Francis Stuart: Quotations

To-morrow, ‘To all Artists & Writers’ [Editorial] (August 1924): ‘We are Catholics, but of the School of Pope Julius the Second and of the Medician Popes, who ordered Michaelangelo and Raphael ot paint upon the walls of the Vatican, and upon the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the doctrine of the Platonic Academy of Florence, the reconciliation of Galilee and Parnassus. We proclaim Michaelangelo the most orthodox of men, because he set upon the tomb of the Medici “Dawn” and “night”, vast forms shadowing the strength of antedeluvian Patriarchs and the lust of the goat, the whole handiwork of God, even the abounding horn. / We proclaim the we can forgive the sinner, but abhor the atheist, and that we count among atheists bad writers [86] and Bishops of all denominations. “The Holy Spirit is an intellectual fountain”, and did the Bishops believe that Holy Spirit would show itself in decoration and architecture, in daily manners and written style. What devout man can read the Pastorals of our Hierarchy without horror at a style rancid, coarse and vague, like that of the daily papers? We condemn the art and literature of modern Europe. No man can create, as did Shakespeare, Homer, Sophocles, who does not believe with all his blood and nerve, that man’s soul is immortal, for the evidence lies plain to all men that where that belief has declined, men have turned from creation to photography. We condemn, though not without sympathy, those who woulde escape from banal mechanism through technical investigation and experiment. We proclaim that these bring no escape, for new form comes from new subject matter, and new subject matter must flow from the human soul restored to all its courage, to all its audacity. We dismiss all demagogues and call back the soul to its ancient sovereignty, and declare that it can do whatever it pleased, being made, as antiquity affirmed, form the imperishable substance of the stars.’ [Note that this passage is described as a letter from Liam O’Flaherty contrib. to To-morrow, II, Aug. 1924, p.4, in Patrick Sheeran, “The Novels of Liam O’Flaherty: A Study in Romantic Nationalism”, NUI UCG PhD. diss. 1972, p.90.)

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Things to Live For: Notes for an Autobiography (1934): ‘There is an emptiness within the human breast, a hunger for we hardly know what, that is the deepest and wildest of all desires. It is the falling in love with life, the dark deep flow below the surface. Subtle, crude, beautiful, terrible. A few have dared to open their arms to it, to plunge into it, and always they are wounded and humiliated; but they have been touched, have been caressed by those fiery fingers that curved the universe, and there remains about them a breadth, a spaciousness, a warmth of genius. / I too have felt that hunger. [... &c.]’ (Chapter I: Prologue, Macmillan Edn. [US], p.3.) ‘I walk through those streets that I once fought to defend, feeling a little like a stranger. And it was this spirit of smugness and deadness that we fought against and were defeated by. The spirit of liberal democracy. We fought to stop Ireland falling into the hands of publicans and shopkeepers, and she has fallen into their hands.’ (pp.253-54; quoted in F. S. L. Lyons, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland (OUP 1982), p.171; see also Breda Dunne, An Intelligent Visitor’s Guide to the Irish, Mercier 1990.)

Things to Live For: Notes for an Autobiography (1934): ‘All the things I admire most I feel to be but a pale reflection of the reality seen by Bernadette [of Lourdes]. What inspires me when I see horse like Miracle and Gregalach, in my little boy Ion, in Marlene Dietrich, in that Antrim bogland, in poems, in people, are sparks from that furnace.’ (Things to Live For, US Edn., “The White Girl” [Chap. V], cp.31; quoted in John Jordan, ‘Things to Live For’, in Feschrift for Francis Stuart, ed. W. J. McCormack, 1972, p.21.)

Things to Live For: Notes for an Autobiography (1934): ‘I will remain with those on the coastline, on the frontier. With the gamblers, wanderers, fighters, geniuses, martyrs, and mystics. With the champions of wild loves and lost causes, the storm-troopers of life. With all who live dangerously though not necessarily spectacularly, on the knife edge between triumph and defeat.’ (Quoted in Jordan, op. cit., 1972, p.22.) ‘There is no sharp division between emotional and physical love for us. Life is a tragic blending of the physical and spiritual for us Irish. The physical and emotional is all so much one that you couldn’t have an affair with a woman you [21] didn’t love; or, if you didn’t to begin with, you would end by loving her in that deep, exclusive way.’ (Ibid., pp.21-22.)

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The Angel of Pity (1935): ‘We are alone and the world is convulsed in its own struggle that has nothing more to do with us at all. Her, too, there is a new truth that I have discovered, or rather than I may have always known but now have experienced. It is that only through a certain solitariness can man ever come into contact with his fellow man. First he must have within himself that sense of being alone, of being aloof from all the turmoil of society in general before he can love disinterestedly. He must be able to stretch his hand out from his own lonely self toward this other lonely and pitiful being. He must, for the moment anyhow, be able to see the both as two solitary and very vulnerable creatures hastening towards that common destiny which neither can contemplate without a tinge of fear. Only in such moments comes the realisation of that brotherhood of man that no catch-cry can every make living.’ (Quoted in Daniel Murphy, ‘Mystique of Suffering: The Novels of Francis Stuart’, in Imagination and Religion in Anglo-Irish Literature 1930-1980, Dublin: IAP 1987, p.185.)

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The Pillar of Cloud (1948): ‘[I had time to see] that it was in such places [i.e., concentration camps] that a new world was taking shape; in the hearts of the tormented a new world was born. A world in which there would be no victims and no more executioners, without prisons and dungeons. Nowhere else was there such faith in a new place [recte peace], in the coming to earth of a liberty or spirit that would be like a new sun shining on men and women. No more suspects no more hunted.’ (pp.51-52; quoted in Maurice Harmon, ‘Francis Stuart’, in Rudiger Imhof, ed., Contemporary Irish Fiction, 1990, pp.10-11).

The Pillar of Cloud (1948): ‘They read together the poems in the French periodicals that Petrov brought Domninc. They read the various poems of Antonin Artaud, who had spent years in various asylums in France, and of Benjamin Fondane, who had died in a concentration camp, and they found her the words of those who had gone done into the fearful depths of the night and who had not been overcome by it. Perhaps others in other countries were singing a new song too, but they could not get any other foreign books or periodicals. It did not matter; what they had was enough, this room and this communion. But sometimes as she [Halka] sat on her bed in the evening, brushing her colourless hair, and he caught a glimpse of her body as she got into her nightgown, he was disturbed by her presence. / He waited. Let her flesh heal, to which so much violence had been done, heal in solitude. Let her be healed again from having fallen into the hands of men; to that he could bring her by a non-demanding and gentle fraternity [...] She had been brought to the edge of doom, and the shadow of doom had touched her flesh and blood and was not yet through off. He was appalled when he thought of the enormous weight of pain tha she had had to bear alone, and which had encompassed her. He recalled what Petrov had said:  “Either we must encompass the night or be encompassed by it.”’ (p.67).

The Pillar of Cloud (1948): ‘In the darkness of the cinema he took Lisette’s hand. He did it simply, without thought. Not because he thought she might expect it. Even though they were going to be married, he knew that she expected nothing. And perhaps because of that he felt a peculiar desire to be to her as any man would be who was in love with a girl. And although he was not in love with her and althought he might be all the same to her, he felt urged by a kind of humility. He would act like all the others, he would be as a young man engaged to her would be, doing all that he would do.’ (p.126.)

The Pillar of Cloud (1948): ‘He was conscious of the presence of the other in the cell with the same instinctive consciousness that he had sometimes had of the presence of a woman in a room. As certain Catholics may be conscious of the Presence in the tabernacle on the altar. He turned to the cement wall and pulled the dirty blanket over his head to shut out the cell and the other. What astonished him was that he did not feel the heat that he expected to feel. Only an intense consciousness of the other’s presence. He had looked intto his face and he had not seen what he expected to see, no profound and evil revelation; only a kind of mean and frightened restlessness in the eyes. One could neither live nor hate according to any plan, to any logic. The conscious love of Christ that was preached was really no love, not the real thing, but a sterile striving of will, a trick. And hatred - one could not hate to order either. The breadth of love and hate blew where it listed. He lay in his great wearness, hearing the other beginning to tramp backwards and forwards, up and down the cellar. But in the very centre of his weariness still glowed the little core of rest, of home-coming.’ (p.216.)

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Redemption (1949): ‘In the last two or three days and nights of His [Jesus’s] life, He reveal in His body what was to be the final secret of flesh and blood, the new secret beyond sex that had weighed on Him like guilty secret. From the Last Supper to the Crucifixion, He plunged to the last depths of flesh and blood and tried to pull His disciples down with Him, but they couldn’t go very far.’ (Redemption, p.151; quoted in Harmon, 1990, p.13.)

Redemption (1949): ‘There are two ways to go down a street of the big city at night. There are two ways that I know, as well as all the others that I don ‘t. There is the way of the shut heart, gone into a glass core reflecting everything - a little machine reflecting, registering, an exact instrument of precision like a camera, a cylinder, a vacuum-cleaner and all other small machines, carried out in highly-polished glass. Then all is reflected in a blind precision, faces, stone, paper, gestures, grimaces. And there is the other way, with the heart open, dark and expanded and reflecting nothing. Being touched by what the streek is and what is in it, the night in the stree and the street in the night. Then there is no more sin, sin begins in the shape and form of the heart, or perhaps that is itself sin, the cylinder reflecting in a vacuum.’ (q.p.; quoted in W. J. McCormack, ed., Festschrift for Francis Stuart, 1972, Introduction, p.16.)

Redemption (1949): ‘Kavanagh looked at him, with his face thrust in at the crack, and did not answer at once. / I couldn’t keep away from her,” he said after a mome “Living or dead.” He withdrew from the door. “Good night, you.” He turned towards his own room. / Ezra went over to the bed and took the girl in his arms. / “Who was it?” she asked. / “Kavanagh.” / He felt her shivering, stretched newly naked in his arms. He took her with a despairing malevolent pleasure, quickly contemptuously, with his head turned away from her breast. What right had she to be as she was, without the knowledge that Margareta had not been spared? He would disarrange neatness and spoil her niceness for her! Let her be a rose, but a rose in whose very centre was the Worm! / With this body I thee enclose ... with this blood, with these tears ... with this maidenhood I thee wed. / He violated her, but she did not know it. Yet she was c scious of the horror too. / She was Annie in the dark and the mud, and the knife go into her. And the light was the lights of the police torch shining on her, exposing her, illuminating her secret bloody shame. She lay in his arms between living and dyi in that space of a quarter of an hour, in that little space of time and silence in which tides turn and cities are taken and bright, virgin moon turns to blood. / She was shuddering as Margareta had gone on shuddering beside him even after the earth had ceased to heave and shudder under the bombs. With this flesh I thee enclose. ... When they pulled away the raincoat in the light of the torches [136] was there much blood on Annie’s body? Or mud? Or what? she wondered.’ (pp.134-35.)

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Redemption (1949): ‘“That is not my task. That is not part of the work I have to do,” said Father Mellows. There was a complete simplicity in his work as he understood it. All here in his parish, but more especially those in sin and pain, were the flock that he must keep. Tehre had been noting said about haning any o them over to earhtly justice, and with his simplicity brodering on naïveté he had no doubt at all about his duty in face of of the crime. / “I still don’t believe it’s any use,” Ezra said, looking across [179] at the priest, “this taking literally of some words in the Gospel, and trying to make them work. This ‘love one another,’ and ‘Feed my sheep’ or lambs or whatever it is.” / “Didn’t we agree before that there were only two sources real power, of heart-power? Two dark powers that can overthrow all the daylight powers, the money powers and the State powers?” said the priest. “Didn’t we say that there were two nights against the great grey worldly day, the night Christ and the night of sex? It was you who called them nights. And that is the truth, Ezra.” / “I’m not denying that,” said Ezra, “but I say that neith your Christ nor your white Worm can be followed directly literally. I saw some conquering troops trying to follow the one for a few weeks in a sacked city, and I see you trying follow the other and I don’t shrink from either, or perhaps I do shrink from them both in my flesh, but my soul, if I have one, doesn’t shrink as it does when I find myself in the midst of one of our respected Altamont families or as it did at Colonel’s. My spirit isn’t nauseated by you and your activity as it is by almost everyone else’s including my own, but I still that it won’t achieve peace on earth, not even peace on a little bit of earth, not even in one flat above a fish-shop.” / Yet he did not want to argue and he was ready to try living there, to come and live there with Margareta. He did not much mind where they lived and, as Father Mellowes had said it would be simpler for her as a cripple than living in a hotel. That was the main reason for going there. That, and Nancy. He thought he saw at last a solution to the problem of marriage. And it was not, as he had known for long now, go back and submit to all the outward trappings of marriage, to being husband and wife in a house together, preying on a slowly destroying each other. But in a small community, held tightly together, without bonds and rights and duties, then if there was still that heart-power in them, something by [180] which they could touch and move each other, it would have a chance.’ (pp.179-80.)

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Redemption (1949): ‘Let her go with him into the sensual violence and darkness and with him rejoice in it; let her be with him there, and from there let them turn back together to the light and the day and live in the day together, in the day and in the night, and then he would ask of her no more.’ (q.p.; quoted in Bertrand D’Astorg, ‘Des ruines, le sacré renaîtra ...’, review of Rédemption, in McCormack, op. cit., p.31.)

Redemption (1994 Edn.), “Afterword”: ‘[...] The Allied picture of what the Second World War was all about, and the manner in which their own side waged it, obtained naturally - a wide consensus in English-speaking, and several other, countries. The picture on the other side of the fire completed a balance and gave the room the psychic lifestyle and feeling of those days, a harmony it would otherwise have lacked. That was my belief then and is so still, when I would have a perceptibly larger, if still small, percentage of agreement. [...; 251.] When Victor Gollancz published the novel in 1949 he splashed the words across the cover - “Francis Stuart’s Redemption”. That is as may be, but this brief history of the novel, as it lived a life of its own, is an attempt to make sense out of what might seem a series of accidents and misconceptions. Ibis I attempt of course primarily for my own sake, not for peace of mind which I have long relinquished hope of, but that by coming to terms with private and personal apparent chaos, I might accept and even welcome the harsh realities of life on this planet.’ (pp.251-52; end; signed Dublin 1994; for full text, see extra.)

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The Flowering Cross (1950), ‘[T]his getting of bread from her, the piece of bread out [...] handed in to him through the hole in the door, was sweet to him as no food had ever been. The bread was for him like her body, that he had never touched or even seen.’ (Louis of Melanie; quoted in W. J. McCormack, Festschrift for Francis Stuart, 1971, Introduction, p.15.)

Black List / Section H [1971] (London Edn. 1975): ‘The civil war created doubt and confusion, and thus a climate in which the poet could breathe more easily. In stead of uniting in a conformity of outlook that had to appeal to dull-witted idealists as well as those with intelligence, it divided people. And once the process of division had started, H foresaw it continuing, and subdivisions taking place, especially on the Republican side, perhaps creating small enclaves of what he looked on as true revolutionaries whose aim had les to do with Irish independence than in casting doubt on traditional values and judgements, pp.73-74; quoted in Harmon, op. cit., 1990, pp.17.) [For longer extracts, see attached.]

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Black List/Section H [1971] (1975 Edn.): ‘Was there no contemporary writer of the kind of Baudelaire, Poe, Keats, Melville, Emily Brontë, Dostoevsky, Proust, or Kafka, to name a few, who because of alcoholism, sexual excess, tuberculosis, venereal disease, rejected love, condemnation, and banishment, as well as even more extreme isolating factors unnamed and unknown, acting on ultra-responsive neurological systems, had been driven beyond the place where the old assumptions are still acceptable? Nobody whose imagination had been so extended by personal disaster of one kind or another to glimpse beyond the present limit of awareness? (Black List/Section H, p.232; also quoted in Harmon, 1990, pp.19.)

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Memorial (1973): ‘All we have are our insights into the Crucifixion, not much on which to found an alternative.’ (p.23; quoted in Noël Debeer, ‘The Irish Novel Looks Backward’, in Patrick Rafroidi & Maurice Harmon, eds., The Irish Novel in Our Time,Université de Lille 1975-76, pp.106-23, p.121.)

High Consistory (1981): ‘The artist at his most ambitious does not seek to change maps but, minutely and over generations, the expression on some of the faces of men and women.’ (Quoted in James A. Murphy, Lucy McDiarmid & Michael J.Durkan, ‘Q & A with Derek Mahon’, Irish Literary Supplement, Fall 1991, pp.27-28.)

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King David Dances (1996): ‘The art of succombing to pain, to the very brink of despair [...] and also, in the absence of actual tragedy, an imaginative skill and tendency to evoke, and dream, agonies of the more subtle and haunting kind.’ ‘[...] confused, emotionally and physically disturbed, filled by vast glimpses, by near visions, but finding each year and month, almost day, ever more difficult.’ (Quoted in Books Ireland [review], Dec. 1996.)

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“Berlin, 1944”: ‘Last night in that cafe, / In a city in the middle of Europe, / Poised on the brink / Of the storm that was to be the end / To all that we know or think / For a flash when I heard you say / A book’s name; Gone With the Wind, /All was flowing, fleeting, slipping away / Until nothing was left, nothing was sure / But ourselves in the half empty café / We so rich, so frighteningly poor, / Your black eyes, so hauntingly black, / And only a movement left, an hour, a night’. (Q. source.)

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Wartime Germany (diary entry on ihs reasons for staying on there): ‘Because I had a more or less blind instinct against three quarters of the whole organised civilization, the machine monster with all its camouflage, of false idealism, under which I had lived. And if I spoke on German Radio to my own people in Ireland it was primarily to say this. Perhaps I was wrong to speak, perhaps it was identifying myself too much with the horrors of Nazism [...] but [...] had I not suffered I would not have come to my present knowledge.’ (Quoted in Geoffrey Elborn, Francis Stuart - A Life, Dublin: Raven Arts Press 1990, p.203.)

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Easter Rising: ‘I was a dreamy, uncouth fourteen year-old on holiday from an English public school when the Easter 1916 Rising gave me a promise that everything I feared and hated was not going to go unchallenged forever. I knew and cared nothing for politics and came on both my father’s and mother’s side from a strictly Ulster Protestant tradition. My delight at the news, which was being deplored all round me, although I could not have analysed it at the time, was because it showed that authority could be flouted on a large and public scale. Till then the only reassurance I had came from accounts I read avidly in the papers of criminal activities. / It did not occur to me to ask if the rebels’ cause was a right or just one. [...//] As though the Easter Rising had set off a chain reaction, which had been my secret hope, it was followed soon by the Russian Revolution which I judged as an even more damaging blow to the Establishment [.../] A figure like Arthur Griffith embodied for me all that was most self-satisfied and distasteful in authoritarianism. [/...]. there were a few others who shared what turned out to be my misconceptions. We made up our minds that we were fighting to make Ireland a place fit for poets to live in, unharrassed by jacks-in-the-office and mediocrities with ballot boxes or missals. [...] Much later, and after several further false hopes and misinterpretations of world events, I was left with very little to pride myself on in the way of prophetic instinct. But once at least I still believe my instinctive response was a true one. Looking back, I can see that besides the challenge to the Status Quo, it was the sacrificial nature of their acts that made the leaders of the Easter Rising figures of such stature, people of one’s race whose memory redeems at least some of the shame that race has brought on itself since. / If the “poet” of fourteen had not read the words of the 1916 Proclamation, his passage into maturity would have been that much more uncertain and uneasy.’ (Francis Stuart, [untitled contribution], in Dermot Bolger, ed., Letters from the New Island, 16 on 16: Irish Writers on the Easter Rising, Dublin: Raven Arts Press 1988, pp.9-10.)

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Post-war Diary (quoted in Colm Tóibín, preface to Black List, Section H, Lilliput Edn.): ‘I was not on any side. Because I did not believe in one propaganda or the other. Because I had a more or less blind instinct against three-quarters of the whole organised civilisation, the machine monster with all its camouflage of false idealism under which I had lived.’ (p.v.) Further: ‘No, I am glad that I suffered and know what I suffered for, because in my blind way I was not on the side of the victors because I know there was no real victory.’ ([xii].)

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Dissent: ‘When we speak of dissent, I think I come in here. I am a writer of dissent [...] In the Irish context I feel myself close to the men of violence, the extremists ...[&c.]’. (Symposium and interview with Thomas Kinsella, James Plunkett, Francis Stuart, Jackie Scott and Thomas Lyttle [UDA], and Ruairi Ó Bradaigh [Kevin St Sinn Féin], quoted in Eavan Boland, ‘The Clash of Identities’, Irish Times, 4 July 1970, p.10.)

‘National literature is to my mind a meaningless term. Literature can’t be national. Literature is individual. Nationality has nothing to do with it.’ (Cited in Gerry Smyth, The Novel and the Nation: Studies in New Irish Fiction, London: Pluto 1997, cp.15.)

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Patrick Kavanagh: ‘Clumsy, unworkable grammar, no literary graces, not “about” anything, not illustrating a previously conceived idea, but to those to whom it speaks, new and wonderful! [...]’ (‘Earthly Visionary’, in Peter Kavanagh, ed., Patrick Kavanagh: Man and Poet, Maine Univ. at Orono 1986, pp.383-86; see further under Kavanagh, supra.]

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W. B. Yeats: ‘In this, if in no other way, he was like Joyce. And in asking why it was that these two of our greatest artists were both, towards the end of their lives, deeply unhappy, it strikes me that it was just because of this; that in both their cases their work, so wonderful in texture, detail and artifice, lacks an inherent unifying vision of man.’ (In Francis MacManus, ed., The Yeats We Knew, 1965,pp. 27-40; p. 40.) The article contains memoirs of meetings and an account of Yeats’s relationship with Iseult Gonne.

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