The cold paw of autumn reached out and caressed me the other evening. Ah. And so, the season draws to a close; which means that the summer schools are in their full flush. Sometimes I wonder whether the annual rash of these schools which we invariably cover at this time of year actually occurs: maybe they are in fact virtual-summer schools, dreamt up initially in the minds of news editors to fill the silly season, and fleshed out by some pretty imaginative colour writing by our more inventive staff over pints here in Dublin.
For is it possible for scholars to gather each year, year after year, and say something new about W.B. Yeats? All that could be said about the man and his work has been published anyway; the University of Texas has a copy of every thesis ever written on him. W.B. Yeats and Alligator Wrestling in New South Wales: a New Appraisal. W B Yeats and Sizewell-B: The Unspoken Aesthetic. W.B. Yeats and the Incas: Andean Human Sacrifice and Michael Robartes. W.B. Yeats and Salted Herring: the Norwegian Perspective. W.B. Yeats and the Sharks Along Great Barrier Reef: A Necessary Corrective. W.B. Yeats and Manchester United: the Unexplored Dimension.
Overview
Ah. I feel a W.B. Yeats paper emerging. Clear the way! Yes! Here it comes! The Colliding Aesthetics of W.B. Yeats and the Gunfight in the OK Corral - An Overview:
"We can be sure that Yeats and Wyatt Earp never met, and it is likely that they never knew of one another's existence. Nor is it likely that the poet had ever heard of Doc Holliday. But there are, nonetheless, resonances in his work which suggest that he was clearly sensitive - if only unconsciously - to the emerging frontier culture in which Earp and Holliday were such foremost players. It is imperative, therefore, to deconstruct Yeats's poems about the dynamic of the EarpHolliday leitmotif, but drawing most powerfully upon the central western myth of the Gunfight at the OK Corral. For therein lies the key to understanding the great body of his work. Furthermore, to comprehend and embrace the mythic integrity of this narrative is to open up an entirely new perspective on Yeats between the publication of The Wanderings of Oisin in 1889 and the Play- boy riots of 1907, which in many senses bore a remarkable similarity to the OK Corral."
There. An entire summer school, just like that. But why do some writers get summer schools and not others? How are the subjects within those summer schools chosen? Why is it that Synge was for so long without a summer school? Is it because he wrote some of the most patronising, risible and uninteresting plays in the entire corpus of the English language, or because nobody could bear to have a summer school in Rathfarnham, where he was from?
Military service
Patrick MacGill has a summer school, though it never deals with the subject closest to his heart, military service in the Great War. Instead it deals with Patrick MacGill and the Art of Taxidermy in Siberia or Patrick MacGill and the Dead Sea Scrolls or Patrick MacGill and the Albigensian Heresy; largely, I suspect, because Blaneyland, where the summer school is held, does not like the real MacGill version of the world and so hosts a summer school named after him, but dedicated to topics utterly unrelated to his life. Exactly what the doctor ordered.
Can there be a summer school more preposterous than that which takes place annually in Mayo? The French sent two generals to Ireland in the 1790s: Humbert and La Hoche. Why those two? Simple: because they had together conducted a war of genocide in the unrepentantly Catholic Vendee after the revolution, perfecting means of mass murder which even today have their uses. In doctrine and strategy they truly were the military precursors of the Nazi butchers of Army Group South which did to the Jews before Sebastopol what Lahoche and Humbert did to the Catholics of the Vendee, and doubtless would ultimately have done to the stubbornly Catholic peasants of Connacht. Manstein, the Nazi commander, may one day have a summer school named after him too, just as Humbert has: Erich Von Manstein and the early Impressionists: A Reassessment.
Fairview Park
Lahoche awaits his summer school even yet. Maybe he'll get his when Sean Russell, traitor and Nazi collaborator, gets one named after him - to be held, perhaps, downwind of the suitably flavoursome Glasnevin crematorium, in Fairview Park, where Dublin Corporation helped raise a statue in this quisling's memory. Naturally, summer schools not being in any way related to the real interests of their subjects, the Sean Russell summer school will not deal with how Ireland's semites (or sapphists, sodomites or socialists) might have been exterminated, but instead will presumably have papers on Peruvian flora and fauna or the future of the snow leopard in Israel.
The real truth about summer schools is that they're an excuse for a good time under the lofty and improving banner of "scholarship". Good. No better man. But would it not be more honest to declare that the purpose of a gathering is to hear incomprehensible, career-advancing papers on, say, Yeats and Early Coptic poetry about DNA, followed by music, booze and - for those still capable - a bit of legover, with absolutely none of it to be taken seriously? Probably: but where would our poor news editors, with their empty news pages, be then?
Wyatt Earp: few scholars acknowledge his influence on W.B. Yeats