Francis Stuart

Francis Stuart (1902-2000) published 25 novels, including 'Black List, Section H' (King Penguin). He was critically acclaimed as a young poet and writer by W.B Yeats among other notable literary figures; however, his wartime broadcasts from Berlin for Hitler's Third Reich immediately established lifelong controversy with Nazi collaboration, issues of criminality and dissidence which permeate his writings. He and his Polish lover, Madeleine Meissner were arrested by the French in Post-War Freiburg where he wrote 'The Freiburg Trilogy'. His life events read like the epic novel of a flawed hero. His father's suicide when Stuart was an infant became a family secret which he discovered during his marriage at age seventeen to Maud Gonne's daughter, Iseult, a former lover of Ezra Pound's. The marriage engulfed him in Irish Republicanism as soldier and gunrunner in the Civil War. He established a reputation as international novelist and aristocratic squire of Laragh Castle (Ireland) where he became a racehorse owner, chicken farmer, drinker, gambler and womaniser. His lifestyle ended on moving to Nazi Germany in 1940 (after a lecture tour there in 1939) organised through the German Ambassador Edouard Hempel. Stuart worked with German Intelligence (Abwehr), and also met members of the anti-Nazi Rote Kapelle'. As broadcaster and lecturer, he reached outcast status becoming a vagrant in post-war Europe. Having left his family in 1940, when his wife Iseult died in the 1950s he married Madeleine in London while they both under Inland Security surveillance. Stuart's return to Ireland in the 1960s meant losing his London Jewish publisher, Victor Gollancz. There followed two decades in the literary underground until his adoption as mascot by the ultra-conservative Arts Council group known as Aosd na. 'Enmeshed' in this group and dependent on them as funding cartel, he struggled for artistic freedom as covertly depicted in his later novels such as A Hole in the Head and The High Consistory. He consistently repudiated Nazism at the behest of the Irish Media yet remained a 'hostage' of Aosd na and their imposed establishment. The eclipse of his work by affiliation with Hitler remains, whereas he claimed that as 'criminal author' his vision had reached full utterance. In this Revised Edition, previously expunged material in the 2007 Liffey Press edition is restored with an exploratory Foreword relating to Stuart and Aosd na. There is a lengthy New Introduction appraising Stuart by Kiely who personally knew him over twenty years. 'Stuart's labyrinthine life will hardly find a more detailed expos '-David O'Donoghue The Sunday Business Post 'Stuart predicted the course his life would take in his pre-war novels'-Tony Bailie The Irish News 'Fascinatingly accurate echo of the controversial writer's own eerie voice'-Brian Lynch The Irish Times 'The biographer's congenial access to Stuart lends authentic immediacy'-Richard T. Murphy New Hibernia Review