If Francis Stuart had never lived, we would have had to invent him; and in a sense we already have. Although the knowable facts of his life and work are accessible in public libraries and archives, the often fierce public debate over Stuart has been marked by an almost disdainful ignorance of those facts. The result has been a sterile and unedifying standoff between two imagined versions of the writer, neither of them convincing.
Those who have attacked Stuart for his political misdeeds have done strikingly little investigation into those misdeeds, as though worried that what they might find would not match the heat of their rhetoric. Those who have defended him have told a story about his consciousness and his politics that is irreconcilable with his published writings and documented actions. The surviving transcripts of Stuart's propaganda broadcasts from the Third Reich to Ireland, which are to be published next week, reveal a Stuart who bears little resemblance to the politically disengaged figure his defenders have conjured.
On one level, the long-running controversy over this little-read Irish novelist has been a local proxy skirmish in the endless modern struggle to define the relationship between art and politics: on this level it is not really about Francis Stuart at all. On another level, until Stuart's death earlier this year, the controversy was coloured by a natural desire on the part of many of his admirers to protect a very old man whom they knew as gentle and wise and bravely dissident. For those who knew him, the idea that such a man could have been a committed supporter of Hitler and the Nazis, and not only for a brief moment but for several years while living in the capital of the Third Reich, is apparently impossible to accept.
This is a failure of the imagination; and that so many sophisticated writers, critics and journalists should be susceptible to it is perhaps a commentary on the distinctive historical experience of independent Ireland. By virtue of its geographical location - its neutrality wouldn't have made any difference if it had been located in the path of the German armies - Ireland was never forced to make its peace with the Nazis, as most of continental Europe was. Wherever the Nazis ruled, officials and ordinary people collaborated with them. While no country in Europe has found an adequate response to the experience of collaboration, the idea of collaboration is not as unfathomable on the continent as it has seemingly been for most commentators on Stuart.
Irish collaboration with the Nazis took place on a small scale, mostly through the IRA. When Stuart travelled to Germany in January 1940 to take up a lecturing post at Berlin University, he carried with him an IRA message to German military intelligence. Over the next several months he was involved in schemes to land a German agent in Ireland, to run guns to Ireland, and to form a pro-German "Irish Guard" from among prisoners of war.
These schemes came to little or nothing, in keeping with the generally shambolic nature of IRA-German collaboration and German wartime espionage in Ireland. Such activity, never a high priority for the Germans, petered out following the Battle of Britain. But for as long as the IRA and the Germans were collaborating in earnest, Stuart was an active participant.
Stuart also became involved in German radio propaganda shortly after arriving in Berlin, translating news items into English and writing scripts for William Joyce ("Lord Haw-Haw ") until Joyce started writing his own material. The German radio propaganda service for Ireland commenced nightly broadcasting late in 1941. Beginning in March 1942 - or possibly February, according to a German transcript whose status is uncertain - Stuart wrote and delivered his own talks to Ireland, roughly 100 in all over a two-year period.
The content of these broadcasts has been the stuff of legend. One astonishingly persistent claim has been that the talks were concerned with "literary" matters; in fact, Stuart made only a handful of passing references to literature.
A more serious claim, superficially truthful but deeply misleading, is that Stuart was broadcasting as "a neutral" in support of Irish neutrality. Stuart did support Irish neutrality, but this did not make him a neutral. Support for Irish neutrality was the official policy of German diplomacy and propaganda. It was the raison d'etre of the propaganda service to Ireland. By 1942, there was no prospect of Ireland's joining the war on the side of Germany; to have urged such a move over the airwaves would have been pointless and, in diplomatic terms, counterproductive. Stuart's position on Irish neutrality was wholly in keeping with the official German line.
Stuart's broadcasts were concerned above all with the necessity of Irish 32-county unity, and at times he pursued this theme without reference to the world war. At other times, though, Stuart's message was unmistakable: defeat for Britain could bring about a united Ireland.
Stuart repeatedly told his listeners that he was not making propaganda. The soft-focus tone that often characterises the talks suggests that he was conscious, most of the time, that he must not belie this stance with a hectoring style: this may be why the surviving transcripts (with the exception of the German transcript already mentioned) contain no explicit anti-Semitism. Anti-Allied vitriol was acceptable within this posture, because it could be yoked to an Irish republican position. Explicitly pro-German sentiment had to be rationed, but it was present: Stuart painted German soldiers as uncommonly intelligent and sensitive; the German people as preternaturally spiritual and courageous; and their Fuhrer as the great man who was leading them to their national destiny.
Transcripts of Stuart's talks have been available for many years in Irish and British archives. They have been quoted piecemeal in valuable studies of the period by Robert Fisk and David O'Donoghue. And yet, through the furore over Stuart's elevation to the honorary position of Saoi of Aosdana in 1996, hardly anyone seemed to have any idea of what he had said over the German airwaves.
As the debate rekindled in 1997 after the 95-year-old Stuart made a seemingly anti-Semitic remark on a television documentary, no one appeared to be aware that at the age of 21 he had published a pamphlet arguing that Ireland must overcome the influence of Britain just as Austria had overcome the influence of the Jews; or that he had written sympathetically of the German brown-shirts in his 1933 novel Try the Sky and blithely of an anti-Semitic riot in his 1934 memoir Things to Live For; or that in 1938, a month after Kristallnacht, he had written a letter to The Irish Times opposing plans to receive refugees from the Third Reich into Ireland.
Those who criticised the granting of official honours to Stuart never answered the question of how an organisation such as Aosdana might go about establishing and enforcing non-artistic criteria for such honours - a question perhaps complicated by the fact that the word "saoi" connotes wisdom.
Throughout the controversy, the figure of Stuart stood as a symbol of art, and as an embodiment of all the romantic-cum-modernist cliches that artists in weak moments spin around themselves: the artist as outcast, the artist as sufferer, the artist as witness. Of course artists can be, and have been, all of these things; but too often the claims made on Stuart's behalf have manifested a vicarious nostalgie de la boue. In an age when Irish writers are blandly revered, and blessedly (if modestly) subsidised by state and super-state, the idea that we have had among us a writer who had been ostracised, blacklisted, reviled, has been strangely reassuring.
Many of the unsustainable claims that have been made about Stuart derive from his autobiographical novel Black List, Section H. It is ironic that in the guise of affirming the transcendental value of art, so many of Stuart's admirers have treated this work of art as a reliable biographical source. It is nothing of the sort: anyone who reads through Stuart's writings of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s will recognise that the consciousness and politics of Stuart's alter ego, H, are distinctly divergent from those of Stuart himself.
It is not remarkable that Stuart should have re-imagined his life in fiction: this is what novelists do. What cannot be re-imagined, however, are the words he wrote and published before the war, and the words he spoke over the German airwaves. Until we read these words on their own terms, within the literary and historical contexts of 1924 and 1938 and 1943, we will never comprehend Stuart's art, nor his politics, nor the relationship between the two.
Brendan Barrington is the editor of The Wartime Broadcasts of Francis Stuart, to be published by Lilliput on Thursday. It will be reviewed in the books pages next week.