Frank McCourt, He’s Not

Critics. Ah, critics.

“They’re always telling you what the [expletive] you are not,” says Malachy McCourt, actor, barkeep, raconteur and first-time author.

McCourt’s memoir, “A Monk Swimming,” won’t be published until June 3, “but already somebody is saying--amazingly saying!--that I’m not Frank McCourt,” says the younger brother of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Angela’s Ashes.”

And Malachy is peeved.

“No, I am not Frank McCourt, and neither is anybody else. James Joyce wrote what he wrote. Frank wrote what he wrote. I wrote what I wrote.”

But comparisons of the Brothers McCourt are inevitable, and Malachy freely admits that there would be no “Monk Swimming” had Frank’s fine prose not opened the golden door, leaving the publishing world hungry for other well-told tales of the Real McCourts.

“It’s something I’m going to have to deal with,” Malachy says. Still, “it drives me nuts!”

“Angela’s Ashes,” Frank’s spellbinding 1997 bestseller chronicling his and Malachy’s impoverished childhood in Limerick, Ireland, won universal praise, as well as multiple honors--the Pulitzer for autobiography / biography, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Booksellers Assn. Book of the Year.

In contrast, “Monk” has been described by one family friend as “a good beach book.”

Before “Angela’s Ashes,” Malachy was the better-known McCourt, a gregarious character actor (“One Life to Live,” “Ryan’s Hope,” “Bonfire of the Vanities,” “The Devil’s Own”), sometime radio talk show host and late-night television wit.

Indeed, “Monk” fetched a spectacular advance of $600,000 before the publisher, Disney’s Hyperion, had seen a word. And 250,000 copies are to be printed--a spectacular number for a first-time author. Hyperion more than doubled the first printing after seeing Malachy entertain its sales force.

“They decided I would be their best salesman,” Malachy says, chuckling.

At 66, Malachy retains a winsome Irish charm. You can imagine him beguiling the crowd at a book reading or happily shooting the bull-arney on a television talk show. In June, Hyperion will send him on a 15-city author’s tour.

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The title, “A Monk Swimming,” comes from a child’s mis-hearing of a line in the prayer Hail Mary. Instead of “Blessed art thou amongst women,” Malachy heard, “Blessed art thou, a monk swimming.” The book is largely a collection of the now-sober and reformed Malachy’s misadventures while “sozzled” or “fluthered.”

He has been fuming about its critical reception.

“Kirkus [Reviews] just kicked the [expletive] out of me, because I’m not Frank.” The American Library Assn.’s Booklist concluded that, “those who appreciated the profundity of ‘Angela’s Ashes’ will be disappointed by this less meaty memoir.”

Then he chuckles. As far as he’s concerned, the critics “can osculate the royal Irish posterior if they don’t like it.” Besides, “I’ll have a beautiful tour. I’ll speak funnily, eloquently. It will be a great love-a-thon. And then I’ll see about writing another book.”

With his wife, Diana, to whom he dedicates “Monk,” Malachy has lived for 33 years in a six-room apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where they reared three children, now grown. Not far away is the tony building where both brother Frank and another recent Pulitzer Prize winner, novelist Philip Roth, live. Malachy also has a son and daughter from a disastrous first marriage.

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As we talk, son Conor, 31, walks in and Malachy perks up. Conor is a New York City police sergeant and a documentary filmmaker who was to leave soon for a film festival in Tucson to screen “The McCourts of Limerick,” a film featuring the Brothers McCourt and, briefly, their mother, Angela, and Malachy Sr., the wastrel father whose rampant alcoholism exacerbated the family’s poverty.

Conor is asked about his father’s book and his Uncle Frank’s book: “The comparison between ‘Angela’s Ashes’ and ‘A Monk Swimming’ is that there is none. People are going to be looking for the sequel to ‘Angela’s Ashes,’ and ‘A Monk Swimming’ is not it. It is a continuation of one person’s life, but not Frank’s life. It’s a continuation of Malachy’s life.”

Frank also is writing a sequel, and there’s another documentary in the works: Conor and Malachy spent 10 days in India retracing Malachy’s life as a smuggler of gold boullion, which provides some of the most entertaining reading in “Monk.”

Laughing his infectious laugh, Malachy is talking again about “Monk,” which, he says he wrote for the most practical of reasons: “A very large advance. It will squeeze anything out of you. Over the years people have said, ‘Malachy, you must have a book in you.’ I would say, ‘Yeah, of course. Doesn’t everybody?’ But it’s another thing to get it out.”

Besides, he adds, “I was always talking.” Is a dynasty of writing McCourts in the offing? Brother No. 4, Alphie, a former restaurateur, writes songs and poetry when he’s not working in building renovation and may try to write about the McCourts, Malachy says. But Brother No. 3, Michael, who works in a San Francisco bar, “can’t be bothered” to try to capitalize on the family history.

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“A Monk Swimming” may not be another “Angela’s Ashes,” but it did get that whopping $600,000 advance. That was important, Malachy says, because “the lights were going out in the acting department. I was not getting sufficient work.”

He was eking out a living, he says.

“A miserable existence on Social Security and a couple of small actors’ pensions. Then all of a sudden, boom! The lights went on again.” In the writing department.

After the spectacular success of “Ashes,” a friend associated with a small publishing house suggested that Malachy write down some of the stories in his own repertoire. He agreed and was offered a $50,000 advance. Then an agent suggested they try a bigger house, and Hyperion bit. That was in January 1997.

A poor student, Malachy quit school at 13. At 20, he followed Frank to the United States and into military service. “Monk” focuses on the decade after his discharge. It could be subtitled, “The Drinking Years, Part 1.”

This period, from age 22 to 33, was not the most interesting, but it was the most turbulent.

“There was the newness of coming to America, the idiocy of my getting married when I was not even an adolescent in my head, having no role models for love, affection, marriage, parenthood, husbandhood. And all that crazy stuff, fighting, traveling off to India”--where he smuggled gold bars in a special vest that made him topple over when he bent to drink at a water fountain.

In show business, he had a knack for connecting with those who could help his career along. While half-heartedly trying to sell Bibles on Fire Island, Malachy met Tom O’Malley, a talent coordinator who booked guests on Jack Paar’s “Tonight Show.” O’Malley put Malachy on the show on New Year’s Day 1958 as an amusing eccentric who had a store of funny, self-mocking anecdotes. (He got out of paying household bills, for example, by stamping them “Deceased.”) O’Malley booked him again and again. Always drunk, always getting laughs, Malachy ignored Paar’s questions and said whatever popped into his head. Malachy became friendly with Robert Mitchum and Richard Harris, which led to small acting parts.

Always, there was drinking. With two well-to-do partners, he opened Malachy’s bar on New York’s Upper East Side. And Malachy cultivated an outrageousness far beyond that of the average New York roue. Once he took naked revenge on a restaurant bar that had the temerity to ask him to check his overcoat. He resisted; they insisted. So he returned to his car, doffed all but socks and shoes, put his overcoat back on and stalked back to the bar--where he (briefly) checked his overcoat, displaying the royal Irish posterior. Anterior, too.

He quit drinking 13 years ago and has become something of a crusader on the subject of temperance.

Says Conor, “After he quit drinking, for a little while he was annoying as hell. He’d found the light, and he wanted to enlighten the whole McCourt family too. But we weren’t ready to be enlightened.”

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Where “Angela’s Ashes” was 10 years in the making, “Monk” had a gestation period of only seven months. At that, Malachy says, “It kind of piddled out, because I lost enthusiasm. I don’t know anything about writing or style or structure.” Just as some people play the piano by ear, he says, “I play the language by ear.”

His early views of America were distorted by the movies.

“I thought all Americans, without exception, were highly intelligent, highly educated, well-rounded, well-read, witty. . . . I was amazed to find out they weren’t and I was, in my own way. I went on these television shows, and people thought I was a howl. I’d say the most inane things and people would laugh.”

When writing “Monk,” he didn’t ask Frank for advice. Frank, in fact, hasn’t even read it, not wanting to be influenced by Malachy’s memories as he is writes a sequel to “Angela’s Ashes” about his own young adulthood in New York. It is a period during which Frank and Malachy had little contact. Malachy says that Frank, who went on to a career as a New York City schoolteacher, “was working hard, going to school, working on the docks, in a bank. I was . . . playing.”

Malachy describes his celebrated brother as “the most generous, nonjudgmental, open guy. It’s quite astounding how he managed to survive without bitterness.” In writing about their life, he adds, “I thought he was too kind. I would have been more savage. He left some people off the hook a bit, really. The priests.”

Malachy has no other quarrels with “Ashes” and, in fact, found it quite “freeing” to have the family story told. “I was always running,” he says, “afraid I’d be found out.” Found out to have been a blackguard from the Limerick slums. Whatever festering embarrassments that remained were exposed and blown away by “Angela’s Ashes.”

Malachy and Frank remain close, and, Malachy says, he is not bothered by being eclipsed--for now--by his brother’s success.

“I had it first,” he says. And, he adds, don’t forget his big book tour coming up.

He grins. Frank may be more famous now, he says, “but come June, it will be a different matter.”