Knighted in 1911 for distinguished service as a British foreign officer, hanged five years later for high treason to the Crown, Roger Casement is one of the most enigmatic figures in the long history of troubles between England and Ireland. His true character has been a source of mystification and of passionate contention. This new biography, which never loses sight of the suffering human being behind the roles ascribed to him-martyr, traitor, flawed hero, moral degenerate-offers a vivid, compassionate, and conclusive analysis of Casement and of his career.
Born in 1864 in Dublin and reared in County Antrim, Roger Casement very early developed an obsessive love for Ireland. After years of consular service for England and after being knighted for his effective campaigns against brutalities inflicted upon tribesmen of the Congo and the Amazon, he resigned to dedicate himself to the cause of Irish freedom.
B.L. Reid narrates with mounting drama and tension the events leading to Casement's participation in the Easter Rising of 1916, and his subsequent arrest, trial, and execution. It becomes clear that in a sense Casement engineered his own destruction. A strikingly handsome and romantic figure who had been much admired for his humanitarian public service, Casement went to trial with powerful support for a plea of clemency. This support evaporated, however, when his notorious "Black Diaries," which recorded in detail his life as a homosexual, were circulated by British officials. Although many Irishmen denounced the diaries as British forgeries, Casement went to the gallows. A controversial figure to the end, he was raised to the pantheon of martyred political heroes in Ireland, while in England Madame Tussaud featured him in her Chamber of Horrors.
Through close study of Casement's diaries Mr. Reid demonstrates that they are authentic, that they fit into the total picture of a symptomatic modern man-passionate and courageous, yet deeply divided and confused.
Industry Reviews
In 1911 Roger Casement, a Protestant Irishman in the British Consular Service, was knighted by the Crown for his work in exposing racist atrocities in the Belgian Congo and the Amazon. Five years later he was hanged as a traitor for a quixotic attempt to land German arms in Ireland in conjunction with the 1916 Rising. It has taken 60 years for a biographer to rescue him from English calumnies and Irish canonization. Brian Inglis' Roger Casement (1974) was the first serious effort to that end; Inglis managed clinical objectivity but the inner mystery of the man eluded him. Reid (author of Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of John Quinn) has achieved something more: he has made sympathetic sense out of a life which was fragmented to the point of "disastrous incoherence." Reid thinks that Joseph Conrad, who knew Casement in Africa, understood something basic when he wrote: "I judged that he was a man, properly speaking, of no mind at all. I don't mean stupid. I mean he was all emotion." What Conrad missed was Casement's "Pauline conversion" to Irish nationalism and his increasingly "ritual or somnambular" allegiance to Britain. When Casement left Germany for the abortive arms landing, he said "I am already a dead man." He wanted desperately to stop the Rising, which he was convinced would fail. It was the final irony in a life filled with ironies and poised on a psychological abyss, a life held together only by courage. Reid agrees with Inglis that the Casement diaries - which the English circulated and the Irish denounced - are authentic. They show Casement, the furtive, compulsive homosexual; but they are also "tiresome as a fact and as a problem." Reid's Casement is "a lesser Hamlet," inept and self-deceiving, but genuinely noble - "a divided spirit pursuing wholeness." (Kirkus Reviews)
