The irresistible story of an Irish idealist
ONE OF THE BLURBS on the back of Roland Philipps’s new biography of Roger Casement claims that the book has “rescued [Casement] from the ignominy to which he has been unjustly consigned”. That’s not exactly true: Casement has been consigned to controversy. He has been praised for his humanitarian successes in Africa and his devotion to Ireland, derided for the fiasco of his failed attempt to run guns from Germany for the 1916 Rising, revered as a gay martyr, disparaged for his sexuality, described and explained exhaustively by more biographers than any other Irish patriot.
Casement (1864–1916) could be considered overremembered. A British subject and Irish nationalist, born in Dublin of an Antrim family, baptized both Protestant and Catholic, he can be found in poems, plays, orations, memoirs, songs, legends, jokes, allusions, anecdotes, paintings, monuments, documentaries, film scripts, a German miniseries and – by the thousands – letters to the editor. His great height, dark curly hair, deep blue eyes and “gentlemanly” bearing are mentioned often. Mary Colum called Casement one of the three “handsomest and most romantic-looking men” she had ever seen. (The others were W. B. Yeats and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt.) His handsome face appeared on Irish postage stamps in 1966 and 2016. The ubiquitous subject of an unendable argument or long national dream, Casement has proved disturbing, entertaining, irresistible. The sheer quantity of material about him defies measure.
The biographies by Brian Inglis (1973), B. L. Reid (1976), Roger Sawyer (1984), W. J. McCormack (2002), Jeffrey Dudgeon (2002), Seamas Ó Síocháin (2008) and Angus Mitchell (2013), to name just a few, present a challenge (and rich sources) for any new aspiring biographer. Ó Síocháin’s monumental volume, almost 700 pages, will always stand as the most definitive in all respects. Dudgeon’s offers extensive commentary on Casement’s sex life in the context of gay codes and cruising practices, and biographical details about some of his lovers in Northern Ireland, as well as a complete account of his family background and political activities, and an annotated edition of the “Black Diaries”. Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost: A story of greed, terror and heroism in colonial Africa (1998) is a major source for Philipps’s Africa chapters.
The chief virtues of Broken Archangel: The tempestuous lives of Roger Casement are its compact size and energetic narrative. For the stranger to Casement’s life, this is the book to buy. Instead of organizing his story chronologically, Philipps begins with Casement’s years in Africa (1883–1903), where he worked in various capacities before being appointed British consul in what was then Por
