BIOGRAPHY: Roger Casement: Imperialist, Rebel, Revolutionary, By Seamus O'Siochain, Lilliput Press, 656pp. €40Of the lives of prominent Irish figures of the 19th and 20th centuries, that of Roger Casement presents by a clear margin the most insuperable difficulties to the biographer. Casement's life was not the fleshed-out life of the politician.
NEITHER DID IT, for the greater part of its length, possess a clear revolutionary trajectory.
He was for most of his life a consular official of the British government who underwent a gradual metamorphosis into a publicist and campaigner, and ultimately into a republican activist. His causes - the Congo, the Amazon and Ireland - are discrete and discontinuous, even if there is a thematic consistency on which Casement came increasingly to insist.
Seamus O'Siochain, who lectures in anthropology in Maynooth, has written what is - and is likely to remain - the most voluminous biography of Casement and a significant contribution to an understanding of his life.
That contribution is to some degree curtailed by the methodology that O'Siochain adopts. He seeks to hew out of the immense materials he has garnered a narrative chronology of a life that is not coloured by the subjectivity of the author. To this end he elects to let the materials speak for themselves and for the most part eschews comment and analysis (his appendix on the Black Diaries is an exception). This is a decision made against the background of the partisanship (both pro- and anti-) that marks much of the biographical writing on Casement. However, it commits him to avoiding a sustained engagement with much of the modern scholarship on Casement's career and thought, and leaves the reader somewhat adrift at the outset.
Casement demonstrated extraordinary courage and very considerable prophetic insight in his humanitarian campaigns against the horrific persecutions of the indigenes of the Congo and the Amazon, the blood-red dawn of late modern colonialism. He maintained great nobility of bearing at his life's end. The problem is in what transpired in between (albeit with some overlap) - his engagement with Irish nationalism.
Margaret O'Callaghan has identified the roots of Casement's nationalism in his family background in Co Antrim, and his passionate absorption as a boy with the accounts of the Gaelic Irish experience of Tudor and Stuart Ireland. Casement's nationalism finds overt expression, however, with the Irish cultural revival, by which, in O'Siochain's apt verb, Casement was "enraptured". Casement's engagement with the revival commences with his involvement in Feis na nGleann at Glenariffe in Co Antrim in 1904. There is something contrived at least in how Casement articulates his embrace of cultural nationalism. The alanas and ochones in his correspondence, his little Irish endearments, are peculiarly grating (as when he writes to his cousin and confidante, the estimable Gertrude Bannister in 1906: "I am a queer sort of 'British' consul, alanna."). There is also an exaggerated heartiness: "glorious boys of Erin", and so forth.
Casement's nationalism owed something to his personal loneliness. Set against the wrenching geographical displacements of which his life was largely comprised, Antrim - and Ireland in general - came to appear a sanctuary of repose. Writing to his sister Nina after his conviction, Casement achieved an extraordinary, exalted lyricism in evoking his surge of emotions on his being back at last in Ireland as he lay prostrate and exhausted at McKenna's fort after his landing on April 21st, 1916, at Banna Strand.
CASEMENT, WHERE IRELAND in its political aspect was concerned, was something of a Quixote, or holy fool. He was remarkably deficient in political judgment. He had little awareness of where the complex lines of political demarcation ran. For example, he was enthused by Horace Plunkett's writing on the Gaelic movement. He had, moreover, almost no sense of how he might appear to those to whom his enthusiasm was addressed. One wonders what impression he left on the "two Fenians of charm and distinction" with whom he was to dine in January 1908, or what Arthur Griffith (whom Casement appeared to consider insufficiently charismatic, and too narrow) made of him.
The artist William Rothenstein, who, like many others, found Casement "excitable and restless" recalled Yeats commenting of Casement in 1911: "As long as he only bothers with present conditions, it doesn't matter; but Heaven help him if he fills his head with Ireland's past wrongs." Yeats must have reflected on the fulfilment of his apprehensions as he wrote to the home secretary advocating Casement's reprieve in 1916.
AT LEAST, BEFORE he underwent his conversion to militant republicanism, Casement was a highly volatile combination of Irish revivalist and unreconstructed Victorian. O'Siochain carefully collates the observations from Casement's private correspondence from South America, which attest to his subscription to contemporary conceptions of racial types and racial purity. He wrote irritably from Rio de Janeiro to Gertrude Bannister in September 1909: "Give me the real black - not this mongrel half black, half white, half Portuguese, half Jew mongrel India mestico."
Joseph Conrad, unnerved by Casement's blithe humanitarianism in the hell of the Congo of Leopold II, King of the Belgians, with dark intelligence discerned "a touch of the Conquistador" in Casement, but also wrote that "some particle of Las Casas's soul had found refuge in his indefatigable body", referring to Bartolomé de las Casas, the great Seville-born member of the Dominican Order who first denounced the sanguinary depredations of the Spanish empire in the Indies.
At once incensed and fascinated by Ulster loyalist preparations to resist Home Rule by force, Casement became active in the Irish Volunteers. If Casement's escalating nationalist fervour intensified in response to the Ulster crisis, it is difficult to feel it had not an endogenous momentum of its own.
CASEMENT WAS IN New York at the outbreak of the first World War, and the Clan na Gael executive adopted an extravagant address to the Kaiser drafted by him: "We feel that the German people are in truth fighting for European civilisation at its best . . . It is by sole possession of Ireland that Great Britain has been able for two centuries to maintain an unchallengeable mastery of the seas and by this agency to convert a small trading community into the wholly arbitrary judges of war and peace for all mankind." The thesis that possession of Ireland was central to Britain's naval dominance was an obsession of Casement's: "For Ireland is, in truth, the Keeper of the Seas."
While there was some readiness on the part of Germany in the very early stages of the war to contemplate an invasion of Ireland, the impetus was lost as the war bogged down in the carnage of the western front. Casement reached Berlin on October 31st, 1914. His German adventure turned into a debacle that was attended by the collapse of his own health, already gravely undermined in the tropics. He was received with hostility by the overwhelming majority of the Irish prisoners whom he sought to recruit for an Irish brigade at Limburg in January 1915; there were cheers for John Redmond.
Casement's outrage was haughtily uncomprehending: "I will not return to Limburg to be insulted by a handful of recreant Irishmen." The culminating indignity came when he was informed in Berlin on March 16th, 1916, by his bête noire, Captain Nadolny of the General Staff, of the plans for what would be the Easter rising. Dogmatically committed to the idea that an Irish rising could only take place in conjunction with a German invasion, Casement listened silently "to what I considered to be absurd views".
The relationship between Casement's humanitarianism and his nationalism remains a source of fascination. In the remarkable letter to Alice Stopford Green in April 1907 that was to become a key text in his myth, he wrote that "when up in those lonely Congo forests I found Leopold I also found myself - the incorrigible Irishman". He "realised then that I was looking at this tragedy with the eyes of another race - of a people once hunted themselves".
Casement's historical stature resides in a humanitarianism that was informed by his Irish background rather than in the later espousal of an obsessional nationalism that culminated in his German adventure and execution. It was to the first that he reverted in his last public utterance, the statement he made before sentence at his trial, in observing that the law under which he had been convicted had "no parentage in love".
Frank Callanan is the author of The Parnell Split and TM Healy