Original poetry and fiction have their own histories, independent of their composers, though often influencing the course of their lives.
So it has been with me and the tale is a long one going back to 1942 when a German professor at Berlin University warned me that by spending the war there, and occasionally speaking on the radio, I was, as a writer in English, gravely damaging my future.
Looking back a long way, half a century, it is difficult to recall without distortion what was my instinctive response, instinctive because not being a very precise thinker, that is how my mind and system operates. Logically there could be no ambiguity, what the professor said was plain and simple sense. This sort of sense, known as “common”, has never been abundant with me.
If I told the truth as I saw it in my work I would be denounced and ostracised by contemporary critics of English - and American - Literature.
Did I not take it seriously? Oh yes, that is not the reason for my ignoring it. As far as I can cross the threshold and enter the past, as I was at the time, I believe I told myself - a deep corner of my consciousness - something else: that there is a vacuum waiting to be filled by someone who sees it as his or her destiny. Or, put more pretentiously: history demands that certain events have a counterpart, something similar to the notion that the picture hanging on one side of the fireplace goes some way in determining what hangs on the other.
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.
I saw myself as some kind of recorder, not a recording angel, far from it, but with some of the flair and inspiration of a prophet, as have all those - the Old Testament ones among them - who approach reality at a time of wish-legend. [251]
When, having gone to Paris with a train-load of mostly French expatriates shortly after the end of the war to present myself (I had even an idea of playing the Prodigal Son) at the Irish Embassy and make a plea for help in getting my lover, Madeleine, whom I later married, out of war-ravaged Germany, I was unrealistic enough to entertain hopes of success. And this despite the fact that I had a wife Iseult, in Dublin and that furthermore her half-brother, Sean MacBride, was Minister of Foreign Affairs.
Oh, I committed folly on folly, of which, because I am not a fool, I was and am not proud. But of what I am modestly proud is what came out of it, the novel Redemption and which could have only emerged from these ridiculous miscalculations.
The narrator of the novel returns from Germany after the war to his native Ireland, an Ireland that has sat out the world conflict on bacon and tea - with the odd pint; and whom Ezra, affects to despise and says so to his estranged wife, Nancy. He, as she and some others close to him realise, is the despicable one and the title of the book suggests that he is finally redeemed.
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.