Golfers even today will tell you that they owe a large chunk of their winnings to Arnold Palmer, because it was Palmer who brought golf out of the country club and into the mainstream of America’s sports culture in the early 1960s.
Palmer’s charisma and his style of play captured the imagination of corporate sponsors and television executives. The result? Golf became cool, and golfers became rich.
Frank McCourt may not have made many of us rich, but he certainly made it possible for Irish-American writers like myself to get published and perhaps earn a buck or two in the great publishing marketplace.
Before Frank’s blockbuster success with “Angela’s Ashes,” conventional wisdom had it that Irish Americans didn’t buy books, and certainly didn’t buy books about the Irish experience on either side of the Atlantic.
Frank, along with Tom Cahill, author of “How the Irish Saved Civilization,” astonished the publishing world in the mid-1990s. I can tell you from personal experience that after “Angela’s Ashes,” it was a lot easier to sell a book – whether a work of history or a novel – centered on the Irish-American experience.
Book publishers and editors suddenly realized not only that Irish Americans actually do buy books, but that loads of non-Irish Americans were interested in the topic as well.
It is impossible to imagine the huge Celtic revival in the United States without Frank McCourt. He made it possible for me and for so many others to explore the Irish-American experience without having to take a vow of poverty.
What’s more, the ferment which McCourt helped unleash led to projects like Thomas Lennon’s PBS extravaganza a decade ago, “The Irish in America: Long Journey Home,” a four-part television series that set records for viewer numbers in several markets.
Frank’s charm and dry wit helped us as well, just as surely as Palmer’s personality helped other golfers crack the big time by broadening the game’s audience and interest.
His emergence as a spokesman for all of Irish America may have unnerved some, but in the end, he helped create new customers for those of us who labor in the sweat shops of book publishing, academia, and ethnic journalism.
I’d like to be able to tell that I saw this coming the minute I heard that Frank had sold his first book, but like many others, I was more than a little puzzled and more than a little wrong.
When Frank told me at a party on Long Island in 1996 that he was about to come out with a memoir, I congratulated him, said all the right things, and, when he went off to chat with somebody wiser and more-agreeable, I turned to my wife and said: “Frank said he wrote a book. I wonder who would buy it.”
All these years later, I’m wondering if there’s anybody out there who hasn’t bought it, or borrowed it, or skimmed it, or who settled for seeing the movie. I wasn’t the only person skeptical that today’s readers would pick up a memoir by an obscure Irish-American school teacher. How wrong we all were.
Frank McCourt, retired school teacher, quickly became Frank McCourt, Pulitzer Prize winner and international literary phenomenon.
As fame and riches poured in, Frank mixed it up with other literary lions but never lost touch with the friends with whom he spent many an evening in the old Lions Head bar in Greenwich Village. Peons like myself bombarded him with requests for “blurbs,” that is, those pithy endorsements you see on the backs of book jackets.
Frank, as far as I can tell, never said no – to anyone! Even those who asked not once, not twice, but three times. Er, that would be me.
One of those requests not only led to a wonderful endorsement, but to a personal note from Frank suggesting I change something I had written about Roger Casement’s death. Frank thought I had it wrong. He was right.
Now that’s class.
In this age of hype, it’s far too common to hear people assert that something has been changed “forever.”
Forever is, I’m told, a long time. But it is fair to say that Frank McCourt and “Angela’s Ashes” have changed the image of Irish America, and changed Irish-American culture, for a good long while.
Frank’s unsparing candor and irreverence – in print and in person – certainly added layers of complexity to the Irish-American narrative.
Until the mid-1990s, until “Angela’s Ashes,” Irish-American culture seemed a little stale, a little stodgy, a little out of date.
McCourt, along with Cahill and others, reinvigorated a culture that, generations ago, produced edgy personalities like Jimmy Cagney and Mary McCarthy.
So we all owe Frank. We owe him for making us seem, well, downright fashionable. We owe him because he persuaded millions of people around the world that they really ought to learn more about the Irish, at home and in America.
We will be thanking Frank for a long time, I suspect.