Review by Colm Toibin

Issues of Truth and Invention. [ Part II ]

I cannot accept that writers should be good people. I believe that part of the purpose of writing is to speak up for the damned and I can hardly object when a novelist takes this seriously enough (or is led by other motives) to place himself outside the pale of the saved, no matter how much I might disapprove of his actions and disagree with his politics. I wish that after the war others who had collaborated or expressed anti-semitic views had also written novels which explored, or even refused to recognise, their own foolishness and badness. I wish that the business of evil were explored more deeply and more seriously in fiction. Thus I cannot complain when Francis Stuart is honoured by his fellow artists. It is not a simple matter; it does not come to us pure. But I cannot regret voting for him.

There is, however, another matter. No one in Aosdána, as far as I am aware, had lost family in the war. All of us were part of the legacy of Irish neutrality, and all of us, debating the issue of Francis Stuart, were living in a sort of backwater, protected from the terrible pain and anger suffered by the families of those killed by the Nazis. What hung in the balance was a fundamental question: had Stuart's name been so dishonoured by what he did in the war that nothing he could write would be enough to justify offering him the highest honour an artist can have in Ireland? I believed and I still believe that the honour was justified, but I'm not sure I would believe this if I had lost family or friends in the war.

Brendan Barrington is a young American living in Dublin. Like Stuart and Máire Mhac an tSaoi, he has connections in the upper echelons of Irish life. His Irish father is a member of a family of distinguished public servants which includes a Supreme Court judge and Brendan Bracken, Minister for Information in Churchill's War Cabinet. Barrington is an editor at the Lilliput Press. He has gone into the Military Archives in Dublin and transcribed Stuart's war broadcasts; he has read all the novels and written an introduction to the transcripts which deals with Stuart's politics and his controversial place in Irish intellectual life.

'Stuart's allegiances to the anti-Treaty side,' Barrington writes,

in the Irish Civil War and to the Third Reich in the Second World War have usually been explained as arising from non-political forces in his psyche: a sense of adventure, a compulsion to betray, a mystical desire to suffer. These forces were undoubtedly present but they existed alongside a political consciousness that was far more highly developed, and also rather more discriminating and conventional, than has generally been recognised. The wartime broadcasts . . . are concerned primarily with politics, and could not have been written by someone as politically naive, or gormless, or blindly revolutionary as Stuart has usually been depicted as being.

Barrington examines Stuart's claim in 1996 that he had 'spoken and written several million words in my life. No one could ever point to a sentence of mine that was or is anti-semitic.' He finds the following in a pamphlet Stuart wrote for the IRA in 1924 when he was 22:

Austria, in 1921, had been ruined by the war, and was far, far poorer than Ireland is today, for besides having no money she was overburdened with innumerable debts. At that time Vienna was full of Jews, who controlled the banks and the factories and even a large part of the Government; the Austrians themselves seemed about to be driven out of their own city.

Ireland should overcome the British influence, he suggested, as Austria had overcome the Jewish influence.

This is the only directly anti-semitic statement by Stuart that has ever been found, but having trawled through the fiction Stuart published in the 1930s, Barrington finds a definable set of attitudes towards Jews, expressed both by characters in the novels and directly by the author in his creation of Jewish stereotypes. There are no prizes, for example, for guessing the racial identity of Ike Salaman in The Great Squire (1939):

His keen swarthy face glowed with the cold passion that consumed him as he bent over the grey parchment. Figures. How secretly beautiful they were! What delight in getting them to dance to one's own tune! Ah, that was the real happiness: this secret mathematical dance of figures, in rows, in spidery waltzes, in formal gavottes, to that thin maddening tune that he had long dreamed of but only heard for the first time today, the clink and clank of a great number of sovereigns.

It would be impossible to say there isn't anti-semitism here; and the same is true of the broadcasts quoted by Fisk, where, as Fintan O'Toole has pointed out, it is easy to find stock references to international financiers and bankers and easy to see that Stuart means Jews.

Casual and less than casual anti-semitism survives in all types of writing from the 1930s. The problem with Stuart is that he wrote the stuff about Jews in Vienna in 1924, then put the stereotypes into his novels in the 1930s, then made anti-semitic comments in letters to his wife from Germany in 1939 (these are quoted in Geoffrey Elborn's 1990 biography), then went to Germany in 1940 and lectured at Berlin University and then included easily detectable anti-semitic references in his broadcasts. 'There is no evidence that anti-semitism was a motivating force in Francis Stuart's decision to live, teach and broadcast in Nazi Germany,' Barrington writes. 'At the same time it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that some strain of anti-semitism was a necessary enabling factor in that decision.'

It can be argued, then, putting it more mildly, that Stuart was not sufficiently repelled by German anti-semitism to decide not to go to live in Berlin. It can also be argued, however, that Stuart was attracted to Hitler's Germany partly because of its anti-semitism. The truth maybe lies somewhere between the two. The evidence against him makes me, as someone who has written about his work and enjoyed his company, very uncomfortable.

Just as the tone of the IRA pamphlet in 1924 is harder and nastier than any tone Stuart would later use in his account of himself, the tone of his letters to the Irish Times in December 1938, which Barrington also quotes, is very far from his later version of himself. In the first letter Stuart opposed admitting refugees from non-democratic countries into Ireland. In his second letter he wrote:

When democracy has found some solution to the pressing problems observable in the countries where it is practised, which I would define as, among others: unemployment, slums, the tyranny of money, and the appallingly low level of general culture, then let it sit in judgment on other forms of government. But, in my belief, our bureaucratic democracies can never of their nature find such a solution, being themselves largely responsible for these evils.

Barrington has done us all a favour in unearthing this letter and the 1924 pamphlet. The main thrust of his argument is that the hero of Black List, Section H is not Francis Stuart, that the man who went to Germany and the mind that created the novel were different, and that a great number of Irish writers and commentators, including myself, have been fooled by the novel. 'It would appear that Stuart had not forgotten the broadcasts, but had reimagined them,' Barrington writes:

What is unfortunate - although not surprising, in light of the enormous personal affection that the elderly Stuart inspired - is that so many writers and scholars have been enthusiastic participants in this reimagining, creating a myth of Stuart that is far more palatable to contemporary sensibilities than the literary and political persona of the man who wrote and delivered the talks printed herein.

In 1976 Stuart gave an interview about the broadcasts: 'These broadcasts didn't usually deal with politics; they dealt very often with literature, both English and Irish, and even with other literature.' This is not true. They hardly ever mentioned literature, and it is an interesting example of Stuart's 'reimagining' of what he did in these years.

Barrington's case, then, is that the holy fool, the awkward, apolitical and damaged figure of H in the novel is an invention,a fictional disguise, for a more political and nastier self. His point 'is not that there is anything intrinsically remarkable about deviations between an autobiographical novel and the life on which it is based, but simply that we cannot and should not look to Stuart's fiction to supply a reliable account of his life'.

Barrington's quotations from the 1924 pamphlet and the 1938 letters to the Irish Times prepare you for a series of broadcasts in a similarly strident tone. And his point about the distinction between Stuart and H makes you expect a skilled rhetorician in front of the microphone. Instead, you get the sort of dullness that perhaps only someone who has done a lot of hackwork could properly recognise. These broadcasts could well have been written by the holy fool who is H in the novel, but now he has a deadline and, for the most part, a few tired and platitudinous opinions. Even at the time, some of these talks must have seemed absurd. And it is easy to imagine Stuart leaving the studio, filled with shame at his own ineptitude, once more, like H, aware of his own awkwardness and inability to exercise his intelligence and putting the whole thing out of his mind for another week.

The most absurd, perhaps, was on 12 August 1942 when he managed to compare Hitler with Gandhi. But the broadcasts are also full of the most terrible sentimentality about Irish people, their spiritual qualities, their struggle for freedom, their decency and open-mindedness, their rural life, their sport. Stuart's efforts at a folksy, common touch must have made him cringe as much as his listeners. His efforts at patriotism were ridiculous. ('If a committee of six average Irishmen, let us say a farmer or two, a National University student, a Civic Guard and an IRA man, were formed into a committee with sovereign powers to settle all the present problems of the world, they would make a far better job of it than Churchill and Roosevelt and company.') Only once did he make a reference to neutral Ireland which made any sense: 'When I hear a report on the debate in the Dáil, as I did the other evening, on whether pubs should be open on Sundays at 1 or 1.30, I'm reminded more vividly than ever how peaceful life is in the 26 counties of Ireland.'

Two things stand out, however, which give weight to Barrington's thesis. There is an astonishingly fierce anti-Englishness in the broadcasts and constant reference to a united Ireland and the problem of partition. This is to remind us that Stuart fought on the Republican side in the Civil War and was interned. He was one of a sizable number of people who fought in Ireland between 1918 and 1923 who never settled down afterwards, never held a job (Stuart's first job was in Berlin in 1940) and roamed American cities, or stayed in Ireland and took to drink, or kept the IRA flame alight. They remained locked into the ideology of the cause for which they fought or became totally disillusioned. Stuart seems to have done both. The tone of his broadcasts about partition and England, his call for Allied troops from Northern Ireland to defect, leads me to change my view that he had an apolitical nature, as does the content of the broadcast of 16 December 1942: 'Like most Irishmen I have no use for second-hand opinions,' Stuart begins. His reaction to the jokes and jeers about Hitler was to

wonder what Hitler really was. Anyone who is the butt of these small city-made mentalities seemed to me to be probably someone of consequence. I began to find out something about Hitler and the new Germany and then, of course, I was completely fired by enthusiasm, for here was someone who was freeing life from the money standards that dominated it almost everywhere I had ever been, not excluding my own country; here was someone who had the vision and courage to deny financiers, politicians and bankers the right to rule. Nor did the word dictator frighten me - I saw that as it was. Our lives were dominated by a group of financial dictators and it seemed to me at least preferable to be ruled by one man whose sincerity for the welfare of his people could not be doubted than by a gang whose only concern was the market price of various commodities in the world markets.

Let us accept then that Stuart was anti-semitic, that he admired Hitler, that he was a rabid Irish nationalist. But his primary interest was not politics. He was a chronicler of his wounded and damaged self who also had these opinions. What was he going to do now that the war was over? His first instinct was to deny his role. In April 1946, he turned to Basil Liddell Hart, who had praised one of his prewar novels: 'Your help would be especially valuable. As you know . . . I was deeply opposed to Nazism and state tyranny, and my experience during the war only deepened this opposition. It is not the hardship of detention here, but also the hold-up in that work which I believe I could do now, that is hard to bear with patience.' When, in October 1946, he was rearrested by the French, Madeleine wrote to Liddell Hart: 'Please, please dear sir help him! Francis Stuart has such a fine and rare soul, the influence of which humanity has great need.' In the earlier letter to Liddell Hart, Stuart had written: 'What we have gone through . . . has, I think, fitted me to write a novel which will have the breadth and maturity which The Angel of Pity lacked.'

The Pillar of Cloud, finished in October 1947, was written during a time when he and Madeleine had to report weekly to French security. Victor Gollancz, his old publisher, agreed to bring out the book. It is set in the world Francis and Madeleine inhabited after the war. (The first chapter is called 'Hunger and Cold'.) Surrounding our Irish hero Dominic Malone are a number of people who have been imprisoned during the war, and are broken and damaged presences in the book. Dominic remains under suspicion and is called in for further interrogation about his own activities. He is questioned not about broadcasts but about his visits to various prisoner-of-war camps in Germany during the war, but 'only against one charge was he vitally concerned to defend himself. That he had ever, in any way, in thought or deed, sided with the captors against the captives, with the executioners against the victims.' During his interrogation it becomes clear that the French are puzzled about the reason the Irishman desperately sought to be imprisoned by the Germans towards the end of the war. 'It was not very difficult to have myself suspected and finally taken and put into a camp . . . I was not there long but I had time to see that in such places a new world was taking shape; in the hearts of the tormented a new world was born.'

A novel by any of us is a set of lies, a set of organised, premeditated fantasies. There is no such thing as an honest novel. Between The Pillar of Cloud (1948) and Black List, Section H, published in 1971, but finished much earlier, Francis created versions of himself and versions of the war and its aftermath which redeemed him, inasmuch as they could, from the ordinary guilt or blame which might attach to collaboration. It must have been a relief to write them. In those years after the war when they were virtual prisoners and were cold and hungry, Francis and Madeleine found enormous comfort in each other. ('I needed a war and hunger and cold and imprisonment. I needed all these things before my eyes were opened enough to see a good woman,' Dominic says.) In The Pillar of Cloud there is an astonishing air of tenderness in the moments the weak and wounded sisters Lisette and Halka share with Dominic. The writing about hunger and the search for food is brilliant. But the real world of guilt and accusation is not allowed to enter. Captain Renier, the French interrogator, is an anarchist and wants to discuss the possibilities for world change rather than accuse Dominic of collaboration.

Stuart needed to believe that he had gained something spiritual, some new insight into the human condition, during and after the war. There's something almost inspiring in the zeal with which he worked in his fiction at trying to rescue himself, heal himself, re-create his past. At the same time he did what many others would do: he wrote letters to figures like Liddell Hart denying everything, he gave interviews in which he made inaccurate statements about the broadcasts, he even tampered with his diaries. But he was alone in using the novel to try to save the situation in which he found himself.

In some of these novels he came close to facing himself; they are not ways of denying what happened so much as tentative explorations of the notion of the criminal who is less guilty than those who would seek to capture him.

During this time, Stuart was still married to Iseult Gonne, who sent him food parcels and encouraged him to come home. After a certain point he was free to leave, but Madeleine was not free to leave with him. In 1948, Sean MacBride became Minister for External Affairs in Ireland, and for this, and several other reasons, the Irish state could not help Madeleine. Things were made worse when Stuart made it clear that he was prepared to return to Iseult, but intended to bring Madeleine with him.

By the time Madeleine finally managed to make her way to Paris in the summer of 1949, Stuart's second postwar novel had appeared. (Madeleine, in a short memoir, published in 1984, wrote of Victor Gollancz: 'This was an immense joy to us and Gollancz was so enthusiastic that he even sent the most wonderful telegram which we could hardly grasp. We were overwhelmed, especially when we considered that Gollancz was a Jew who could have resented Francis's stay in Germany during the war.') In Redemption, Francis began to imagine what would happen if a figure who had been imprisoned at the end of the war, and who had fallen in love with a German woman, returned to an Ireland in which his first wife still lived, an Ireland which had remained undisturbed by the war.

Ezra Arrigho, the returnee, becomes involved with a priest (who plays something of the same role as the interrogator in The Pillar of Cloud), the priest's sister and the local fishmonger. When the fishmonger murders a woman and when, a little later, Ezra's German lover arrives in the town, it is decided that they will all - the priest, his sister, Ezra, his lover and the murderer - move into a flat above the fishmonger's. 'Isn't it time we forgave each other?' the priest asks. 'Perhaps this is our last chance to lead a new life and if we don't take it there won't be another. And your wife, Ezra, let her take her place in it too. Let her forgive you and Margareta and come and live with us too.'

In Chapter 14, Ezra's estranged wife, Nancy, and his aunt talk about him - these scenes caused particular offence to Iseult Gonne, her mother and her friends. 'There was always a kind of heartlessness about him,' Nancy says. 'He'd use people and then drop them.' 'Like he used you,' the aunt replies. The portrait of the aunt in the book is deeply unpleasant; the portrait of Nancy for the most part renders her lonely and pathetic and sexually frigid. When Ezra meets her he says: 'Isn't there something horrible about the thought of all the married couples shut up together in houses and flats everywhere, all the watertight little families bound together more by fear and suspicion of the rest of the world than by love of each other?' Ezra asks his wife to 'abandon everything, and come out with me now and we'll find a corner for you and get a basin and hang up a mirror - there are beds enough.' He brings her to the house where she sees the sleeping German lover. 'I'd go mad in a place like this,' she says and leaves. But before she goes there is one of those moments in which Stuart had come to specialise. Nancy is looking at her husband's sleeping lover:

The face of the sleeping girl that, without asking, she had known was Margareta had touched her with a pang of pity. Like that, asleep, people had another aspect than when they were awake and active. Awake, she was probably that designing little creature that she had expected, but there, looking at her asleep in the shadows, there had been a moment of recognition. Nancy had, in spite of her sense of wrong, seen in the sleeping face, not the feared stranger, but something almost familiar - a defencelessness, was it? - like her own.

'The daring and delicate experiment', the community over the fish shop, is harbouring a murderer and this allows Stuart to dramatise ideas of guilt and innocence. When the policeman tells the priest that the murderer stuck a 'cold knife into her heart', the priest replies: 'That knife was not so cold as your justice. And it struck quickly. Agony is a mysterious concoction of many things, of fear and of time in the first place. In Annie's agony there was very little time. But in his there will be weeks and months of which each hour will be endless.' When Margareta hears what Kavanagh has done, she says: 'Who needs us most, we will love most. It can never be otherwise.' In a strange ceremony on the night before Kavanagh is arrested, Father Mellows marries his sister to him.

These two novels are closer to parables than pieces of social realism. They use aspects of Stuart's experience, but merely as a way of exploring the states of consciousness and ideas of good and evil which preoccupied him, for good reason, in the postwar years. He imagined himself not only as innocent, but as a victim, and not only as a victim, but as someone who had come through his suffering to understand something fundamental about suffering. The images in the final chapter of both books are particularly solemn and almost sacramental in their ideas of communion and community; the writing is suddenly beautiful and clear, as though Stuart had in his imagination created a new space for himself. 'The dark must have its hour, and there was no good trying to stem it when it came, with complacent words. It could not be held back as the sea could not be held back. It was like the sea, the cold unfathomable sea, balancing and counteracting the dry land and the teeming, human dry-land activity.' What impelled Stuart in these novels is a paradigm for what pushes us all towards writing novels: the dramatic revelation of matters that are hidden and dark and difficult. The impulse was urgent and raw, and the glow of pure feeling is intense.

Stuart wrote six more novels between Redemption (1949) and Black List, Section H. In 1960 Victor Gollancz turned down a seventh. He wrote to Ethel Mannin (who had known Stuart well between the wars, visited him in Germany after the war and put him up when he came to London with Madeleine): 'I am terribly sorry about Francis Stuart as it has of course been obvious for some time that no one except myself would publish him.' The Stuarts had moved to London in 1951, where Madeleine worked as a cleaner and Francis, intermittently, as a night security officer at the Geological Museum. When Iseult died in 1954, Francis and Madeleine married.

Slowly, Stuart's war activities became a rumour, a matter of conjecture; his novels with their interest in mysticism and victimhood, on the other hand, won him fame among a small number of readers. His war rhetoric was lodged in the archives: his novels, written in a different style, were open to the public. He and Madeleine had suffered at the end of the war, and those few years had soldered their relationship. Rather than collaborators, they felt like survivors.

In 1958, Francis published Victors and Vanquished and Barrington is right to see it as significant. Here, the hero 'is an exact replica of Stuart in almost every respect, except that he refuses to carry the IRA message to Germany, refuses to get involved in collaborationist schemes while in Germany and refuses to make propaganda broadcasts; he spends most of his energy looking after a Jewish family, a wholly imagined (and deeply unconvincing) plotline.'

Yet there are moments of pure illumination in the novel, and careful examinations of what preoccupied Stuart most after the war - his own reasons for going to Berlin in 1940. Here he allows a Jewish friend to question Luke, his protagonist, not about his support for Hitler but about another matter which may have kept Stuart awake at night in the years after Iseult's death: his leaving her and their two children in Ireland. 'It's not a matter of whether you met with weariness or ecstasies; it's that your wife was your destiny and you had to learn to be one with it. Then, as that happened, your heart would have widened to embrace the difficulties and pain, and you yourself would have been changed, whether she was or no, and you would have come to some peace.' Later, when his Jewish friend tells him that 'it's a disease that spreads, this hardening of hearts, and it seems to me you didn't guard yourself against it,' our Irish hero answers: 'I know you're right, that's the worst of it.'

There is one short scene in Victors and Vanquished which I found surprising and affecting. In Berlin, Luke dreams that he goes back to Ireland and visits his wife and talks to her and she doesn't fully recognise him. He goes upstairs and fails to see his daughter. The dream leaves him oppressed and uneasy. Immediately on reading it, of course, I fell into the trap of believing the dream, or the sense of longing behind it, to be true, part of what happened to Stuart, that his escape from Ireland brought with it complex feelings rather than mere relief. The passage has the feeling of a difficult truth being told, of something yielding in Stuart's version of his own past. On the other hand, he may well have made it up, or allowed something he felt for a moment as he wrote the book to become something his protagonist had felt during the war.

Issues of truth and invention become more intense when we reread Black List, Section H in the light of the broadcasts and Barrington's introduction. There is certainly a new energy in the book, a sense of lived experience delivered in comic and awkward detail. By far Stuart's longest novel, it deals with a question which is fundamental in our response not only to crime or guilt or innocence but also to fiction itself and its discontents.

The following facts are clearly established: Stuart supported Hitler, he had anti-semitic feelings, he broadcast extreme anti-British sentiments in the war, he abandoned his family. He later evaded the truth about all of this. These facts, however, belong to the world of the courtroom or the newspaper. They do not belong to the novel, because the novel asks a different question when it comes to guilt or innocence. The novel's question is: what was it like? The novel can deal with the ambiguities, can allow a protagonist to stalk its pages who may be guilty according to clearly established fact, but whose mind and way of noticing things and appetites and deepest feelings can be bathed in a language and a tone that render these questions ineffectual and beside the point, almost banal. Something like this happens in Macbeth after the murder of Duncan; something like this happens in The Wings of the Dove.

And something like it happens in Black List, Section H, but here it is different. It is as though the murder of Duncan were glossed over, or the betrayal of Milly Theale elided. It is as though the personalities of Macbeth or Merton Densher were described in terms of drift, in terms of distance from a moral universe which might later judge them. In this case, H goes to Germany and broadcasts from there to Ireland. This much is not left to the reader's imagination, and most readers will have a moral view of it, just as we do of the killing of Duncan or the courting of Milly Theale. In Black List, Section H, then, the move to Germany is not left out, but what is elided and glossed over, instead, is the difficult matter of its author's politics, the reason for that move.

Black List, Section H is, on the one hand, a study in drift. H is a gambler, an unsettled, unsettling figure, in need of spiritual healing, unable and unwilling to connect with the social, political or sexual world around him. But it is also a desperate attempt, through the medium of fiction, to explain H's drift to Germany, to give it meaning, to make it seem part of a plan. When H reaches Berlin, having had an argument about treachery with a man called Stroud in London, he sees the boarded-up shops and he thinks about the Jews, such as Gollancz, who had been his friends:

Was his being here a betrayal of them? The message that reached his conscience from his deepest nature, from what he felt were the genes on which his being was constructed, suggested that he had to experience, in his own probably small degree, some of what they suffered, and, on one level, even more, because he could not claim their innocence. He had long suspected that his destiny bound him to them in a manner more obscure than that of their present defenders such as Stroud. He also realised that he would go to certain lengths in association with their persecutors, in violent reaction against the mores of home, thus ensuring that his condemnation would not, unlike theirs, arouse any sympathy.

Stuart wrote this twenty years after the event. It is clear that he genuinely believed that he had gained a great deal from his outlaw status after the war, that the feeling of being beyond the liberal pale gave him strength and insight and inspiration. Nonetheless, there is something preposterous about this passage; as an explanation for taking a job in Berlin in 1940, it is outrageously forced.

H is a self that Stuart imagined, even though he gave him many of his own attributes - his own hatred for authority and the established order, his own friends and associates, and the same itinerary. He did not include in H's make-up the man who wrote the pamphlet in 1924, the man who wrote the letters to the Irish Times in 1938, the man who broadcast his admiration for Hitler in 1942, the man who made constant and easy-to-decipher references to international finance. He made him a mixture of a muddled drifter and searcher for truth. Those of us who believed that H and Stuart were one and the same person were wrong to do so.

After Black List, Section H, Stuart wrote another six novels, some autobiographical pieces and some poems. His interest in being an outlaw, in being loathed by well-meaning liberal people, was not a joke or something made up. Anyone who knew him in his last years will attest that he meant it. And this perhaps explains his efforts to sue In Dublin and Kevin Myers and the Irish Times and to send out provocative invitations. He longed for the dock. He longed to be accused in front of everybody and despised in public. He longed for public disapproval as much as he longed for (and won) the love and support of a small group of friends. He also, in his own contradictory way, longed for fame as a novelist and man of letters.

In the late 1980s when two biographers were vying with one another for his attentions, Francis remarked to a friend that he had led 'a not uninteresting life'. He meant, I think, his connection with Yeats, his part in the Irish Civil War and his life in Germany. But the fifty years after the Second World War, when he grappled with the truth and fiction of what he had been through, coming close to what he did and then evading, avoiding and denying it, are the years which are really interesting. He was, in the end, an artist, and he created memorable images of both destruction and the possibility of healing and comfort, of treachery and deep communion, of his own hurt self and a self that he invented.

After Madeleine died in 1986, Stuart married the Irish painter Finola Graham. He became weaker as he went into his nineties, but managed still to write and give readings and travel. Eventually, he moved from the house in Dundrum into a home, and then to a private house in County Clare, where he was looked after until his death last year. Towards the end, he threw away his reading glasses and delighted in the freedom of not having to read, but he continued to write in old-fashioned copybooks. He told a visitor that he had a recurring dream that he went to a ticket office and asked for a ticket to his father, who had committed suicide almost a century earlier. He managed to combine, in the years I knew him, a steely interest in causing as much trouble as he could and an extraordinary and feline serenity. His legacy is likely to remain difficult.