Francis Stuart: Artist and Outcast (review)

Few writers would have less cause to complain that interest in their lives had eclipsed study of their work than would Francis Stuart. His numerous escapades and associations—as an operative in the Irish Civil War, a point in the Yeats-Gonne-MacBride romantic geometry through his marriage to Iseult Gonne, a carouser in literary Paris and Dublin, a radio broadcaster from Nazi Germany, and as a controversially rehabilitated saoi of Aosdána—would tempt any biographer, historian, or polemicist to write of Stuart apart from his literary creations. But a literary biographer who finds himself drawn more toward the biography than the literature need only turn to the credo voiced by H, the autobiographical hero of Stuart's Black List, Section H (1971), who informs Yeats, "It's the writer who's one with his work . . . who says the things that now mattermost." Stuart rejected Yeats's choice between"perfection of the life, or of the work," treating them as a single thing; and for good measure, he tossed out an ideal of perfection as well.

Kevin Kiely—a friend and admirer of the late author—quotes from Stuart's writings throughout the biographical narrative of Francis Stuart: Artist and Outcast. Much of the book, however, is based on Kiely's conversations with his subject. These discussions were conducted both informally, while Kiely was one of the several younger writers drawn to Stuart in the 1980s, and formally, once the book became "the task that Stuart set [Kiely], namely to write an account of his life with reference to his works in it."The biographer's congenial access to Stuart lends the book an authentic immediacy, but there is also a whiff of forced objectivity in his personal asides, as if Kiely is at pains to remind the reader he is not a ghost writer of exculpatory autobiography. In general, he eschews judgment on the most controversial aspects of Stuart's life, which were his collaboration with the Nazis and his abandonment of his family. Influenced by Stuart's own commitment to an ethical neutrality, Kiely's "aim is neither to defend nor condemn but to present the evidence as accurately as possible."

Too often, though, the limits to the use of that evidence were set either by Stuart's cooperation or by the biographer's own good manners. Was it as a guest, rather than a researcher, that Kiely shied from asking why Francis and Madeleine Stuart—his second wife, née Gertrude Meissner—still kept a German map of 1942 Europe in 1980s Wicklow? This, like Madeleine's friendship with William Joyce, aka Lord Haw-Haw, is one of the facts Kiely presents without editorializing. While one reader might enjoy the interpretive freedom, another reader might feel that she or he has been passed the buck. Judgment need not be judgmental; neutral readers of Artist and Outcast ought to ask themselves, as many Irish people wryly asked of their own government during the war, Just who are we neutral against?

Kiely does deserve credit for not writing the book that more opinionated readers, eager to prove Stuart's lapses, would have demanded. He seeks to treat the whole of Stuart's life, from his birth in Australia in 1902 to his death in Country Clare in 2000, and refuses to organize the rest of the biography into a preamble and postscript to the war years. Reading of Stuart's poverty in the '50s and '60s, when he and Madeleine worked menial jobs so that he could continue to write despite the malign neglect of publishers and readers, even cynics will concede that Stuart's sense of artistic mission was no after-the-fact rationalization for his enthusiastic and well-rewarded collaboration with the Nazis. But it is undoubtedly a fiction, in Stuart's sense; that is, while the notion that Stuart went to Germany driven by a need to associate with the guilty may be a more penetrating vision of...