Sir - In her account of Francis Stuart (February 3rd), Eileen Battersby intelligently asks: "Why did he choose to write Black List in the third person and in the past tense?"
I may have part of the answer. During much of the 1960s I was a main reader for my then London publisher, Timothy O'Keefe of MacGibbon and Kee, who was deeply concerned with the revival of Irish writers, among them Francis Stuart, whose careers had been interrupted by the war. So an early draft of the autobiography came our way, but both Tim and I, alas, found the first-person narrative unsatisfactory.
I was upset, because I had been a friend of Francis since 1950, and I racked my brains for a way around the problem. It was agreed that we should ask Francis to re-write Blacklist, Section H as a kind of case history, so that the amoral protagonist should seem more like The Idiot of Dostoevsky, a favourite author and book of Francis. But I believe that he had already come to the conclusion himself, and that using the third person and past tense would distance the often inflammable material from the merely personal.
Some of this should be documented in the O'Keefe correspondence in the University of Oklahoma at Tulsa, and perhaps in due course the original draft will be published, and people can judge if our Jamesian edict was just. Such scholarship would be of more help in understanding the career of Stuart than trumping up charges against him in his nonage. - Yours, etc., John Montague
Ireland Professor of Poetry, c/o School of English, Trinity College, Dublin 2