Hollywood Cemetery by Liam O'Flaherty

Liam O’Flaherty abandons his usual stark tone and dark storylines for slapstick comedy in this hard-to-find 1934 novel.
The main character Brian Carey is a recognisable O'Flaherty creation - a sullen, arrogant, hard-drinking writer whose belief in his own genius makes him contemptuous of many of those whom he meets.
The rights for one of his books has been purchased by Hollywood media mogul Jack Mortimer who wants to turn it into a movie.
The novel opens in Ireland where Mortimer, reluctantly accompanied by Carey, is searching for a female lead.
The wild, promiscuous girl he choses is reinvented as Angela Devlin who is brought by Mortimer back to Hollywood but no-one is allowed to see her face as the mogul manufactures a media frenzy about his mysterious new starlet.
Carey, who despite initial hostility towards her has fallen in love with Angela, is bribed, blackmailed and eventually threatened with assassination to play along with the scheme.
O'Flaherty's portrayal of Hollywood is cartoonish - everyone is on the make, no-one, apart from Carey, has any real talent. Mortimer doesn't want to shoot the movie in Ireland because he reckons he can create a more authentic version of Ireland in his Hollywood studio.
The story becomes more convoluted to the point of absurdity as the novel progresses, any semblance of plot disintegrating in the process.
The brashness and falsity of Hollywood and the prostitution of talent for the sake of a quick buck is old hat these days, but that this novel was published nearly 80 years ago.
O'Flaherty was a native Irish speaker, born on the Aran Islands, who fought for the British army in the First World War, tried to lead a communist uprising in Dublin during the Civil War and became a prolific short story writer and novelist. He had direct experience of the movie industry. His novel The Informer was made into a film by his cousin John Ford.
He also worked in Hollywood during the 1930s, trying to make a living as a screenwriter, and so it can be presumed that this ultimately unsuccessful novel, is based on at least some personal experience.
As in interesting foot note, a quick web search on Hollywood Cemetery brought up this little nugget:
MAD HATTER'S VILLAGE
Sometimes an author arrives unheralded on the literary scene, publishes one book, then disappears without a trace. That seems to be the case with Mary Cavendish Gore, who appears to have produced one novel and nothing else. (The only Google hit shows that she renewed the copyright in 1961.) Or could the author, whose voice is masculine, be using a pseudonym? Could the author, in fact, be Liam O’Flaherty (best known for The Informer), whose life roughly parallels that of the protagonist? I admit that's not likely, but it would be fun, if true.
Mad Hatter’s Village by Mary Cavendish Gore. Alfred H. King (1934), 306 pp.
A pedantic writer hopes that his latest novel will bring him fame and fortune. In the meantime he lives in a shack on a beach near Los Angeles and ekes out a living on his pension check from the British army. Several of his friends are similarly strapped for cash. He is pursued by a nearly divorced woman with two children. Although he finds her unattractive, uncouth, and unresponsive, they start an affair. He can’t open up to her but can’t break it off the relationship either.
Despite its satirical edge, in the last analysis this is a plaintive story of a decent if talentless fellow who must cope with painful memories, unrealistic aspirations, and dire poverty. He tries to solve his problems by walling himself off emotionally, a strategy that fails in the novel’s surprise (and inadequately foreshadowed) ending. The protagonist, if not exactly likable, is credible and skillfully drawn. The same may be said for the girlfriend and the minor characters. In a just world this thoughtful and well written book would takes its place with other struggling-writer novels, such as Martin Eden and Ask the Dust. As it is, potential readers will be lucky to find a copy.

Lewis, Stuart and O'Flaherty

Belfast-born CS Lewis is often cited as a "Christian apologist" but the theology that he incorporates in his 'fantasy trilogy' is distinctly unorthodox.
The first two novels – read over Christmas and arse about face (the second read first and first second) – tell of the journeys of an English university don to Mars and then to Venus.
Out of the Silent Planet (the first in the trilogy) sees Elwin Ransom kidnapped and taken to Malacandra (Mars) where he encounters three distinct intelligent species who live mostly in the deep canyons that criss-cross the surface of the planet. The outer shell of the planet is dead.
During his encounters with the various species Ransom is told that the Solar System was created by Maledil who put various deities in charge of each planet and along with numerous ethereal entitities, "eldila".
Ransom eventually gets to meet Oyarsa, the Malacandran deity, who tells him that his equivalent on Earth (Thulcandra) has become 'bent' and was sealed into Thulcandra's atmosphere following a great battle that took place long before life existed on the planet.
While Oyarsa can communicate with the deities on the other planets in the Solar System, Earth has become known as 'the silent planet'.
Christianity is not mentioned and the cosmology that threads through this novel seemed to mirror the gnostic myths of an overall deity, lesser gods (including one who believed that he was the supreme being and creator of all) and archons (Lewis's eldila).
Describing Ransom's descent from space to the surface of Malacandra, Lewis writes: "Suddenly the lights of the Universe seemed to be turned down. As if some deamon had rubbed the heaven's face with a dirty sponge, the spleandour in which they had lived for so long blenched to a pallid, cheerless and pitiable grey... what had been a chariot gliding in the fields of heaven became a dark steel box dimly lighted by a slit of window, and falling. They were falling out of the heavens, into a world. Nothing in all his adventures bit so deeply into Ransom's mind as this. He wondered how he could ever have thought of planets, even of the Earth, as islands of life and reality floating in a deadly void. Now, with a certainty which never after deserted him, he saw the planets - the 'earths' he called them in his thoughts - as mere holes or gaps in the living heaven - excluded and rejected wastes of heavy matter and murky air, formed not by addition to, but by subtraction from, the surrounding brightness. And yet, he thought, beyond the solar system the brightness ends. Is that the real void, the real death. Unless... he groped for the idea... unless visible light is also a hole or a gap, a mere diminution of something else. Something that is to bright unchanging heaven as heaven is to the dark, heavy earths...
(Out of the Silent Planet P45)
Describing the eldila he writes" "You must be looking in the right place and the right time; and that is not likely to come about unless the eldil wishes to be seen. Sometimes you can mistake them for a sunbeam or even a moving of the leaves; but when you look again you see that it was an eldil and that it is gone." (P94)
CS Lewis is hugely inventive in creating alien landscapes, lifeforms and fauna. He even gives us as basic initiation into the Malacandran language.
Both Out of the Silent Planet and its sequel Journey to Venus (also published as Perelandra) can be read as straight forward adventures, in the same way that his later more famous children's novels can.
Journey to Venus reintroduces Ransom but whereas Malacandra is an old and dying planet Venus is still young and virginal with life still emerging. Ransom finds a virtual garden of Eden, complete with the Venetian equivalent of Eve and Adam (although they are green-skinned).
Again he is superb at creating an alien landscape with islands that float on an ocean and whose landscape warps and flattens with the tides inhabited by dozens of animals, fish, trees and plants.
Weston, one of Ransom's kidnapper's from Out of The Silent Planet, is also sent to Venus (by the Earth's bent Oyarsa) to try to engineer another 'downfall' similar to the biblical one on Earth. Ransom works to stop it.
The third novel in the trilogy That Hideous Strength is in my pile to be read.
Francis Stuart's final novel (novella) also touches on spiritual themes but in a much more gnarled way. King David Dances is by no means a good novel – it is almost entirely lacking a cogent plot – but it does contain some typically Stuartian passages.
An imaginary dialogue between the narrator Lodsi Dormondi and 'The Grand Arbiter runs:
"Grand Arbiter: Tell me, apart from the care of cats and a general rapport with the animal kingdom, what have you mastered.
"Lodsi: The art of succumbing to pain, to the very brink of despair, of teetering on the edge of the pit and then regaining balance just in time. And also in the absence of actual tragedy, an imaginative skill and tendency to evoke, and dream agonies of the most subtle and haunting kind."
(King David Dances P35)
In a superbly inarticulate attempt to describe his warped spirituality Stuart writes:
"We aren't demanding, or begging for miracles or even dispensations, not for the old rewards: eternal beatitudes, reunion with lost ones. It seems to me, though I haven't yet got round to meditating on this that our first concern is the great events, experiences, that illuminate the outer chaos, revealing for a moment a harmony, taking place in obscurity, burning themselves out in an intensity of love and compassion, are preserved. That is that they should not pass and perish and that those who seek this assurance are given it, however fragile and with whatever contradicting asides, for only the pure in heart, if not in the mortal flesh, can clearly decode such signals. (P50)
Despite the appalling syntax this rings as something that is for Stuart heartfelt and struggling to said but he is not quite sure how to say it.
On the final page Stuart writes:
"Here I shall end this diary as I began: confused, emotionally and physically disturbed, filled by vast glimpses, by near visions, but finding each year and month, almost day, ever more difficult." (P61)
Liam O'Flaherty is a much more earthy writer than Stuart or Lewis and his stories are rooted in nature and human interaction.
The Black Soul tells the story of O'Connor, an Irishman wounded in the trenches while fighting for the British army during the First World War. He is an arrogant, isolated and damaged man and clearly a fictional alter-ego for O'Flaherty.
With his sanity is at breaking point and filled with disgust for the society in which he lives he flees to an island of the west coast of Ireland where the people still live an almost primitive existence, dependent on the land and sea for their survival.
O'Connor is just as contemptuous for the island peasants as he is of the urbane Dublin that he has fled but it is in this landscape that he begins to heal, both physically and mentally.
O'Flaherty's prose is raw and poetic: "Red John's cabin lay huddled against the buff of the hill. Around it the wind only sighed and moaned, for none but stray blasts reached it, blasts that had wandered from the storm, fallen in weariness from the whirling coils that rushed eastwards without pausing for breath. But the sea-spray sometimes struck the door, with a slow falling swish, as of a mountain of loose silk being crushed. The cries of the sea-birds that whirled about it sounded dismally. It was as if the lid were wrenched from the mouth of hell and the wailing of the damned came floating up from distant caverns." (The Black Soul P16).
While O'Connor is being healed his presence stirs passion and jealousy among the people he is staying among. Red John, in whose cabin he lives, becomes insane with anger as his wife Little Mary falls for O'Connor and becomes his lover.
The Black Soul is not as gritty as The Assassin or The Informer and less bleak than Skerritt. It comes the closest to the perfection of his short stories and for me it is his best piece of long fiction

The Ecstacy of Angus by Liam O'Flaherty

Robert Graves is probably more famous for the personal mythology that he developed in The White Goddess than the poems that his muse actually inspired. It is to this personal mythology category that Liam O’Flaherty’s novella The Ecstacy of Angus seems to fall.
While much of O’Flaherty’s writing is poetic I am not aware that he ever wrote any verse but many of the sentences in this piece possess a rhythm and diction more often found in a poem.
It is O’Flaherty’s attempt at a creation myth, telling the story of “ever-youthful Angus, god of love” wandering through the land of Banba (an ancient name for Ireland) and “saving his mortal children from Crom, the dark lord of death”.
There children are not his offspring but ‘inspired’ into being by Angus, who in the same ways inspires the rest of nature to reproduce - animals, insects, fish. However, their numbers have soon grown to such an extent that there is no longer any room on Banba and people start turning against one another and fighting for territory.
Angus approaches Mananaan, the god of the sea, and asks him to give up part of the ocean to create land for people to live on.
But with words that could be found in a Gnostic text Mananaan tells Angus that overcrowding and strife in Banba is: “the outcome of your rash conceit, which drove you to the senseless task of making mortal beings in your own image, but without the fullness of your power. Restless, passionate youth, with little knowledge you undertook a monstrous labour, which required wisdom beyond the comprehension of your feverish mind.”
In anger Mananaan whips up a storm and Angus is forced to flee from the sea to shelter in a glen where he is discovered by “the fairy princess” Fand.
Fand is an archetypal femme fatale, intent on seducing Angus– although admittedly it is unusual for such women to be surrounded by an entourage of sprites who pleasure both her and her conquest during foreplay.
Like her predecessors – or maybe in terms of mythological timescales successors – Eve, Delilah, Salome, Cleopatra and Morgan le Fey, Fand’s seduction of Angus ultimately leads to his downfall.
Her sole aim was to become pregnant by him so that she should become “the mother of a host of kings”. However, Angus has been left emasculated, his eternal youth drained from him and left as a fragile old man.
He encounters another Gnostic like entity, “the Genius of Unrest” who is “neither god nor human, since I am part of the universal space, of which neither gods nor humans have yet gained comprehension”.
The Genius of Unrest, along side the Tree of Knowledge, says he will enter the minds of Angus’s offspring and “shall give him no peace”.
As he dies Angus “curse[s] with my last breath, man, whose blood shall be salt and who shall forever languish in desolate pain”.
The novel ends with the words “Hail! Genius is born.”
John Zneimer in the The Literary Vision of Liam O’Flaherty writes that O’Flaherty felt that this was what was taking part in himself.
“Genius is the quality of being possessed, being driven, being used by a more than human force,” writes Zneimer.
He continues: “For O’Flaherty, genius is above all mere complexities. It is concerned with a different realm, ‘the cold majesty of Beauty’, and to attain that all mere human pleasures and aspirations must be forsaken.”
That O’Flaherty associates himself with genius is perhaps arrogant but then he was an arrogant man and in spite of his avowed communism he was often contemptuous of “peasants” and ordinary working people.
The Ecstacy of Angus was first published in 1931, but the Wolfhound edition I picked up very cheaply online was reprinted in 1978 and includes line drawings that would not be out of place in an illustrated edition of the Mahabharat.
The language is over-flowery and probably embarrassing to those who might have been looking for something in the style of The Assassin or The Informer. However, O’Flaherty’s literary terms of reference were wide and as readers of his short stories will know he can write just an intensely about events in a rock pool on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean as he can about an interrogation in a seedy Dublin tenement.
(I couldn't find an image of the book cover so settled for this image of Mananaan for now)

Liam O'Flaherty

A box-set of Liam O'Flaherty's Complete Short Stories as a Christmas present has made me think again about the possibility of writing a biography about him some time.
It is surprising that such a prolific writer who led a peripatetic and adventurous life has never been subject to a full biography before.
He was born on Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands, in 1896 and was brought up speaking English and Irish and developed a reputation as a story teller when he was child.
He was sent to a Catholic boarding school when he was 12 on the understanding that he would eventually be ordained into the priesthood but later admitted that he had no vocation. Despite this he was admitted to UCD but dropped out to fight for the British army in the First World War.
He was wounded and suffered from shell shock for many years. O'Flaherty fictionalised his wartime experiences in the novel Return of the Brute.
In 1918 he began a period of world wondering after signing up as a crew member on a cargo ship.
He sailed to the Mediterranean and to the port of Izmir in modern day Turkey where he went on a massive bender. From there O'Flaherty sailed back to Britain and then on to South America where he jumped ship in Brazil.
He managed to hitch a lift back across the Atlantic until he joined another ship and sailed to Canada from where he made his way to New York and became involved in the trades union movement and joined the Communist Party.
By 1921 he was back in Ireland and became involved in a fringe anti-Treaty group during the Irish Civil War and seized the Rotunda in Dublin where he raised the red flag.
He managed to escape before the Free State army overran the Rotunda and while standing outside the GPO in O'Connell Street overheard a woman saying: "Did you hear that bloody murderer Liam O’Flaherty is killed, thanks be to God.”
He fled to London, with a pistol strapped to his back and it was there that he started writing short stories and novels.
O'Flaherty continued to travel widely and went to the USSR and spent a lot of time in France. He also spent many years in Los Angeles working as script writer.
As well as his novels and short stories he wrote a number of biographical books. Two Years tells about his time travelling on the cargo ships, while Shame the Devil (which he inscribed 'I offer this dagger to my enemies') recounts another nervous breakdown during the 1930s brought on by writers block. Shame the Devil also revisits some of the key moments of his life.
I think he also wrote a satire about one of the periods he spent working in LA as a script writer called Hollywood Cemetery. He was there in the 1935 and during most of the Second World War.
O'Flaherty returned to Europe in the late 1940s and eventually settled in Dublin where he lived until his death in 1984, although for the last 30 years of his life he did not produce any new material.
His novels are uneven and critics have accused O'Flaherty of never really mastering the format although The Informer, which made into a film by John Ford (a cousin), The Assassin and Famine are still in print.
My own favourite is his early novel The Black Soul, which was partially biographical, and tells of a shell-shocked individualist suffering from a nervous breakdown among a close-knit, superstisious community on an island of the west coast of Ireland.
O'Flaherty's writing can be a bit gauche sometimes and even The Black Soul is a bit ropey in parts. However, it is always passionate.
However, his real achievement was his short stories. There are around 120 in my new box set, including those from Dúil, which was written in Irish, and their English translations.
The best of them are brief, uncluttered pieces steeped in nature or something that seems to capture a pivotal moment in someone’s life and that seems to define everything else that will ever happen to them.
Like so much else about him O'Flaherty's personal life was complicated. He married a divorcee and they had one daughter and he had another daughter with an American woman and various other liaisons.
First-hand witnesses would be hard to come-by now, although there are sure to be some people still alive who knew him well.
The various volumes of autobiography and his collected letters would provide some decent source material, however, using these sources could entail falling into a trap which O’Flaherty himself set for future biographers.
On the very first page of Shame the Devil he writes: “No-one knows what is truth. And therefore, if I lie in attempting to tell the truth in this book, let the blame lie at the door of original sin rather than at the door of my conscience.”
The only thing that resembles a biography to date is a coffee table-style book called Liam O’Flaherty’s Ireland by Peter Costello which includes some biographical material, stories and extracts from his novels and pictures of O’Flaherty, Inishmore and scenes that intended to illustrate his writing.
In his introduction Costello writes: "[O’Flaherty] was a man with a divided nature; even the Gaelic language of his childhood village was not the language his father wanted in the home. Solitary, he tried for many years to gain a foothold in crowded Hollywood. An individualist to the core, spontaneous and restless, by inclination a wanderer, he espoused the fervent Communism so typical of those early twentieth-century writers who were filled with generosity and purity of heart; he was still reading Sartre and Le Drapeau Rouge in the last years of his life. Yet it was a cause that failed him, as it did so many other admirers of Lenin and Trotsky. In touch to his nerve ends with the tides and eddies of creation, he loathed with great bitterness all organised religion, yet spent years studying for the priesthood. In the end he died with the blessing of a priest, reconciled with God, if not with the institution he had so long rejected. O’Flaherty was a strange, often contradictory man, unique among his contemporaries in Irish literature. In his writings we can see the beginnings of much that is now being done in both Gaelic and Irish literature. Though often neglected in the sweep of modern Anglo-American criticism, he was widely appreciated on the continent; and his own love of France and admiration for Russian literature suggest that he was more truly a European writer. "

The art of the short story

The last week has left me feeling like I have been given the equivalent of a literary doing over that I think has undermined by body’s resistance and left me shivering and coughing and spluttering with a cold for the last few days.
It started about two months ago when my cyberspace friend Gerard Brennan emailed me and invited me to contribute a short story to a book that he is co-editing.
Gerard runs the crimesceneni website and has been more than kind about my novel The Lost Chord, reviewing it on his blog and on Amazon, plugging it in an article for Verbal magazine and even talking about it during a contribution he made to a book show on BBC Radio Ulster.
He said the common theme of the story collection would be crime stories with an Irish mythological theme and he had already lined up a number of leading crime writers from throughout Ireland.
I was a bit wary to start with, firstly because while I have total respect from crime writing as a literary genre it is not my thing. My publisher described The Lost Chord as a novel of ‘music and mystery’ on the blurb and it does have elements of a detective story to it but it is by no means a crime novel.
The other names who had agreed to contribute are among the best-known crime writers in Ireland and so I felt that I would be a bit of an imposter.
The second reason why I was wary about getting involved was because I had never really attempted to write a short story before. Sure I’d done a few but never bothered revising them and never even thought about trying to get them published.
I like novels, I read them for pleasure and at this point I have written three and a quarter of my own – one published, one hopefully due to be published soon, a new novel which is still taking shape and my first flawed, much-rejected outing which is tucked away in a drawer somewhere.
I think I know what makes a novel work and it is a genre I am comfortable with but short stories are a totally different thing. Apart from Liam O’Flaherty and Jorge Louis Borges I never really bothered reading them until quite recently when I got John McGahern’s New and Selected Short Stories as well as O’Flaherty’s three book box set of Complete Short Stories.
The briefing notes and guidelines that Gerard sent me were intriguing but I decided that it was not really for me until while out walking one morning I hit on an idea. Writing is writing, right. It doesn’t matter if it is crime, science fiction, romance or so-called serious literature. So what if I wasn’t a natural crime writer it was all down to the art of story telling.
Two days later I had written nearly 8,000 words and was still only halfway through the story. The guidelines were between 2,000 and 6,000. But this was a first draft I told myself, keep writing, get all my ideas down and then I would cut it back in the next draft.
By the time I’d finished the story was nearly 13,000 words and I briefly considered expanding it and seeing if I could turn it into a full-length novel. There were four very strong characters and a couple of interesting minor ones, I thought, and they could all be developed and other plot lines brought into play.
In the end I decided against it, firstly because I wanted to continue with the novel I am writing, secondly because I wanted see if I could actually distil it into a good tight short story and thirdly because I’d already told Gerard that I would contribute.
I emailed him and said I’d had over run on the word count and could he accept something more than the top limit of 6,000 words.
No problem, he replied, and so I set about trying to edit my story down eventually getting a version that I was happy with which sat at just over 8,000 words. I’d had to cut a number of scenes that I was very keen on and drop sub-plots that I’d thought gave the story a bit more depth.
I was keen to get an opinion because from his website it is clear that Gerard Brennan lives and breaths crime fiction and I wanted to know if my story would make the grade. The reply back was cautiously optimistic but with the proviso that all decisions had to be taken jointly between Gerard and his co-editor Mike Stone (no not that one – an English writer of mainly of sci-fi, horror and fantasy).
A few weeks later Gerard came back and said the plot was too complicated and that Mike had thought it was really a novella being squeezed into a shorter format, although he said they both liked the overall story.
They were right. I had approached the story as I would writing a novel. When I had edited it down I had still tried to keep in all the ideas that I’d had when it was a 13,000 word piece introducing too many character points of view, too many twists and sub plots.
Gerard advised on keeping the basic plot and writing from a single point of view, cutting the number of characters and ditching some of the superfluous scenes. Superfluous! These were some of my favourite parts of the story and included some of, what I thought, was the best writing.
Again I decided that I would just forget about it until about two weeks later I suddenly thought of how I could maybe make it all work and so within a day I had rewritten a new draft, using mostly material from the original, but from a different perspective and telling a much simpler story.
I sent it back. Gerard was upbeat but suggested a few more revisions which I agreed would make it a better story and so rewrote again. By mid-week Mike Stone was also involved in the process pointing out gaps in the plot which I had thought were perfectly clear but then again just because I knew what I was talking about didn’t mean that everyone else did.
We were down to mere sentences but both editors had still not finally committed to including the story in the collection until Friday morning when I got two separate email from Gerard and Mike saying that my story was in.
As I said at the start I felt as if I’d been given a literary hiding but it was an invigorating and humbling experience. To have something you have written scrutinized in such fine detail is unnerving but to me it is the sign of the perfect editor.
It is hard to distance yourself from something that you have written. You can’t see the flaws, especially when you are trying to turn the whole thing round in too short a period of time.
It was like having a master class in short story writing. In fact mid-week to try and take my mind of my ‘crime’ short story I started writing another one and finished it that night. I read over it yesterday and I can see that it needs redrafted but is much more focused and tightly written. It is a short story and not a mini-novel squeezed into the short story format.
Thanks to both Mike and Gerard. You can find out more about Mike’s writing at his website mylefteye and about Gerard’s writing and his excellent insights in Irish crime writing a crimesceneni.
The short story collection they are editing is due to be published by Morrigan Books in early 2010 and Gerard is running a competition to try and find a name for it. You can read more at his website and find out who some of the other authors who are contributing are.

Francis Stuart

I read Blacklist Section H by Francis Stuart again during a recent holiday. I first bought it more than 25 years ago and must have read it a dozen times since. It is a book I keep going back to and coming away with something new each time. I have spent quite a bit of time and money tracking down Stuart’s novels over the years, many of which are now out of print, and there are now about 20 on my book shelf.
I even tracked the author himself down in 1997 to do an interview following the publication of his last novella King David Dances. He was 95 at the time when I visited him at his home in Dublin and he was very hard of hearing and had trouble walking. Never-the-less he sat patiently with me for more than an hour and half and I'm sure he sussed out that there was more than mere journalistic interest to my questions.
It was quite surreal to hear him talking about his final meeting with Samuel Beckett in Paris when they were both in their eighties, or about conversations he’d had with WB Yeats and Liam O'Flaherty in the 1930s, and according to his biographer, Kevin Kevin Kiely, he was even introduced, briefly, to James Joyce in a Paris cafe.
However, there is always something slightly awkward about admitting that your favourite writer is Francis Stuart for he is still derided by many as a Nazi propagandist. And let’s face it there is no getting around it, Stuart went to Germany in 1940 to teach in Berlin and went on to broadcast propaganda to Ireland on behalf of Nazi Germany.
Blacklist is autobiographical but written in the third person as if Stuart was trying to stand back and dissect his own life - in particular as to how he ended up living and working in Berlin during the Second World War. Detractors who accused Stuart of being a Nazi collaborator labelled Blacklist as an attempt at self-justification, however, there is too much going on here for it to be a simple as that. Stuart goes out of his way to portray himself as flawed and selfish but with painful insights into his own psyche.
From a scene in Berlin, Stuart’s narrator, H, comes across a street in a former Jewish district and contemplates the fate of the Jews under the Nazis (this would have been in 1939 before the ’final solution’ had been fully implemented).
He writes that H “had to experience , in his own probably small degrees, some of what they suffered and, on the one level, even more because he could not claim their innocence. He had long suspected that his destiny bound him to them in a manner more obscure than their present defenders… He also realised that he would go to certain lengths in association with their persecutors, in violent reaction against the mores of home, thus ensuring that his condemnation would not, unlike theirs, arouse any sympathy.”
Stuart is a complicated character and seems to have had the attitude of ‘whatever everyone else is for I’m against it’. He was born to Irish parents in Australia in 1902 but his father took his own life when Francis was an infant. He was brought back to Ireland by his mother where he was brought up by his unionist relatives in the north until he went to public school in England. Despite his Protestant/Unionist background he married Iseult Gonne - daughter of WB Yeats’s muse Maud Gonne - and became a Catholic and a Republican who smuggled guns to Ireland for the IRA and was interned by the newly formed Free State government in the 1920s.
His novels from the 1930s seemed to almost anticipate what would actually happen to him in later life. His narrators go out of their way to align themselves with fringe elements or commit acts that ensure their isolation from society. It is from this position of isolation that Stuart seemed to believe that writers and poets would be able experience the imaginative counter currents in which great art is produced.
In Blacklist Stuart defines H’s situation shortly after his arrival in Berlin: - “Time: Deepest winter, 1940. Situation: uncertain, compromised, companionless, cold to freezing… Alternatively: alone and free and passionately involved in my own living fiction, imaginative participation unimpaired, unpredictable possibilities.”
Stuart equates great art with suffering and isolation and his novels are constantly name checking novelists, poets and painters who were pushed to the fringes of society or endured mental or physical suffering to produce great art – Van Gogh, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Keats, DH Lawrence, Osip Mandelshtam and Emily Bronte.
Infact, Emily Bronte actually appears in one of Stuart’s most original novels – A Hole in the Head – written in the 1970s and set in a fictional version of Belfast, where a severely mentally disturbed writer, recently abandoned by his wife, arrives in Troubles-torn ‘Belbury’ with Emily, who is as real to him as the people who exist outside his mind.
I think you almost have to buy-in to that ‘outsider’ philosophy to understand Stuart, otherwise you would simply label him as the equivalent of the schoolboy who got caught smoking behind the bike shed when he knew it was wrong but tried to justify it by saying he did it all in the name of art. The criticism would be valid if Stuart had simply produced vacuous, self-serving novels after his years in German but even his fiercest critics had to grudgingly concede that there was a certain depth to them.
The 1940s novels The Pillar of Cloud and Redemption jar against the conventional narrative of post-World War II history – which for the most part has been set down by the victors. Stuart’s his ‘late-harvest’ books (written when he was in his seventies and eighties) – A Hole in the Head, Memorial and The High Consistory ¬- challenge conventional morality and often jolt you into questioning values that most people would not consider questioning. And if you can get hold of them Pigeon Irish and The Coloured Dome, written in the early 1930s, are worth reading, not least because they seem to articulate the very philosophy that Stuart was subsequently accused of manufacturing to justify his decision to go to Germany a decade later.
However, the jumping off point has got to be Blacklist Section H, but be warned it could turn in to an obsession.