The Irish passion for summer schools has become an export industry. There is now a summer school which combines the best of the Irish product with good weather and an exotic locale - and is focused on an Irish writer. The Trieste James Joyce Summer School was inaugurated in the Italian port city last year, and held its second session in June. It has proved a very valuable addition to the Joyce circuit - and is a unique experience, too.
James Joyce's arrival in Trieste, then part of Austria-Hungary, in 1904, was a chance event; it happened to be the place where a job was available. But, unusually for him, it was a happy chance, one that actually did bring some benefits. And it certainly brought benefits for Joyce devotees, providing as it does a more than reasonable excuse to visit and enjoy a city with an atmosphere all of its own.
It would probably be wrong to state that Joyce was happy in Trieste during his stay there from 1904 to 1915 (with an eight-month break in Rome) and again for part of 1919 and 1920; happiness and that turbulent spirit rarely consorted. But it would be true to say that in Trieste Joyce found a lifestyle and a world-view that were highly congenial to him. Excitingly for visitors, a great deal of that lifestyle and world-view is intact today.
The Trieste of the first decades of this century is far better preserved than is the Dublin of the same epoch. The reason is that after Trieste became part of Italy following the first World War, it declined greatly in importance, being then just one port among many where formerly it had been a major port of the Austro-Hungarian empire. As a result, it has suffered far less so-called development than has Dublin - and this is not just a matter of physical changes but also of changes in spirit and attitude. Those in Trieste seem much closely aligned than do those of present-day Dublin to what Joyce would have experienced.
In a number of respects, Joyce came upon a city that had some of the best features of the Dublin he had left, without its (for him) soul-destroying aspects. Like Dublin, Trieste was a major port city; like Dublin, it was an important centre of a powerful empire (and in both cases that status was greatly resented by the majority of the local population); and like Dublin it enjoyed a spectacular setting by the sea beneath high (well, highish) hills. In letters from Dublin in 1909, Joyce, in a neat reversal of the traditional exile's lament, actually evinces a nostalgia for Trieste, and declares he can't wait to get back there.
Trieste's lively social life - the bars, the theatres, the operas - certainly appealed to him, and he remained on friendly terms with a number of Triestines after he left the city in 1920, though he never returned there, or indeed to Italy again. Trieste contains many mementoes of Joyce, among them a copy of his first volume, Chamber Music, inscribed by him to his brother Stannie, which is in the possession of a local pharmacist. Today, Trieste is very proud of the Joyce connection, a pride given its most specific embodiment in the newly founded summer school.
The school, the brainchild of Prof Renzo Crivelli and Dubliner Dr John McCourt of the University of Trieste, follows the classic pattern of such institutions: lectures in the mornings, seminars in the afternoons, and various social events in the evenings. These latter were very memorable: a journey to the Triestine hinterland, the Carso, near the border with Slovenia, ending with a most unusual repast in a local farmhouse-cum-restaurant; a dinner that was taken over by a group of Triestine widows and widowers, who certainly showed us how to shake off our troubles, and many other such occasions. Nor should one omit the easy accessibility of the sea and the possibility for really enjoying it that Triestine weather affords.
What really distinguishes the Trieste version of the venerable summer school formula, however, can best be summed up in one word: relaxation. This is not really the work of the organisers, excellent though they are, but is essentially a function of the quality of the city itself, a place where relaxation is second nature. Nor does it mean that no work gets done: a lot does, but it is all a question of the atmosphere in which it is carried out.
Another quality that makes the school special is the presence of a large number of eastern Europeans with a very strong interest both in Joyce and in contemporary Irish writing; as Finnegans Wake aptly puts it: "Your fame is spreading like Basilico's ointment since the Fintan Lalors piped you overborder and there's whole households beyond the Bothnians and they calling names after you." This interest is quite a recent phenomenon and is clearly linked to the political changes in the countries concerned. It is already adding a new dimension to Joyce studies: one of the lectures at this year's school was by the Hungarian scholar Tekla Mecsobner, who discussed the Hungarian-Irish connection both in relation to Joyce and more widely.
Naturally, there's a strong Italian contribution, with a special focus on Joyce's specifically Triestine writings - Giacomo Joyce and the articles in the Triestine paper, Il Piccolo della Sera. Important research on Joyce's Triestine life and writings was presented by Renzo Crivelli and John McCourt.
In that connection it was especially appropriate to have the Irish scholar Prof Kevin Barry of NUI Galway there to discuss Joyce's critical writings, which he is editing in a volume due to appear shortly. Prof Barry was but one of what can safely be called a lively Irish contingent, who quite literally and in some cases emphatically added their voices to the occasion - and not just at the formal events either. The presence of some of the Irish contributors had been aided by the Arts Council and the school also benefited from the enthusiastic support of the Irish Ambassador to Italy, Joseph Small.
Indeed, the highlight of the week was provided by an Irish contributor, the poet and playwright Paula Meehan, both at her reading and at a discussion with John McCourt of current Irish writing and Joyce's influence. It is one thing to discuss and analyse writing; it is another to experience it, when it is of that calibre. And it is also very valuable to get a firsthand insight into the relationship of present-day Irish writers to a figure who, despite, or maybe because of, his fame, remains very problematic for many of them, in interesting ways. It is a policy of the school to include an Irish writer - last year's was Colm Toibin - and it is an extremely enlightened and enlightening one. Nor was the traffic just one-way: one evening was devoted to a fascinating reading from the work of the contemporary Trieste novelist, Claudio Magris.
The Trieste Joyce Summer School is the second such school of its kind; since 1987 one has existed in Dublin, founded by the late Augustine Martin and now continued by Dr Anne Fogarty. Many aspects of the two schools are similar; this year, for instance, the Dublin one, run by UCD, included the playwright Frank McGuinness discussing Ibsen's relation to Joyce, and through that, to some extent, exploring his own. Moreover, the Joyce world being a small one, a number of the usual suspects turn up at both. So there is not exactly a dearth of venues for Irish people, especially, to engage with Joyce. Nor is the quality of the lectures and seminars one whit inferior at either.
What makes the difference between two very fine institutions is, of course, the difference of the cities: Dublin (population almost one million), the cradle of Joyce's imagination, edgy, pressurised, slightly frenetic, a fully-fledged capital city, in short, and by that fact alone perhaps already significantly different from the place Joyce knew (for him, at best, it "wore the mask of a capital"); Trieste (population around 300,000) caught in something of a time-warp, embalmed by the retreat of the Austro-Hungarian empire and to that extent perhaps a good deal closer to the place that Joyce would have experienced.
For an Irish person, Trieste, with its own special magic, certainly brought more closely home a sense of Joyce's cosmopolitanism - his non-Irishness. If he could be said to have had an ideal other than that of his art, it was the European one, not as an abstract category of sameness, but as an intensely lived experience of diversity. As a group of us - Irish, German, Hungarian - sat one evening at a very affordable restaurant overlooking the sea (a sort of cut-price Sorrento Terrace) and gazed over the bay in which Trieste nestles, my own long-held suspicion about these Joycean occasions seemed to be confirmed: that their real value lies in the possibilities for such cosmopolitan interaction, and that in such engagement we are indeed following the lesson of the master.
Those interested in the Trieste Joyce School can contact Dr John McCourt, Via Ponziana 18, Trieste 34137, Italy. Tel 003940 761974.