Malachy McCourt obituary: Larger-than-life author who put a comic spin on his Limerick childhood

Born September 20th, 1931

Died March 11th, 2024

Malachy McCourt, who fled a melancholic childhood in Ireland for the US, where he became something of a professional Irish man as a thespian, publican and best-selling memoirist, died earlier this month New York city. He was 92.

Malachy McCourt said in an interview with The New York Times last year that he had a heart condition, multiple kinds of cancer and muscular degeneration.

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In 1952, when he was 20, the Brooklyn-born McCourt reunited with New York.

He embarked from Ireland with a ticket paid for with $200 in savings sent by his older brother, Frank McCourt, who had emigrated earlier and was working as a public school English teacher. Frank would also become a late-blooming author, whose books included the Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiographical work Angela’s Ashes.

Malachy McCourt left school in Limerick when he was 13, two years after his heavy-drinking father deserted the family, leaving his mother, Angela, to raise the four of their surviving seven children. The family, Malachy would write, was “not poor, but poverty-stricken.”

“Coming out of that life, the things that get you are the two evils of shame on one shoulder, the demon fear on the other,” he told The New York Times in 1998. “Shame says you came from nothing; you’re nobody; they’ll find you out for what you and your mother have done. Fear says what’s the use of bothering, drink as much as you can, dull the pain. As a result, shame takes care of the past, fear takes care of the future, and there’s no living in the present.”

In the mid-1980s, he gave up drinking and smoking.

The barrel-chested, red-bearded McCourt appeared regularly on soap operas – notably Ryan’s Hope, on which he had a recurring role as a barman – and played bit parts in several films. In the 1950s he opened what was considered Manhattan’s original singles bar: Malachy’s, on the Upper East Side.

For all his idiosyncrasies, his best-selling A Monk Swimming in 1998 (the title evokes the author’s childhood mishearing of the Hail Mary’s “Blessed art thou, amongst women”) and Singing My Him Song (2000) would evoke inevitable comparison with his brother’s autobiography.

“I was blamed for not being my brother,” he lamented, adding slyly, “I now pledge to all those naysayers that someday I will write Angela’s Ashes and change my name to Frank McCourt.”

Reviewing A Monk Swimming in the New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote that “where Frank is restrained and tragic, Malachy is outrageous and comic” – which may largely be because the younger brother focuses largely on his whiskey-fuelled barfly antics, pretending to be happy in United States, rather than on the anguish he left behind struggling to survive in Ireland.

[ A Monk Swimming: Another rising from the ashes ]

“The great psychobabble today is the dysfunctional family,” Malachy McCourt told the New York Times in 1988. “Well, I’ve never met one that was functional. In Limerick, a family that was dysfunctional was one who could afford to drink but didn’t.”

Malachy Gerard McCourt was born September 20th, 1931, in Brooklyn. His father, also named Malachy, had fled to New York from the British as a member of the IRA. His father met his mother, Angela Sheehan, after he was released from jail for hijacking a truck.

The McCourts returned to Ireland seeking work during the Depression after the death of a seven-week-old daughter. Malachy was three years old.

“I was a smiley little fella with a raging heart and murderous instincts,” he wrote, adding that relatives and neighbours described him as cute, which “in Ireland meant cunning and devious”.

Relatively few entries on his CV are verifiable (or would be, had he ever actually bothered to compose one). Among McCourt’s intimates, though, his feats – bona fide, embellished or even fabricated, but by now folkloric – seem perfectly plausible.

“Truth is,” he acknowledged, “I knew I couldn’t do anything at all but tell stories and lies.”

As a young student he would also escape into books. He read voraciously, but he failed the basic primary certificate at Leamy’s National School. (In 2002 the department of education and science in Ireland awarded McCourt its first honorary primary school certificate. He called it “the only academic honour I’ve ever gotten”.)

At 15 he enrolled in the Irish Defence Forces School of Music in Dublin, but for Malachy, the military and the trumpet were not harmonious. He left for England, where, Frank McCourt recalled, he was hired as a custodian in a wealthy boarding school, “and he walks around cheerful and smiling as if he’s the equal of any boy in the school and everyone knows when you work in an English boarding school you’re supposed to hang your head and shuffle like a proper Irish servant.” He was fired.

He then welded wheels at a bicycle factory and shovelled coal at the gas works in Coventry until Frank had saved up $200 to bring him to the US. There he washed dishes, worked on the docks, sold Bibles on Fire Island, served in the army and, novelist Frank Conroy wrote in the New York Times Book Review, “became a professional Irishman, for which he can hardly be blamed,” since “his Irishness was all he had”.

Among McCourt’s other exploits: smuggling gold bars from Switzerland to India; auditioning cold for an off-Broadway production, which led to his first stage role, in “The Tinker’s Wedding”; being cast in “Reversal of Fortune,” “Bonfire of the Vanities” and other movies; playing Henry VIII in commercials for Imperial margarine and Reese’s peanut butter cups; and stints as a radio and television host (“I couldn’t wait to hear what I had to say next”).

His first marriage, to Linda Wachsman, ended in divorce. An on-again, off-again, on-again love affair with Diana Huchthausen Galin resulted in marriage in 1965. In addition to Diana McCourt, he is survived by a daughter from his first marriage, Siobhán McCourt; a son from that marriage, Malachy jnr; two sons from his second marriage, Conor and Cormac; a stepdaughter, Nina Galin; nine grandchildren; and one great-grandson. Frank McCourt died in 2009. Malachy and Diana McCourt had lived in the same apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for 59 years.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times