Sir, - It is not often that I find myself in agreement with Kevin Myers, but in what he had to say about the election of Francis Stuart to the position of Saoi Aosdana (October 10th), I find that I am! As Myers quite rightly points out, Stuart was, as a young man, part of the republican movement and as such could not be considered to be a political ingenue, an excuse some of his apologists seem to offer for his behaviour during the second World War. Indeed, if he is to be defended as a political innocent, his election to the position of Saoi - a wise man of the tribe - is all the more inappropriate.
Declan Kiberd, someone who really should know better, rehashes what he had to say about Stuart in his book Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation. There Stuart merits only three mentions; somewhat strange for a writer who is supposed to have influence two generations of Irish writers. Indeed, Kiberd makes this rather hyperbolic claim without advancing any examples of writers influenced by Stuart.
He goes on to say that Stuart is something of a continental modernist - whatever that might be - in the tradition of Sartre and de Beauvoir. Let us not forget that Sartre remained in Paris during the German Occupation and continued to write and publish under the German censor. It was Sartre and de Beauvoir who, in letters published after their respective deaths, revealed themselves to have been totally amoral in their private lives.
What we see here in Stuart is an illustration of what happens when the artist feels called upon to take a public position on some matter or other. This taking of a public position, by the artist, dates in recent times from the Dreyfus Affair, where indeed the term "intellectual" was coined. Just as the term "Impressionist" was coined as a term of abuse, so too was the word intellectual - a sense it seems to have maintained, to a greater or lesser extent, at least in the Anglo-Saxon world.
Stuart's actions in Nazi Germany may be described as naive in the extreme, but to apologise for them in the manner in which Eavan Boland and Ulick O'Connor do shows an amazing ignorance of the meaning of what Nazi Germany perpetrated. While the imagination might be an ambiguous place, as Boland puts it, the victims of the Nazis were not murdered by ambiguity.
If the artist must take a public position, can we not expect him/ her to stand for justice, truth and reason, those somewhat out-of-date values of the Enlightenment; to adopt a moral position, as opposed to a political or expedient one? In the words of the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas: "Politics is opposed to morality, as philosophy is to naivete." Yours, etc.. Rathfarnham, Dublin 16.