The Dream of the Celt

EPILOGUE

The story of Roger Casement shoots up, dies out, and is reborn after his death like those fireworks that after soaring and exploding in the night in a rain of stars and thunder, die away, are still, and moments later are resuscitated in a trumpet fanfare that fills the sky with fires.

According to Dr. Percy Mander, the physician present at the execution, it was carried out “without the slightest hindrance,” and the death of the offender was instantaneous. Before authorizing his burial, the doctor, following the orders of the British authorities, who wanted some scientific certainty regarding the “perverse tendencies” of the man they had executed, proceeded, after putting on plastic gloves, to explore his anus and the beginning of his bowel. He confirmed that “to the naked eye” the anus showed a clear dilation, as did “the lower portion of the intestine, as far as my fingers could reach.” The doctor concluded that his exploration confirmed “the practices to which the executed man apparently was devoted.”

After being subjected to this handling, the remains of Roger Casement were buried without a stone, cross, or initials, next to the equally anonymous grave of Dr. Crippen, a celebrated murderer who had been tried some time earlier. The pile of shapeless dirt that was his grave was adjacent to the Roman Way, the trail along which, at the beginning of the first millennium of our era, the Roman legions entered the remote corner of Europe that would later be England in order to civilize it.

Then the story of Roger Casement seemed to vanish. The measures taken by the lawyer George Gavan Duffy with regard to the British authorities, in the name of Roger’s siblings, to have his remains handed over to his family for Christian burial in Ireland, were denied then and each time his relatives made similar attempts, for another half century. For a long time, except for a small number of people—among them the hangman, John Ellis, who in the memoir he wrote shortly before committing suicide, said, “He appeared to me the bravest man it fell to my unhappy lot to execute”—no one spoke of him. He disappeared from public attention, in Britain and in Ireland.

It took a long time for him to be admitted to the pantheon of the heroes of Irish independence. The secretive campaign launched by British Intelligence to slander him, using fragments of his secret diaries, was successful. It hasn’t completely dissipated even now: a gloomy aureole of homosexuality and pedophilia surrounded his image throughout all of the twentieth century. His figure discomfited his country because Ireland, until not many years ago, officially maintained an extremely harsh morality in which the mere suspicion of being a “sexual deviant” sank a person into ignominy and expelled him from public consideration. For much of the twentieth century the name, accomplishments, and travails of Roger Casement were confined to political essays, newspaper articles, and biographies by historians, many of them English.

With the revolution in customs, principally in the area of sexuality, in Ireland, the name of Casement gradually, though always with reluctance and prudery, began to clear a path to being accepted for what he was: one of the great anticolonial fighters and defenders of human rights and indigenous cultures of his time, and a sacrificed combatant for the emancipation of Ireland. Slowly his compatriots became resigned to accepting that a hero and martyr is not an abstract prototype or a model of perfection but a human being made of contradictions and contrasts, weakness and greatness, since a man, as José Enrique Rodó wrote, “is many men,” which means that angels and demons combine inextricably in his personality.

The controversy regarding the so-called Black Diaries did not end and probably never will. Did they really exist and did Roger Casement write them in his own hand, with all their noxious obscenities, or were they falsified by the British secret services to execute their former diplomat both morally and politically in order to create an exemplary warning and dissuade potential traitors? For dozens of years the British government refused to authorize independent historians and graphologists to examine the diaries, declaring them a state secret, which added fuel to the suspicions and arguments in favor of falsification. When, a relatively few years ago, the prohibition was lifted and investigators could examine them and subject the texts to scientific tests, the controversy did not end. Probably it will go on for a long time. Which isn’t a bad thing. It’s not a bad thing that a climate of uncertainty hovers over Roger Casement as proof that it is impossible to know definitively a human being, a totality that always slips through the theoretical and rational nets that try to capture it. 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 there is in them a good deal of exaggeration and fiction, that he wrote certain things because he would have liked to live them but couldn’t.

In 1965, Harold Wilson’s government finally permitted Casement’s bones to be repatriated. They arrived in Ireland in a military plane and received public homage on February 23 of that year. For four days they lay in state at the church at Arbour Hill prison like those of a hero. A gathering estimated at several hundred thousand people passed by to pay their respects. There was a military escort to the pro-cathedral and military honors were paid him in front of the historic Post Office building, general headquarters of the Easter Rising of 1916, before his casket was carried to Glasnevin cemetery, where he was buried on a rainy, gray morning. To deliver the speech of tribute, Éamon de Valera, the first president of Ireland, an outstanding combatant in the 1916 uprising, and a friend of Roger Casement’s, got up from his deathbed and said the moving words usually spoken to say farewell to great men.

Neither in the Congo nor in Amazonia is there any trace left of the man who did so much to denounce the great crimes committed in those lands in the days of the rush for rubber. In Ireland, scattered throughout the island, some memories of him remain. On the heights of Glenshesk in Antrim, in the glen that goes down to the small inlet of Murlough, not far from the family house of Magherintemple, Sinn Féin put up a monument to him that the radical unionists of Northern Ireland destroyed. The pieces have remained there, dispersed on the ground. In Ballyheigue, in County Kerry, on a small square facing the sea, stands the figure of Roger Casement sculpted by Oisín Kelly. In the Kerry County Museum in Tralee is the camera Roger took on his trip to Amazonia in 1911, and if you ask, you can also see the overcoat of rough wool he wore on the German U-19 submarine that brought him to Ireland. A private collector, Sean Quinlan, has in his cottage in Ballyduff, not far from the outlet of the Shannon into the Atlantic, a rowboat that (he states emphatically) is the same one that carried Roger, Captain Monteith, and Sergeant Bailey to Banna Strand. In the Roger Casement School, in Tralee, the office of the director has on display the ceramic plate from which Casement ate, in the public bar of the Seven Stars, when he went to the Court of Appeals in London where his case was decided. In McKenna’s Fort there is a small monument—a black stone column—recording in Gaelic, English, and German that he was captured there by the Royal Irish Constabulary on April 21, 1916. And on Banna Strand, the beach where he landed, stands a small obelisk on which the face of Roger Casement appears next to the face of Captain Robert Monteith. On the morning I went there, it was covered with the white droppings of the screeching gulls that flew overhead, and everywhere one could see the wild violets that moved him so much that dawn when he returned to Ireland to be captured, tried, and hanged.