Dec 25, Will Slattery, Casement's Ghost

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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here.

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Casement's Ghost

Will Slattery

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For the past 20 years of my life I have been haunted by Roger Casement, a 19th and 20th Century Anglo-Irish diplomat and civil servant who in 1911 received a knighthood from the United Kingdom of Great Britain & (at the time) Ireland for his international humanitarian work and who was then a swift 5 years later executed by the United Kingdom of Great Britain & (at the time) Ireland for high treason.

Quite a few people are haunted by Roger Casement. The British Foreign Office is haunted by Roger Casement, who was once a model civil servant—genteel, broad-minded, polite, hard-working, amenable to British institutions at home and abroad, liberal in a classic sense, willing to forgo marriage family for duty country, suffused with a solid bourgeois morality but charismatic enough for a knighthood & the pseudo-aristocratic legitimacy it could lend to his future work for the empire —before he became a seditious flame-tongued Irish nationalist and a leading participant in the 1916 event known as the Easter Rising, a chaotic rebellion against English rule which marks the first armed conflict of the 20th Century Irish Revolutionary Period and the birth of modern Irish independence.

The Republic of Ireland is also haunted by Roger Casement. A well-known Anglo-Irish administrator renouncing his accumulated imperial-bureaucratic privileges and taking up the Fenian banner was a cause for celebration and a demonstration of the inevitable moral might & triumph of a Free Catholic Ireland—until it came out that Roger Casement was also what might be called an inveterate sodomite who had led a double-life throughout his career in which he worked his way through dozens of younger men’s cocks in alleys and docks and bars and parks and fields and rivers spread across three continents.

You’re also almost certainly haunted by Roger Casement, although you might not know it; if you’ve ever read Heart of Darkness or seen Apocalypse Now or heard the phrase “the horror! the horror!” or see images of mist-and-blood flit through your mind’s eye when you think of colonialism then you’re haunted by Roger Casement, for in 1890, in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Roger Casement met Joseph Conrad and became a friend, a fascination, and a specter to him. Casement, seen through a glass darkly, looms out at us via Conrad; altered, refracted, shadowy, at times menacing flashes of Casement show up physically and spiritually in both Marlow and Kurtz.

I think of Roger Casement on average 2 or 3 times a week and yet I feel—strangely, at times achingly—that I’m no closer to fully understanding the man now at 35 then I was when I first learned of him as a teenager.

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I’ll try to give a brief and neutral account of the major episodes and incidents of Casement’s life:

Born into an Anglo-Irish family in Ireland (i.e., of Protestant middle-and-up class background), Casement had a successful career as a civil servant, diplomat and administrator for which he received a good deal of recognition and accolades.

During the early 1900s Casement personally investigated and exposed imperialist violence including torture, rape, mutilation, enslavement, and murder in Western colonies in the Congo. Returning home from Africa, Casement published his findings to great international acclaim--and outrage--but this had little effect on Western imperialism in the region.

Slightly later in the early 1900s Casement personally investigated and exposed imperialist violence including torture, rape, mutilation, enslavement, murder, and attempted ethnic cleansing in Western rubber plantations in the Putumayo region of the Amazon. Returning home from the Amazon, Casement published his findings to great international acclaim--and outrage--but this had little effect on Western imperialism in the region.

During the 1910s Casement abandoned his work for the British Foreign Office, became an advocate for the liberation of Ireland (then still occupied by the United Kingdom), helped organized the 1916 Easter Uprising with the hope that it would lead both to a free Ireland and to the eventual destruction of the entire British Empire, and was subsequently tried for treason and executed by the British government.

During and after his trial for treason Casement's reputation was complicated and sullied by the circulation of what are now known as the Black Diaries, writings in what appears to be Casement's own hand which include both mundane accounts of his daily life and graphically explicit accounts of the secret sexual encounters he had with other men (a minority of scholars argue that the Black Diaries are in fact an anti-Casement forgery generated by the British state to tarnish his image, but the majority of historians and readers believe them to be authentic).

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I first encountered Casement as a "Leader of '16" due to a precocious adolescent interest in both left-wing politics and modern Irish history. I do not find Casement physically attractive, but if I am honest I do feel that I somehow fell in love with him as a teenager and have been in love with him ever since, despite his many complications and flaws as a historical personage. I have felt significant romantic attraction for only 5 or 6 real, present-day people over the course of my life; this number maybe doubles if we include historical personages, so Casement is in a somewhat small group. I can't fully explain my love for the man, but I feel it has something to do with the steady march of his conscience through the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

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Of the persistent mutilation by government soldiers, there can be no shadow of a doubt, should the system maintain forced labor on this scale, I believe the entire population will be extinct in thirty years.

--Casement on Belgian imperialism in the Congo

And the charming Lizardo Arana tells me in Iquitos I shall find "such splendid Indians" here, and he feels sure the result of my journey to the Putumayo will be more capital for the Company! Yes, more capital punishment if I had my way. I swear to God, I'd hang every one of the band of wretches with my own hands if I had the power, and do it with the greatest pleasure. I have never shot game with any pleasure, have indeed abandoned all shooting for that reason, that I dislike the thought of taking life. I have never given life to anyone myself, and my celibacy makes me frugal of human life, but I'd shoot or exterminate these infamous scoundrels more gladly than I should shoot a crocodile or kill a snake.

--Casement on his desire to kill Peruvian rubber barons

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Casement’s diaries do not make for immediately compelling reading—the daily entries are fragmented, terse, sometimes formulaic, often concerned with trivial and quotidian details (weather, letters arriving, if he went out for lunch, distance travelled, billiards scores, etc). Sometimes he goes weeks without a sexual encounter, and sometimes he has several in impressively rapid succession. The details of his sexual forays are usually recorded in a quick, excited manner: age, location, memorable physical attributes of the partner, if he paid for it, ejaculations (both verbal and genital), and dimension(s). Casement generally seems to have preferred men younger than himself with firm, lean torsos, large cocks, and substantial sexual stamina; the primary thing he tends to record about himself in these encounters is his own capacity for being penetrated. A few examples:

 

Casement’s sexual encounters tend to range (in slightly anachronistic terminology) from “anonymous” to “cruising” to “rough trade” to “paying for sex”, sometimes combining and recombining elements of these. Often times there’s a grimy sadness to the image of Casement cruising, especially during his journeys to Africa and South America—a lonely middle-aged foreign service officer trying to get 18-year-olds to top him. Whenever he is back in Europe, we sometimes get encounters that show different, slightly sweeter types of intimacy and longing:

What I find fascinating and elusive about Casement is that through his diaries we have prodigious, almost impossible access to firsthand accounts of his sensations and sentiments about his sexual experiences: joy, exhilaration, 5 dollars here or there, “very, very deep thrusts”, howling, “deep screw”, biggest since wherever, on top or on bottom, “splendid steed”, “huge”, “again”, “Grand”, indoors and outdoors, what time of day and of night, uncertainty, “so deep mutual longing”.

Despite this, we have almost no access to Casement’s sense of his own sexuality; his diaries let us know how all his fucking felt, but rather little about how he felt about the nature and orientation of his fucking. Let’s compare what his personal effects offer to those of other Anglo-Irish homosexual luminaries from the same period, say, Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde, both slightly older but of the same generation and broadly similar class backgrounds:

If you are the man I take you to be you will like to get this letter. If you are not I don’t care whether you like it or not and only ask that you put it into the fire without reading any farther. But I believe you will like it. I don’t think there is a man living, even you who are above the prejudices of the class of small-minded men, who wouldn’t like to get a letter from a younger man, a stranger, across the world - a man living in an atmosphere prejudiced to the truths you sing and your manner of singing them. The idea that arises in my mind is whether there is a man living who would have the pluck to burn a letter in which he felt the smallest atom of interest without reading it. I believe you would and that you believe you would yourself. You can burn this now and test yourself, and all I will ask for my trouble of writing this letter, which for all I can tell you may light your pipe with or apply to some more ignoble purpose - is that you will in some manner let me know that my words have tested your impatience. Put it in the fire if you like - but if you do you will miss the pleasure of the next sentence which ought to be that you have conquered an unworthy impulse. A man who is certain of his own strength might try to encourage himself a piece of bravo, but a man who can write, as you have written, the most candid words that ever fell from the lips of a mortal man - a man to whose candor Rousseau’s Confessions is reticence - can have no fear for his own strength. If you have gone this far you may read the letter and I feel in writing now that I am talking to you. If I were before your face I would like to shake hands with you, for I feel that I would like you. I would like to call YOU Comrade and to talk to you as men who are not poets do not often talk. I think that at first a man would be ashamed, for a man cannot in a moment break the habit of comparative reticence that has become second nature to him; but I know I would not long be ashamed to be natural before you. You are a true man, and I would like to be one myself, and so I would be towards you as a brother and as a pupil to his master. In this age no man becomes worthy of the name without an effort. You have shaken off the shackles and your wings are free. I have the shackles on my shoulders still - but I have no wings. If you are going to read this letter any further I should tell you that I am not prepared to “give up all else” so far as words go. The only thing I am prepared to give up is prejudice, and before I knew you I had begun to throw overboard my cargo, but it is not all gone yet.

--Bram Stoker in an 1872 letter to Walt Whitman 

Stoker was an oft-unhappy closet case who probably never had sex with another man, but his youthful letters and correspondences give us a window into a kind of homosexual worldview marked by notions of camaraderie and liberty and bravery. On on the other end of the out-and-outré spectrum Wilde (fin du siècle faggot par excellence) ends up almost compulsively disclosing his vision of homosexuality as a superior orientation while on trial for it. But as a historical figure Casement consistently resists this sort of categorizing; we simply don’t know how he felt about his sexuality even if we know so many of his sexual encounters.

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A few months ago a sexual partner of mine rummaged through a stack of papers on my coffee table (he's bright, curious, quick, nimble, always roving) and found a little pamphlet which had pictures of Casement and the other leaders of the 1916 Easter Uprising. With no prior knowledge of Casement, seeing only his face among rows of others, he immediately asked who this man was. Why do you want to know?, I wondered.

Because he's hot, he replied.

I laughed and explained that, coincidentally, he was also the homosexual one. Over a century later Casement still has a draw for many men.

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In The Rings of Saturn--a strange, associative, perambulatory essay-novel which serves as a history of the metaphysics of transformation and destruction--W. G. Sebald gives a long and elliptical account of the chain of horrors which first lead an exiled Conrad to Africa, where he met Casement and where Casement saw the next link in the chain of horrors that would lead him up the Congo and to the Amazon and back to fight for a free Ireland. Sebald gives an effectively concise account of the injustices forced upon the Irish people by the English and how they affected Casement:

The injustice which had been borne by the Irish for centuries increasingly filled his consciousness. He could not rid his thoughts of the fact that almost half the population of Ireland had been murdered by Cromwell's soldiers, that thousands of men and women were later sent as white slaves to the West Indies, that in recent times more than a million Irish had died of starvation, and that the majority of the young generation were still forced to emigrate from their native land.

Sebald suggests that there's a link between the Black Diaries, Casement's homosexuality, and Casement's sense of morality:

The authenticity of this Black Diary, kept until recently under lock and key at the Public Records Office in Kew, was long considered highly debatable, not least because the executive and judicial organs of the state concerned with furnishing the evidence and drawing up the charge against alleged Irish terrorists have repeatedly been guilty, until very recent times, not only of pursuing doubtful suspicions and insinuations but indeed of deliberate falsification of the facts. For the veterans of the Irish freedom movement it was in any case inconceivable that one of their martyrs should have practised the English vice. But since the release to general scrutiny of the diaries in early 1994 there has no longer been any question that they are in Casement's own hand. We may draw from this the conclusion that it was precisely Casement's homosexuality that sensitized him to the continuing oppression, exploitation, enslavement and destruction, across the borders of social class and race, of those who were furthest from the centres of power.

"We may draw from this the conclusion that it was precisely Casement's homosexuality that sensitized him--" is a wry, sly, elusive little move Sebald buries in that paragraph--it's of course the resolution we want to achieve, that Casement being a homosexual and Casement being a revolutionary are wedded somehow, and it's of course a reasonable thought, but it precisely can't be a formal conclusion because we have no direct link or insight from Casement's own hand or mouth--only our intuitions, associations, and hopes. Sebald implicitly acknowledge some of the unknowability here with his last account of Casement, his trial and execution, and the ultimate transformation of his body:

As expected, Casement was found guilty of high treason at the end of his trial at the Old Bailey. The presiding judge, Lord Reading, formerly Rufus Isaacs, pronounced sentence. You will be taken hence, he told Casement, to a lawful prison and thence to a place of execution and will be there hanged by the neck until you be dead. Not until 1965 did the British government permit the exhumation of the remains of Roger Casement, presumably scarcely identifiable any more, from the lime pit in the courtyard of Pentonville prison into which his body had been thrown.

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I'll attempt to end with a moral accounting of this elusive Anglo-Irish man I love in a strange way:

Roger Casement was born into an empire which afforded him a position of comfort, security, wealth, & status; Roger Casement saw the link between the empire in which he lived, the systems of economic extraction empire creates, and the horrors of mass murder, ethnic cleansing, and genocide; Roger Casement rejected his position of comfort, security, wealth, & status and did his best to destroy the empire in which he lived, up to the point of death. Have you done better? (I have not). 

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Will Slattery teaches high school in Tucson and helps curate things here at Essay Daily. He tweets on very rare occasion (@wjaslattery) and posts miscellaneous personal content on Instagram rather frequently (@wjasity).