Henry Francis Montgomery Stuart (29 April 19022 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. His associations with the IRA and years in Nazi Germany led to a great deal of controversy.

Early life

Francis Stuart was born in Townsville, Queensland, Australia on 29 April 1902 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 Iseult Gonne, Maud Gonne's daughter. Maud Gonne's companion, Mary Barry O'Delaney, stood as his godmother upon his conversion. Aged 24 years, Iseult had had a romantic but unsettled life. Maud Gonne's estranged husband John MacBride was executed in 1916 for taking part in the Easter Rising. Iseult Gonne's father was the right-wing French politician Lucien Millevoye, with whom Maud Gonne had

an affair between 1887 and 1899. Because of her complex family situation, Iseult was often passed off as Maud Gonne's niece in conservative circles in Ireland. Iseult grew up in Paris and London. She had been proposed to by W. B. Yeats in 1917 (he had also earlier proposed to her mother; Yeats was 50 at the time, Iseult 20). She also had a brief affair with Ezra Pound prior to meeting Stuart. Pound and Stuart both believed in the primacy of the artist over the masses and were subsequently drawn to fascism; Stuart to Nazi Germany and Pound to Fascist Italy.

IRA involvement

Iseult gave birth to a daughter, Dolores, on either 6 or 9 March 1921. (Sources conflict—Geoffrey Elborn says 6 March, while Kevin Kiely says 9 March.) Only a few months later, on 24 July, Dolores died of spinal meningitis.

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 in 1922, 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 1936 poem "Why should not Old Men be Mad?" in which he lists what he regards as provocations to rage, he claims he has seen

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

Iseult gave birth to a son, Ian, also spelled Ion, on 5 October 1926.

Another time, neighbours reported seeing a fire in the couple's house:

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."

Antisemitism

Stuart is known to have written only one piece of what might be considered antisemitic 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.

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

Post World War II

In 1945 Stuart decided to return to Ireland with a former student, Gertrud "Madeleine" 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. Stuart and Meissner 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 documenting his life and distinguished by a queasy sensitivity to moral complexity and moral ambiguity.

Meissner died in 1986, and Stuart married his third wife, Finola Graham, in 1987.

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.

In 1996 Stuart was elected a Saoi of Aosdána. This is a great honour in the Irish artistic and literary world 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 sympathiser; Stuart sued for 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".

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

Stuart's son Ian studied sculpture under Laurence Campbell in Ireland and, in 1948, Otto Hitzberger in Germany, where Ian met his first wife, the sculptor Imogen Stuart (). Ian and Imogen married in 1951, had three children together (Aiobheann, Aisling, and Siobhán), and divorced in 1971. Ian then married 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. Ian Stuart died on 8 February 2013.

Works

;Fiction

  • We Have Kept the Faith, Dublin 1923
  • Women and God, London 1931
  • Pigeon Irish, London 1932
  • The Coloured Dome, London 1932
  • Try the Sky, London 1933
  • Glory, London 1933
  • Things to Live For: Notes for an Autobiography, London 1934
  • In Search of Love, London 1935
  • The Angels of Pity, London 1935
  • The White Hare, London 1936
  • The Bridge, London 1937
  • Julie, London 1938
  • The Great Squire, London 1939
  • Der Fall Casement, Hamburg 1940
  • The Pillar of Cloud, London 1948
  • Redemption, London 1949
  • The Flowering Cross, London 1950
  • Good Friday's Daughter, London 1952
  • The Chariot, London 1953
  • The Pilgrimage, London 1955
  • Victors and Vanquished, London 1958
  • Angels of Providence, London 1959
  • Black List Section H, Southern Illinois University Press 1971 )
  • Memorial, London 1973
  • A Hole in the Head, London 1977
  • The High Consistory, London 1981
  • We Have Kept the Faith: New and Selected Poems, Dublin 1982
  • States of Mind, Dublin 1984
  • Faillandia, Dublin 1985
  • The Abandoned Snail Shell, Dublin 1987
  • Night Pilot, Dublin 1988
  • A Compendium of Lovers, Dublin 1990
  • Arrow of Anguish, Dublin 1995
  • King David Dances, Dublin 1996

;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

See also

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

References

Bibliography

  • Stephan, Enno (1963). Spies in Ireland. London: Macdonald.
  • Lengthy interview conducted in 1998 by Naim Attallah
  • Aosdána short biography
  • RTÉ short obituary
  • The Guardian obituary
  • Francis Stuart Papers, 1932–1971 at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Special Collections Research Center
  • Colm Tóibín, "Issues of Truth and Invention" – Essay on Francis Stuart
  • Amanda French, " A Strangely Useless Thing': Iseult Gonne and Yeats," Yeats Eliot Review: A Journal of Criticism and Scholarship 19.2 (2002): 13–24. (pdf)