Francis Stuart
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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 can be interpreted less appreciatively in the light of his propaganda work for Nazi Germany during World War II and the subsequent controversy.
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[edit] Early life
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.
[edit] IRA involvement
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 Irish Republican Army (IRA) side of this fight, Stuart was involved in gun running and was interned after a botched raid.
[edit] Literary career
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 provocations 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 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. 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.
[edit] Involvement with the Third Reich
It was also during the 1930's that Stuart became friendly with German Intelligence (Abwehr) agent Helmut Clissmann and his Irish wife Elizabeth. Clissmann was working for the German Academic Exchange Service and the Deutsche Akademie (DA). He was facilitating academic exchanges between Ireland and the Third Reich but also forming connections which might be of benefit to German Intelligence. Clissmann was also a representative of the Nazi Auslandorganisation (AO)- the Nazi Party's foreign organisation in pre-war Ireland.
Stuart was also friendly with the head of the German Legation in Dublin, Dr. Eduard Hempel, largely as a result of Maud Gonne MacBride's rapport with him. By 1938 Stuart was seeking a way out of his marriage and the provincialism of Irish life. Iseult intervened with Clissmann to arrange for Stuart to travel to Germany to give a series of academic lectures in conjunction with the DA. Stuart travelled to Germany in April 1939 and his host in Germany was Professor Walter F. Schirmer, the senior member of the English faculty with the DA and Berlin University. He eventually visited Munich, Hamburg, Bonn and Cologne. At the completion of his lecture tour he accepted an appointment as lecturer in English and Irish literature at Berlin University to begin in 1940.
In July 1939 Stuart returned home to Laragh and confirmed at the outbreak of war in September that he would still take the place in Berlin. When Stuart's plans for travelling to Germany were finalised, he received a visit from his brother-in-law, Séan MacBride, this meeting followed the seizure of an IRA transmitter on 29 December 1939, which had been used to contact Germany. Stuart, MacBride, Seamus O'Donovan, and IRA Chief of Staff Stephen Hayes then met at O'Donovan's house. Stuart was told to take a message to Abwehr HQ. in Berlin. He travelled alone to Nazi Germany, something that was possible because Ireland was neutral in the Second World War, and arrived in Berlin during January 1940. Upon arrival he delivered the IRA message and had some discussion with the Abwehr on the 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 Vessenmayer. 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. In so far as is known he had no further contact with German Intelligence although he did maintain links with Frank Ryan up to his death and funeral in June 1944.
[edit] Time in Berlin
Between March 1942 and January 1944 Stuart worked as part of the Redaktion-Irland ("Editorial Ireland" in English) team, reading radio broadcasts containing German propaganda which were aimed at and heard in Ireland.[1] 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.
In his radio broadcasts 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. Stuart described one such event at the Berlin Olympic stadium in June 1939 as: “A most amazing thing. Such a spectacle and organisation.”[2]
[edit] Anti-semitism
Stuart is known to have read only one piece of what might be considered anti-semitic propaganda for Redaktion-Irland: his first, and even then it was a single sentence. 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. He was able to recognise anti-semitic propaganda as it appeared in the magazine "Der Stürmer":
"These are mostly pages from newspapers - especially The Sturmer [sic], the special anti-semitic one."
And in the same letter he remarked:
"I have heard something of the Jewish activities prior to 1933 here and in cooperation with the communists - they were in many instances appalling."[3]
[edit] 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, 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. While the Aosdána affair was ongoing, Irish Times columnist Kevin Myers attacked 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.[1] Even so, subsequent research by Brendan Barrington (see Bibliography) would mean the Irish Times would now have a much stronger case.
Francis Stuart died of natural causes at the age of 97 in Ireland.
[edit] Works
Francis Stuart wrote over thirty books including Black List Section H (1971) ISBN 0-14-006229-7.
[edit] Bibliography
- Anne McCartney, Francis Stuart face to face: a critical study (2000), Institute for Irish Studies Publications, Belfast ISBN 0-85389-768-9
- Francis Stuart, The Wartime Broadcasts of Francis Stuart edited by Brendan Barrington (2000), Lilliput Press, Dublin ISBN 1-901866-54-8
- Mark M. Hull, Irish Secrets. German Espionage in Ireland 1939-1945, 2003, Irish Academic Press ISBN 0-7165-2756-1
- Enno Stephan, Spies in Ireland, 1963. ISBN 1-131-82692-2 (reprint)
[edit] References
Francis Stuart: A life by Geoffrey Elborn Raven Arts Press 1990
[edit] External links
- Aosdána short biography
- RTÉ short obituary
- Biographical note at the Southern Illinois University library
- Essay by Colm Tóibín on Francis Stuart
- An essay about the relationship between William Yeats and Iseult Gonne (pdf)
[edit] See also
IRA Abwehr WW2 - main article on IRA Nazi links
