in parts of it I may be a bit fanciful even there I think its permitted but there’s such a theory now about memoirs that you have to tell the absolute truth and nothing but the truth, I think there is nothing wrong with a little embroidery as long as you stick essentially. You don’t introduce so called facts that are not facts. I think it can be factual without being dull because if you just present the facts then it’s very dull. You have to present in such a way and put a flair mark and some little bit of embroidery around it as far as dialogue and what people say. Essentially you can remember what people said, you can certainly remember the tone of what people said and present it that way and I think in most of my life I have anchors in which I can hang the hats of my memory and each of those pegs prompts another memory and gives me a context on which I can expand.

Dr. Kent: Has this been a good experience for you? Writing this book and having this new platform?

Alphie McCourt: It has been because as I said to someone there’s many things in my life went unfinished, many things I didn’t finish. I don’t know if this is true of most people or if I’m only conscious of it, so there’s a number of things I didn’t finish but I’m very happy that I finished this book A Long Stones Throw and that its published and its there and some people have read it and loved it. Some people are moderately cheerful about it and I haven’t met anyone who hated it. Mind you three different women have told me it was an all nighter because they stayed up all night reading it. I don’t know what that means but they say it.

Dr. Kent: You are like your brothers, masterful in weaving the tragic in with the comic. What you were talking about in Ireland when the good things happen you say well it’s good to know that the tragedy’s around the corner. Talk to close this out here about this duality in Irish literature, especially McCourt literature of the humor and the tragedy.

Alphie McCourt: It probably has a lot to do with the weather! You know when its raining that there must be sunshine somewhere not too far behind. We grew up in the rain so we always anticipate the sunshine and when we do get a little sun there’s an absolute certainty that the rain is not far behind and I found as a kind of sideline I find there’s a very stable appetite for our growing up and in my own book one third of it takes place in Ireland, two thirds of it takes place in the united states and yet when it comes down to destruction I’m always back in Limerick and I kind of hope that people will see me in Canada, in new York, and see me in my couple of years in the Army and couple years in California so its not an entirely one dimension of life. On the other hand, people are curious, they want to know. They really want to understand so I have to entertain and humor peoples desire to understand. I can’t explain it, no one can explain all we can do is lay it out, illuminate it as best we can and let people draw their own conclusions. But I’ve spent some years in the united states, I spent 19 years in Ireland, so that gives you some idea of my own perspective.

Dr. Kent: Of course in a similar fascination that we have in this country with Ireland, there’s the great fascination with new York city, especially new York city of the 60s, new York city as it developed; the skyline as well as the culture and so much the center of American culture and you were right in the middle of a lot of that.

Alphie McCourt: I was! The late 60s was a time as I said before, the last period of great prosperity but also a massive unrest. We didn’t know whether we were coming or going here. Between everybody’s right were being asserted at that time. African American rights, women’s rights, gay rights and everything else; plus we had the Vietnam War and all of that and the big conflict between college students on the one hand protesting the war and construction workers on the other hand wearing the emblem of the stars and stripes. I saw a couple of incidents where I saw things really blow up. The 70s of course was probably the worst time in the city when we went into economic depression in the 70s but we got through that too. New York is very resilient, they said in the 1980s that the rest of the country went down very quickly. In 1987 New York went down very slowly. Then the country came back very quickly and we came back very slowly but we always come back.

Dr. Kent: As my last question for you here, we don’t have much time left, but I want to ask you something that surprised you in the writing of this book, something that came out that you didn’t expect.

Alphie McCourt: Oh! That’s a big question. I think probably the extent of my own wanderings kind of surprised me. I had never thought about it that much and when I looked at it all I find that so much of my life I stood outside, I didn’t enter in, that I wanted to be kind of in it but not around it. I spent a lot of my life looking askance and that’s an uncomfortable position but I guess at some point I adopted it. I had a very early experience with politics when I was young, 16, 17, 18 and I think maybe it soured me on any kind of orthodoxy and caused me to look askance. It doesn’t say that I’m cold, uncompassionate; I’m none of those things but kind of at the core Yates’ epitaph cast a cold eye on life on death all men ask why. I think I did too much of that.

Dr. Kent: Its fascinating speaking with you and the wonderful thing about a memoir is we can all speak with Alphie McCourt by reading his memoir and getting inside his life story going from limerick New York and many other places on the way. The book starts out in fact between Canada and the United States. What an honor it’s been chatting with Alphie McCourt. The book is called A Long Stones Throw. We can find out about that on the web at sterling and Ross website and its available just about everywhere. Thank you so much for chatting with me today.

Alphie McCourt: And thank you very much, it’s been a pleasure, I enjoyed it.

Dr. Kent: We’ve been speaking with Alphie McCourt, author of A Long Stone’s Throw and what a pleasure that’s been. My next guest on the show will be a musician. His name is James Reams and we’re going to listen to a track that’s very timely from his album. It’s called Troubled Times. This is fun music; his band is called the Barnstormers. So listen to this track and then we’ll chat with James Reams for a bit after that.

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