Biography:Francis Stuart had a gun. The location was Liberty Hall. The occasion was a staged reading of his play, Who Fears to Speak, which had been accepted, then rejected, by the Abbey Theatre because of its "propogandist outlook on modern Ireland".
The reason for the rejection was made plain when Stuart strode on to the stage and produced the gun. The audience applauded what was plainly a symbolic gesture: a reaffirmation by a writer with a revolutionary past of the validity of the gun in contemporary politics. The date, December 1st, 1970, was significant: exactly a fortnight earlier the Provisional IRA had gunned down two Catholic men in Belfast. According to Lost Lives by David McKittrick et al, it was the first time the IRA had murdered civilians "alleged to have been involved in criminality". The wife of one victim said of the murderer: "I think that person must be very sick."
Was Francis Stuart sick? Evil? Uncaring? Or was he mentally healthy and morally good? One reason why these questions are still debated in Ireland - the debate is notably insular - is that we can ask them of ourselves. Certainly, I can do so: I was in Liberty Hall that night and may have joined in the applause. A writer with a gun. Wow!
Kevin Kiely says that Stuart "could hardly object" to being seen as an ally of the IRA. But the primacy of the alliance is rather lost sight of in this book, as it was during the 1997 controversy about awarding the Aosdána title of Saoi to a writer who had referred to the "Jewish idea" as "a worm that could get into a lot of fine looking fruit" and who had broadcast for the Nazis during the war.
EVEN BEFORE THE war Stuart's sympathies were on display: in 1939 he was, "in the spirit of fun", flying the Swastika over his Wicklow home. By the time he arrived in Berlin, in January 1940, the IRA-Nazi connection was known to Irish military intelligence. The G2 officer who told me this was Colonel Dan Bryan. I met him in 1982 while researching Caught in a Free State, the RTÉ TV drama about German spies in Ireland. Later that year I sent the script to Stuart. His response was welcoming. Considering the possible damage to his reputation, this was paradoxically generous, almost masochistically so. As such it was a variation on a complex psychological theme that more usually involved a combination of passive guilt and active evasiveness.
Throughout Stuart's life these paradoxes infuriated his enemies and endeared him to his friends.
Unfortunately, Kiely's book, while it acknowledges the enmity, is unduly friendly when it comes to analysing Stuart's piercing yet shielded personality. But objectivity is, perhaps, too much to ask of what is less a biography than the record of a long friendship. However, even as a record the book has shortcomings. Kiely hurries over the controversy about whether he should be made a Saoi of Aosdana , for example, because it "would mean too lengthy a digression". (He delays long enough, though, to make the bizarre claim that John Banville resigned from Aosdána because the organisation was "an effective civil service for artists" and, therefore, "repugnant" to him.)
KIELY HAS A nonchalant attitude to nomenclature - Sean MacBride, for example, is described as "Chief of Staff of the political wing of the IRA". His prose is similarly casual. Some of the infelicities are merely awkward (though in this instance revealing): "Stuart had an obsession with rulers, leaders, kings and despots and enjoyed telling their life's events and about the women whom they pursued". Some are poetic: Iseult Stuart "was someone to whom horses were almost zoo-like creatures, functionless on the landscape and remote from her consciousness". Some are baffling, such as the following about the suicide of Darrell Figgis in London: "It was a shock to Stuart as the news filtered back mainly through gossip, as did the news of the death of Figgis's mistress, and the suicide of Figgis's wife two years before her husband's".
Stuart's own version of his sojourn in Germany, faithfully redacted by Kiely, is set in the same kind of opaque jelly. Consider, for instance, the slipperiness of "deference" in the following sentence: "It is a moot point as to whether Stuart, out of deference to his wife and mother-in-law [ Maud Gonne], intended taking an IRA message to Berlin for the sake of the adventure or in support of the IRA". Kiely here inserts a quivering distinction of his own: "This action . . . has labelled him pro-German if not pro-IRA". The reporting of Stuart's wobbling then resumes: "His own opinion was that the adventurer aspect came first for him. His action, he said, required one to take an overall view and make a complete ideological leap and to see him as the outcast, neutral observer, the novelist and poet rather than an IRA activist. He had to decide, if he reached Berlin, whether he would deliver the secret contents of that message." As an example of Stuart's evasiveness, this argument is Bird's Jelly De Luxe.
On his arrival in Berlin, Stuart was given an eight-room apartment and taken to meet the head of the German Foreign Office. Kiely mentions in passing that during this meeting Stuart expressed a desire to meet Professor Franz Fromme, an old acquaintance from Dublin. This is Stuart at his most disingenuous: Fromme was an important Nazi asset and a vital link to other IRA figures, notably Frank Ryan, the socialist republican recently released from a Spanish prison.
Stuart's relationship with Ryan was crucial. According to Kiely, it was something the writer did not like to talk about. That did not prevent him alleging that Ryan had privileged access to Nazi brothels. The role Stuart played in relations between Ryan and the IRA leader Sean Russell is murky; nor is there any clarity about his knowledge of Russell's suspicious death in a German submarine in 1940. About the claim that Ryan expected to become a minister in a Nazi-backed Irish government, the old-guard leftist Manus O'Riordan said that Stuart was "a self-serving venomous old viper anxious to foist his own sins on Ryan". That kind of vehemence helps the neutral observer to understand why those who promote the writer's naiveté or, indeed, what Kiely calls his "beatitude", are so often so angrily defensive. It is less easy to understand why anyone would give serious consideration to Stuart's claim that "deep down" he knew Germany would lose the war and for that reason wanted to be, as Kiely puts it, "with the losers in their utter perdition". Had that want been real, siding with the Jews could have satisfied it promptly.
AS A PERSONALITY, Stuart will continue to be of interest to political and cultural historians. The story of his marriage to Iseult, for instance, is worth a book on its own. The violence she suffered during the early part of the relationship apparently included starvation and the burning of her clothes. W B Yeats, who got involved in sorting out the largely sexual chaos, said, "the young man is a sadist - one of those who torture those they love, a recognised lunatic type". Yeats is hardly an objective witness: he had himself proposed marriage to Iseult, which might have been worse than misfortunate, since he sometimes "thought" he was Iseult's mystical father and Maud Gonne sometimes wondered if he was Stuart's "real father".
Kiely asks: "Was [ Stuart] trying to cause her death?" He answers the question thus: "The burning of Iseult's dresses may have been subconscious revenge for her previous sex life. He admitted to me that their relationship was so fraught as to be doomed. She in turn broke his plaster heron - a legacy of art classes at Rugby". On second thoughts, the ménage calls not for a book but a play - Who Fears To Speak as a dreadful comedy, a symbolic farce with a fake gun and real dead bodies. Much of the ammunition for it is on display in this fascinatingly accurate echo of Stuart's own eerie voice.
Brian Lynch is currently the Writer Fellow in Trinity College Dublin
A fascinatingly accurate echo of the controversial writer's own eerie voice Francis Stuart: Artist and Outcast By Kevin Kiely The Liffey Press, 365pp. €22.95