Malachy McCourt’s 1998 memoir A Monk Swimming opens with the line, "There was always the story in any gathering in Limerick."
McCourt and his brothers — most notably fellow memoirist Frank McCourt (Angela’s Ashes) — have built their lives around storytelling in a variety of formats including radio, books, television, films and plays.
Malachy was born in New York and returned with his family to Ireland in the 1930s. There the McCourts endured terrible poverty that resulted in the deaths of three siblings.
The 1940s and 1950s saw the brothers McCourt begin making their way back to the states. Frank became a teacher. Malachy became, by turns, a television personality, pub owner, stage and screen actor and writer.
Interviewer Craig McDonald met with Malachy McCourt in March 2003 when he was promoting a collection of Irish writings he had edited entitled Voices Of Ireland: Classic Writings of a Rich and Rare Land.
Malachy McCourt:
VOICES OF IRELAND
McDonald: How did your new anthology, Voices of Ireland, come about?
McCourt: It was actually the publisher who came up with the idea and asked me. They said, "A lot of folks have favorite Irish pieces of literature," and I said, "Hmm, I do." They said, "Would you like to put the book together?" And I’m a terrific yes man, so I said, "Yes, I will!"
McDonald: Did you have to go back through and review material, or were you familiar with most of the works you chose for the collection?
McCourt: There were some of them that I didn’t know. I mean, I knew William Carleton, because I think that’s sort of the ultimate of peasant life. Everybody knows Jonathan Swift. And Maria Edgeworth is probably the first and best of the Irish women writers. (Joseph Sheridan) LeFanu I wasn’t too familiar with, but I got to read the Uncle Silas and I got to like that a lot. And then, the rest of them, the Lady Gregory, and Oscar Wilde, and (William Butler) Yeats, and (John Millington) Synge — I had performed in Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World so that play has always appealed to me. And James Stephens — the legends about him are rife, including the fact that James Joyce would have wanted him to finish Finnegan’s Wake, should anything have happened to him. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I like to think that it is.
McDonald: It’s a big book, obviously…. Well, at 1,126 pages, it is very heavy. Is there anything that didn’t make the cut that you wish you could have gotten in?
McCourt: No, actually. There was another piece, another book by Maria Edgeworth, but we decided not to put that in. That was their suggestion, the publisher’s suggestion, but I thought, "No, we can’t have another — one is enough of each. It is too big of a book as it stands, anyway, and another 200 pages would just make it absolutely impossible to heft." It’s not exactly light airport reading.
McDonald: No, it’s closing in on being almost a workout device….
McCourt: To hold it, and to read it.
McDonald: Are there particular qualities, to your mind, that typify Irish writing?
McCourt: I think that all of them are unabashed about using the language to the full. It would appear that on occasion, which perhaps might be a Celtic trait, there’s a tendency to never use one word where a thousand will do. That aspect does appeal to me. I like the texture of language. I think it was John Millington Synge who said it very nicely and succinctly about a play, that it must have "the texture of a crisp autumn apple." Words, you see, you must be able to get them between your teeth and just crunch them and take a joy in them…say, "Ahh, my God that was a lovely word…that was lovely sentence…that was lovely thing to say, and I’m so glad I said it."
McDonald: How do you approach appearances for this book? Do you read excerpts from others’ writings?
McCourt: I don’t read from the book. It’s hard to do that: I think it’s axiomatic — we must not disturb the dead. If I’m going to favor one over the other, they’re going to be out of their graves and at my throat, and I can’t have that. They all deserve their rest now. So I think and speak of them all with great affection.
McDonald: Any contemporary Irish writers you’re drawn to?
McCourt: There’s a wonderful writer called Collum McCann. He’s just written a terrific book, called Dancer, which is about Nureyev. That’s a fictional/biographical and very wonderful story. I like him a lot. An American writer named Tom Kelly does some very gritty stuff about New York…very fond of his stuff. And, of course, you can’t ever go past Seamus Heany and The Poet. Just absolutely fantastic. And I’m always most curious to know what this fellow Frank McCourt is up to. Yeah, I read everything he writes.
McDonald: You’ve written two memoirs. I read somewhere that Frank has said he avoided reading them because he was afraid it might affect his writing of his own memoirs.
McCourt: Yes, right.
McDonald: Does that go the other direction? You do really read everything he writes?
McCourt: Oh, I do, I do. Yeah. I suppose it was a thing about repetition….I don’t know. I have my own opinions, and I suppose most writers have their own ways of going about things, but he’s read my stuff after he had finished his.
McDonald: Do you have a third memoir planned?
McCourt: I have a sort of — I suppose it will be a memoir of a sense — but I’m writing a book about Sobriety. It’s a very tangled kind of a thing, ’cause you have to be very careful about talkin’ about what it is, yourself, rather than preaching to people about what they should do, and I have no intentions of doing that. You know that old crap about "Take my advice." I try not to advise people — there’s nothing worse than that, I think. It’s the kind of stuff that should be left alone.
McDonald: You haven’t been drinking in years and years and years. Is that something you struggle with still?
McCourt: Well, it gets easier. But all I have to do is not to drink. Sometimes it’s not easy, but it’s so simple: Do not drink today. That’s all. And there’s nothing more to it than that. If the drink signals come in, I say, "Oh…well…thank you for sharing, now fuck off." And pass ’em on.
McDonald: Do you find yourself in pubs these days?
McCourt: All the time.
McDonald: And you’re able to —
McCourt: Yeah. And I’m a very convivial kind of a fellow, but I don’t have to drink. If other people have to that’s their business; it ain’t mine. I never drink when I’m sober — that helps me a lot.
McDonald: You ran your own place for years. What’s the most important advice you have for someone who would open a pub or a bar?
McCourt: Be there! That’s the thing! It is the most demanding and strangest life. You have to be this kind of a Boniface. You have to greet everybody. You have to be able to remember people’s names. Remember what they drink. Remember to be cautious about saying "That’s not the woman you were with last week" when they come in with somebody who might be their wife.
McDonald: It sounds like you just described a politician.
McCourt: Oh yeah! The bar owner, or the bartender, I should say, has all the aspects of a priest, as well. He stands turning wine into water or water into wine and muttering things about a $1.75 plus a $1.75 makes $3.50, plus tax. And then he hears confessions. Tells people to go home…gives advice. There you have the altar and the tabernacle, which is the cash register, and your congregation. You’re in command of all you survey.
McDonald: I think the analogy holds.
McCourt: Yeah (laughing).
McDonald: I understand you’re just back from Ireland. Do you return every year?
McCourt: Actually, no, I don’t. I don’t have any fond memories of Ireland.
McDonald: I assume you went back to promote your book?
McCourt: No my beloved and I went to Italy for several weeks, and then I had been asked to speak at a Jungian conference in Ireland — on the west coast. I was asked to speak on creativity after midlife, so I did. And then got out of there. I don't mind it too much. I used to be very angry and all that, but I don't mind it too much now at all. After all, it's giving me a sort of a rich vein, a lode, to mine and to tap into.
McDonald: Well, the bulk of your life has been spent here in the U.S…..
McCourt: Fifty years. Fifty years here, in New York, where I was born. I have a great love for this place, this city. All my dreams and aspirations all came true here. I just got an honorary grade school certificate from the Irish Department of Education. I failed it when I was 12, and now they gave me an honorary one because I've never gone to school. It's the first academic award that I've ever gotten in my whole life, so I'm so pleased with myself. Now I'm on my way.
Mconald: You mentioned New York. Since September 11, 2001, it’s hard not to ask anyone who lives in New York — particularly writers — what that day meant to them.
McCourt: As we know, the first casualty in war is of course the truth. They're all lying. They're all telling massive, huge lies and frightening the people. And then we have the essential things of our lives affecting our children. We have more homeless people in New York than ever before in history — 38,000 homeless people and 17,000 of them are children — and we're talking about defending them against what? All the good will that the world had for America after 9-11 is gone. And now it's all bottom-line…you've got to make sacrifices. There is anger here now. All the promises that Bush made, and they all made — they're not coming through with the help. It's horrible.
McDonald: You have to do a lot of traveling obviously, too….
McCourt: Yeah, I got back from Ireland, and then went to Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Thursday I was in Scranton and flew back yesterday.
McDonald: Much more burdensome flying now, yeah?
McCourt: Oh, God, yeah. They had been asking those questions, which they don't ever ask anymore now: those dopey questions you get. Now they've dropped all of that. But, of course, I was being a little whimsical, I was saying, "Yes. No. No." and they would say, "What?" And I'd say, "Yes, I packed my own bag, no, nobody has asked me to carry anything, no, my bag hasn't been out of my sight." So I did that in Sacramento, and they hit me with a question: "Are you carrying anything sharp?" Dopey me said, "Nothing but my tongue." Jeeesus, you'd swear I had said I was carrying a weapon of mass destruction. They hauled me out of the line, they went over my body with a thing, made me take off my shoes, and then she came around and says, "Open your mouth."
McDonald: Bureaucrats can be so literal, eh?
McCourt: Yeah, "open your mouth…." I was just doing the Oscar Wilde thing, because, when he came to America, they said, "Do you have anything to declare?" and he said, "Nothing but my genius." So I thought, 'A little whimsy will go a long way here.' It DOESN'T, so, "Shut up McCourt."
McDonald: Another of your recent books is a study of this history of the ballad Danny Boy. How’d that one come about? Another book idea proposed to you?
McCourt: That was the suggestion of the publisher. They had already done one on Strange Fruit, the Billie Holiday song, so they were wondering what the next song would be that would resonate with people, so they came up with Danny Boy. It wasn't something that I was particularly interested in, but then I got kind of fascinated by it and the history of it.
McDonald: Anything that particularly fascinated you in the research phase?
McCourt: (Laughing) Yeah, that it's not Irish.
McDonald: Written by an English cleric, right?
McCourt: Yeah. I had kind of thought that perhaps there was an English connotation there, but I had no idea how English it was.
McDonald: In your memoir, A Monk Swimming, Richard Harris is a recurrent presence throughout the book. He passed away recently. Any particularly good stories? What are you going to remember most about him?
McCourt: He was a tremendous energy. He would get obsessed with one song and sing it or play it over and over and over again, and then that would pass and he would go onto something else. He had a paranoia. He couldn't stand criticism too much…He was impossible to tease. But then, on the other hand, he was extraordinarily generous to friends and great fun to be with and witty and all of that. We hadn't talked in many years, and I was sorry about that. There it was — you move on. There was a kind of a thing that if you didn't cater to him as a star, if you didn't take your position like Saddam Hussein's generals — sit below him and kowtow and pay obeisance you were gone, and that wasn't one of my things. So I was sorry to see he had died. I happened to be in London and I saw he was in hospital, I said, "I should call him and wish him well" but I didn't do that and I'm sorry I didn't. It's not something that's gnawing at me. It wouldn't have made any difference — he would have died anyway.
McDonald: Given your complex relationship with Ireland, what do you do in New York City on St. Patrick's Day?
McCourt: It's not so much what I do, as what I don't do: I don't go to that thing that passes for Irish as a parade, which it's not of course. It has to do with, I think, a lot of hypocritical Catholics who wouldn't know Saint Patrick from Saint Bonaventure. It's not Irish, so I don't have any particular feeling for that.
McDonald: More of a holiday for everyone who is not Irish?
McCourt: Exactly. If they want to bring their kids I suppose they'll be safe — safe from thinking, anyway. They won't learn a damned thing about Irish culture. If you would ask them who Oscar Wilde was, or who John Millington Synge was, or who Jonathan Swift was, they would probably think they were hamburger chains.
McDonald: You appear in the film Gods and Generals —
McCourt: Yeah, and The Guru. In Gods and Generals I play Blair, the Postmaster General, who tried to persuade Lee to take over the Union Army. And then I died on Oz recently.
McDonald: What's coming up next?
McCourt: Nothing in the movie department. A couple of movies are in the can, one called Beautiful Kid and another called Happy Hour so they should be out sometime this year.
McDonald: Last question: Do you have a favorite Irish proverb?
McCourt: I do: Live every day as if it's going to be your last, and one day you'll be right.
— © Craig McDonald, March 2003
