The legacy of a life - the good, the bad, the disputed actions, the celebrated achievements - can be assessed with hindsight. Death makes evaluation possible. But no baby gives any clues as to what he or she will become. The Irish writer Francis Stuart lived much of his life within a confusion that was far more disturbing to others than to himself, writes Eileen Battersby.
In old age he gave the impression of contentment, coupled with benign amusement at the wrath he continued to incite. While he reacted to memory, there was a bewildering lack of introspection. But he always considered art as "one of the few hopes in a darkening world."
Just over two years since his death on February 2nd 2000, he retains his critics and his defenders, with most of his critics concentrating on, and speculating about, his actions - in particular his role in Nazi Germany - not his work. His admirers say: "Look to the work." Like most writers, he wanted his books, not his biography, to answer for him.
Never a saint, no hero either, he was a witness, a survivor dogged by ambiguities. Above all, and most strangely, this European absurdist, concerned with the cult of the individual, also possessed a near pagan spirituality that ultimately made him a religious writer ever exploring the theme of innocence tested by evil.
Townsville, Queensland
His long life began 100 years ago today in a place called Townsville, in Queensland, Australia. It sounds like one of those nowhere settings favoured by Peter Carey. Stuart's parents, both of whom had emigrated from Co Antrim, were sheep farmers.
Within months of his birth, his father died in a psychiatric hospital, leaving his mother to return to Ireland with five children. Young Stuart found father figures in his Ulster uncles. Yet he soon embraced the outsider's role he would play throughout his life. His unhappy years at Rugby public school in England may have been the beginning.
He seems an unlikely writer; not a scholar - nor even, as he would admit, particularly educated. Nor was he a natural storyteller. Psychological conditions and notions of imprisonment preoccupied him.
Still, his life provided a rich source of fiction. The idea of a young and not very successful Trinity student finding himself at one of AE's starry literary gatherings, as a sort of gormless fly on the wall, could only have been devised by a novelist.
But it did all happen. Not only did Stuart attend that party, he also met the daughter of the woman who had inspired a poet. Iseult Gonne had by then already experienced life and romance. She was exotic, a mistress of Ezra Pound. Small wonder Stuart was more tongue-tied than usual. Suddenly he moved in a world of writers, artists and thinkers.
In 1920, when he was 18, they married. Before this he had converted to Catholicism. In one of the many ironies that shaped his life, this initial conversion of convenience would become very important to him. His new religion haunted his work and influenced his perception of art and the artist. The image of the young boy with the exotic older woman (Iseult was six years his senior), prevails. However, Stuart was by than writing poetry and for a time could claim W.B. Yeats as a mentor. In the chaos, there was usually some redeeming order, just as in his novels, women are redeemers.
Literary legacy
Fiction has often proved more telling than autobiography and it would have been impossible for Stuart to have written a memoir more revealing than Black List, Section H, the work on which his literary legacy will always centre. He saw it as "an imaginative fiction in which only real people appear, and under their actual names where possible". Even in that statement there is a hint of the reasonable defiance that was always part of his character.
First published in the US in 1971, it remains his great book, the summation of all his novels. It discloses a great deal about himself; it also provides glimpses of wartime Germany. But it is as an artistic manifesto cataloguing the development of a raw if aspiring artistic consciousness that it is most intriguing. Written in the third person and in the past tense, it is an essay in chaos. There is a ragged candour in the portrayal of his obvious alter ego H, a self-absorbed obsessive on the run from everything. There may be no grace, no lyricism in the prose, but Stuart captures the emotional tone and emotional chaos of an inner voice.
"Literature," H decides, "was only to be experienced by those who pluck it direct from life." Stuart did exactly that: his life was his unifying literary theme. The first time I saw him was during the inaugural Dublin Writer's Conference in 1989. White-headed and dressed in black, standing on the stage and flanked by other writers, he seemed enormous, a kind of subversive truth-teller. He was by then already ancient, but he spoke forcefully about the role of the artist. Dostoyevsky, whose tormented spirituality so influenced him, was his reference. It was an impressive speech, much more than a token voice from the past.
No self-justification
Later I was to interview him, twice. He was very funny and likeable, adored cats and racehorses and made no apology for anything. There was no self-justification. He was to outlive his world and his century, but not before outrage and controversy erupted over his being honoured as a Saoi by Aosdána, in October 1996. Debate became increasingly impassioned. Stuart insisted on television that he had never supported the Nazi regime and was "intensely sorry for the hurt I caused so many people by appearing to".
His simple burial had a dramatic grandeur he would have enjoyed. On a sunny day of strong breezes, his coffin was carried from the local church to a cemetery containing a ruined 12th-century chapel, overlooking the sea at Fanore, Co Clare. His friends prayed. This week his widow, the artist Finola Graham, is placing upon his grave a limestone flag engraved with his poem The Octogenarian: "The haunts of love, the haunts of love!/ I went there seeking for a dove/ And brought her home against my chest,/ Thinking at last I would have rest . . ."