Francis Stuart
Francis Stuart (1902-2000) was a prolific Irish writer whose novels have a thrusting modernist iconoclasm. Though his work remains well regarded by some, it must be interpreted in light of his anti-semitism, propaganda work for Nazi Germany during World War II and subsequent evasions.
Francis Stuart was born in Australia to Irish Protestant parents; his father was alcoholic and killed himself when Stuart was an infant. This prompted his mother to return to Ireland and Stuart's childhood was divided between his home in Ireland and boarding school in England.
In 1920 he became a Catholic and married Maud Gonne's daughter, Iseult MacBride. Iseult was seven years older than him and had had a romantic but unsettled life. Gonne's estranged husband John MacBride was executed in 1916 for taking part in the Easter Rising, and Iseult MacBride's own father was the right-wing French politician, Lucien Millevoye, with whom Gonne had had an affair between 1887 and 1899. Because of her complex family situation, Iseult was often passed off as Gonne's niece in conservative circles in Ireland. Iseult grew up in Paris and London, she had been proposed to by William Butler Yeats in 1917 and had a brief affair with Ezra Pound prior to meeting Stuart; this is made ironic by Pound and Stuart's shared belief in the primacy of the artist and the way in which this belief lead Stuart to Nazi Germany and Pound to fascist Italy.
Iseult and Stuart had a baby daughter who died in infancy. Perhaps to recover from this tragedy, they travelled for a while in Europe but returned to Ireland as the Irish Civil War began. Unsurprisingly given Gonne's strong opinions, the couple were caught up on the anti-Treaty side of this fight, Stuart was involved in gun running and was interned after a botched raid.
After independence, Stuart participated in the literary life of Dublin and wrote poetry and novels. His novels were successful and his writing was publicly supported by Yeats. Yeats, however, seemed to have had mixed feelings for Stuart who was, after all, married to a woman he regarded almost as a daughter and, even, as a possible wife. In his poem Why should not Old Men be Mad? (1936) in which he lists what he regards as provokations to rage he has witnessed, he claims he has seen a
- "A girl that knew all Dante once
- Live to bear children to a dunce"
The first of these lines is accepted as referring to Iseult and the second to Stuart.
Stuart and Iseult had two children, a son Ian and a daughter Katherine. Ian Stuart went on to become an artist and was married for a time to the sculptor Imogen Stuart. However, this may not have been a happy time, from the accounts given in his apparently auto-biographical novels, both he and his wife struggled with personal demons and their internal anguish poisoned their marriage.
In 1940, Stuart was offered a lecturing job at the University of Berlin and travelled alone to Nazi Germany, something that was possible because Ireland was neutral in the Second World War. Between 1942 and 1944 he recorded radio broadcasts to Ireland. In these he frequently spoke with admiration of Hitler and expressed the hope that Germany would help unite Ireland. After the war he maintained that he was not drawn to Germany by support for Nazism, but that he was fascinated by wartime Germany as a dark spectacle of the grotesque and as a celebration of destruction.
In 1945 Stuart decided to return to Ireland with a former student, Gertrude Meissner; they were unable to do so and were arrested and detained by Allied troops. After they were released, Stuart and Meissner lived in Germany and then France and England. They married in 1954 after Iseult's death and in 1958 they returned to settle in Ireland. In 1971 Stuart published his best known work, Black List Section H, a roman à clef documenting his life and distinguished by a queasy sensitivity to moral complexity and moral ambiguity.
In 1996 Stuart was elected a Saoi of Aosdána, this is a high honour in the Irish art world and the influential Irish language poet Máire Mhac an tSaoi objected strongly, referring to Stuart's actions during the war and claiming that he held anti-Semitic opinions. Ultimately she resigned from Aosdána in protest, sacrificing a government stipend by doing so. The newspaper columnist Kevin Myers wrote in the Irish Times criticizing Stuart as a Nazi sympathizer; Stuart sued for libel and the case was settled out of court. The libel laws in Ireland place a burden of proof on defendants, an unusually severe test by international standards. Even so, were the case to be re-fought today, Stuart would likely lose given subsequent research by Brendan Barrington (see Bibliography).
Francis Stuart died of natural causes at the age of 97 in Ireland.
Works
Francis Stuart wrote over thirty books including Black List Section H (1971) ISBN 0140062297.
Bibliography
- Francis Stuart face to face: a critical study, Anne McCartney (2000), Institute for Irish Studies Publications, Belfast ISBN 0853897689
- The Wartime Broadcasts of Francis Stuart, Francis Stuart, Brendan Barrington (Ed.) (2000), Lilliput Press, Dublin ISBN 1901866548