Francis Stuart, who died on February 2nd, aged 97, was a quintessential outsider. Fatherless since infancy; alienated from the world of his cousins; estranged from his wife and children, he wandered uncommitted and tortured in search of experience for literary stimulation. He believed that as a creative writer he should court ostracism. This was his fate after he had spent the war years in Berlin where he broadcast to Ireland for the Nazis. He survived it all, returned eventually to this country and in old age was acclaimed among the cognoscenti as one of the great Irish writers of the century. This acclaim culminated in his election as a Saoi of Aosdana in 1996. Henry Francis Montgomery Stuart was born on a sheep farm in Queensland where his parents, both children of Antrim landowners, had settled. Three months later his father committed suicide, and his mother brought her only child back to Ireland. They lived in Meath and then in Dublin where he was at several preparatory schools before going on to Rugby.
At the age of 17, shortly after returning to Dublin, he met at a soiree at AE's house, Iseult Gonne, the 23-year-old daughter of Maud Gonne by the French Boulangist politician, Lucien Millevoye. After an elopement to London they returned to marry at University Church in Dublin. Francis Stuart converted to Catholicism. Under Maud Gonne's influence, he joined the Irregulars in the Civil War and eventually ended up in prison in Portlaoise. At one stage he was sent to Belgium to purchase arms but squandered the money on a Russian ballerina. It was the first of a multitude of infidelities. He started writing as a poet before turning to novels in the late 1920s. Although they were acclaimed by discerning critics like William Butler Yeats, they sold badly. Self-absorbed and irresponsible he lived extravagantly, indulging expensive lady-loves or going on "batters" with friends. Efforts to redeem his deteriorating finances on the racecourse ended in tears.
In 1939, deciding that he needed a job and in despair about his relationship with Iseult, he accepted an offer to become a university lecturer in Berlin. He was recruited to prepare texts for broadcasts by "Lord Haw-Haw". He himself broadcast to Ireland praising neutrality and the IRA; he drew protests from the Government on a few occasions. But any sympathy he had for the Nazi regime evaporated after it invaded the Soviet Union. He refused to make anti-Soviet broadcasts. When the war ended he was imprisoned for eight months by the French. In Berlin he had fallen in love with a Polish student of his, Madeleine Meissner. After the war, they lived together in Freiburg and Paris. His novels The Pillar of Cloud and Redemption published in these years described the horrors of life in a Germany that had been smashed into submission. But his subsequent books had less edge. He had to go to the US in 1971 to find a publisher for Black List, Section H, a memoir written in fictional form which was to be his most celebrated work.
By this time he had married Madeleine, Iseult having died in 1954. They enjoyed great happiness together until her death in 1984; significantly, the theme of redemption though the love of a woman joins that of redemption through suffering in his post-war work. They returned to live in Ireland. He was taken up by writers including Ulick O'Connor and Anthony Cronin who were determined not to allow his wartime follies to blind them to his artistic talent. He was elected a member of Aosdana in 1981.
He returned to poetry in later life. A volume of his poems entitled We Have Kept the Faith - Poems 1918-1992 was published to mark his 90th birthday. But shortly after the ultimate accolade of being made a Saoi in 1996 he said in a television interview: "The Jew was always the worm that got into the rose and sickened it." A motion was proposed by Maire Mhac an tSaoi to have Stuart expelled from Aosdana. Anthony Cronin defended him, pointing out that the reference to the Jews was a quotation from a character in one of his novels and was not indicative of anti-Semitism. The motion was defeated overwhelmingly, so denying him a last opportunity of renewing his role as an outcast. In June 1999 he attended at the High Court to hear The Irish Times express regret that an article by Kevin Myers may have given the impression that he was anti-Semitic.
Francis Stuart is survived by his wife, Finola Graham, whom he married in 1986, by his son Ion, and through him and a deceased daughter descendants of the third and fourth generation.
Francis Stuart: born 1902; died February, 2000