Vale Frank McCourt

There's a fabulous post here from Adrian McKinty, an Irish crime writer living in St Kilda, on the passing of Frank McCourt.

And another from Andrew Burke at Hi Spirits, probably the best thing I've read about McCourt all week:

His book humbly and gently painted a picture of a hard life growing up in Limerick in Ireland, before taking off for USA as a young man. It took him many decades to come to the right stance toward his material, but when he let the story tell itself, without anger, self-pity or any self-aggrandisement - just the details - it spoke volumes. A warm sense of humanity lifted the book above the pack and made it a modern classic among other Irish classics.

The profile Andrew links to, by Malcolm Jones in Newsweek, finishes plaintively. I would have thought McCourt had earned his right to leave us, having survived to write his book 'that had to be written' and the acrimony that ensued, and lived fairly happily ever after to boot, but Jones thinks otherwise:

After the appearance of each of his three memoirs ('Tis describes his immigrant experience in the United States, Teacher Man details his teaching career), I always hoped he would write even more, because that would mean that I might interview him again. Now that possibility is gone. There will be no more books and no more talk from Frank McCourt. I know that any time I want, I can go to the shelf and pull down Angela's Ashes or one of the other books, and there he'll be, almost as good as in the room. Very few people got their voices onto the page as well as he did. But "almost" isn't the same as the full Frank. There won't be that sense of amazement at the ease with which he could coin a quip on the fly. There will be no shock at the endlessly articulate talk that poured out at the dinner table. He was a fine writer, but he was perhaps an even greater talker. It was the kind of talk that no one has figured out how to get between the pages of a book, not even Frank McCourt.

Update: Stuyvesant alumnus Elizabeth Kadetzky writes about McCourt's teaching days here at The Rumpus. And there is a video at NYU's website. Apparently a lot of McCourt's old students commented at a blog at The Times - but I've yet to find that link.