2As an Irish studies scholar working on the contemporary Irish novel, I had come across multiple references to and commendations of Stuart, on the part of such writers and intellectuals as Dermot Bolger, Colm Tóibín, Hugo Hamilton, Paul Durcan, Nuala O’Faolain, Fintan O’Toole, etc. Yet I also discovered that Francis Stuart was a very controversial figure in Irish life until his death in 2000 at the age of ninety-seven. A staunch nationalist and an admirer of the traditional Irish Republican Army (IRA), Stuart’s reputation was forever tarnished by his decision to remain in Nazi Germany during World War II, recording propaganda broadcasts from Berlin at the bequest of Hitler’s government. He and his partner were imprisoned by the Allies after the war on account of this act of collaboration. It is that period of his life and the consequences of that commitment that Stuart retraces in Black List, Section H, a kind of fictionalised autobiography which attempted to explain Stuart’s state of mind before, during and immediately after the war.

3This dubious past is hard to reconcile with the admiration given to Stuart by certain writers who raised him to the level of a sort of cult hero, especially as they were the same artists and writers who, from the late 1970s onwards, had been most prominent in expressing dire criticism of post-independence Ireland, denouncing through their writings the contradictions of the dominant nationalist discourse and the failure of successive governments to meet the citizens’ expectations, ranging from economic opportunities to social equality and justice, freedom of conscience, and cultural diversity. From an outsider’s position, the commitment of those writers to greater moral, sexual and intellectual freedom, to social and gender justice and equality in contemporary Ireland, seems in contradiction with Stuart’s evident leanings for the authoritarian, overtly antisemitic, racist, homophobic type of regime which he seemingly admired in Nazi Germany. The only likely explanation for the devotion that Stuart enjoyed among this class of intellectuals in Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s is his claimed anti-conformism, which must have sounded attractive to those who felt constrained by the then-conservative atmosphere prevailing in Ireland, which stemmed from the alliance of the ruling nationalists with the Catholic Church. However, a close examination of the incidents in Stuart’s life, followed by the controversies that surrounded the later part of it, and then of some of their fictional representation or rendering in Black List, Section H, casts light on the deep, unsettling paradoxes underlying the reception Stuart enjoyed in the later stage of his existence back in Ireland, in the view of the reprehensible ideology Stuart seemed to share, which is partly reflected in Black List, Section H.

 

4Francis Stuart was born in 1902 in Australia, the son of Ulster-Scots parents. After his father’s death by suicide, his mother returned to Ireland. Stuart was educated in England, attending public schools, including two years at Rugby School, after which he went back to Dublin; there, he was soon introduced to some of the most illustrious members of the Celtic Revival, such as A.E. Russell and Maud Gonne, William Butler Yeats’s long-time muse. At the age of eighteen, Stuart married Iseult Gonne, the daughter Maud Gonne had conceived with her French lover, the right-wing antisemitic journalist Lucien Millevoye. During the same period, Stuart became involved in the Irish Civil War on the Republican side and was interned in 1923. In 1939, after his reputation as a writer had grown, especially after the release of Pigeon Irish and The Coloured Dome, both published in 1932, he abandoned his wife Iseult and their two children, to answer an invitation to go to Germany for lecturing purposes. He went there again in 1940 and was employed to broadcast in English to Irish audiences from the studios of the Irland-Redaktion, broadcasting German propaganda in favour of continuing Irish neutrality. He also began to write radio scripts for William Joyce, “Lord Haw-Haw”, who broadcast English-language propaganda for the Nazis. As a consequence of this collaborationist involvement, Stuart was arrested after the war by the French, along with his companion Gertrud Meissner, later re-named Madeleine, who became his second wife after the death of Iseult Gonne. Stuart married for a third time after Madeleine died in 1986 – his last wife was Finola Graham. After being released from prison, Stuart and Gertrud lived in England for a while before settling back in Ireland in 1958. Even though Stuart faced some difficulties getting it published, Black List, Section H (1971) was critically acclaimed, and was followed by other publications, among which A Hole in the Head (1977) is probably the most often mentioned. Despite the fact that for several decades Stuart enjoyed a favourable critical reception of his literary production, in the 1980s and 1990s his dubious past started to re-emerge, causing much controversy.

• 3 Andreas Roth, “Francis Stuart’s Broadcasts from Germany, 1942-4: Some New Evidence”, Irish Historic (...)

[…] it triggered off a long-running controversy in the letters pages of The Irish Times. Some prominent intellectuals rushed to Stuart’s defence, arguing, for example, that the worm metaphor was indeed a positive one, representing the “hidden, unheroic and critical”.3

6In 1999 Stuart won a libel action against The Irish Times and the journalist Kevin Myers over an article which argued that Stuart was antisemitic, and as Roth points it out, several highly regarded writers and journalists took side with Stuart. Anthony Cronin for instance wrote against Stuart’s accusers:

• 4 Anthony Cronin, “Healing the Wounds of Francis Stuart”, The Independent, 27 June 1999, online: http (...)

They based their claims on the Channel 4 programme, which set out to substantiate the charge but could only come up with one half-sentence which does not exist in Stuart’s work, and on the fact that he was in Germany during the war and made broadcasts from there4

proceeding to explain Stuart’s presence in Germany by his desire to escape from his marriage, arguing that Stuart never expressed any antisemitic opinion in any of the broadcasts from Germany. But Stuart’s problematic past was placed under the limelight most evidently on the occasion of his being proposed for a nomination as a Saoi in Aosdána in 1996, along such prestigious Irish writers as Samuel Beckett and Seamus Heaney. This prompted a fierce debate among members of Aosdána and in the larger public, about the legitimacy of attributing such a national honour to Stuart; among the most vocal opponents of the title were journalist Kevin Myers and Conor Cruise O’Brien’s wife, the poet Máire Mhac an tSaoi, also a member of Aosdána. She put in place a motion to remove him from the institution. But again, a number of writers and intellectuals came to his rescue. Hugo Hamilton, the son of a German mother and an Irish father, identified with Stuart’s position and felt that he understood his stance:

• 5 Hugo Hamilton, “Understanding Francis Stuart”, Writing Ulster, no. 4, 1996, Francis Stuart: Special (...)

As intellectual anarchist or a writer-as-rogue, positioning himself at a distance from society and from the righteous ideological clamour, Stuart examines the intensity of human relationships during his time. […] His achievement is to place himself and his characters in a world of desire and longing, an emotional chaos that reflects the upheaval and mindlessness of this century. His writing emerges from that chaos of Europe with a unique clarity and truth that I found remarkable when I first read it […].5

7Nuala O’Faolain, for her part, asked whether other people would not have also agreed to do the broadcasts had they been placed in the same position as Stuart; Fintan O’Toole was perhaps one of Stuart’s most circuitous, even devious advocates when he argued:

• 6 Fintan O’Toole, “Stuart Has Confronted Outcome of His Actions”, The Irish Times, 5 December 1997.

Stuart was undeniably a Nazi collaborator. And he did, in his broadcasts to Ireland from Hitler’s Germany, use coded antisemitic phrases. […] None of that was, is, or ever will be excusable. […] But Stuart was, in the overall scheme of things, a very minor figure6

suggesting that the wrongfulness of collaborationism was a matter of degree and not a crime by essence.

• 8 Colm Tóibín, “Issues of Truth and Invention”, London Review of Books, vol. 23, no. 1, January 2001, (...)

Despite the outbreak of war, 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.8

9The same portrayal of Stuart as an instinctual dissident was painted by Maurice Harmon, professor of Anglo-Irish literature at University College Dublin, in an article entitled “The Achievement of Francis Stuart”, in which he discussed the persona Stuart constructed for himself in Black List, Section H, arguing that:

• 9 Maurice Harmon, “The Achievement of Francis Stuart”, Writing Ulster, no. 4, 1996, p. 29.

He is instinctively against authority and has a preference for poets who have suffered calumny and derision, for people who have been despised and threatened. His radical, nihilistic philosophy is contemptuous of established orders and values.9

• 12 Kathleen McCracken, “‘Talking to One of the Old Masters’: Paul Durcan’s Response to Francis Stuart (...)

Underpinning this alliance is the common conviction that the writer must challenge the oppressive orthodoxies of church, state, gender and class in favour of all that is ordinary, sensual, vulnerable, human, that as a social visionary it is his duty to attack conformity and materialism, to be original, non-establishment, dissident.12

11Colm Tóibín, who wrote the introduction to the 1995 Penguin edition of Black List, Section H, made an effort in 2001 to assess the older man with objectivity and clarity, in view of fresher evidence about Stuart’s past; in an article published in the London Review of Books, he tried to account for the attraction his generation felt towards the older Stuart:

• 13 Colm Tóibín, “Issues of Truth and Invention”.

He made himself available to younger writers and journalists and was kind and oddly wise and encouraging. […] 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.13

15Black List is also a third-person narrative featuring a protagonist sometimes called Luke Ruark, sometimes Harry, sometimes just H, whereas all the people who played a major role in Stuart’s life, such as Iseult Gonne, her mother Maud Gonne, their friend William Butler Yeats, and Stuart’s friend Liam O’Flaherty, appear under their real names, with the notable exception of Gertrud / Madeleine who features as Halka. One might wish to regard this play on identity as a form of distance the older Stuart writing in 1971 was willing to establish with his younger self, while referring to a past so obviously objectionable to most readers’ eyes. But distance is precisely what creates so much confusion and unease when reading the book, for the narrator or author relating the facts years later markedly abstains from offering any judgment, or from justifying the young protagonist’s dubious choices of fighting against the Irish Free State in 1922 and working for German radio in 1939. Neither do we find any implicit condemnation of H’s abandoning his wife and children, or leaving Iseult to cope alone with the tragic death of an infant daughter, all facts taken from Stuart’s real life. Black List is thus openly unapologetic, and not meant to obtain redemption for its author: on the contrary, it forcefully expands on the implicit claim of its title, begging for condemnation, seeking our reprobation as the ultimate proof of the irreconcilable nature of the link between authentic art and morality.

• 24 Ibid., p. 30.

[the ceremony] seemed put on for the sake of the relatives who would now recognize the relationship, whether they privately approved or not, as legitimized and one of those things which were to be accepted because established by custom and common consent.24

• 26 Ibid., p. 240.

Meanwhile a caller had come to Dineen, introduced himself as Herr Scheffer, and invited H to go to Germany to give readings from his novels under the auspices of a body called Die Deutsche Akademie.26

18H’s supposed indifference and passivity to the realities around him are offered as excuses used by Stuart to elude a clear explanation why a Third-Reich official should suddenly show such interest for a semi-obscure Irish writer whose reputation had not yet crossed the borders, contrary to other Irish writers like George Bernard Shaw, Yeats, or James Joyce. Any suggestion that a sympathy for the ideology of the Reich might underlie H’s decision to move to Germany is carefully undercut by other seemingly more urging causes, such as H’s growing estrangement from Iseult, the repeated defeats of his horse on the racing-tracks, and of course the lure of self-banishment:

• 27 Ibid., p. 238.

[…] the only side to take was always the one considered most unpardonable by the circle in which he found himself, in this case that of most intellectuals with a sprinkling of enlightened politicians.27

22Stuart only rarely directly addresses the issue of H’s collaboration with the Nazis. On one occasion, as H catches sight of some Jewish businesses being “broken and barricaded” he wonders if his presence in Berlin might be considered a betrayal of his Jewish friends, among them Gollancz, Stuart’s long-standing publisher, as hinted at before. The following sentence is again typical of Stuart’s circuitous way of writing, which while pretending to be reluctant to justify H’s choices, nevertheless conveys the most ambiguous feelings:

• 33 Ibid., p. 259.

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 also realized 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.33

23By drawing a comparison between H’s peculiar form of masochism and the persecution of the Jews, Stuart belittles, if not completely denies, the scale of Shoah. H’s egotistic existential qualms are equated with the systematic destruction of six million people all over Europe, the disappearance of whole communities and their language and culture. The comparison also slyly implies that, like H, the Jews brought their misfortune on themselves. What is more, the attempt to justify any degree of collaboration with one of the most heinous episodes of modern Western history by the mere desire to “react against the mores of home” – which from what we gather from the first part of H’s story amounts to a stifling moral conformism, and a repressive atmosphere of sexual prudishness – is intellectually and morally outrageous. Finally, the alleged “sympathy” which the suffering of the Jews is bound to arouse in public opinion according to Stuart hints at another antisemitic cliché according to which Jews always treacherously seek to pass off as victims. Besides, Stuart devotes the last section of the book to the description of H’s and Halka’s sufferings during their flight from Berlin and their final imprisonment, suggesting that they were the real victims of the conflict, and not the millions of men, women and children who died in concentration camps or on the battlefield at Stalingrad.

• 36 Ibid., p. 382.

When he recalled some of his semi-serious fantasies at the time of his first coming to Berlin, in one of which he’d tried to persuade Hitler to use his unique power to bring about a real revolution, he couldn’t be certain he hadn’t been infected by the plague, however unusual his symptoms.36

25Of course fascism is called a plague but Hitler is simultaneously acknowledged as possessing a “unique” power, and the call for a “real revolution” echoes the typical fascist hatred of the established order and their yearning for a new world based on tyranny and dictatorship.

26The truth about Stuart, as revealed by the transcripts of his broadcasts published by Barrington, is that he was a staunch Irish nationalist who, like people inside the IRA, believed that the Germans could help them bring about a united Ireland, and therefore hoped for a Nazi victory against their great enemies which were Britain and the United States.

28The younger writers’ attraction for such a persona as H could also lie in Irish people’s slight interest in World War II and in the Holocaust, due to the country’s neutrality in the conflict and the complex reality underlying it, not to mention the relatively small number of Jews in Ireland. The fact that the IRA wanted a German victory, that in 1935, Dáil Éireann responded to the rise of Hitler by passing the Aliens Act, designed to keep Jews out of Ireland, or that Éamon de Valera was one of the first heads of state to send his condolences on the death of Hitler are some of the complex issues which surround the history of World War II seen from Ireland. As O’Toole reminds us in the same article where he defends Stuart:

• 38 Fintan O’Toole, “Stuart Has Confronted Outcome of His Actions”.

If we want to talk about Irish guilt regarding Nazism and the Holocaust, there are more obvious places to begin. […] The difference between Francis Stuart and all of these other collaborators is that he, at least, engaged with the consequences of his actions. Other writers who had been drawn to right-wing totalitarianism and then became disillusioned with it – W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, for example – took refuge in an artistic flight from reality.38

• 40 “L’admiration pieuse et inconditionnelle pour le ‘génie littéraire’ nommé Céline, avec son cortège (...)

The pious, unconditional admiration for Céline’s “literary genius”, accompanied by a stream of legends fabricated by the “great writer” himself, has long been part and parcel of political correctness. […] The[ir] worship of the alleged “visionary” went along with compassion for the “victim” he was supposed to have been. It is the heart of the legend of Céline, that of a hero and martyr for the sake of Literature who was wrongfully accused, and even persecuted.40