Sir, - Kevin Myers (October 22nd) quotes Francis Stuart as having stated on the Channel 4 documentary (a poorly made, jaundiced documentary) on the IRA and anti-semitism that "the Jew is like the worm in the rose".
What Kevin Myers does not tell us is that Stuart was quoting from himself; from Black List, Section H (London 1975), page 64, where H (Stuart's alter-ego) is contrasting his own identification with the Jewish character against Iseult Gonne's anti-semitism: "She lived too much in the mind, by moral or spiritual judgements, not to distrust what he was beginning to see was the Jewish character: humble where she was proud, realist where she relied on abstract principles, revelling in the senses which to her were tiresome. If there was a Jewish idea, which was surely a contradiciton, it was a hidden, unheroic, and critical one, a worm that could get into a lot of fine-looking fruit".
The worm metaphor is intended as a profound spiritual affirmation and Stuart all his own life has striven to be such a worm himself: "hidden, unheroic, and critical".
In Black List, Section H it is Stuart's identification with individual Jewish friends as well as with the Jewish race that sets him out on the path of a lifetime's vilification by the likes of Kevin Myers.
I admire Kevin Myers (a rare bird - one who can write prose well) when he is writing about what he loves - e.g. Patrick O'Brian's novels - but when he is motivated by ignorance and loathing he would break your heart.
Like a good man, he should read Black List, Section H before any further spitting in the face of Francis Stuart.
The truths of history lie in the fictions of the O'Brians and Stuarts of this world and not in the diatribes of the Sebag-Montefiores and the Myerses. -Yours, etc., Paul Durcan,
Ringsend,
Dublin 4.