Many writers have been misread, but none as consistently and as unfairly as Francis Stuart, usually by adversaries who have yet to read his books. In Ireland he became a convenient target of hatred for those desperate to justify their pathetic righteousness. Most of the time Stuart responded with resigned amusement.
Notoriety ensured he would not be forgotten and he cultivated a benign anarchy. Freedom from convention was his creed, risk was his natural medium and for him artists had to be scapegoats.
True to his humour - and he was very funny - he refused to justify himself, thus outraging his enemies. By living so long, by outliving his world and his century, he was doomed to pay the ultimate price, that of survival.
An active writer almost to the end, Stuart never became Ireland's great literary elder statesman. More minor European absurdist than major Irish writer, his concerns, in spite of his avowed republicanism, belonged to the cult of the individual.
Author of a large, uneven and haphazardly interrelated body of work, his awkward, relentlessly questing art possessed one all-important unifying theme, his life.
It is pointless placing him in a political context, his preoccupations were almost exclusively interior. He broadcast from Germany, encouraged Ireland's policy of neutrality and was sympathetic to IRA prisoners. He was neither political nor particularly intellectual. "I went to Germany to work and stayed."
Dubbed an outsider, a role he embraced as essential to his work, he set out to explore the nature of being an individual and was determined to arrive at the heart as well as the meaning of consciousness. It was this almost pagan spirituality which in fact rendered him a religious writer.
Contradictions will always surround him, but he recognised confusion as a central, unavoidable and vital fact of life. His work will always remain divided into two groups, Black List, Section H and the rest, which includes The Coloured Dome (1933), The Pillar of Cloud (1948) Redemption (1949), The Flowering Cross (1950), his two Northern Ireland novels, Memorial (1973) and A Hole in the Head (1977), The High Consistory (1981) and Faillandia (1985).
His legacy will always be contained within the pages of Black List, Section H which he saw as "an imaginative fiction in which only real people appear, and under their actual names where possible". First published in the US in 1971, it is a summation of all his novels as well as the record of much of his life. In it H. - his alter ego - announces somewhat melodramatically, "literature was only to be experienced by those who pluck it direct from life".
Stuart certainly did; his life provided him with his fiction.
He was no stylist; his flat, formal flat prose lumbers rather than flows and at times the syntax gives the impression that English was not his first language. There is a quality of translation about it, little music, no lyricism.
Why did he choose to write Black List in the third person and in the past tense? For all its stiffness, or possibly because of it, Stuart's relentless narrative voice defines emotional chaos with an unsettling exactness. Another achievement is the subtly ironic and sustained tone of cultivated gormlessness.
Despite its status as an account of the events which shaped European history, Black List, Section H, which has always been simplistically regarded as the record of his stay in wartime Germany, is primarily the story of the shaping of a raw consciousness.
H. wants to be a writer although he is dismissed as illiterate. Stuart, by his own admission barely educated, entered the society of writers and artists almost by default. At 18, he married the beautiful and sophisticated Iseult Gonne, six years his senior, a former lover of Ezra Pound. She had already rejected Yeats. There is a ragged, unabashed truthfulness about Black List which is true of its creator. The book succeeds largely through the portrayal of H. as a half-hearted, self-absorbed obsessive, wary of responsibility and on the run from everything. For all his dithering however, H. is also something of a career dreamer with lofty aspirations, intent on acquiring a Dostoyevskian urgency.
It is no coincidence that the 19th-century Russian master should mean so much to Stuart - the blackness, the frenzy, the humour and the tormented spirituality caught his imagination.
Stuart did not see himself as a witness, primarily because he always acknowledged that he was far more interested in the individual than society. Impressions, not absolutes, concerned him.
Stuart could be seen as the prophet of hindsight, a contradiction he would have liked. He could look back, recall, recreate, just as H. is alert to comments and gestures, but Stuart was neither introspective nor analytical, he reacted to memory.
In a clever aside in Black List, H., the aspiring young literary man and passive student of life, borrows back numbers of the New York Times Book Review, "the idea of a weekly paper devoted wholly to literature struck him as peculiar as having religious periodicals".
Black List, Section H is not about wartime Germany, it is one man's story, his own, part of which took place in that country.
Stuart wrote his war book many years earlier. The Pillar of Cloud is set in the moral ruins, "the vast graveyard" of post-war Germany. In it he attempts to explain what happened. It does not work; Stuart dismissed it believing, "I wrote it too soon. I should have allowed more time to pass."
Beyond sentimentality, beyond sexuality, women, in his fiction, are redeemers. In Redemption, the second novel in the trilogy, Margareta's reappearance assures Ezra Arrigho, his spiritual peace.
In the concluding volume, The Flowering Cross, the imprisoned Louis Clancy wins his freedom through his love for Alyse, the blind girl. The central figures in Memorial and A Hole in the Head are both writers, each obsessed with a woman. For Segrue in Memorial it is Herra, for Barnaby Shane in the later novel, it is Emily Bronte.
Stuart's depiction of relationships is dominated by a sense of the neurotic. His characters need tenderness to the point of violence. Innocence is invariably under pressure from evil, but for Stuart, the religious writer, it survives and redeems.
In Black List, H. rediscovers the Bible, also revealing a complete indifference to Irish censorship law. At a dinner party which includes Yeats, H. says: "If somebody somewhere writes a book which is so radical and original . . . that it would burst the present literary set-up wide open, the writer would be treated with a polite contempt by the critical and academic authorities that will discourage further mention of him. He'll raise deeper, more subconscious hostility than sectarian ones and he'll be destroyed far more effectively by enlightened neglect than anything we would do to him here."
Yeats looks at him and asks: "You believe that the artist is bound to be rejected? You equate him with the prophet?"
Not quite the prophet, Stuart the questing, religious outsider shaped by his doubts and ambiguities, is ultimately more truthteller than artist.