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At a White House ceremony to present his deputy at the time, Joe Biden, with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Barack Obama quoted our own William Butler Yeats: “Think where man’s glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.”
Yeats himself had visited the White House on December 28th, 1903, for a lunch with Theodore Roosevelt.
Atlantic Monthly later revealed there was a misunderstanding when the poet spoke of the need to consider “the Little People”.
The president affirmed his support for “the little nations” but was quickly advised that Yeats was actually referring to supernatural creatures, whom he claimed to have seen “many times”. Roosevelt was nonplussed, but his children found it great fun.
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Here at home, the Yeats International Summer School is still going strong after 60 years and, on a recent trip to Sligo, I found myself reflecting on the numerous occasions I covered it for The Irish Times.
However, my first visit was in a different capacity: as a young student I was awarded a scholarship to attend. A previous scholarship-holder, Mary Bourke from Ballina, later became president of Ireland under her married name of Mary Robinson. However, aspirants to succeed Michael D Higgins should relax: I have no plans to run for the Áras in 2025 – at least not at this stage . . .
The director of the school at the time of my first visit was Cambridge academic Thomas Rice Henn (1901-74), an imposing figure who had the unusual and interesting habit of turning off his microphone when making pronouncements in Latin.
I recall having a pleasant chat one day with himself and the distinguished poet Kathleen Raine (1908-2003), whose work is apparently much admired by the Prince of Wales.
Sadly there was no internet in those days to read up on their backgrounds in advance, because I could then have asked Dr Henn about his dramatic experiences in the second World War: here was a Yeatsian scholar who received British and American military decorations and produced manuals on automatic rifles and machine-guns. I could also have tried to persuade Kathleen Raine to talk about her personal life. Wikipedia tells us she had “an unrequited passion” for Gavin Maxwell (1914-69), the gay author of the naturalist classic Ring of Bright Water. Their relationship would have some interesting resonances in today’s more liberal climate.
Apart from a rocky interlude when I became aware that my scholarship covered tuition but not accommodation, that Sligo fortnight in the late Sixties was a great experience, not just for the lectures but also at a social and even political level.
There were students in attendance from universities in the US which had become locations for radical and militant agitation over such issues as civil rights and the Vietnam War. I still recall how a young American declared, in solemn and determined tones, that there was no way he would allow himself to be drafted to serve in that controversial conflict, even if it meant a jail sentence.
Fast-forward to 1983, which was the first year I reported on the school, where I got to meet many leading writers and academics.
Three years later in 1986, for example, the novelist John McGahern (1934-2006) gave a rare public reading from his works at the Hawk’s Well Theatre. He also read from his own translation of Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s Irish-language classic An tOileánach (The Islandman), which he compared to Homer. The first novel of his I had read was The Dark, published in 1965. In those days of extreme censorship it was banned because of its treatment of sexual issues and the author lost his job as a primary schoolteacher. I finally got hold of a copy when I was doing summer work in England and, meeting McGahern later in Sligo, one felt like a Soviet dissident who had come across Boris Pasternak or Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Other journalists covered the school, of course, among them the late Síle Yeats (1955-2007): a charming person and grand-daughter of the great man, she was working at the time for the Irish Press.
Another name that comes to mind is Mary Lappin (1929-97), who handled media matters for the School. An appreciation in The Irish Times after her death stated that, “When reporters went AWOL to a Sligo hostelry, she often phoned the copy through herself.”
I am glad to say I never availed of that service, although it is good to know it existed as a “backstop”, so to speak.