JOHN HEWITT SUMMER SCHOOLSEAMUS HEANEY could make a lucrative living touring Ireland's proliferation of summer schools. Just recently he gave a reading at the MacGill Summer School in Glenties, Co Donegal, where such was the attendance that people were turned away from the door.
It was the same story in Armagh city yesterday where the Nobel laureate's reading on the opening night of the John Hewitt Summer School was sold out.
Tony Kennedy, director of the Hewitt school, now in its 21st year, was delighted with the enthusiasm shown. The week of events - with the theme 'Let There Be No Wall', a line from Hewitt's poem Freehold - features poetry and fiction readings, learned discourses on literature, politics and history, creative writing courses, drama, and much else besides.
Such was the draw of Heaney, who was reading with New York poet Billy Collins, that he was booked for an additional night tonight in the 500-seater main theatre of St Patrick's Trian in the centre of the city. Even that couldn't satisfy demand, with the result that Kennedy, whose day job is running Co-Operation Ireland, hit on the brainwave of running an audio-visual transmission of Heaney's reading in the smaller theatre in the Trian that holds up to 200. "These tickets half-price," he said.
Heaney fondly remembered Hewitt, who befriended him when he was a young poet in Belfast in the 1960s, contributing a positive review of his first collection Death of a Naturalist to the Belfast Telegraph.
Hewitt, who died in Belfast in 1987 aged 79, is viewed as a poet whose work, vision and philosophy crossed sectarian divisions. In remarks in The Irish Times in 1974 that seemed designed to subvert Northern political and religious orthodoxies, he said of himself: "I'm an Ulsterman of planter stock. I was born on the island of Ireland, so secondarily I'm an Irishman. I was born in the British archipelago and English is my native tongue, so I'm British. The British archipelago consists of offshore islands to the continent of Europe, so I'm European."
Hugo Hamilton, who read from his new novel Disguise at the school yesterday, did not refer to this well-known comment of Hewitt's, but it was clear that he would question whether identity could be so comfortably encapsulated. He prefaced his reading with remarks about his German-Irish upbringing and how his tyrannical father banned him from speaking English. He spoke too about how he wore lederhosen and Aran sweaters, about conflicting identities, and "how after that strange childhood I still have problems about where I belong".
ClairWills, professor of Irish literature at Queen Mary, University, London, in her lecture on emigration during and after the second World War 'The Best are Leaving', recalled the arguments of the 1940s and 1950s that the boat to England was taking away Ireland's brightest and best.
Emigration of that period was too complex for such an easy evaluation, she found, while also addressing how some of the views of that time had "eugenical overtones". She quoted as an example one member of the Irish Commission on Emigration 1948-1954 expressing concerns about too many Mayo people leaving: "a very fine stock and would be a great loss to the country".
Prof Wills also noted a particular puritanical streak among the more conservative of the commissioners, particularly when it came to women who emigrated and "their unfortunate inclination towards hairdressers, fashion, luxury and comforts of all types".
