The Self-Referential Opener
I finished Frank McCourt’s memoir Teacher Man two weeks ago. It’s a quick read, about 220 pages, and for those unfamiliar with McCourt, he wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning memoir Angela’s Ashes (1996).
Admittedly, this book scared me. I first heard about it from Nicolette’s teacher-friends who were emailing around a presale excerpt. Once I’d read the teaser, I realized that the entire book might make me want to be a teacher, again.
Individual profundity dislodges my ambitions.
Strangely, McCourt doesn’t portray his career as profound or even glamorous; instead, he grounds it in both his teaching foibles and his personal struggle to reconcile his occupation with his place in the world. The book is strange in that way: it focuses on a highly success teaching career but it lacks the power to inspire one to pursue teaching.
Instead, it inspires one to write.
In prologue of Teacher Man, McCourt employs the oft-used F. Scott Fitzgerald quote: “there are no second acts in American lives,” and then evidences himself as the counterargument to Fitzgerald’s proclamation: he was 66 when he wrote Angela’s Ashes. The first book McCourt published, written after his retirement as an NYC public school teacher, won the Pulitzer Prize. Regardless of anything, that’s fucking amazing.
(Sidenote: Many people disagree with Fitzgerald. See here and here and here.)
I also must admit that I’ve never read Angela Ashes, or seen the movie for that matter. But it’s on the infinite list.
My justification for reading Teacher Man is four-fold: 1) mental siesta: I needed to recuperate from Faulkner; 2) I saw McCourt on The Colbert Report, and Colbert shockingly let him tell stories the entire time instead of harassing him with faux-Conservative rhetoric; 3) McCourt was an excellent storyteller on the show and he spoke with an Irish brogue, so I put 1 and 1 together and assumed that he was a good writer; and 4) Nicolette bought a discounted copy of Teacher Man at Target.
Style: Pre-Inebriation Pubspeak
McCourt writes simples sentences, small and clear, with a manageable vocabulary, which marks him as an anomaly in my experience with Irish writers (although I do like big words and Merriam Webster). To me, McCourt falls under the category of grandfather storyteller, and I don't mean that he's as old as a grandfather (he is), but rather that he writes in that ruminating kind of way; the stories he writes seem as though he has just recalled them from the darkened halls of his mind, and its easy for me, as a reader, to imagine him telling them over a breakfast of eggs and hash.
When I was younger, my grandfather used to tell stories like McCourt. I would go over to my grandparents house for dinner and with a little prodding, he would launch into an account of the time he slipped out of his house to play soccer by moonlight, or how and his brother started their own tool and dye business in his father's garage. But as he grew older and eventually semi-retired, he would talk about his profession: machinist, foreman, inventor, owner - in a style similar McCourt's account of his time as a teacher. The musing on a life's work: they all don't have the same style, but they have a similar feel - the grandfather storyteller feel.
For dialogue - this fits right into the grandfather storyteller categorization - he doesn’t use quotations marks; instead, he incorporates many conversations into the narrative by using new and indented lines, and he often sets the conversation apart in a sentence by capitalizing the first word where the dialogue begins: “After my interview she was already in the hallway, knotting her scarf under my chin, telling me, That was a breeze” (51).
Eras
The book itself is divided into three different Parts, “It’s a Long Road to Pedagogy,” “Donkey on a Thistle,” and “Coming Alive in Room 205.” Each Part is made up of a different number of chapters (each of which is its own vignette), and each chapter flows throughout the work in numerical and chronological order. In the dedication, McCourt thanks his editor, Nan Graham (who is also DeLillo’s editor), for sculpting his words until they became a book. Honestly, I could see Graham's hand pretty easily in the ordering and break up of the chapters. I sensed a bit of randomness to the vignettes, and there isn’t a rhyme or reason for the jumps in time. Granted, most of the chapters tell a story that significantly affected McCourt as he evolved as a teacher.
The vignettes themselves focus more on McCourt’s humorous failings than they do his triumphs, and with the exception of a few encounters, the book maintains a self-depreciative tone that constantly lowers McCourt to the level of “the average teacher.” It's clear that he doesn’t want to presume that he is a better educator than anybody else, probably because he knows that a large number of his readers are teachers, and also because it’s likely that McCourt wasn’t the greatest teacher himself and he doesn’t want to come off with an air of pedagogical superiority, especially after his surprise success with Angela’s Ashes. In McCourt’s eyes, his newly acquired literary currency doesn’t raise him above what he was for all those years in the NYC public education system. He acknowledges that he does not retroactively become a great teacher of writing because he became a great writer after he quit teaching. In a sense, McCourt is trying to be true to history (there's a statement), and he gives the students the benefit of the doubt in terms of their recollection and subsequent evaluation of him before he became a literary star. In short, it appears that McCourt doesn’t let fame alter what he thinks of himself.
There is, however, the problem of the picture opposite the title page. The caption reads: “America’s Teacher of the Year”. The picture that accompanies the caption is of McCourt with a deadly serious look and a shopping bag on his head. I can’t tell if McCourt really was teacher of the year, or if this was something put together in cut-and-paste style by some witty kids for their favorite teacher, and that it was included in an effort to set the self-depreciative tone of the prose. I assume that the editors of the book wouldn’t include something like this if it wasn’t true, but who knows. While I was reading, I kept waiting for McCourt to talk about his nomination and eventual acceptance of the “Teacher of the Year” award, and when it never came, I was left feeling slightly short-changed. Here were all these tales of a man struggling in life for vindication, and he finally gets it when he wins the Teacher of the Year award, or so I assumed. I’d love hear McCourt’s account of that. Part of me thinks the vignette wasn’t included because the “Teacher of the Year” awards are bullshit to begin with. Of course the best high school (NY's Stuyvesant HS, where McCourt taught) would have the teacher of the year. It’s too perfect and too rigged. What about those teacher’s who are struggling in the below-average school districts, paid far less than the average teacher, and who deal with far more? One can’t forget that the students at Stuyvesant are the supposedly the brightest; they must be of a certain intelligence level (according to a test) in order to enroll in the school.
Portrait
At its root, the memoir is about McCourt’s unorthodox classroom perspective and his struggles as a teacher. Always on the periphery of his life are the occurrences that made him into the Pulitzer Prize wining author he became: his rough childhood, his misadeventures with women, his cultural liminality, and his constant “examination of his consciousness.” This is a book about what the artist was doing before he became the artist. It’s the normative first act that's just as important as the the second act, and it should give confidence to any young writer who can’t find the courage to move beyond the blank white page. Teacher Man is really Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Man.
