Francis Stuart: Commentary

W. B. Yeats (1): Daniel Albright annotates Yeats’s line, ‘A girl that knew all Dante once / Live to bear children to a dunce’ (“Why Should not Old Men be Mad?”, opening poem of On the Boiler), quoting Stuart’s poem to his wife Iseult: ‘I wondered would they never go / As under the table I felt your heel / While they spoke high art and quoted a line / From the Purgatorio. / Who was it had known all Dante once? / And why - though why not - had he called me dunce?’ (See Allbright, Poems of W. B. Yeats, 1992.) Albright notes that Yeats also lamented her marriage to Stuart in “Death of a Hare”, but read in 1932 a book by Stuart and wondered, ‘What an inexplicable thing sexual selection is [... &c.; as supra.]

W. B. Yeats (2) - Letter to Olivia Shakespear (21 June 1924): Yeats wrote ‘in high spirits‘ foreseeing ‘an admirable row’ having ‘heard that a group of Dublin poets ... were about to publish a review.’ Further: ‘They had adopted my suggestion and were suppressed by the printers for blasphemy. I got a bottle of Sparkling Moselle, which I hope youthful ignorance mistook for champagne, and we swore alliance. ... I saw a proof sheetmarked by the printer. ... My dream is a wild paper of the young which will make enemies everywhere and suffer suppression, I hope a number of times, with the logical assertion, with all fitting deductions, of the immortality of the soul.’ (W. B. Yeats, The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade, London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954, p.705; also quoted in Richard Ellmann, infra].) A month later Yeats wrote to Shakespear asking her to ‘[p]lease subscribe and help a first beginning of new political thought where we need it above all things - Municipal workers and hotel employees are about to strike on the edge of the Tailteann festival.’ (Ibid., p.707; all quoted in Bernard McKenna, “Yeats, “Leda,” and the Aesthetics of To-Morrow: “The Immortality of the Soul”’, in New Hibernia Review, 13, 2, Samhradh/Summer 2009, p.17-18.)

W. B. Yeats (3): ‘Read The Coloured Dome by Francis Stuart. It is strange and exciting in theme and perhaps more personally and beautifully written than any book of our generation; it makes you understand the strange Ireland that is rising up here. What an inexplicable thing sexual selection is! Iseult picked this young man by what seemed half chance, a mere desire to escape from an impossible life, and when he seemed almost imbecile to his own relations. Now he is her very self made active and visible, her nobility walking and [91] singing. If luck comes to his aid he will be our great writer.’ (Letter to Olivia Shakespear, Letters, ed. Wade, 1954, p.799-80; quoted Geoffrey Elton, Francis Stuart: A Life, p.91; also [in part] W. J. McCormack, Festschrift for Francis Stuart, Dolmen 1972, Introduction, p.10-11.) Elborn notes that Yeats, recuperating in at the Royal Hotel, Glendalough, expected to be stimulated by Stuart’s conversation, especially after reading Pigeon Irish, but admitted in a letter to Georgie [Mrs. Yeats] that he found Stuart ‘alone rather flat ... [he] always agrees with me or pretends to & that is very dull.’ (Elborn, op. cit., p.90.)

W. B. Yeats (3): ‘The youngest of Irish writers, Francis Stuart, who as a style full of intellectual passion and music, though he seems to write with the point of a needle, describes the most violent events and has written two strange novels, upon the mystic, upon the sacrificial victim. He himself is typical of the new Ireland, at once so medieval and so sceptical, so [undeciphered]. Shortly after I first met him he spent fifteen months in jail as a political prisoner; then he was [in] trouble with his church as one of the editors of a weekly review called in half a dozen Catholic papers infamous, immoral, blasphemous. A little later [he] was spending his life under the influence of St. John of the Cross in meditation and in prayer. A little [later] still he owned a race horse and was betting at the Curragh. His last novel is lived in the immediate future [viz., The Coloured Dome]. [... &c.] (Yeats, ‘Modern Ireland: An Address to American Audience, 1932-33’; in Irish Renaissance, ed., Robin Skelton and David R. Clark [from ‘Irish Gathering’, in Massachusets Review, 1964], Dublin: Dolmen, 1965, pp.13-25; pp.23-24.)

W. B. Yeats (4), wrote to Iseult [Gonne] Stuart: ‘just said to Lennox Robinson, that if I was not afraid of being misled by my sensitiveness to a certain kind of mystic thought I would say that your husband had the most noble & passionate style of anybody writing in English at this moment. But I will not, because of that fear, say as much as that in public, or not yet. I enclose on a separate sheet of paper a sentence which should serve [...]’ (Letter thanking Iseult for the ‘happy days’ at Laragh; quoted in Geoffrey Elborn, Francis Stuart - A Life, Dublin: Raven Arts Press 1990, p.91.) Note, the sentence supplied by Yeats was: ‘Francis Stuart has a style full of lyrical intensity, a mind full of spiritual passion ... He had written a strange, profound, lovely book.’ (Idem.) [See also under Thomas MacGreevey, q.v., infra.]

A[natole] Rivoallan, Littérature Irlandaise Contemporaine (Paris: Hachette 1939), pp.143-45: ‘[Stuart] convey[s] in the novel all the poetic gifts he perhaps sometimes misused [...] his plot is freed, if not from the real, at least from the temporal’; discusses the themes and imagery of Pigeon Irish (‘exquisite and poignant poem of a carrier pigeon [...] also the tragedy of a female visionary [...] in the ideological war of clashing European powers’) and The White Hare (‘fascinating and profound fantasia’); [...] Notes Towards an Autobiography (‘a most unpretentious and uncommon reading matter [...] complete, sincere personal analysis’). [Cited in Pierre Joannon, ‘Francis Stuart or the Spy of Truth’, in The Irish Novel in Our Time, ed. Patrick Rafroidi & Maurice Harmon, l’Université de Lille 1975-76, pp.157-183; p.159.)

Donagh MacDonagh, ed. & intro., Poems from Ireland, [preface by R. M. Smyllie] (Dublin The Irish Times 1944), ‘Author of several charming and slightly fantastic Irish novels, notably The Coloured Dome and Pigeon Irish; he had also written a considerable quantity of verse; he has been in Germany since before the present war; also contains biog. Notice.

Serge Radine, ‘The greatness of Stuart is his ability to embrace all the pain of men and still to preserve hope.’ (‘Neue Pfade in Der Literature’, review of 1951; trans. & rep. in Festschrift for Francis Stuart, ed. W. J. McCormack, [Lilliput] 1972, p.24-15; p.25 [end].)

Ethel Mannin, on Every Man a Stranger (1949) - her William Joyce novel - in Brief Voices: A Writer’s Story (London: Hutchinson 1959): ‘[B]y 1947 the horror of the starvation in Germany and Austria was so terrible that I began to feel that if could make the effort and go there and do some first-hand reporting and write a book about it more people would send food-parcels - which it was perfectly possible to do even under rationing, as some of us demonstrated. Of secondary importance, but still of importance, was the fact that I had an Irish writer friend, Francis Stuart, in the French zone of Germany, and an Austrian friend in Vienna, a young man Reginald and I had met before the war when he was dancing in a cabaret in a Yugo-Slav night place. There were, too, various other people to whom we had been sending parcels, and whom we neither of us knew personally, whom it might be possible to help further by a personal visit. (p.70.) [Cont.]

Ethel Mannin, on Every Man a Stranger (1949) - cont.: ‘I went this time by train from Munich to Baden-Baden in the French Zone, having secured the necessary Movement Orders and permits in Munich without too much difficulty, and then by train to Freiburg, where Francis Stuart still was.’ (p.74.) There is no more about Stuart in spite of her connection with her later assistance when he returned to London [as in Elborn, supra].

Laurence Durrell, review of Black List, Section H, in New York Times Book Review (9 April 1972), ‘a book of the finest imaginative distinction’; ‘the light that plays over the book is the pale light of catatonia’; ‘The real tension of the book lies here - the spiritual lifeless ness of the hero become magnetic; one is pressed to go on to see whether the cloud of autism will ever lift.’ (p.37; quoted in S. J. Caterson, ‘Joyce, the Künstlerroman and Minor Literature: Francis Stuart’s Black List, Section H’, in Irish University Review, Spring/Summer 1997, p.92-93.)

Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (1948): ‘My dream’ [he wrote] ‘is a wild paper for the young which will make enemies everywhere & suffer suppression & hate a number of times, for its logical assertion with all fitting deductions of the immortality of the soul’. [See var. version under W. B. Yeats, supra.] in Accordingly he wrote but did not sign the leading article of the review, which was called To-Morrow. The article, not elsewhere reprinted, is a flamboyant mixture of paganism, anti-clericalism, and Yeatsism’ [editorial cited in full, Ellmann, pp.250-51; see also under Elborn, infra]. (Cont.)

Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (1948): ‘Yeats was right in foreseeing the failure of To-Morrow, but not in thinking that the failure would be magnificent. The review, with its heretical but vague policies, collapsed after two issues had roused considerable notoriety.’ (p.215.) See also ftn.: ‘This editorial is signed by H. Stuart and Cecil Salkeld, but was written by Yeats, according to Mrs. Stuart. The style makes the authorship quite clear.’ (To-morrow [sic], I, August 1924, p.4; Ellmann, op. cit., p.322.)

Daniel Murphy, ‘Mystique of Suffering: The Novels of Francis Stuart’, in Imagination and Religion in Anglo-Irish Literature 1930-1980 (Dublin: IAP 1987), pp.176-201. Quotes W. B. Yeats on Stuart: ‘He is silent unless one brings the conversation round to St. John of the Cross, or a kindred theme.’ (Letters, eds., Hone, p.409.) Murphy refers to ‘an apparently uncritical feeling for Catholicism’ in Stuart which ‘conceals a deep-lying distrust of organised faith which is combined in his work with a sense of the artist’s function as one essentially of challenge and dissent.’ Quotes The Angel of Pity: ‘We are alone and the world is convulsed in its own struggle [... &c.; as in Quotations, infra]. (Cont.)

Daniel Murphy, ‘Mystique of Suffering: The Novels of Francis Stuart’ (1987): Murphy ends with a Christian confession: ‘Stuart’s image of suffering, like Beckett’s, is one which is ultimately disclosive of meaning. Growth in knowledge is related in his fiction to the tragic fulfilment exemplified in the life and death of Christ. The tragic sense, however, intertwines positively with the religious in his work, suggesting an almost infinite capacity in man for endurance of suffering. It is this capacity which sustains man’s growth in fellowship and love and his aspiration ultimately towards the fulfilment exemplified in Christ’s love for mankind.’ (p.210).

A. N. Jeffares, W. B. Yeats: A New Biography (London: Macmillan 1988): ‘Yeats’s poem “Leda and the Swan” appeared in Stuart and F. R. Higgins’s To-morrow (Aug. 1924), along with an unsigned leader on the immortality of the soul, counting among atheists bad writers and bishops of all denominations, dismissing demagogues, calling the soul back to its ancient sovereignty, declaring “it can do whatever it please”.’ (p.274.)

W. J. McCormack, Festschrift for Francis Stuart on His Seventieth Birthday, Dublin: Dolmen 1972, Introduction: ‘There is little in Irish literature to compare with Stuart’s achievement for when he was leaving for Germany Sean O’Faolain was finishing Come Back to Erin and Lord Dunsany was shooting snipe in Anatolia. Yeats was dead and his forebodings of the rough beast were largely ignored in his homeland. In contemporary art only such a painting as Jack Yeats’s The Blood of Abel attempted to handle the same life that Stuart was passing through. The artist (said Jack Yeats with typical simplicity) does not create; he assembles memories. For Stuart the progression was from invention to self-knowledge - though the element recollected from childhood disturbances remains important. The timetable was destined by the synchronising of the outer chaos with his inner disturbance. It is from this precarious balance that Stuart speaks in his finest work.’ (p.15.)

Maurice Harmon, ‘Generations Apart: 1925-1975’, in The Irish Novel in Our Time, ed. Patrick Rafroidi & Harmon (Université de Lille 1975-76), p.49-65: ‘One of the most impressive features of this novel is that the individual’s quest for redemption through the imagination merges with the historical processes [...] [H’s] philosophy of life, a belief in suffering and endurance as redemptive agencies, owes little to Irish sources [...] it finds natural affinities in his actual and imaginative encounters in Europe with the suffering, isolated and unorthodox individuals, specially women, through his thinking about people in extreme states of experience, such as Christ [...] and religious mystics, and [...] the reading of certain kinds of novelist, particularly Russian.’ (p.63.) [Cont.]

Maurice Harmon, ‘Generations Apart: 1925-1975’ - cont.: Harmon remarks on Stuart’s ‘belief in the redemptive value of suffering’ and writes further: ‘It is essential for Stuart’s purposes that all the characters should be colourless, without social distinction, without outward distinction. What they are is made visible in how they live.’ [Cont.]

Maurice Harmon, ‘Generations Apart: 1925-1975’ -cont.: Of Black List, Section H: ‘The book is both a manifesto of beliefs, tested in the abyss of post-war dislocation, and an apologia for a life lived in accordance with its own obscure laws of intuition and self-belief. It is the means by which these two purposes are related that the book is most challenging.’ (Quoted in Eamon Maher, review of Harmon, Selected Essays, ed. Barbara Brown, Irish Academic Press, in Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Winter 2006, p.452.)

Paul Durcan, interviewed in Cork Examiner (18 June 1979, identifies Francis Stuart as a key to his own development ‘unlocking a network of harmonic connections’. (See further under Durcan, supra.)

Geoffrey Elborn, Francis Stuart: A Life (Dublin: Raven Arts Press 1990), 288p.; no notes, no index; bibl., and photos; Edward Maguire port. as cover [Hugh Lane Gallery].

Richard Kearney , Myth and Motherland [Field Day Pamphlet No. 5] (Derry: Field Day 1984): ‘Similarly [to Yeats], Francis Stuart, another exponent of the immunity of literary myth from moral judgement, turned to fascism, as his pro-Nazi broadcasts from Berlin during the war and his novelistic apologia for this action after the war - Black List Section H - testify.’ (p.22.)

Hugo Hamilton, [on a reissue of A Meeting in Berlin] [with port.], in Irish Times (10.9.1994); ‘the fact is that Stuart gave his greatest allegiance to his art, to his poetry, to the tightly spun craft of his prose which still leaps from the page with The Pillar of Cloud today.’

Anne McCartney, ‘The Significance of the Self in Francis Stuart’s Work’, in ‘Francis Stuart Special Issue’, Bill Lazenbatt, ed., Writing Ulster, No. 4 (Jordanstown 1996), pp.55-68; ‘[Stuart] deliberately sets himself up as a scapegoat and goads the reader into taking a high moral stance. For a writer who asserts that the true writer must provide a counter-current to the “platitudinous complacencies” of popular opinion, there must be some reassurance in provoking a sense of moral outrage since this firmly places the reader in the anonymous mass of the moral majority. The reader therefore becomes instrumental in the ostracism of the writer, pointing the [finger] and demanding an act of contrition. That the majority of readers fail to see beyond the question mark confirms Stuart’s opinion that the vast majority of humanity blindly accepts the consensus views of society.’ (p.56.)

S. J. Caterson, ‘Joyce, the Künstlerroman and Minor Literature: Francis Stuart’s Black List, Section H’, in Irish University Review (Spring/Summer 1997), pp.90-91: ‘The essential difference between Stuart and [James] Joyce as writers of the self may be expressed in terms of the paradigm of minor literature described by David Lloyd, who draws on the work on Kafka of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Lloyd lists the features which distinguish major from minor literature. A major work of literature is defined in terms of ethics, “since ethics involve the capacity to judge as from the perspective of archetypal man”. The major work is one which is “in some manner directed towards the production of an autonomous ethical identity for the subject”. The ethical disposition is “elicited precisely through identification” because “the aesthetic experience is the mode in which that perspective is most purely achieved”: the writer thus becomes “representative and canonical”.’

S. J. Caterson, ‘Joyce, the Künstlerroman and Minor Literature: Francis Stuart’s Black List, Section H’ (1997) - cont.: ‘For Lloyd, minor literature has as its primary feature its “exclusion from the canon”. Lloyd sees minor literature as a kind of writing that “emulates but does not fully attain the qualities of a canonical literature” and is commonly the literature of a minority group. A work of minor literature “remains in oppositional relationship to the canon and the state from which it has been excluded”. In other words, “the production of narratives of ethical identity is generally refused”. Tellingly, as far as Stuart is concerned, in minor literature “the forms of articulation call into question the very terms in which a canonical literature is defined”’. [Cont.]

S. J. Caterson, ‘Joyce, the Künstlerroman and Minor Literature: Francis Stuart’s Black List, Section H’ (1997) - cont.: ‘[...] In neither A Portrait nor Black List is the artist shown as having realised his literary ambitions. Black List is, however, the product of Stuart’s life: it is his life’s work. The artist is neither more nor less than the man. What is remarkable, and disturbing, about Stuart is not his neo/subromanticism, but the single-mindedness with which the goal of selfrealisation in art is pursued. It is often said that each person has at least one book within him or her. Stuart has himself within one book. Therein lies the strange power of Black List, Section H. [End]’ (p.; quoting David Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism, California UP 1987, pp.19-26; Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, Minnesota UP 1986).

Seamus Hosey, ‘Germany Recalling: Francis Stuart and the Aosdána Debacle’, article in Magill, Christmas Annual, 1997, p.39; reports on the ‘trial’ of Stuart held at a meeting of Aosdana (Dublin Castle, wed. 26th Nov. 1997); quotes sentence from Black List, Section H extracted out of context in Channel 4 programme on A Great Hatred [dir. Simon Sebag Montefiore and dealing with anti-Semitism in Irish Republicanism]: ‘If there was a Jewish idea, which was surely a contradiction, it was a hidden, unheroic and critical one, a worm that could get into a lot of fine-looking fruit’; relates Anthony Cronin’s answer to Máire Mac an tSaoi’s charges (admitted to be written in hospital under medical use of morphine) that Stuart was actually sympathetic to Jews in Germany, and further cites a quotation from Stuart in Robert Fisk’s In Time of War: ‘I could never be a writer in the bosom of society. I disliked Allied sanctimoniousness about fighting a Christian crusade against evil’. Further quote comments in Robert Hogan, ed., Dictionary of Irish Literature (1979): ‘Out of the rubble he hoped renewal would come through the recovery of a past very much like the one he imagined to be characteristic of the Apostolic Age - a spiritual community rooted in familiar groups, each cohering around a core of shared suffering, compassion and love’. Hosey reports that Mac an tSaoi cited Sean MacEntee, her father, as the source for information about Stuart’s anti-semitic tendencies, quipping that Cronin and Ulick O’Connor were ‘little boys in short pants’ at the time; also present and speaking were Paul Durcan and Aidan Higgins.

Eileen Battersby, ‘Prophet of hindsight who outlived both his world and his century’ , assessment of Francis Stuart (The Irish Times, 3 Feb. 2000); ‘It is pointless placing him in a political context, his preoccupations were almost exclusively interior’ ; ‘Dubbed an outsider, a role he embraced as essential to his work, he set out to explore the nature of being an individual and was determined to arrive at the heart as well as the meaning of consciousness. It was this almost pagan spirituality which in fact rendered him a religious writer.’ ‘The Pillar of Cloud is set in the moral ruins, “the vast graveyard” of post-war Germany. In it he attempts to explain what happened. It does not work; Stuart dismissed it believing, “I wrote too soon. I should have allowed more time to pass.” / Beyond sentimentality, beyond sexuality, women, in his fiction, are redeemers. In Redemption, the second novel in the trilogy, Margareta’s reappearance assures Ezra Arrigho, his spiritual peace. / In the concluding volume, The Flowering Cross, the imprisoned Louis Clancy wins his freedom through his love of Alyse, the blind girl. The central figures in Memorial and A Hole in the Head are both writers, each obsessed with a woman. For Segue in Memorial it is Herra, for Barnaby Shane in the later novel, it is Emily Bronte. / Stuart’s depiction of relationships is dominated by a sense of the neurotic. His characters need tenderness to the point of violence. Innocence is invariably under pressure from evil, but for Stuart, the religious writer, it survives and redeems.’ Quotes Black List Section H (dinner table conversation with Yeats:) ‘If somebody somewhere writes a book which is so radical and original [...] that it would burst the present literary set-up wide open, the writer would be treated with polite contempt by critical and academic authorities that will discourage further mention of him. He’ll raise deeper, more subconscious hostility than sectarian ones and he’ll be destroyed far more effectively by enlightened neglect than anything we would do to him here.’ Battersby concludes: ‘Not quite the prophet, Stuart ... is ultimately more truth-teller than artist.’

Eileen Battersby, review of Anne McCartney, Francis Stuart, Face to Face: A Critical Study (2000), in The Irish Times (20 Jan. 2001), Weekend, p.14; remarks that the righteousness on both sides of the Stuart war-time debate has become repulsive, ‘[a]s repulsive, indeed, as was the voyeuristic publication on these pages [Irish Times] of a portrait of the dead Stuart appearing as a medieval saint juxtaposed with accusations of Stuart’s alleged Nazi collaboration in a heated review of an extremely useful books, The Wartime Broadcasts of Francis Stuart, 1942-1944 edited by Brendan Barrington (Lilliput 2000); calls the broadcasts ‘infamous, muddled, tedious and amateurish talks’; commends McCartney for pointing out that Stuart was sacked by his German employers. Quotes, ‘this main focus of interest was the controversy of his life rather than his writing.’ Further: ‘Despite the fact [that] his writing provides a unique nexus between the Yeatsian mysticism which marks his early work and the post modernism of his recent novels, thereby illustrating the many changes which have occurred in the genre of the novel and of story-telling in particular, in the twentieth century, little credit was given to his success as a writer’; McCartney calls his work ‘a fascinating record of one man’s commitment to writing and of his determination, despite all the odds, to make a living out of words. Above all, though , his work charts the journey Stuart undertook in his search for the truth.’

Eileen Battersby, review of Anne McCartney, Francis Stuart (2000), in The Irish Times (20 Jan. 2001) - cont.: Battersby holds that McCartney is over-intellectualising Stuart’s approach to his work, and the work itself’, and further considers few of the wide-ranging literary and philosophical references and analogies’ drawn upon ‘wholly conclusive’, but endorses the ‘avenue of metaphysics to metafiction’ in which ‘the surest understanding of his fiction’ appears to lie. Battersby characterises him as ‘a thinker - albeit confused - not a story-teller, committed to what he called ‘the interior’, the individual’s private hell. Further remarks on Stuart’s representation of women as ‘spiritual redeemers’; regrets that McCartney does not test the novels as novels; ‘If little else remained to be said about Francis Stuart, and so much more will be debated and argued, the force of his mid-career quasi-autobiographical narratives must be acknowledged as having brought them beyond matters of nationality or morality and on to an interior turmoil which attempts to make sense of existence.’; quotes Faillandia (1985): Reasoning can’t distinguish true from false except on fairly extraneous levels’; concludes that the public debate, like Stuart’s internal one, will never be concluded.

David O’Donoghue, ‘Stuart had many reasons for German stay including IRA role’ , in The Irish Times (3 Feb. 2000), recounts that Helmut Clissmann, formerly Dublin head of German Academic Exchange Organisation (DAAAD), controlled by the Nazi Party during 1933-45, offered Stuart a post teaching English at Berlin University four months before the outbreak of war; Stuart was an IRA volunteer; secret meeting with Jim O’Donovan in Killiney; found Abwehr officials dubious of his claims to represent IRA; saved by intervention of Prof. Franz Fromme, who had met him on a Dublin trip; champagne suppers with Nazi officials between lectures; also met Frank Ryan after the latter’s release from Spandau; scriptwriter for Lord Haw-Haw after the abortive landing-invasion of Russell and Ryan, 14 Aug. 1940; sacked in 1944 for refusing to make anti-Soviet comments; lavishly praised IRA Northern commander Hugh McAteer on air, Dec. 1942; recommended a vote for republican extremists in 1943 election, to de Valera’s indignation. (O’Donoghue is author of Hitler’s Irish Voices.)

Robert O’Byrne, ‘Repeated disputes made him well known’ , in Irish Times (3 Feb. 2000), giving account of the Aosdana fracas; Finola Graham is reported as saying that his cat Min ‘had snuggled into Francis and he gradually just ebbed away very peacefully’. A separate, obituary-style notice in the same issue, also by O’Byrne, quotes Stuart on his wartime broadcasts: ‘My whole feeling about the broadcasts was that I was entitled to say what I liked and that it was the only time in my life that I was going to get the chance to say publicly what I thought’. O’Byrne quotes the anti-semitic remarks that Stuart is alleged to have voiced on RTE television: ‘The Jew is the worm that got into the rose and sickened it’ , and said of his broadcasts, ‘Je ne regrette rien’; called on to resign by Máire Mhac an tSaoi, late Nov. 1997; defended by Anthony Cronin and Paul Durcan; motion defeated; Stuart apologised on television in January 1998, insisting that he regretted the Holocaust [pogrom] and disclaim support for the Nazis, adding that he was ‘intensely sorry for the hurt caused so many people by appearing to [do so]’; never spoke publicly of the matter again.

David Pierce, book notice of Anne McCartney, Francis Stuart, Face to Face: A Critical Study (2000), in Times Literary Supplement (13 April 2001), quotes David H. Greene: ‘Few writers of our time have had as clear a shot at fame, and missed it, as Francis Stuart has had.’ McCartney calls him ‘an innovative and a revolutionary writer who will someday [sic] be awarded a place along with Joyce and Beckett as one of the leading Irish novelists of the twentieth century’. Pierce considers the work ‘not wholly convincing or indeed error-free’; remarks that the author deploys theology, continental philosophy and feminism but that the essence of her argument is a ‘more personal form of criticism’; right troubled by Stuart’s wartime years in Germany.

[ top ]

Brendan Barrington, ‘Words that Aren’t Neutral’ [‘Francis Stuart’s propaganda broadcasts from the Third Reich reveal a Stuart who bears little resemblance to the politically disengaged figure his defenders have conjured’], in The Irish Times (7 Oct. 2000), calls the controversy ‘a local proxy-skirmish in the endless modern struggle to define the relationship between art and politics’; ‘natural desire on the part of many of his admirers to protect a very old man whom they knew as gentle and wise and bravely dissident’. Barrington calls this ‘a failure of imagination’ and recounts that Stuart carried IRA message to German military intelligence; involved in schemes to land agent in Ireland, run guns and for pro-German Irish Guard among prisoners; ‘active participant’ in IRA-German collaboration until it petered out after the Battle of Britain; translated news items into English and wrote scripts for Lord Haw Haw before the latter started writing his own material; wrote and delivered his own scripts, Feb./March 1941, delivering roughly 100 in all over two years; only a handful of passing references to literature; did support Irish neutrality but this was the official propaganda position; central concern was Irish 32 county unity; persistently argued that defeat for Britain could bring about a united Ireland; surviving transcripts contain no anti-Semitism apart from a single German transcript whose ‘status is uncertain’. [Cont.]

Brendan Barrington, ‘Words that Aren’t Neutral’ in The Irish Times (7 Oct. 2000) - cont.: Stuart repeatedly told his listeners that he was not making propaganda; soft-focus tone; anti-Allies vitriol acceptable within [pro-IRA] posture; painted German soldiers as uncommonly intelligent and sensitive, the German people as preternaturally spiritual and courageous; and their Fürher as the great man who was leading them to their national destiny’. The transcripts were available for many years in Irish and British archives; studied by Robert Fisk and David O’Donoghue. Stuart elected Saoi of Aosdána, 1996; at age of 21, published pamphlet arguing that Ireland must overcome influence of Britain just as Austria had overcome the influence of the Jews; wrote sympathetically of the brownshirts in Try the Sky (1933); wrote blithely of anti-Semitic riot in Things to Live For (1934); wrote letter to The Irish Times, opposing plans to receive refugees from Germany, one month after Kristallnacht [when Jewish shopkeepers were besieged and dispossessed], 1938. Barrington raises the difficulty of ‘non-artistic criteria’ for Aosdána and remarks on ‘vicarious nostalgie de la boue’ in claims made on Stuart’s behalf, disputing that Black List, Section H is a ‘reliable biographical source’, whilst commenting that Stuart reinvented himself in his post-war writings and suggesting that his pre-war writings and broadcasts tell a different story. (p.8.)

Fintan O’Toole, ‘His Master’s Voice’, review of Brendan Barrington, ed., The Wartime Broadcasts of Francis Stuart 1942-1944 (Lilliput 2000), 218pp., in Irish Times (14 Oct. 2000) [Weekend], praises Barrington’s ‘superbly scholarly edition’ and ‘his long, authoritative and brilliantly argued introduction’ from which he quotes: ‘the debate [between Stuart’s critics and defenders] was incoherent on the level of fact: accurate information about Stuart’s collaboration with the Nazis [...] was scarce, and a number of old myths and red herrings resurfaced .. Through it all, hardly anyone seemed to have any idea of what Stuart had actaully said over the German airwaves.’ Paul Durcan, his lit. executor, provided permission for the publication of the full texts of those transcripts kept by Irish military intelligence and to a lesser extent the BBC monitoring reports. O’Toole writes: ‘Taken together, this evidence completely and irrefutably demolishes the myth that Stuart and his many defenders attempted to sustain: that he was a political innocent with no sympathy for the Nazis, who merely broadcast some mild talks on cultural and literary matters.’ [Cont.]

Fintan O’Toole, ‘His Master’s Voice’, review of The Wartime Broadcasts of Francis Stuart, ed. Barrington, in The Irish Times (14 Oct. 2000) - cont.: O’Toole cites “Lecture on Nationality and Culture”, a pamphlet by Stuart published by Sinn Féin, 1924, which incls. remarks [as above] recommending an Austrian solution to the British problem; quotes broadcast of Nov. 1943: ‘I admired Hitler from the first days of power in Germany [...] In another book of mine [...] written in 1932 and published in New York and London in 1933, I described a clash between Brown Shirts and government forces in Munich, in which I did not hide my sympathies for the revolutionaries, as they were then.’ His talks by no means rabid and always avoiding overt anti-Semitism but completely in accord with Nazi policy as regards Irish neutrality; propaganda objects were to get the IRA to stir up trouble in the North; to soften up the Republic for post-war German domination; to abuse the allies and sanitise their own [German] actions. [Cont.]

Fintan O’Toole, ‘His Master’s Voice’, review of The Wartime Broadcasts of Francis Stuart, ed. Barrington, in The Irish Times (14 Oct. 2000) - cont.: O’Toole detects a ‘nauseating’ contradiction in the treatment of Hitler as a hero compared with Parnell, Lincoln and Gandhi, and his insistence that he does not advocate that Ireland ‘should become a small replica of a National Socialist Germany’ (Stuart); retails without irony the Nazi doctrine of lebensraum and rails against British Imperialism in Ireland and elsewhere; Ireland must prepare to become a loyal member of Hitler’s post-war international system; ‘closeness of the ties between Ireland and Germany’ (Stuart); instead of identifying with ‘Chicago and Manchester corner boys’ we should adore the brave, thought German supermen who ‘can overcome all human limitations’ (Stuart); characterised by O’Toole as ‘vile propaganda’. See also Eric Luke’s photograph of Stuart ‘shortly after his death’ [Feb. 1999], in The Irish Times [Nov. 2000].

John Montague, letter in response to Eileen Battersby’s feature-article on Francis Stuart (Irish Times, 3 Feb. 2000), reporting that he ‘may have the answer’ to her question why the novelist wrote Black List in the third person: ‘During much of the 1960s I was a main reader for my then London publisher Timothy O’Keefe [sic] of MacGibbon and Kee who was deeply concerned with the revival of Irish writers, among them Francis Stuart, whose career had been interrupted by the war. So an early draft of the autobiography came our way but Tim and I, alas, found the first-person person narrative unsatisfactory.’ He goes on: ‘I was upset because I had been a friend of Francis since 1950, and I racked my brains for a way around the problem. It was agreed that we should ask Francis to re-write Blacklist [sic], Section H as a kind of case history, so that the amoral protagonist should seem more like The Idiot of Dostoevsky, a favourite author and book of Francis. But I believe he had already come to the conclusion himself, and that using the third person and past tense would distance the often inflammable material from the merely personal.’ Montague indicates that the correspondence should be among other O’Keefe papers at Univ. of Oklahoma, Tulsa, where the ‘Jamesian edict’ of the publisher and reader can be judged in relation to the original draft of the novel, and that ‘such scholarship would be of more help in understanding the career of Stuart than trumping up charges against him in his nonage.’ The letter is signed by Montague as Ireland Professor of Poetry, c/o School of English, Trinity College, Dublin 2. (The Irish Times, 14 Feb. 2000.)

Obituary ( The Irish Times [unsigned]): ‘Ostracised outsider was acclaimed in the end’, in Irish Times, 5 Feb. 2000), gives bio-details: b. 2 Feb.; fatherless since infancy following suicide of his father in Australia; alienated from word of his cousins; estranged from wife and children; wandered uncommitted and tortures; believe that creative artist should court ostracism; years in Berlin; broadcasts; lived with mother in Meath and Dublin; prep. schools and Rugby; returned to Dublin at 17; met Iseult at AE’s house; eloped to London; returned to Dublin and m. in University Church [St. Stephen’s Green]; converted to Catholicism; joined Irregulars (anti-Treaty IRA) under Maud Gonne’s influence; sent to Belgium to buy arms and squandered funds on a ballerina; imprisoned in Portlaoise; extravagant living, lady-loves, and “batters” with friends; horse-racing; accepted post in Germany, 1939; praised Irish neutrality on air; his support for Nazi regime evaporated after invasion of Soviet Union; refused to make anti-Soviet broadcasts; imprisoned in French Quarter for 8 months after war; lived in Frieburg and Paris with Madeleine Meissner; novels relating horrors of life in Germany smashed into submission; ‘subsequent books had less edge’; ‘had to go to the US in 1971 to find a publisher for Black List, Section H, memoirs in fictional form; m. Madeleine, 1954; Madeleine d. 1984; ‘taken up’ by Anthony Cronin and Ulick O’Connor, being ‘determined not to allow his wartime follies to blind them to his artistic talent’; elected to Aosdana, 1981; Poems 1918-1992, on 90th birthday [1993]; Saoi in 1996; pronounced on television shortly after: ‘The Jew was always the worm that got into the rose and sickened it’ [cf., Blake - ‘the invisible worm ...’, a quotation from one of his characters and not therefore not necessarily indicative of his own opinion; motion by Máire Mac an tSaoi to have him expelled on suspicion of anti-semitism successfully opposed by Anthony Cronin and resoundingly defeated; attended High Court to hear Kevin Myers express regret that an article of his may have given the impression that Stuart was anti-semitic; m. Fionula Graham, 1986; descendents [through marriage to Iseult and their son Ion, and his deceased dg. (Siobhan; fam. Pussy) to the fourth generation. [See report of Francis Stuart’s funeral, infra.]

J. Ardle McArdle, review of Kevin Kiely, Francis Stuart: Artist and Outcast, in Books Ireland (Summer 2008), taking the biographer to task for his indulgent view of his subject: ‘The dog that did not bark in Francis Stuart is the content of Stuart’s broadcasts which, among other things, ignored “small matters” like the USSR’s invasion of Poland and the Baltic states and his insistence that Soviet war was “honourable” forgetting the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the mass deportations of whole populations to central Asia, the massacre of the Polish soldiers in the Katyn forest, the waiting in the Praga region of Warsaw in 1944 while the inhabitants of the city, Christian and Jewish, were subject to bestial slaughter by Stuart’s German paymasters. An equally doubtful element is the full title which is Francis Stuart Artist and Outcast. Stuart was not an outcast. He was rather the darling of much of the Irish literary world who ignored the flaws in his hastily scribbled works.’ Further, observes disdainfully that Stuart (seemingly) alleged that Frank Ryan died of syphilis. Commends Kiely for his ‘great honestness’ [sic] and absolves him from blame in giving us ‘the true Stuart, self-obsessed, addicted to drink, a philanderer, jealous of and spiteful about his rivals’. (p.139.)