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In a letter to the
historian Alice Stopford Green of 20 April 1906, Roger
Casement summed up his life as he entered middle age:
It
is a mistake for an Irishman to mix himself up with the
English. He is bound to do one of two things-either to go to
the wall (if he remains Irish) or to become an Englishman
himself. You see I very nearly did become one once. At the
Boer War time, I had been away from Ireland for years, out
of touch with everything native to my heart and mind, trying
hard to do my duty, and every fresh act of duty made me
appreciably nearer the ideal of the Englishman. I had
accepted Imperialism. British rule was to be accepted at all
costs, because it was the best for everyone under the sun,
and those who opposed that extension ought rightly to be
'smashed'. I was on the high road to being a regular
Imperialist jingo--although at heart underneath all, and
unsuspected almost by myself, I had remained an Irishman.
Well, the [Boer] war gave me qualms at the end-- the
concentration camps bigger ones-and finally, when up in
those lonely Congo forests where I found Leopold, I found
also myself, the incorrigible Irishman. [1]
Mario Vargas
Llosa’s fictionalized biography of this ‘incorrigible
Irishman’ is a fairly hefty book, consisting of 455
pages. There are fifteen chapters, plus an epilogue. The
chapters alternate as regards the scenes they depict.
Odd numbers are set in Pentonville Prison London, as
Casement in the summer of 1916 awaits the outcome of his
appeal against the death sentence imposed for his role
in attempting to import arms for use by Irish
nationalist rebels. Even numbers are set in Casement’s
past. The Pentonville chapters also contain much
material from Casement’s earlier years, as there are
many flashbacks, reminiscences and reflections, often
prompted by the various people who come to visit
Casement in his cell. Chapters one to seven are grouped
under the title El Congo, eight to twelve
Amazonía, thirteen to fifteen Irlanda. Of
course there is no such clear demarcation in the
individual chapters, as Casement’s memories range and
flow over the entire course of his life. Although it is
written in the third person, El Sueño del Celta
resembles a fictional autobiography. There is no point
of view save that of the protagonist. Casement dominates
every page. There is no scene depicted or dialogue created
in which Casement is not present. We only know what
Casement knows.
In an
interesting interview Vargas Llosa gave to Angus
Mitchell while he was still working on the book
the author says:
I don’t want to write a book of
history which is disguised as a novel, not at all. I
want to write a novel and so I’m going to use my
imagination, my fantasy, much more than historical
material. I love history but I am a novelist. I want to
write a novel, a book in which fantasy and imagination
are more important than the historical raw material... I
know that I am not Irish so probably in my novel Irish
people will find many things that they do not recognise,
but I hope the novel overall will justify the
inaccuracies. [2]
Because of his association with
Antrim, Casement is sometimes erroneously seen as of
the North of Ireland, but he was a Dubliner, born in
the suburb of Sandycove, just to the south of Dun
Laoghaire. According to Vargas Llosa, the event that
most shaped Casement's childhood was the death of
his mother when he was nine. The author writes
poignantly and tenderly about the relationship
between the boy Casement and his mother, Anne
Jephson. Memories and dreams of his mother accompany
Casement to the end. To take one of many examples,
there is a chapter in which the jailer in
Pentonville Prison talks to Casement about the loss
of his son on the Western Front, and laments the
fact that he had died without knowing women.
Casement is only half listening.
Roger at least had known even for
a short time the happiness of a beautiful woman,
tender, delicate. He sighed. Unusually for him, he
hadn’t thought of her for a while. If there was a
hereafter, if the souls of the dead followed from
eternity the transient life of the living, he was
sure that Anne Jephson had been observing him all
the time, following his steps, suffering and
worrying with each reverse he suffered in Germany,
sharing his disappointments, and that terrible
feeling of having made a mistake, of having
idealized the Kaiser and the Germans, of having
thought they would make the cause of Ireland their
own and become loyal and enthusiastic allies of the
dream of Irish independence (275). [3]
Almost four years after the loss
of his mother, Casement's father also died. This did
not leave an equal effect, as Casement never appears
to have been close to his authoritarian father. (I
suspect that Casement Senior was a somewhat more
complex figure than may be visible from Vargas
Llosa’s description of him). The orphan Casement
went to live with relatives in England. Vargas Llosa
has him already espousing Irish nationalism at this
time, though he does not return to Ireland when he
finishes school. Instead, he went to Africa, a
continent he was to reside in for some twenty years
and which he came to consider home. Initially, he
bought into the common currency of the day that
justified the Scramble for Africa of the late
nineteenth century, the White Man’s ever deeper
incursions into that continent. Indeed in the early
years, Casement worked for the Belgian-sponsored
International Association. He was primarily a
surveyor, opening up land that had been unexplored
by Europeans and reporting on the native population.
Vargas Llosa expresses Casement’s belief in the
manifest destiny to ‘civilize’ Africa:
To take European products to
Africa and bring back the raw materials which the
soil of Africa produced was, more than a mere
trading operation, an enterprise that favored the
progress of people who were stalled in prehistory,
given over to cannibalism and the slave trade. Trade
brought with it religion, morality, law and the
values of modern Europe, culture, freedom,
democracy. It created progress which would culminate
in converting the wretches of the African tribes
into men and women of our time (26).
After a number of years Casement
was appointed Consul by the British Foreign Office,
to serve in present day Maputo, then Lourenço
Marques in Mozambique. He seems to have made a very
competent civil servant, a capable, hard-working,
clever, and resourceful representative of the
British government. Thereafter came the first great
task of Casement’s life, the investigation of the
rubber-gathering operation run by the Belgians in
the Congo. Vargas Llosa devotes many pages to
bringing to life the cruel system operated by the
Belgians. There are long descriptions of the
terrorist methods that were used on the native
population to force them to work bringing in food
and rubber. Belgian-led paramilitaries murdered many
Africans and mutilated more, cutting off hands or
feet or genitals as punishment for minor or spurious
transgressions. Vargas Llosa documents the beatings,
floggings, imprisonments, torture and murder. At one
stage Casement is addressed by a priest, a Father
Hutot.
‘Can you believe that things such as this happen in
this world, Mr. Consul?’ the priest said to
Casement. ‘Yes, mon père. I believe
everything bad and terrible that I am told now. If I
have learned anything in the Congo, it is that there
is no more bloodthirsty beast than man’ (97).
There are several Catholic
priests in the book, Fr Hutot in Africa, Fr Urrutia
in South America, Father Carey in Pentonville.
Vargas Llosa’s Casement has a lifelong
semi-association with the Catholic Church. He had
been secretly baptized a Catholic by his mother, and
though he did not live as a Catholic, he certainly
died one. For today’s sensibility it is perhaps
ironic that a practicing homosexual should have been
(re)admitted into the Catholic Church, though the
case of Oscar Wilde a couple of decades earlier
offers a parallel.
Two years later the Foreign
Office offered him the post of consul in Santos,
Brazil, and subsequently in
Rio de Janeiro. South America was to
provide the scene for the second great act of
Casement’s life, when he was called on to
investigate the conduct of another rubber company,
in Amazonia, what is now part of modern Colombia.
Casement’s 1912 Putumayo Report exposed the
exploitation of the indigenous population of the
upper Amazon region. The book offers a long
treatment of the systematic cruelties perpetrated by
agents of Julio César Arana’s Peruvian Amazon
Company. It is during these years that Casement
consciously or unconsciously formulates a unified
theory of colonialism, a world view broad enough to
include Congolese, South American Indians, and Irish
farmers and fishermen. He could see that abuse and
massacre was ever the way of the colonizer and
imperialist: ‘The Congo and Amazonia were united by
an umbilical cord. The horrors were repeated, with
few variations all inspired by greed, the original
sin which accompanied man from birth, the secret
fountain of infinite evil. Or was there something
else to it? Maybe the devil had at last won the
eternal battle?’ (158).
The epiphany extends to Ireland:
We Irish are
like the Indians here in the Putamayo. Colonized,
exploited and condemned to be so, as long as we
place our trust in the institutions and governments
of England to win our freedom. They’ll never give it
to us. Why would the Empire that colonizes us do
anything for us unless it felt irresistible pressure
to make them do it? That pressure can only come from
armed force (239).
Casement’s subsequent trajectory,
his growing involvement with the militant wing of
Irish nationalism, his trips to the United States
and then Germany, are what constitute the third
element in Vargas Llosa’s book. They will be
familiar ground for anyone versed in Irish history.
Casement’s fate takes him to attempt to organize an
Irish Brigade formed from among the Irish members of
the British Army imprisoned in Germany. They are
‘blind and deaf to his exhortations. Theirs
was another side of Ireland; that of the vanquished,
whom centuries of colonization had robbed of the
indomitable spark that sent so many men and women to
the barricades in Dublin’ (366).
He organizes the importation to
Ireland of substantial military supplies from
Germany, and yet then goes to Ireland to try to
prevent their use in what would be the Easter
Rebellion. Ironically, it could be argued that
Casement had not committed treason, for he came to
Ireland to stop a rebellion, not to foment it. This
distinction might have been of use in at least
seeking to commute the death sentence. In the event,
information on Casement's diaries was made public
and the scandal accompanying their ‘revelations’
precluded any possibility of a reprieve, or more
accurately became a further pretext for executing
Casement.
There is no doubt that Vargas Llosa finds admirable
elements in Casement’s personality and in many of
his actions. As he said in the interview with Angus
Mitchell earlier mentioned, Casement ‘seems
to be a character whose natural environment is a
very great novel and not the real world’
Yet
Vargas Llosa’s Casement is a highly flawed figure.
As the book moves towards its close, the emphasis is
ever more on the Irishman’s failures and mistakes
and the contradictions of his life, expressed
through the tortured self-recriminations of the
protagonist. He was always very careful and
meticulous with his paperwork—why did he become so
careless towards the end? Having spent years
planning for and advocating an Insurrection, why did
he come to Ireland to stop one? Why had he had so
little success in recruiting an Irish Brigade in
Germany? Why did he accept a knighthood when he
hated England? How come he was unable to make any
progress in learning Irish, even though he had
quickly gained proficiency in various African
languages, as well as French and Portuguese? He had
a German train ticket in his pocket when he was
arrested in Kerry. Worse still, he had not destroyed
a piece of paper which gave the code to communicate
with the German War Department. How could he have
been such a fool as to not take elementary steps to
get rid of incriminating evidence?
Of course the greatest mistake was
his association with the shadowy Norwegian
Christensen, Lucifer, as Vargas Llosa has
Casement call him, though in happier times he
had been Casement’s ‘Viking God.’
Anyone
who writes a biography of Casement,
fictionalized or otherwise, must confront the
issue of Casement’s sexuality and especially the
matter of the Black Diaries. The very first
scene of the book shows a clerk employed by
Casement’s attorney berating Casement: ‘How
could you have been so stupid, you idiot? How
could you put such things on paper, hombre de
Dios. And why did you not destroy those
diaries before starting to conspire against the
British Empire?’(15).
In some instances, Vargas
Llosa has Casement distancing himself, changing
the subject when the Diaries are mentioned, or
claiming not to know what people are talking
about. He thanks Fr Casey for not asking about
‘those filthy things which, apparently, they are
saying about me’.
He tells the priest that he will not heed the
English Cardinal Bourne’s outrageous request
that, before he becomes a Catholic, he should
repent of all those ‘vile things the press is
accusing me of’(396).
But we also see Casement reminiscing – alone in
his prison cell – about his first homosexual
awakenings, how Africa had freed him of the
constraints of Victorian society. He remembers a
boy he went fishing with in Boma—‘Shutting his
eyes, he tried to resurrect that scene of so
many years ago: the surprise, the indescribable
excitement’
(282).
Little
by little, over the course of the novel, we see
Casement picking up more and more young men.
There are erotically-charged encounters which do
not lead to sex, such as when Casement asks a
young man in Amazonia to let him take his
photograph:
Roger took various shots, to
the laughter and jeering of the other young men.
He made the youth take off the paper hat, lift
his arms, show his muscles and assume the pose
of a discus thrower. For this last pose he had
to touch the young man’s arm for a second. He
felt his hands soaked from nerves and the heat.
He only stopped taking photographs when he saw
that he was surrounded by ragged urchins who
were gazing at him as if he were a strange
insect. He thrust the coins towards the young
man and quickly returned to the consulate (159).
In many cases he fights his
compulsions, feeling disgust after an encounter
and embarking on long periods of abstinence.
Often this is symbolized by the urge to take a
bath. He reaches a nadir when he has sex with a
beggar he picks up on a Paris street, and takes
home a case of genital lice. But worst for him
by far is what follows from picking up the
Norwegian Christiensen, the British spy whom
Casement met in New York in 1914. In a real way
Casement’s sexual proclivity helps to bring
about his death. Vargas Llosa as author appears
to accept that the Black Diaries were written by
Casement, but believes that he did not do all
that is described in them. Some of the incidents
were imagined or fantasized, what might be
called a personalized pornography.
"He
had been weak and succumbed to the flesh on many
occasions". Not as many as were described in his
diaries and note-books, although of course to
write about what one has
not experienced, but
what one wanted to experience, was also a way of
living it, however cowardly and timidly’ (375).
At the end of the novel, Dr
Percy Mander, the doctor who witnessed the
execution, authorizes Casement’s burial only
after he has meticulously examined the dead
man’s anus. With a white rubber glove, he probes
it to satisfy himself that it is dilated, thus
‘confirming’ that the dead man had indulged in
the ‘practices’ which were described in the
Black Diaries. This final touch--historically
true—epitomizes human degradation, but it is the
degradation of the British prison and its agent
Mander.
Some
critics have seen in El Sueño del Celta
another of Vargas Llosa’s well-known attacks on
what he calls nationalism. For example, in his
Nobel Prize acceptance speech he said the
following:
I
despise every form of nationalism, a provincial
ideology – or rather, religion – that is
short-sighted, exclusive, that cuts off the
intellectual horizon and hides in its bosom
ethnic and racist prejudices, for it transforms
into a supreme value, a moral and ontological
privilege, the fortuitous circumstance of one’s
birthplace. Along with religion, nationalism has
been the cause of the worst slaughters in
history, like those in the two world wars and
the current bloodletting in the Middle East.
Nothing has contributed as much as nationalism
to Latin America’s having been Balkanized and
stained with blood in senseless battles and
disputes, squandering astronomical resources to
purchase weapons instead of building schools,
libraries, and hospitals.[4]
Yet it
is surely impossible to see this book as a
critique of nationalism, or of Irish nationalism
at any rate. In fact, Vargas Llosa’s treatment
of Irish nationalism is benevolent, mostly
focusing on the cultural nationalism that gained
so much ground during Casement’s lifetime. Irish
nationalism, as Vargas Llosa associates it,
means attending a Feis in the Glens of
Antrim, or trying to understand those old men
and women who in Casement’s time still spoke the
North Antrim dialect of Irish. It is a rural
idyll--there is no consciousness of the city, of
Dublin or Belfast.
On several occasions Roger
felt his eyes becoming moist as he listened to
the joyful melodies of the bagpipers and choirs,
or, as he heard, even without understanding a
word, the story-tellers recounting the ancient
Gaelic romances and legends, born in the
medieval night (143).
The
contradiction is apparent rather than real,
for in the same Nobel Prize acceptance
discourse Vargas Llosa went on to say:
We should
not confuse a blinkered nationalism and its
rejection of the ‘other’, always the seed of
violence, with patriotism, a salutary,
generous feeling of love for the land where
we were born, where our ancestors lived,
where our first dreams were forged, a
familiar landscape of geographies, loved
ones, and events that are transformed into
signposts of memory and defenses against
solitude. Homeland is not flags, anthems, or
apodictic speeches about emblematic heroes,
but a handful of places and people that
populate our memories and tinge them with
melancholy, the warm sensation that no
matter where we are, there is a home for us
to return to.
Casement was certainly an advanced
nationalist, but he lacked the true spirit
of a revolutionary. Someone like James
Connolly, or Tom Clarke, would not have
sought to stop the Rising, and would never
have insisted that the volunteers of the
Irish Brigade not be sent to
Ireland. It was rather pointless to
hope to supply 20.000 guns to the Volunteers
and then tell them not to use them. That
quantity of arms could have challenged the
British presence in Ireland had it found its
way north to Liam Mellows' Volunteer
battalion which had mobilized in
Galway. Indeed a few years later
General Tom Barry' s Third West Cork Brigade
fought the British to a standstill even
though they were armed with just a few score
rifles. Vargas Llosa has Casement
questioning his role in these events:
Had he made yet another
mistake with his life? What might have
happened if the arms on board the Aud
had got into the hands of the volunteers who
waited at Tralee Bay? He imagined hundreds
of patriots on bicycles, cars, horse-drawn
carts, even donkeys, silently moving under
the stars and distributing the arms
throughout Ireland (366).
Vargas Llosa’s title
comes from that of a long epic poem which
Casement had written ‘in September 1906’.
With the publication of El Sueño del
Celta and its inevitable translation to
other languages, Casement will be introduced
to a whole generation who know little of
him. Indeed, one can foresee Hollywood
taking an interest in the cinematic
possibilities of the extraordinary pageant
of Casement’s life. Vargas Llosa’s Casement
may be far more vivid than is the figure of
the many scholarly biographies which already
exist. While this is a good thing,
popularized history or fictionalized
biography brings with it its own risks.
Often a creative depiction of persons or
events tends to become canonical. It is not
uncommon to meet Irish people, the young
especially, whose vision of Eamon De Valera
is based entirely on the sinister pantomime
villain depicted in the movie Michael
Collins. Just recently, Robert Redford’s
treatment of Mary Surratt in his movie
The Conspirator
seems
likely to establish her heroic
status with those who know little else about
the Lincoln assassination. Casement is such
a multifaceted personality that even Vargas
Llosa’s sympathetic and wide-ranging
portrait remains only one man’s
interpretation.
The
author has done an impressive job of
immersing himself in the diverse milieu of
the Congo, Amazonia and Irish nationalism,
and put admirable effort into researching
his book. In his acknowledgements, he lists
the countries in which he carried out
research: The Congo, Peru, Amazonia (where
Colombia. Peru and Brazil come together),
Ireland, the United States, Belgium,
Britain, Germany and Spain. But his
expectation, that ‘probably in my novel
Irish people will find many things that they
do not recognise’ is quite unfounded.
At times he calls the north of Ireland
Irlanda del Norte, a term which only
came into use years after Casement’s death.
And he has Casement celebrating the 900th
anniversary of the Battle of Clontarf in
1914, ‘in which the Irish under the
leadership of Brian Boru defeated the
English’. (The reality is that Clontarf was
an Irish victory over the Vikings, though
there were Irish and Vikings on both sides.)
He surely exaggerates the degree to which
Ireland forgot Casement. Only one of many
figures in the Irish nationalist pantheon,
yet Casement has given his names to the
country’s only military airport, to a large
football stadium and several football clubs,
as well as appearing on an Irish stamp in
the 1960s. And there was of course the state
funeral in Dublin of whatever remained of
Casement on that sleety morning in the
spring of 1965.[5]
One wonders if Vargas Llosa was aware of
another Irishman whose trajectory also
combined Irish nationalism with
international humanitarianism—Richard
Madden. Both worked in both Latin America
and Africa, though in a different sequence,
and there are many parallels between the
two. Of course Madden lived to be an old man
and died peacefully.[6]
Perhaps a flaw in the book is that it fails
to yield a rounded portrait of Casement.
There is much detail about him, but a lot is
omitted. We do not get a multi-dimensional
vision of Casement the man. Much of his
personality remains unseen. He was by all
historical accounts somewhat irascible and
dogmatic, yet Vargas Llosa’s Casement shows
nothing of that. It is perhaps a limitation
of the authorial technique used. Because of
the narrative point of view, focused
strictly on Casement, readers do not get to
see him as others saw him, especially his
friends and collaborators. Not everyone was
impressed with him, even among those who
shared his politics. Some did not trust him.
In fact Casement was always an outsider,
especially in his own country. He actually
spent only a small part of his life in
Ireland--it would be interesting to
calculate how few years this amounted to.
And the author falls short in explaining the
cause and origin of why his Casement is so
vehemently anti-British. British Imperialism
has only an ephemeral presence in the novel.
The wrongs it perpetrated are not listed in
the kind of detail devoted to Belgian
colonialism, and would in any case by
Casement’s time bear no comparison with
them. Hence, Casement’s actions might appear
unreasonable and excessive to readers of the
novel who are unfamiliar with Irish history.
It is of course impossible to criticize the
author for ahistoricity, since Vargas Llosa
repeatedly asserts that this is a novel, not
a biography. The parameter is set as early
as the first chapter, as the long scene in
which Casement is told of the appearance of
the Black Diaries has no historical
substance that I am aware of. There are
other cases, such as Vargas Llosa’s
depiction of the role of Catholic priests in
Casement’s work in the Congo--most of
Casement’s contacts were actually with
humanitarian Anglican clergymen.
Born in a land far from Ireland, Vargas
Llosa only heard of Casement when well
into middle age, and yet was inspired to
know more, to honor Casement and to
bring him before the readers of the
world. It is in Kerry, where the last
tragic act of Casement’s life began,
that Vargas Llosa ends his book.
In McKenna’s Fort there is a small
monument [7]
in Irish, English and German, a column
of black stone, marking the spot where
he was arrested by the RIC. And on Banna
Strand, the beach where he arrived,
there is a small obelisk bearing the
images of Casement and Captain Robert
Monteith. The morning I went to see it
was covered with the white droppings of
the screaming seagulls that circled
above, and on all sides you could see
the wild violets which so moved him the
morning that he returned to Ireland to
be captured, tried and hanged (451)
[1]
Cited in Margaret O’Callaghan ‘Casement,
Colonialism and A Remembered Past’
in David George
Boyce Ireland inTransition,
1867-1921,
(London: Routledge,
2004), p.162.
[2]
Angus Mitchell, ‘An Interview with
Mario Vargas Llosa’, Irish
Migration Studies In Latin America
7, 2, 137-144 (July 2009).
[3]
All translations from the Spanish
text are by the reviewer.
[4]
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2010/vargas_llosa-lecture_en.html.
Accessed 5 July 2011.
[5]
It is striking that one of the men
who accompanied Casement on his last
voyage, Daniel Bailey, very likely a
British agent, died in Canada in
1968, and hence was still alive on
the day that Casement was reburied.
[6]
See Gera Burton, ‘Liberty’s Call:
Richard Robert Madden’s Voice in the
Anti-Slavery Movement (1833-1842)’
in Irish Migration Studies in
Latin America 5:3 (November
2007), pp. 199-206, and
José
Antonio Quintana García, 'Madden and
the Abolition of Slavery in Cuba' in
Irish Migration Studies in Latin
America 7:1 (March 2009),
pp.81-84.
[7]
A picture of the novelist at the
Casement monument heads Mitchell’s
interview with Vargas Llosa
mentioned above.
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