Another piece of the Stuart jigsaw

Even now, approaching the first anniversary of his death, it remains impossible to attempt an intelligent debate about the writer Francis Stuart without being attacked or misquoted. And "writer" is the key, neglected word as his large body of writing, including Redemption (1949), Black List, Section H (1971) and Memorial (1973) has so often been overlooked in the mudbath rhetoric employed by those intent on accusing him of Nazi collaboration. His defenders are equally liable to overlook the books in concentrating their defence on the man. How could he, and the German people, not have known about the evils systematically perpetrated in Nazi Germany? We might equally ask how could we, the Irish people, not have known about the child abuse systematically perpetrated in Ireland; both are emotive challenges, and both impossible to defend or answer.

In fairness the righteousness of both sides in the Stuart debate has become repulsive. As repulsive, indeed, as was the voyeuristic publication on these pages of a portrait of the dead Stuart appearing as a medieval saint jutxaposed with accusations of Stuart's alleged Nazi collaboration in a heated review of an extremely useful book, transcripts of The Wartime Broad- casts of Francis Stuart 1942-1944 edited by Brendan Barrington (Lilliput, 2000). These transcripts of the infamous, muddled, tedious and amateurish talks supply one part of a bizarre puzzle. Anne McCartney's long overdue critical study based on a close, feminist reading of the novels is another piece of the jigsaw. If she has achieved anything with this sympathetic book, it is making the simple point that Stuart was sacked from his broadcasting job. On reading the transcripts it comes as no surprise.

Considering Stuart lived so long - less than three months short of 98 years - and that his career as a writer spanned more than 75 of those, while his most important book, Black List, Section H, was published as long ago as 1971, it is odd that the amount of serious textual criticism surrounding his work remains tiny compared with the hefty space allocated to the often confused facts of his life, particularly his years spent in war-time Germany. In Ireland it appears your status as a responsible citizen may be judged according to your views on Stuart, who seems to have lived long enough to regret his early star-struck admiration of Hitler. Thousands did. His worst crime seems to have been extreme nationalism, extreme enough to embrace any enemy of Britain. Stuart was always an outsider by choice; the push to make him an outcast in old age was as disrespectful as it was hypocritical. There is also, of course, the always complex, ambivalent, self-absorbed figure dominating his work - be he artist or simply an individual, look at H, or Dominic Malone in The Pillar of Cloud.

In her introduction McCartney sets out to correct the imbalances of the public interpretation of Stuart and quickly assumes the role, and tone, of a crusader. This is a shame but inevitable as she writes, "the main focus of interest was the controversy of his life rather than his writing". It is a point she reiterates, often loftily. "Despite the fact his writing provides a unique nexus between the Yeatsian mysticism which marks his early work and the post modernism of his recent novels, thereby illustrating the many changes which have occurred in the genre of the novel and of storytelling in particular, in the twentieth century, little credit was given to his success as a writer." She sees his work as "a fascinating record of one man's commitment to writing and of his determination, despite all the odds, to make a living out of words. Above all, though, his work charts the journey Stuart undertook in his search for truth."

As early as page one of her introduction this book is already burdened by the problem evident throughout the maze of confused arguments about Stuart; the need to qualify and re-qualify. The literary critic becomes defence lawyer. There is also, of course the fact that the claims McCartney makes for Stuart as a writer apply to most serious writers. Most people, writers or otherwise, spend their lives searching for truth. I also think Stuart never saw story as central to his fiction - he set about doing something very different.

He drew from his life as a way of fuelling a process of interior debate and response that preoccupied his characters, whom he placed in life situations, usually of stalemate. While this is a valuable book for anyone interested in Stuart the writer, or indeed for those who have felt compelled to make statements about the man without reading his books, there is one flaw running consistently through it - McCartney is over-intellectualising Stuart's approach to his work, and the work itself. She draws upon a wide range of literary and philosophical references and analogies in her analysis of Stuart's work, few of which are wholly conclusive. But she does pursue the avenue of metaphysics to metafiction and therein lies the surest understanding of his fiction. His thinking is ultimately also more simplistic - and chaotic - than she either concedes or recognises. Interestingly, she suggests he makes us - the readers - judge him, in order to judge ourselves.

Admittedly this is an academic book from a self-consciously feminist viewpoint, written in careful academic prose - with the unfortunate exception of the illadvised confessional passages near its close, which have no place in a professional work of criticism. McCartney wrote her D. Phil on Stuart; she knows the fiction; but I feel she has imposed a higher level of theoretical intent on Stuart, an instinctive writer of impulse, than he ever possessed. "All in all, Stuart's writings," writes McCartney, "contain numerous aspects which are deemed to be defining features of women's writing." She does highlight the breadth of his religious reading. Stuart was a great reader of the Gospels, and the lives of the saints - St Ther ese of Liseux and St Catherine of Sienna - fascinated him. Alongside his themes of guilt and the quest for redemption, many of his characters battle with an hysterical spirituality and provocative morality which were also central to Stuart and his writing.

The three novels written in the immediate aftermath of the war, The Pillar of Cloud, Redemption and The Flowering Cross are important, particularly in the context of Stuart's understanding of the tensions experienced by individuals brought together by, as McCartney notes, the "shared suffering and the experience of hearing the - to use Stuart's phrase from Redemption - "howling voices of the dark". No one could accuse Stuart the novelist of complacency. The fear and confusion in his work are amongst its strengths.

There is also the curious realisation that here again, throughout McCartney's study, we see Stuart presented as an Irish writer who somehow existed outside the context of Irish literature. Stuart's life and career paralleled and lasted beyond those of many finer Irish poets and prose writers, but most of McCartney's references are to writers and artists from other countries. One of the few literary comparisons she offers that I do find utterly convincing is Stuart's debt and links with Dostoyevsky - not that I would place him, as a writer, anywhere near the Russian master.

It is true that Black List, Section H is more valuable as an extraordinary document of witness and self-analysis than as work of art. I have been attacked in the past for suggesting he was a minor European Absurdist rather than a major Irish writer and for claiming he is not a prose stylist. His voice moves between the formal and stiffly conversational. Stuart's work is about turmoil and doubt, not resolution.

HE WAS a thinker - albeit confused - not a storyteller, and perhaps not the poet he saw himself as. It is interesting, but his prose is often jagged and he even admitted he had little interest in writing dialogue as he was committed to what he called "the interior"; the individual's private hell. His views on Irish politics were never a secret, yet somehow Irish and Irishness are not as central to his work as they are to other Irish writers. McCartney does not look at him as an Irish writer. While this study must be read, I wonder would it have proved sharper and more deliberate had she chosen to explore the books individually rather than through six thematic chapters?

Even so, religion and sexuality, and self-definition achieved through sex as a concept, shape Stuart's anarchic, even prophetic vision of human life. Woman is above all, a symbol for him, not merely a lover or enemy. Stuart does self consciously present women as spiritual redeemers. Although he writes about relationships and examines them, his depiction of sexuality is refined to the point of abstraction, while his religious struggle is far more palpable because of its confusion.

McCartney's honest, and rigorous, if diffident, book tackles what has become a huge thesis - the genesis and motivation of an artist whose actual achievement has yet to be satisfactorily assessed. Throughout her book she stresses the reality of a mind at work; to read Stuart, she writes, "is to gain an insight into the workings of another mind". Again, this is true of most writers. It is thorough, but less textually argued than it might have been. Nor does she really test the novels as novels. She admits her interest grew out of hearing a chance remark made on a bus trip in 1987 about "the question-mark over Stuart". So even she came to him initially through the controversy, not through his fiction. She bought Black List, Section H that day, and began "a quest for knowledge".

If little else remained to be said about Francis Stuart, and so much more will be debated and argued, the force of his midcareer quasi-autobiographical narratives must be acknowledged as having brought them beyond matters of nationality or morality and on to an interior turmoil which attempts to make sense of existence. As Stuart wrote in Faillandia (1985), "Reasoning can't distinguish true from false except on fairly extraneous levels." The ongoing internal debate he attempted was never concluded - nor will the more public ones about his motives be.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times