Francis Stuart

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For other people named Francis Stuart, see Francis Stuart (disambiguation).

Francis Stuart
Born(1902-04-29)29 April 1902
Townsville, Queensland, Australia
Died2 February 2000(2000-02-02) (aged 97)
County Clare, Ireland
OccupationWriter, lecturer
NationalityIrish
GenreFiction, poetry, essays
Notable works
  • The Pillar of Cloud
  • Redemption
  • The Flowering Cross
  • Black List, Section H
  • Memorial
  • The High Consistory
Spouse
  • Iseult Gonne
  • Gertrud Meissner ("Madeleine")
  • Finola Graham
Children
  • Dolores
  • Ian
  • Katherine

Henry Francis Montgomery Stuart (29 April 1902 – 2 February 2000) was an Irish writer. He was awarded one of the highest artistic accolades in Ireland, being elected a Saoi of Aosdána, before his death in 2000.[1] His years in Nazi Germany led to a great deal of controversy.[2]

Early life

Francis Stuart was born in Townsville, Queensland, Australia[3][4] on 29 April 1902[5] to Irish Protestant parents, Henry Irwin Stuart and Elizabeth Barbara Isabel Montgomery. His father was an alcoholic and killed himself when Stuart was an infant. The widowed Elizabeth Stuart returned with her son to Ireland. The boy's childhood was divided between his home in Ireland and Rugby School in England, where he boarded.

In 1920, at age 17, he became a Catholic and married

Fascist Italy
.

IRA involvement

Gonne 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. The couple were caught up on the anti-Treaty Irish Republican Army (IRA) side of this fight. Stuart was involved in gunrunning and was interned after a botched raid.

Literary career

After the establishment of the Irish Free State, 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 provocations to rage, he claims he has seen

"A girl that knew all Dante once
Live to bear children to a dunce"

The first of these lines is accepted as referring to Gonne and the second to Stuart (Elborn 1990).

Stuart and Gonne had three children, a daughter Dolores who died three months old, 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 and later to the Berlin-trained artist and jewellery designer Anna Stuart whom he first met in 1970. They gave Stuart three grandchildren; food entrepreneur Laragh, photographer Suki and sculptor Sophia.

Stuart's time with Gonne may not have been an entirely happy time; from the accounts given in his apparently autobiographical novels, both he and his wife struggled with personal demons, and their internal anguish poisoned their marriage. In her letters to close friend William Butler Yeats, Iseult Gonne's mother Maud Gonne characterizes Francis Stuart as being emotionally, financially, and physically abusive towards Iseult: "Stuart's conduct towards Iseult is shocking. While they were staying with me in Dublin he struck her & one day knocked her down. He threw her out of her own room with such violence that she fell on the landing half-dressed at the feet of Claud Chevasse who was staying in the house at the time."[7] Another time, neighbours reported seeing a fire in the couple's house: "They found Iseult in her dressing gown outside. Stuart had locked himself in her room from where the flames were coming. They could see him pouring petroleum. Finally, he opened the door -- he had been burning Iseult's clothes to punish her! Frequently he locked her up without food."[8]

Involvement with the Third Reich

It was also during the 1930s that Stuart became friendly with German Intelligence (

Nazi Auslandorganisation (AO) – the Nazi Party's foreign organization – in pre-war Ireland.[citation needed
]

Stuart was also friendly with the head of the

Friedrich Wilhelm University to begin in 1940. At this time, under the Nuremberg Laws, the German academic system had barred Jews[relevant?].[citation needed
]

In July 1939, Stuart returned home to

Stephen Hayes then met at O'Donovan's house. Stuart was told to take a message to Abwehr HQ in Berlin.[citation needed
]

He arrived in Berlin in January 1940. Upon arrival, he delivered the IRA message and had some discussion with the Abwehr on conditions in Ireland and the fate of the IRA–Abwehr radio link. He also reactivated his acquaintance with Abwehr asset Helmut Clissmann who was acting as an advisor to

SS Colonel Dr Edmund Veesenmayer. Through Clissmann, Stuart was introduced to Sonderführer Kurt Haller. Around August 1940, Stuart was asked by Haller if he would participate in Operation Dove and he agreed, although he was later dropped in favour of Frank Ryan. While Stuart maintained contact with Ryan until his death in June 1944, there's no record of any further involvement by him with the Abwehr.[citation needed
]

Time in Berlin

Between March 1942 and January 1944 Stuart worked as part of the Redaktion-Irland (also sometimes referred to as Irland-Redaktion, "Editorial Ireland" in English) team, reading radio broadcasts containing

Nazi ideology and propaganda which were aimed at and heard in Ireland. Before deciding to accept this job he discussed it with Frank Ryan, and they agreed that no anti-Semitic or anti-Soviet statements should be made. He was dropped from the Redaktion-Irland team in January 1944 because he objected to the anti-Soviet material that was presented to him and deemed essential by his supervisors. His passport was taken from him by the Gestapo after this event.[9]

In his radio broadcasts, he frequently spoke with admiration of

Hitler and expressed the hope that a victorious Nazi Germany would help create a united 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. Stuart described one such event at the Berlin Olympic stadium in June 1939 as: "A most amazing thing. Such a spectacle and organisation."[10]

Anti-semitism

Stuart is known to have read only one piece of what might be considered anti-semitic propaganda for Redaktion-Irland: his first. Whilst enthralled with the macabre spectacle of wartime Nazi Germany, he is also on record via his letters as deploring much of what he saw around him.[11]

However, Stuart did write the following in a 1924 Sinn Féin pamphlet (discovered by journalist Brendan Barrington, see Bibliography):

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.[12]

Post World War II

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, an autobiographical fiction[13] documenting his life and distinguished by a queasy sensitivity to moral complexity and moral ambiguity.

In 1991 he made an extended appearance on British television: on 16 March he took part in an

After Dark discussion called The Luck of The Irish? alongside J. P. Donleavy, David Norris, Emily O'Reilly, Paul Hill and others.[14]

In 1996 Stuart was elected a

libel and the case was settled out of court. The statement from the Irish Times read out in the High Court accepted "that Mr Stuart never expressed anti-Semitism in his writings or otherwise".[11]

For some years before his death he lived in County Clare with his partner Fionuala[who?] and in County Wicklow with his son Ian and daughter-in-law Anna in a house outside Laragh village.[citation needed] Stuart died of natural causes on 2 February 2000 at the age of 97 in County Clare.[5][16]

Works

Stuart wrote many novels including Black List Section H (1971). His best-known work is heavily autobiographical. Much of his writing is now out of print.[citation needed]

Fiction
Pamphlets
  • Nationality and Culture, Dublin 1924
  • Mystics and Mysticism, Dublin 1929
  • Racing for Pleasure and Profit in Ireland and Elsewhere, Dublin 1937
Plays
  • Men Crowd me Round, 1933
  • Glory, 1936
  • Strange Guests, 1940
  • Flynn's Last Dive, 1962
  • Who Fears to Speak, 1970

Bibliography

See also

  • IRA Abwehr World War II
    – main article on IRA Nazi links

References

  1. ^ Irish Times, In honour of Francis Stuart? October 10, 1996
  2. ^ Obituary of Francis Stuart. The Guardian, 4 February 2000.
  3. ^ Francis Stuart Archived 5 October 2018 at the Wayback Machine Irish Paris. Retrieved: 29 August 2013.
  4. ^ Francis Stuart: Life Ricorso Irish writers database. Retrieved: 29 August 2013.
  5. ^ a b Obituary: Francis Stuart The Guardian, 4 February 2000.
  6. ^ Maume, Patrick (2009). "O'Delaney, Mary Barry". In McGuire, James; Quinn, James (eds.). Dictionary of Irish Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  7. ISBN 9780393034455
    .
  8. ISBN 9780393034455
    .
  9. ISBN 1-900960-04-4
  10. ^ Hull, p.310
  11. ^
    The Irish Independent
    . p. 1.
  12. ^ Colm Tóibín, "Issues of Truth and Invention" (Part II), London Review of Books, 1 September 2000, on colmtoibin.com
  13. ISBN 0198661584. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help
    )
  14. ^ See List of After Dark editions#Series 4
  15. ^ The Irish Times, 27 November 1997
  16. ^ Francis Stuart dies RTÉ News, 2 February 2000.

External links

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