Photo by Reid Yalom
| Memories of Frank Mccourt |
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| Saturday, 25 July 2009 08:50 | |
 I was serving time for bank robbery in a Massachusetts prison when I first heard about Frank McCourt. The Abbot of the Portsmouth Abbey in Rhode Island was seated next to me in the visiting room. He told me he had just finished reading the novel Angela's Ashes, and promised to mail me a copy. He knew I was writing my autobiography, a story that also included a troubled father who acted against his conscience in the home. Father Mark recited the opening section of the book while a prisoner and his lover seated behind us provided a sort of soft core porn soundtrack with their loud slurpy kiss.Five years later I was invited to the Sun Valley Writer's Conference as a Sundance Creative Writing Fellow. The opening dinner party for the participant writers was hosted at Ernest Hemingway's infamous Ketchum, Idaho home --- which is now a sort of museum. I introduced myself to Frank in the hallway where Hemingway blew his brains out, and told him that I read Angela's Ashes in prison and admired the writing. Frank laughed when I told him how the Abbot quoted the beginning passage accompanied by sloppy kissing noises in the prison visiting room. The following year I was back at the Sun Valley Writer's Conference. During an interview with me on stage, with the novelist Mark Salzman, the topic of forgiving my father came up as it always does when I speak about my childhood. My father had been periodically vicious, and during one severe beating in which he fractured two of my bones, I stabbed him in the neck in self-defense. He survived, but my younger brother and I were placed in foster care. Soon I became addicted to bloody violence. I told the audience that at a certain point during my incarceration I refused to take my father’s abuse personally, and so I no longer believed that I needed to forgive him, to morally reconfigure him by bestowing him my magnanimity. Developing compassion for him freed me from a need to forgive. After the speech, folks lined up to speak with me. Frank waited patiently for his turn. I was humbled when he told me that he too never felt like he had to forgive his father. He'd arrived at the same place of compassion for his flawed dad. We joked that our friends didn't always understand our compassion, protectively intent themselves to treat our fathers like the unforgiven. During a stint in solitary confinement, an old Esquire magazine found its way into my cell. There was a story in it about the ex-convict Seth Morgan who wrote the novel HOMEBOY. A photograph showed Seth with Norman Mailer and William Styron at a PEN Awards party. In that instant when I saw the photo, I told myself that Seth's success is what I wanted for myself---a book, and the respect of literary lions. There are photographs somewhere that show me standing next to Frank McCourt and William Styron at the Sun Valley Writer's Conference. My quiet prison cell dream of nearness to literary giants was finally achieved that weekend. Frank invited me to drinks when I was next in New York. While I was writing my memoir I got stuck. My wife and I flew down to Zihuatanejo, Mexico, where I read a memoir a day during our six-day stay. I took with me the works of Dave Eggers, Tobias Wolfe, Paul Auster, Nabakov, Harold Brodkey. And, of course, I read Angela's Ashes again. I completed my memoir and asked Frank if he would read it for blurb consideration. He said sure. I told him I didn't want to send him a digital copy, or mail him a hard copy. I would be in NYC later in the year, I said, and wanted to hand-off the manuscript in person, over drinks and steaks, preferably in one of his favorite pubs. Old school-like. We met and talked about our fathers, the paradox of how they gave us experiences that made life unruly for us in our youth, but also how they gave us experiences, personality skills, that could eventually help us overcome the squalor of our pasts. He toasted my book. I toasted our lives. We later hugged before he stepped into a cab. Frank has been on my mind a lot lately. And not merely because I knew he was ill. I am writing a second memoir, spending many hours editing the chapter on how I learned about compassion while I was in prison. Developing compassion for myself, and subsequently for my father, changed my life. That's how I finally untethered from the full-throttle rage that had once upended my world. Frank once mentioned that having compassion for his father came to him when he developed compassion for himself as a father. Now that I am the father of a young daughter, I understand that I too need to have compassion for my own parenting limitations. As I write the Compassion chapter, I always recall Frank standing in that line at the Sun Valley Writing Conference after my interview, with his outsized talent and off-the-charts international literary success, waiting his turn like everyone else to shake my hand, to validate the words of a young writer finding his voice. He was gracious to me in a very inspiring way, and I will always cherish the teacher's conversation. 
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