ASKED in old age what he had done during the Terror, the Abbe Sieye's famously replied "J'ai vecu" - I survived. The same question is often asked of Francis Stuart what he did during the terror of Nazism has shaped, and continues to shape, his place in Irish literature. As the continuing debate over his elevation to the position of Saoi in Aosdana shows, it is a question that will not go away. But the simplest answer - that he survived - may also be the best. Stuart went through a key 20th century experience, that of collaboration with tyranny, lived to tell a tale and felt obliged to tell it with imaginative truthfulness.
It is depressing to find that so much of what has been written about Stuart recently misses the rather simple point that he is only worth talking about at all because he is a writer. As a political figure, he is entirely marginal, except perhaps as a convenient scapegoat.
Condemning his collaboration with the Nazis allows us to forget that key sections of the political and literary intelligentsia in Ireland, ranging from Fine Gael to the IRA and from W.B. Yeats to the very highest echelons of the diplomatic corps, showed strong pro fascist sympathies in the 1930s and 1940s. Had he not written half a dozen important novels, Stuart would be a scarcely visible footnote to a long roll of dishonour.
Yet, somehow, both Stuart's detractors and his defenders manage to avoid any real discussion of his work. To those who believe that he should not have been honoured his wartime actions make his work irrelevant. But it is just as foolish to defend him on the grounds that he is a great novelist in spite of what he did in the war. For the fact is that he is an important writer not in spite of, but because of what he did and failed to do in his years in Germany. The shame of collaboration is inextricable from his achievement.
To understand Stuart's significance, it is necessary to remember that Nazism, in its most important respect anti Semitism - is a fictive construct. Its key text, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, began life as a chapter in a novel, Biarritz, by Herman Goedsche. Shaped into the Protocols and packaged as a true account of the plan for world domination of a secret cabal of Jewish bankers, it became a keystone of Hitler's ideology and, ultimately, of the Holocaust itself.
In his broadcasts from Nazi Germany, which were not as has been claimed on entirely literary matters, Francis Stuart used if not the language exactly, then certainly the central underlying notion of the Protocols. Europeans, he said, did not "want to return to a system whereby international financiers hold sway. We want no more fine sounding speeches about liberty, equality and fraternity, but warm hearted realism".
Likewise, in his most blatantly Nazi broadcast, in which he declared himself completely fired with enthusiasm for Hitler, he specifically credited the latter with doing what Nazi propaganda claimed - overthrowing the hidden rule of Jewish financiers. Hitler was "freeing life from the money standards that dominated it ... here was someone who had the vision and courage to deny financiers, politicians and bankers the right to rule ... it seemed to me at least preferable to be ruled by one man whose sincerity for the welfare of his people could not be doubted, than by a gang whose only concern was the market price of various commodities in the world market."
While not explicitly anti Semitic, this talk of a gang of financiers was, in a culture saturated by the Protocols and their offshoots an easily broken code. The admission by Stuart's alter ego in Black List, Section H that he "couldn't be certain he hadn't been infected by the plague, (of Nazism), however unusual his symptoms is well founded.
No one could ever make reparation in reality for so enormous a moral failing. But Stuart did make reparation in the only way a novelist could by trying to transform in his post war novels the meaning of Nazi fictions. Nazisni was, In Walter Benjamin's famous formulation, the irruption of aesthetics in politics. After the war, Stuart's work reverses the process, bringing life - ordinary, honest, complex humanity - into the domain of art.
Stuart's artistic reaction to his disillusion with fascism was markedly different from the earlier reactions of writers like Yeats and T.S. Eliot whose faith in the authoritarian right had dissolved even before the disasters of war and holocaust. In the late 1930s, in lyrics like Long Legged Fly, Lapis Lazuli and Little Gidding, both renounced politics and tried to re imagine art as a small but immaculate world that wars and political tumults cannot undermine. The philosopher Paul de Man, more directly implicated in fascism and anti Semitism, reacted even more radically, in effect denying the relationship of language to reality.
Stuart's importance is that he refused this easy option. He travelled, instead, in an entirely opposite direction. Into the aesthetic world of his novels he placed the most immediate human contingency imaginable: his own life. Thus his masterpiece Black List, Section H is a re ordering of the relation ship between life and art, between narrative and truth, that challenges the Nazi idea that life - and therefore. politics - should be aestheticised. Instead of denying reality, he discovered it. Instead of escaping into art, he forced his art to confront the reality of his own experience. To have followed that through for over 50 years must be, in the end, an honourable thing
