Review by Colm ToibinIssues of Truth and Invention.
In March 1992 I received a printed invitation from Francis Stuart to a party in Dublin commemorating a party he had given in Berlin on St Patrick's Day 1941. I wondered, when I read it, why Francis had sent this. Over the years he had invited me to several events, but he had never had invitations printed. I wondered if it was clear to him, as it was to me, that the invitation was a direct provocation. He was 90 years old; a good deal of mystery and controversy still surrounded him, his political opinions, his novels and, especially, the fact that he had spent the war years in Germany and broadcast from there to Ireland. He lived at that time in Dundrum in the suburbs of Dublin and he had settled, it seemed, into an extremely mellow and happy old age. He still wrote novels and followed public events, but he exuded a sort of dreaminess, loving cats and rabbits, remaining quiet-spoken and smiling and charming and hospitable. He preferred silence to small talk and solitude to gossip, but sometimes when he spoke, especially about public life, there was a steely anger in his tone, a clear dislike for the liberal editorial policies of the Irish Times, for example, and a clear hatred for political leaders and politics generally. In his manner he was serene: in his opinions he was not. He was the exact opposite of every member of his generation I had known. I met him first in 1972 when I was 17 and in my first week at University College Dublin. He shared a platform with the American poet James Tate. While Tate read from his work, Stuart spoke about his difficulty in publishing his novel Black List, Section H, which had finally come out from an American university press. He did not look like a 70-year-old man. He was tall, his frame was thin but strong, his hair was grey in a crew cut. His accent sounded foreign. His position that night was that of outlaw, of someone who spoke dark and difficult truths which were not acceptable to those who controlled publication. But he was connected at the same time to the higher reaches of Irish grandeur: he had been married to Iseult Gonne, Maud Gonne's daughter, and had been a friend of Yeats. I found myself sitting beside him in the student bar and it was astonishing and fascinating to hear someone talk with familiarity and slight contempt about Maud Gonne, and then withdraw into himself, become silent and vague and uncomfortable, refusing to deal in colourful anecdotes or fond reminiscences. Black List, Section H had been published the previous year by Southern Illinois University Press. It was the only book by Francis Stuart in any Dublin bookshop. Because it had come from America, it cost much more than a normal hardback. Slowly, over the next year or so, I met people who had read it and talked about it in hushed and reverent tones as something special and strange and haunting. And slowly, too, an argument developed about Stuart. For some, the writing was too awkward; for others, the insistence on outlaw status was too laboured; for others, the years in Germany placed Stuart outside the pale. I read the book myself in the spring of 1975. I began it some time on a Saturday and put it down only to go to a student party. I remember that I came back at four in the morning to the damp basement flat where I lived and picked the book up again and read it until I had finished it, at some point on the Sunday morning. Neither before nor since have I read anything that overwhelmed me in the same way. I shared nothing with H, the narrator who was so close in his biographical details to Stuart himself. I was not from a Northern Unionist background; I had not fought in the Irish Civil War; I did not marry Iseult Gonne in 1920 when I was 18; I did not know Yeats or hang around with Liam O'Flaherty; I did not go to Germany in 1940. These, however, were merely the outlines of Stuart's life and that of his narrator H, who used the real names of figures like Yeats and O'Flaherty to make you believe in him. What hit me hard in that first reading of Black List, Section H was Stuart's ability to deal with the notion of a damaged self, someone who was clearly weak, clearly wrong and who felt nothing but contempt for the world around him. I had come across these anti-heroic attitudes in other books, but this was an Irish self, and a man I had met, who seemed willing to dramatise his own moral awkwardness and his own dark search for a clearing in the forest where these qualities could be, however tentatively, recognised and healed. It was clear to me even then that most people who read the book would not feel what I felt. It continued to provoke argument, and the argument in its favour was hard to win. The book was not well written, for example, and the contempt in it certainly implied a contempt for liberal and democratic values as well as for many people. And H's account of himself mixed self-love and self-indulgence; and there was something oddly forced about H's outlaw status. None of this mattered to me, and none of this mattered to other people I met over the years who had also been hit by the wave of complex emotion that came from the book. Francis Stuart was born in Australia in 1902. His parents were both Ulster Protestants, and after his father's suicide when he was four months old, his mother brought him back to Ireland. He was sent to various English schools, including Rugby. In 1920 he married Iseult Gonne, who was seven years older than him, and was Maud Gonne's daughter with the right-wing (and deeply anti-semitic) French politician Lucien Millevoye. (Iseult had had an affair with Ezra Pound before Francis married her; in 1917 Yeats had proposed marriage to her.) Stuart published poetry which Yeats admired. He fought on the Republican side in the Irish Civil War and was interned. He published his first book of poetry in 1923 and lived in County Wicklow with Iseult Gonne, travelling frequently to Dublin and London; they had two children. Between 1931 and 1939 he published 11 novels, an autobiography and a book called Racing for Profit and Pleasure in Ireland and Elsewhere. Stories of the demise of his marriage begin quite early. In July 1920 Maud Gonne wrote to Yeats that Stuart's 'conduct towards Iseult is shocking. While they were staying with me in Dublin he struck her and one day knocked her down. He threw her out of her own room with such violence that she fell on the landing.' The failure of their life together is dramatised in many of Stuart's later books. In 1940 Stuart went alone to Germany where he taught at the University of Berlin and between 1942 and 1944 broadcast to Ireland. After the war he was arrested by the Allies, along with Madeleine Meissner, who later became his wife. The couple eventually made their way to Paris and then London and then to Ireland in 1958. Stuart wrote a number of novels which dealt with his experience of the war: The Pillar of Cloud (1948), Redemption (1949), The Flowering Cross (1950), Victors and Vanquished (1958) and Black List, Section H (1971). When Stuart returned to Ireland, Madeleine and he lived first in a cottage in County Meath, then moved in 1971 to Dundrum. Stuart published nothing in the 1960s and they lived in relative obscurity. His 70th birthday in 1972 was marked by a Festschrift edited by W.J. McCormack and this book set the tone for Irish writing about Stuart over the next twenty-five years. 'Despite the outbreak of war,' McCormack wrote, 'Stuart decided that he should be where Europe was then focused, that somebody should bear witness. In addition, he felt that in wartime Germany he would at last be cut off from conventional demands on his feelings and that in isolation he might begin to find himself.' He discussed Stuart's novels of the 1930s and their treatment of violence and war and isolation and said that 'perhaps no other artist in the English language was so aptly prepared by his earlier psychic life for the experience of wartime Germany, for the shades of humanity who populated Europe.' In the 1970s Stuart began to write book reviews for the weekly Dublin newspaper Hibernia. He made himself available to younger writers and journalists and was kind and oddly wise and encouraging. Although he never openly sought either success or popularity as a novelist, he became a respected figure in literary Dublin. For example, in 1980, when Neil Jordan, at that time the most promising young writer in the country, published his first novel, it seemed natural that Stuart would launch the book. In the early 1980s Penguin reissued Black List, Section H. For me and many others who visited the Stuarts in these years, there was a special aura around both of them, Madeleine as much as Francis. That they were religious and interested in mysticism may explain part of it, but the fact that they were old and made clear their loathing for Ireland's pieties is also significant. They were warm and deeply engaged with the world and with each other. Many of us came away from their house inspired and cheered up. Some of the stories were funny. When Stuart began to talk to Fintan O'Toole about his friendship with the poet Paul Potts, and his admiration for him, Fintan thought he was talking about the dictator Pol Pot. He began to imagine Stuart in Paris befriending the future mass murderer and now, after all the years, talking casually and fondly of him. Some of the stories were not so funny. I once asked Stuart about his friendship with members of the UDA - these were the bad years of the UDA's rule in Belfast - which I had heard about but supposed to be untrue. He nodded and said that yes he had been travelling to Belfast to see the UDA and had become friendly with one of the younger members and had met Andy Tyrie, the leader, and come to admire him in certain ways. Stuart would leave a silence at such moments and, if there were a rabbit or a cat close by, he would stroke it. I knew that he was also sending books to IRA prisoners and writing letters to them. I was puzzled by his refusal to make moral judgments of a conventional kind. When you talked to him and to Madeleine, you knew, or could imagine, that they had been through experiences in the war and after the war which had marked them deeply. And those experiences had included their own involvement in the German side of the war and implication in its activities. I knew they both lived in the shadowy spaces between knowledge and forgiveness; their response to this was not simple, and I never fully understood it, and I still don't. Once - I was working as a journalist then - I came to see Stuart because another friend of his, on the Republican side, had been found guilty of the murder of a policeman. I believed the evidence to have been very scanty and the conviction unsafe. (It was, many years later, overturned.) I thought Stuart would be concerned about this, but he was not. He was pretty sure, he said, that his friend was guilty. His friend, however, was a wonderful man, and killing the policeman was part of his bravery and courage and seriousness, Stuart said. Madeleine then began to talk about the man's girlfriend and the great love between them and what would happen now. I remember her eyes lighting up and I remember the words vividly as she said: 'He is the love of her life.' Always, there was the shadow of what they had been doing in Germany. InBlack List, Section H, the narrator went to Germany not because he admired Hitler or the Nazis, but because he sought his own crucifixion there, sought to be where there was darkness and destruction. If the book had any politics, it was a hatred of the hypocrisy which could preach democracy and then bomb Dresden. The attitudes in it seemed to take their bearing from Stuart's reading of Dostoevsky while interned. The narrator of Black List, Section H and the old man who lived with his German wife in Dundrum were, ostensibly, both apolitical. Only once in all those years did Stuart say anything which made me wonder about that. It was late at night in a Dublin restaurant, it must have been 1981 or 1982, and Stuart turned to me and asked if I did not believe that democracy was merely a system in which scum could come to the top. For once, I was able to argue with him - there was nothing oblique or strange about his position. As always, he spoke calmly and gently, smiling as he spoke. By this time, he was writing a column for In Dublin magazine, of which I was features editor. The columns were short and sharp in their blanket attacks on the establishment - church, state, consumers all. They proposed a sort of anarchism and mysticism. The interesting thing, of course, was that the writer was an elderly man whose name carried with it an uncertain stigma. In 1983 Robert Fisk published In Time of War: Ireland, Ulster and the Price of Neutrality 1939-45 and this seemed to settle the argument about what Stuart had been doing in Germany. Fisk's account of the episode was based on transcripts of Stuart's broadcasts in the Northern Irish Public Record Office and an interview with Stuart. In the interview, Francis spoke about Hitler: 'I felt that somehow the system in Europe needed completely destroying and for me Hitler was a kind of Samson pulling everything down.' He regarded Hitler, he said, as 'a super-dissident'. Fisk wrote that Stuart accepted the lectureship in Berlin 'partly because his marriage to Iseult Gonne was breaking up and also because the new job was well paid'. 'Although Stuart was drawn towards the Nazis,' Fisk went on, 'because he "had the idea that the war might end in everything collapsing, and this was always my dream", he was also a political innocent, contemplating a visit to Moscow until advised against it by some White Russian friends, and realising only after a year that Hitler - far from being a dissident - was an ultra-conservative.' According to Fisk, however, his broadcasts 'could have left no one in any doubt that the system of government he was expounding was the National Socialist one . . . But Stuart's broadcasts were unexceptionable compared to most of the material about Ireland which emanated from Germany.' Fisk mentioned the 'poisonous' anti-semitic tone of other broadcasters to Ireland. He did not, however, include Stuart in their company. A few strange passages from the transcripts are quoted in Fisk's book, such as this one on the German defeat at Stalingrad: 'This has moved Germany more than any other event of the war, for while such victories as the fall of Paris might be attributed to the perfection of the German war machine, this is an affair of human beings, a triumph of flesh and blood.' Or another on St Patrick's Day 1943: 'One day we will have a great hurley match, or a great race meeting to celebrate peace and we will hold it outside Belfast to celebrate the return of the Six Counties.' Or: 'It is of no importance at all that the Tricolour should fly from the City Hall in Belfast instead of the Union Jack if Belfast workers are to find it as hard to live and support their families as before. Such freedom is merely an illusion and such nationalism a farce and a danger.' Stuart told Fisk that he had refused to make anti-Russian broadcasts: that as a result 'his telephone began to ring at odd hours of the night and anonymous voices at the other end of the line threatened him with "being sent to a camp".' Stuart told Fisk that he hated the 'insufferable attitude of Germans when they were on top' and 'if I had really asked myself in a sober way in 1940 whether I wanted a German domination of all Europe, I don't think I would have desired that.' He told Fisk that when he returned to Ireland 'I hardly ever met anyone who heard me. I don't think anyone really listened.' Fisk also wrote about the Goertz affair. Herman Goertz was a German agent selected for a mission to Ireland. He 'was given two objectives in Ireland; to gain the IRA's help during a possible German invasion of Britain and their assistance in cutting off Eire's connections with the United Kingdom'. Goertz was introduced to Stuart, who gave him Iseult's address in County Wicklow and told him that he could contact her in an emergency. When he parachuted into Ireland in May 1940, Goertz made his way immediately to Iseult's house. She was later arrested for harbouring him briefly and held for a month before being found not guilty. By the time Fisk's book came out I was no longer seeing much of Francis and Madeleine. In 1982, we had printed a letter about Stuart's column which accused him of having been a Nazi supporter. On the morning In Dublin appeared Francis phoned me and we had a brief, friendly conversation about the letter, which, foolishly, we had not consulted him about. Since our conversation had been so amicable, I was rather surprised to get a solicitor's letter and rather more surprised when it became clear that Francis intended to sue the magazine. We settled with him, but it was clear to me that he had wanted a court case. I thought at the time that he had wanted his name cleared of Nazi and anti-semitic connections once and for all, but I am no longer sure about that. In 1981, with the encouragement of the Government, the Irish Arts Council set up an organisation called Aosdána. This consisted of 150 writers, artists and composers. Once the original group had been chosen by the Council, new members would be elected by the existing members, and, with certain restrictions, members whose incomes fell below about £12,000 a year would receive a stipend for the rest of their working lives. The scheme also included an honours system where a limited number of members would be elected a Saoi, or 'wise person'. Samuel Beckett was one, so is Seamus Heaney. Since Francis Stuart was one of the original members of Aosdána, he was entitled to be nominated, and this was where the trouble began. When it was proposed that Stuart be made a Saoi, there was some informal debate between members of Aosdána over whether honouring him involved more than honouring his work. At first, he was defeated, but in 1996 he was made a Saoi and the honour, symbolised by a collar of gold, was conferred on him by Mary Robinson, who spoke about his 'awkward' presence in Irish literary life. I am a member of Aosdána and I was among those who voted for him. In October 1997 Channel Four made a programme about Irish anti-semitism in which Stuart was interviewed. He told the interviewer: 'The Jew was always the worm that got into the rose and sickened it. Yes, but of course I take that as praise. I mean all those so-called healthy roses, they need exposing - many of them are sick.' Interviewer: Are you ashamed that you helped Nazi Germany now?
The Irish Times columnist Kevin Myers was watching this programme and would have much to say about it: 'Honouring such a man with the highest artistic accolade this state has to offer is at best to be morally neutral about the barbarous cause he served. It is to follow the fascist chic ethic that art counts above all else,' he wrote in October 1997. Two month later he returned to the subject: 'Francis Stuart offered his services to the Third Reich after the outbreak of the Second World War. There would be no controversy had he repented for doing so. Has he repented, clearly and unambiguously? Specifically and precisely: he has not . . . By honouring this man who unrepentantly served the Third Reich, Aosdána has disgraced itself, which is its right, and the country which pays for it, which is not.' Also watching the programme was the poet Máire Mhac an tSaoi, another member of Aosdána. Just as Francis Stuart was connected to the higher echelons of Irish grandeur, Máire Mhac an tSaoi has her own elevated co-ordinates. She is married to Conor Cruise O'Brien. Her father, Sean McEntee, fought in the Irish War of Independence and was a minister in most of Eamon de Valera's Governments. Her uncle was a cardinal. Every schoolchild of my generation knew her poems, written in Irish, by heart. She is a formidable presence at any gathering. She proposed a motion whereby Aosdána would condemn what Stuart had said and call on him to resign from the organisation. In the lead-up to the meeting of Aosdána many people came to Stuart's defence, including a number of journalists on the Irish Times. Nuala O'Faolain referred to the 'spiritual excitement' of reading Redemption and later Black List, Section H and wrote that she was amazed 'that so many people are so comfortable with their own righteousness. How can they know that they would not have made the broadcasts in Berlin during the war, in the circumstances described in Black List, Section H?' Fintan O'Toole, another columnist on the paper, wrote:
Other commentators, including Conor Cruise O'Brien, took the opposite view. I could not attend the meeting of Aosdána which discussed Máire Mhac an tSaoi's motion, but I wrote a piece about the controversy in the Sunday Independent in Dublin. 'Coming from a Unionist background,' I said,
By this time, Black List, Section H had been reissued once more as a Penguin Classic, and my piece in the Sunday Independent was fuelled by the acknowledgment of the main players in the anti-Stuart camp that they had not read the book. I had done the introduction to the Penguin edition in which I wrote that in the experience of reading the book there was a feeling 'that nothing had been invented. Not only the names were real, but the places, the gestures, the emotions and moments of truth were described and evoked with a sense of absolute truth and total honesty.' Máire Mhac an tSaoi's motion was defeated and she resigned from Aosdána. Stuart did not attend the meeting. A fax supporting the motion was sent by the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland. Stuart initiated libel proceedings against Kevin Myers and the Irish Times and the case was settled - in Stuart's favour - in June 1999. The settlement included the statement: 'The Irish Times accepts that Mr Stuart has never expressed anti-semitism in his writings or otherwise and regrets the publication of an impression to the contrary. The Irish Times has agreed to pay a sum of money in respect of the costs of Mr Stuart's action.' In January 1998, six weeks after the Aosdána meeting, Stuart gave an interview to Irish television in which he tried to explain his use of the phrase 'the worm in the rose': 'the rose of our consumer society', he said - 'which to my mind is a very horrible society'. Asked if he regretted the Holocaust, he said: 'Well, of course I regret it.' Asked if he ever supported it, he replied: 'Never.' Asked if he regretted his support for the Nazis, he said: 'I never supported that regime and I'm intensely sorry for the hurt I caused so many people by appearing to. As I did understandably appear to support it.' The war, he said, 'was probably by that time the greatest war in history. I have always believed that the sort of writer I am should be at the heart of where things are most intense and that I should report it, unbiased as I hoped to do, primarily for my own people.' Asked about Hitler, he replied: 'Hitler came to power in Germany after the Versailles Treaty, when things were very, very . . . I know people who were there in a terrible state then and he did a lot for Germany until, until . . .' He appeared lost for words and then: 'I think that certain people are possessed, as it's called in the Old Testament. I think of Hitler as becoming possessed by the spirit of evil.' Around this time, a book called Hitler's Irish Voices: The Story of German Radio's Wartime Irish Service by David O'Donoghue appeared and made clear that Stuart had had a meeting with the IRA leadership late in 1939 before he went to Berlin and that he had operated as a messenger for the IRA, which was interested in obtaining German assistance for its campaign. (Stuart's brother-in-law Sean MacBride - Maud Gonne's son by the Irish revolutionary John MacBride - had been Chief of Staff of the IRA until 1936; Stuart had also maintained informal contact with some of his old colleagues from the Civil War, those who had not followed de Valera and joined Fianna Fáil, which entered the Dáil in 1926 and took power in 1932.) O'Donoghue's book gave the most complete account of Stuart's broadcasts thus far. He confirmed Fisk's assertion that there was no anti-Russian propaganda in them. He also confirmed that there was no direct or specific anti-semitic content. Stuart's broadcasts as reported in O'Donoghue's book supported Irish neutrality, and attacked the British. On two occasions, the broadcasts, which were monitored by the Irish security forces, annoyed the Irish Government and caused a diplomatic complaint and this may have been the reason Stuart's Irish passport was not renewed in 1942. On one occasion, when Stuart called on troops from Northern Ireland to go over to the other side, he was himself crossing a line which could have caused him much trouble after the war. O'Donoghue notes that Francis and Madeleine (who had also worked for German radio's foreign service) deliberately allowed themselves to be arrested by the French rather than the British after the war. This, then, was the evidence against Francis Stuart. I wish sometimes that I had been able to go to the Aosdána meeting and speak against Máire Mhac an tSaoi's motion. I believe that in his postwar work, in his three best novels, Stuart had placed himself in a peculiar position. He was able to write those books only because of his own foolishness and treachery. His material was gathered in the most outrageous place in the most outrageous way. The novels do not, in Allen Tate's phrase about Ezra Pound, reach us pure, but to refuse to praise them or honour them, or indeed honour their author for writing them, is to confuse crafted, self-conscious novels, written in the postwar period, with their author's life during the war. The novels are dramas of guilt and innocence which do not incite us to join any party or hate anybody, but instead to consider how one strange figure ended up in Germany and broadcast for Hitler (Black List, Section H), how three wounded figures dealt with the postwar desolation (The Pillar of Cloud) and how one strange figure brings disruption and the possibility of transcendence back to Ireland from the European War (Redemption).
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