My Memories of Frank McCourt, the Stuyvesant High School English Teacher

By Elizabeth Kadetsky, The Rumpus. Posted July 24, 2009.

When I was in high school I, like many teens, believed myself to be a misfit, the only alienated person in the room. I found respite in Frank McCourt’s English classes at Stuyvesant High.We knew him as Frank, among the circle of protégés of which I was proud to consider myself a part. English class with Frank involved him sitting on his desk telling us stories about his Irish childhood; then, he passed out purple mimeograph sheets and led us in Irish drinking songs: Nancy Nancy, Nancy whiskey, Whiskey whiskey, Nancy-o.

Everything about Frank’s was a snub of the establishment. It was not just his voluminous charms and wisdom, but this insouciant, even reckless, posture against authority that made us embrace him as ally and advocate—no matter he sometimes snubbed us as well. He was a fierce mentor, complicated, loveable, moody, and occasionally mean. It can’t be fun interacting for seven hours a day, year upon year, with self-important, brash sixteen year olds convinced that they are destined for Harvard or M.I.T. and are therefore smarter than anyone with a station so lowly as teacher.

My senior year, on the last day of Frank’s Irish literature course, he came in and held up a stack of our papers, our “senior theses.” Mine was on Edna O’Brien, and I recall having labored on it heartily. Even today I find this author’s work difficult, so it’s plausible I’d made no sense at all in my attempt to say something pithy or intelligent about her. As I did not save my own copy, however, I never got the chance to have a second look. Frank waved the stack in the air while abusing us all as callow and short-sighted. Then, with dramatic flourish, he tore our papers into tiny bits and deposited the whole mess in the trash can. It was unclear he’d actually read them, and he certainly hadn’t bothered to grade them. That was that. How he arrived at our final grades for the course remained a mystery—though I recall he was an easy grader. This, no doubt, contributed to his popularity.

Another time, he sat on his desk and opened the class, as usual, with a comforting phrase we’d grown accustomed to hearing, that always came as a relief during schooldays punctuated with threats and taunts from other teachers who felt it their duty to work us dry. “Sit back. I’m going to tell you a story,” Frank said in his brogue, dangling his feet and looking off into a middle distance, as if transitioning into the special mind space of the Homerian, oral epic-tellers. This day, he went on to deliver a finely crafted short story, with a neat arc rising between a polished beginning and ending. This was unlike his usual tales, more often freewheeling episodes from the grand narrative that we would later read in print in 1996, as Angela’s Ashes; I don’t remember ever reading this story among his published work. In this tale, an old man is living parasitically with his grown daughter and son-in-law. One day he falls asleep on the couch, only to leave a kettle boiling on the stove. The daughter comes home and discovers it poker-hot and gleaming, setting off an argument that results in the father’s getting booted from the apartment. When Frank finished, he got quiet and stared at us for a long time. “That is my story,” he finally hissed. “Don’t you ever dare steal it.” I felt the red hot burn of that kettle in his gaze.

That didn’t faze me, or his other defenders. I started waiting for the appearance of that story. Instead, a classmate of mine published a short story in The New Yorker that fall of our graduation, which was soon chosen by Raymond Carver for the year’s Best American Short Stories, and subsequently for the best of the decade.

I nevertheless left Stuyvesant bragging to everyone I knew about my association with this legendary teacher, despite his utter lack of fame among anyone who hadn’t been his student or one of their parents. No one had the faintest idea what I was talking about. He hadn’t published a word as a writer; the public wouldn’t hear of Frank McCourt for another decade and a half, when he finally surprised none of us with the brilliant literary success of that first memoir.

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Elizabeth Kadetsky is the author of a memoir, First There Is a Mountain, published in 2004, and short stories in Best New American Voices, The Pushcart Prizes anthology, Antioch Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. Her personal essays and journalism have appeared in The New York Times, The Village Voice, and The Nation. She is visiting writer on the creative writing faculty at Penn State University.

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