LIKE THE returning swallows, press releases about literary summer schools are welcome harbingers of the warmer months to come. The first of them have been fluttering into my e-mail inbox for weeks now, writes Frank McNally
And happy as I always am to see them, I can never help wondering about the ones that didn't make it. For just as the swallows must navigate the vast, hazardous Sahara desert, before crossing the Atlas Mountains and then taking their chances with the notoriously trigger-happy gun-clubs of Iberia, so electronic press releases face many risks on their journey.
Perhaps the biggest risk this year is that they will be lost in the sprawling, arid expanse of vote-Yes-to-Lisbon propaganda, which is currently filling my inbox faster than I can delete it. After that, they face the jagged peaks of the vote-No-to-Lisbon campaign, whose material is almost as ubiquitous and equally hazardous.
If it somehow survives those, the plucky little literary press release may think it's home. . .only - bang! - to be shot down by the Irish Timesspam-filter.
But even if it completes the journey, the dangers for the event it advertises are not past. The world of Irish summer schools is, like nature, full of harsh competition. It is a cruel place where survival of the fittest is the rule. Thus, and with a heavy heart, I see that the first two big literary festivals of the summer - which would be likely to attract similar clientele - are both fixed for the same weekend.
During their lifetimes, Oliver Goldsmith and Jonathan Swift were rather more careful not to meet. The latter was 63 when the former was born, and he died 15 years later. But the 2008 Trim Swift Festival opens in Meath on May 29th, continuing through the June holiday weekend, while the Goldsmith International Literary Festival starts on the 30th in Westmeath and Longford, and continues likewise. I can only wish them both luck.
ALTHOUGH Goldsmith is now best known for literature, the annual commemoration ( www.goldsmithfestival.ie) will this year also focus on his journalism. Writing for the press was one of many indignities forced upon him by his gambling and generally dissolute lifestyle. He was, in the popular euphemism, "colourful" - constantly in debt and needing the help of friends, among whom Samuel Johnson was one of his most loyal.
It was the publication of The Vicar of Wakefield that finally secured his reputation. But even this occurred in fraught circumstances. In Boswell's biography, Johnson recalls receiving a message one morning "from poor Goldsmith", who was in "great distress". Dispatching an emergency guinea with the messenger, Johnson followed at more leisure, and found that Goldsmith's landlady "had arrested him for his rent, at which he was in a violent passion".
The Irish writer had already spent the advance guinea on a bottle of Madeira, and when this and his visitor calmed him down, he produced the manuscript of his masterpiece by way of a realisable asset.
Johnson recorded the great literary moment for posterity. "I looked into [ the novel], and saw its merit; told the landlady I should soon return, and having gone to a bookseller, sold it for sixty pounds. I brought Goldsmith the money, and he discharged his rent, not without rating his landlady in a high tone for having used him so ill."
Even the 1773 opening night of Goldsmith's famous comedy She Stoops to Conquer was accompanied by unplanned dramatics. The theatre manager disliked the piece and nobody was confident of its success. So Goldsmith's friends took the precaution of deploying in the audience a man called Adam Drummond, who, according to one of the plotters, "was gifted by nature with the most sonorous and at the same time contagious laugh that ever echoed from the human lungs".
Unfortunately, he was also a simple type, and had no idea which bits of the play were funny. So the company arranged a series of signals, with the laughter of Johnson (again) providing the cues. Unfortunately, Drummond overdid his performance to an embarrassing extent, and when the signallers tried to rein him in, it was too late. He was a laughing jackass, run amok.
"These were dangerous moments," noted the chief plotter, "for the pit began to take umbrage; but we carried the play through and triumphed, not only over [ the theatre manager's] judgment, but our own."
ONE OF the highlights of the Trim weekend ( www.trimswiftfestival.com) will be a satirical writing competition, with prizes totalling €1,000 for prose or poetry in the tradition of Swift. The two suggested themes include: "Global warming - a lot of hot air". But given its naturally comic quality, surely most contestants will opt for the second subject: "The Lisbon Treaty referendum - a modest proposal". There will, however, be a slightly poignant note amid the laughter - namely that the Boyne Writer's Group will be helped to choose the winner by a guest judge, the former TD Joe Higgins.
Bereft political colour writers have fond memories of Joe, whose contributions to Leader's Questions used to light up the Dáil chamber. He once likened the challenge of getting a straight answer from Bertie Ahern to the plight of a man "playing handball against a haystack". No matter how hard Joe hit the ball, it never came back directly. And yet his attempts were always entertaining.
That all ended last May, alas. Since when, Joe has gone where savage indignation no longer lacerates his breast. Or if it does, it's no use to Dáil sketch writers.