PERHAPS it was the best and most illuminating thing for Aosdana to have done to have elevated Francis Stuart to the position of Saoi. Aosdana, with its bogus titles and its pretensions towards Gaeldom, belongs to the realm of studied fantasy and to the belief that the Gaelic soul is a more purely artistic soul than that to be found elsewhere.
Aosdana and the rank of Saoi in fact have no real resonances within contemporary Irish life; for most of us, the terms meant absolutely nothing until they were conjured out a thin but thrillingly Gaelic air by Anthony Cronin over a decade ago. And simply because the encouragement of artists and artistry is seen to be A Good Thing, nobody has felt able to question the validity of terms such as Aosdana and Saoi.
Let us put this another way. Were some other country to appoint an inner circle of high artists, would we not find it a trifle ridiculous if they reached into their folklore and their mythology to give this inner circle a name? If the English were to proclaim that henceforward their chosen artists would belong to the League of Arthur, and that within that league there would be a circle of high priests of pure art, perhaps called the Round Table or Merlin's Elect, would we not find it all, oh, just a trifle amusing?
Above Criticism
The truth is that Irish people generally are not easy with titles, nobilities, honorifics; we have permitted Aosdana to be an exception because it appeals to a guilt about whether we support the arts enough, and its credentials are enhanced by a Gaelic title. When in doubt, give an organisation an Irish name. That places it above criticism, even though the name has no meaning and no actual cultural resonances for us today.
To say that Aosdana is a precious and meaningless confection is to appear philistine. uncouth. But we know Aosdana refers to an imagined world of bards and kings. of a lost Gaelic culture which was stolen by the Conqueror, which we fitfully try to reinvent. No matter that the reality was that the courts were muddy hamlets. and the kings no more than illiterate cow thieves: merely to refer to that lost civilisation is to cast a spell which replaces wit and sceptical wisdom with a self regarding piety and an indulgent sanctimoniousness.
Those are the very qualities which are conjured out of a generally mordant air when so many people discuss Irish neutrality in the last world war. But it was not piety, nor saintliness, which caused Ireland to remain out of the hostilities, but simply commonsense. An island without a navy or an air force, and with an all infantry army, could not sensibly have gone to war with the Third Reich. No other country did so for moral reasons; why should we, who only stood to have our cities destroyed and our maritime trade ravished, and to little purpose, embark upon such a ruinous crusade?
Commonsense should not be mistaken for piety. If I see a group of men beating a man with iron bars in the centre of Dublin, I assure you, I will do nothing; but, safe in my bed that night, I trust I do not confuse my inactivity with nobility, personally being above such squalor. We are none of us above such squalor, particularly if we are the victim of the assault.
Darkest Hour
We know now, in all the most horrible detail, what the Third Reich did to Jew and Christian; socialist and gypsy; noble and homosexual. It is the darkest hour in mankind's tenancy on this Earth; the scale of the evil. and its detailed intrusion into the lives of people across the entire Eurasian landmass, is not merely without precedent it is almost certainly unrepeatable. No single civilised standard remained unviolated; no single crime remained uncommitted. Millions and millions were studiously and deliberately murdered. from the bocage of Normandy to the warm waters of Sebastopol.
Of lesser value than life is art; but it was in art that the Third Reich showed its true intentions. Goebbels seized control over all theatre soon after Hitler came to power, and all who worked in it were obliged to join the Reichstheaterkammer, from which Jews and anti Nazis were from the first excluded. In the following five years, most artists, writers and actors of merit who could do so fled Germany as the regime concocted a bogus folk art, based on garbled myths and anti Semitic fantasies, to encourage the war effort. In the opposite direction went Francis Stuart.
The Meeting of German Writers in Weimar in 1941 was told by Professor Kurt Hesse of the writer's duty to create "a confession of faith in the soldierly life, efficiency on the battlefield, and the sacred death for Fuehrer, race and fatherland". The Reich Literature Council president, Hanns Johst, told his audience - including some foreign writers: was Francis Stuart present? - of the need for literature as a weapon in the service of the Reich.
Enemy of Civilisation
To have volunteered to serve that enemy of civilisation and of art is not just a mistake on a par with life's other little blunders. It is a cosmic error from which no full escape is possible. That is the inevitable consequence of aligning oneself with the greatest enemies humanity, and humanity's arts, have ever known, though the resulting provided wonderful experiences material for a writer as indisputably fine as Francis Stuart is.
He has told us that he went to Germany because he sought life on the fringe, on the very margins, in a land inhabited by martyrs and mystics. Fine. And untrue. He went to Germany not in the hour of Germany's defeat, but at the moment of victory, as Poland lay in ruins. More conquest, more subjugation followed, all of it commanded from Berlin, where he had made his home and from where he broadcast.
He was at the centre of things. Had Germany conquered Europe, as appeared likely for most of his time in Berlin would he not have been celebrated as a righteous ally of the Third Reich? Who knows. might he not in due course have been honoured by being made Saoi within a puppet Aosdana?