Frank McCourt master class

Frank McCourt

In the days following Frank McCourt's retirement from teaching in New York high schools, the tumult of three decades of teenage voices remained whirling in his head. They are there, still.

"After 30 years in the classroom, with all these voices, where something was going on all the time, all those 'Mr McCourts'. You go home in the afternoon and the weekend and you know it's going to happen all over again," says McCourt on a visit to Auckland.

"Everything for teenagers is so dramatic - if they have one pimple on the end of their nose, it's" - he mock-sobs - "oh, oh, oh, suicide. All this stuff going on, it's like having 10 Broadway plays in front of you every day."

He draws breath. "I don't know how I did it."

How he did it, and got through it, are questions he mused over, often painfully, during the writing of his new book Teacher Man, following on from his Pulitzer Prize-winner "misery memoir" Angela's Ashes and its sequel 'Tis.

Although he retired 18 years ago, at the age of 57 - he is now 75 - McCourt says trawling back through those years for this book was an emotional experience.

"Teacher Man, that gave me so much trouble," he sighs. "Writing it was very hard. I started writing a novel but that didn't work out, so. Reality kept intruding and going back through those years could be pretty painful - the process of selecting what you talk about over the years and what did you learn."

So critical is he in the book of the system, and some colleagues, that McCourt, after six hours with the publisher's lawyers, had to change names. He treads carefully, too, with the breakdown of his first marriage, which ground on for 19 years and produced one daughter, Maggie. In Teacher Man, he simply says, "When my marriage collapsed, I was 49, Maggie 8.

"No, I didn't write that much about the marriage," he admits. "I had to be careful with her because she'd like to kill me. Her favourite form of address was, 'you son of a bitch'." He smiles, slyly.

McCourt's life - the appalling poverty of his Irish childhood, the struggles when he fled to America at age 19 - had all the makings of a depressive, and he admits in the book that he was a social cripple, unless he had had a few drinks.

Yet for all that was hard about teaching, he believes it saved him.

"When my first marriage didn't go well, and that takes the energy out of you, going into the classroom for me was an escape from the world - and women."

Luckily for him, he met his second wife Ellen, a vivacious American some 20 years his junior. McCourt lights up when he talks about Ellen, whom he met in 1989 and married in 1994.

"I met her through a friend of her's, Debbie, who was going out with a friend of mine, Jerry. I was single at the time, I had divorced and Jerry was envying me my happy ways. He and Debbie concocted a little meeting where he invited Ellen to this bar in Greenwich Village and they invited me, so. We clicked, we hit it off.

"The thing is, we get married in August, her birthday is on the 18th, mine is on the 19th, my former wife's is on the 17th and her former boyfriend is on the 16th. Put us all together and you have a den of snarling lions."

There is a bite of steel in McCourt's blue eyes that, while hardly suggesting a snarling lion, hints at a severity that must have made him formidable in the classroom. But when he started out, he says, he had absolutely no confidence.

"On the first day I wasn't so much nervous as slightly paralysed with indecision - I didn't know what I was going to say to them."

The decision was made for him when one of the kids, in a classful that had so far ignored this new, small teacher, threw a baloney sandwich across the room.

McCourt picked it up off the floor and ate it. "The main thing is, they noticed me. I didn't do it as a sort of 'now I'm going to do this clever thing'. I ate it because it was there and I didn't know what else to do."

McCourt may have won the students' attention but it also marked the start of what he refers to as "my continuing problems with management". But "as long as you can keep the kids in their seats and keep them quiet, keep them from fighting, that's all right, they [the principals] generally leave you alone".

McCourt says he constantly compared his own experiences and growth as a teacher with what he had gone through as a child at school in Ireland.

"The teachers I had in Ireland were a bunch of sadists and bullies. I thought, well, this is how you teach. I was going to be a tough guy. We were little kids in primary school and they used the stick all the time. But you are not going to use that with these big New York kids. Some of them were football players who could have broken me in two. No, you have to find your own way."

McCourt's "own way" was inventive. He told the classes stories about Ireland. He encouraged kids to tell stories about their own lives, to "find the significant in the insignificant". One mad day, he asked the kids to bring cookbooks to school.

"I've always been interested in cookbooks. One of my favourite writers was [American food writing legend] M. F. K. Fisher and her book The Art of Eating. The subject of food came up in the class and I suggested off the top of my head that tomorrow, bring in a cookbook. 'A cookbook? For what? Mr McCourt, you're weird.' I thought I was weird, too.

"Then the whole thing started with reading the recipes aloud, especially the Italian recipes which were very musical, and they caught on. One of them said, 'I know why you're doing this. It's because they look like poetry' and they are, a good recipe is pure poetry."

In one school, McCourt turned his students' relentless flow of fake excuse notes into a writing lesson. "The excuse notes were a good creative device, they were urgent, practical. I used the excuse notes that they brought in which they'd forged and turned that into a branch of writing in the classroom and they liked that.

"I gave them a hypothetical situation 15 years in the future and told them you are writing for a future son or daughter - and they did it with great sincerity and creativity."

This is said with a great chortle.

McCourt, when pressed - "Oh stop! It's so shameful" - confesses that he earned US$4700 a year in his first teaching job. Now, with books that have sold in the millions, and all the extras that come with his level of celebrity, he has a lawyer, an accountant, a financial adviser. He lives in an apartment adjacent to Central Park, New York, and has a house in Connecticut.

"That's what you do when you become a big shot, buy a house in Connecticut with the Arthur Millers, the William Styrons and the Philip Roths all around you, and Mia Farrow. But I prefer to be in the city."

The next book, he says with a flash of those flinty eyes, "has to be a novel because there are things I want to say about people that I couldn't put in a memoir".

What a chilling thought. He continues. "There's a lot of bile built up in me about the school system and teachers and so on. I have to get that out of my system. I've been in there and I've seen it and I can see how easily teachers are discouraged."

Teachers could not ask for a feistier advocate and, like all the best teachers, this is one you would really prefer to please.

As McCourt says, "A teacher has nothing to defend themselves with but their mouth." But a teacher-writer of this capacity has a great arsenal of attack at his disposal as well.