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In July 1916, while attempts were being made to organise a reprieve, copies of his journals (the so-called Black Diaries) — which appeared to show that Casement was an active homosexual — were circulated by the government. On 3 August, Casement was hanged in Pentonville prison.
Maria Varga Llosa employs the novelist’s device of placing Casement in his last days awaiting execution, while allowing extensive flashbacks to the earlier career, which are particularly effective in their depiction of western cruelty. The story is never less than gripping; but does the novelist illuminate any more than previous biographers, who include, of course, Brian Inglis, a former Spectator editor?
The novelist has, in principle, the capacity to penetrate to the inner sensibility of the man and explore more fully the nature of Casement’s conversion to Irish nationalism, his humanitarian campaigns and his disputed sexuality. The trouble is that the amiable author rather sentimentally funks the issue:
My own impression — that of a novelist, obviously — is that Roger Casement wrote the famous Diaries but did not live them, at least not integrally; that he wrote certain things because he would have liked to live them but couldn’t.
What this means in practice is that rough group sex with sailors may be fantasy while more gentle one-on-one encounters with local lads are real. The problem with this is that the Diaries are detailed and inter-
connected, and there is not a hint of fantasy. Again, the author talks of a ‘gloomy aura’ of ‘paedophilia’ surrounding Casement’s reputation throughout ‘much of the 20th century’. But the truth is that it is only in this century that scholars like the Ulster gay rights activist Geoff Dudgeon, basing himself on archival research, have raised the issue of grooming young boys.
As for the connection between the Irish cause and Casement’s broader humanitarian writings, the author essentially accepts Casement’s own view that there is a fundamental similarity between the working of colonialism and imperialism in Ireland, the Belgian Congo and Putamayo in this period. Llosa allows space for one friend of Casement’s, Herbert Read, to dispute this view, but rather short-circuits the views of another friend, Joseph Conrad, on this topic.
Conrad was unimpressed by the Irish story of oppression, and spoke of
springing from an oppressed race, where oppression was not a matter of history but a crushing fact in the daily life of all individuals, made still more bitter by hatred and contempt. A very different thing from a historical sense of wrong and blundering administration, which I will admit if you like.
Even more profoundly, how do we explain Casement’s explicit enthusiasm for the German empire?
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