A revolution wrought by people slowly mastering the intricacies of Irish grammar is as marvelous as the butterflies of Casement’s Putumayo, unexpected, over the top. Perhaps it’s the weight and weightlessness of poetry itself at work. A national uprising depends on a national identity; and nowhere is the political weight of poetry more evident than in the flowering of Irish culture that culminated in the Easter Rising, whose crucial declaration was signed by three poets, two teachers, a musician, and a labor organizer who was also a historian. Casement evaluated only the uprising’s literal, immediate results and underestimated its intangible, symbolic possibilities. It was his greatest error, a politician’s rather than a poet’s calculation. He only succeeded in canceling the islandwide uprising called for Easter Sunday, turning it instead into a Dublin-only Easter Monday beginning. Who knows now what would have happened had he understood, or failed to communicate at all, or never landed?
Casement seems to have been at sea his whole life, where his father left him, among foreigners and enemies, equivocal in his loyalties, his private life at odds with public practice. When the German submarine sent him and two others ashore near the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland’s west, he at last came to earth, and to himself, as a nationalist and a martyr. His description of his arrival in a little coracle, from a letter to his sister, is among the best things he wrote: “When I landed in Ireland that morning . . . swamped and swimming ashore on an unknown strand I was happy for the first time for over a year. Although I knew that this fate waited on me . . . I cannot tell you what I felt. The sandhills were full of skylarks, rising in the dawn, the first I had heard for years—the first sound I heard through the surf was their song as I waded in through the breakers, and they kept rising all the time up to the old raThat Currsahone . . . and all round were primroses and wild violets, and the singing of the skylarks in the air, and I was back in Ireland again.” He knew that he was coming to join the Easter conspirators in death, and accepted it calmly when he was caught; in fact, he seems to have been calmer from his landing to his death than through most of the years before.
Three drenched strangers could hardly pass unnoticed during wartime in the remote region they’d landed in, and they were soon hauled in by the local constabulary. Casement at first claimed to be an Englishman from Buckinghamshire who’d written a life of St. Brendan the Navigator. He later managed to get word to the rebels through a local priest before he was transferred from Tralee across Ireland—he passed through Dublin without knowing what was happening there—to London. Told he would be charged with high treason, he said, “I hope so.” By the time of his trial, the seven signatories of the Proclamation had been executed by firing squads. Wartime England treated Casement with medieval ferocity: he was imprisoned in the Tower of London at first, under military supervision and the constant glare of lights, in the clothes that had dried upon him in Kerry.
Ironically enough for a charge of treason, the law by which he was tried dated back to 1351 and was written in archaic French, a relic of the time when England’s rulers still had roots and claims in France and little reach in Ireland. Much of the deliberation about whether or not he had committed treason depended on whether the text implied a comma and how a word should be translated; some of the local witnesses to his arrival in Kerry spoke in a brogue the English court could hardly understand. The ideas of nationhood behind the charges were undermined by such language problems; and Casement’s fellow Irishman George Bernard Shaw thought he should have put up the defense that he was not an Englishman and could therefore not commit treason against England. He did so, but only in his final speech after the death sentence had been read, a speech of surpassing clarity and integrity.
The most damning evidence produced against Casement had nothing to do with treason and never appeared in court, and yet more than anything it sealed his fate and shattered his reputation. The police had seized the papers Casement had left in London, including diaries written in 1903, 1910, and 1911, diaries which laconically document his very active sex life with other men. Casement’s trial took place only twenty-one years after Oscar Wilde’s trial for homosexuality, which ended in conviction, prison, then exile, disgrace, and, in Wilde’s words, “dying beyond my means.” Although Casement was not in court for the same reason, his sexuality was held up to be judged by a public that had changed little since his fellow Irishman’s fall from public grace. With his many influential friends and heroic past, Casement might well have been pardoned, but transcripts from the diaries were widely distributed to the press and influential members of the public as a smear campaign to undermine any such support. Some of his friends deserted him, some stood fast, and the “black diaries,” as they became known, were widely regarded afterward as forgeries. Many in Ireland still recalled the smear campaign against Parnell: forged letters suggested he had condoned the infamous Phoenix Park murders of the secretary and undersecretary for Irish affairs. He was cleared (though he was later accused of adultery, a genuine charge that ended his career). Books have been written to prove that Casement too was the victim of trumped-up evidence, but it seems clear now that the diaries are genuine. What has changed is the ways they can be read.
Poor Casement, condemned to be a window onto a closet. It seems to be his sexuality that renders most of his biographers so hostile. They continually snipe at him for all kinds of trivial things, from lack of landscape appreciation to sex with members of “the lowest orders.” One even claims, in the wake of the Anthony Blunt spy scandals at the end of the 1970s, that there is apparently a high correlation between treason and homosexuality, which would be more credible had Blunt and his Soviet spy circle been the only gay men in England during the Cold War. The most authoritative of the biographers claims in his closing paragraphs that Casement’s “nature was divided to a depth just short of real pathology, of disastrous incoherence.” Yet little more than overwrought emotion and bad writing can be laid at Casement’s door (and at the doors of most late Victorians); his courage, kindness, and commitment to the rights of the oppressed make the course of his life coherent and transform the apparent about-face from civil servant to revolutionary into a logical progression from redressing imperial cruelty in Africa and the Americas to attacking it in Europe.
Pleasure and pain are among the most incommunicable of experiences, the most private, the most shameful, and taboo. Casement described them in terms of their objective effects and outward signs. In his official reports he gives us the descriptions of mutilations, decimated populations, suppurating wounds from beatings, severed body parts, and corpses. In his private journals, his erotic encounters are reduced to a few descriptive phrases of beautiful eyes, large cocks, and sexual acts. The reports were official political documents, but why did Casement keep the diaries, which were to be devastating, perhaps even fatal, for him? It may be that they represented an outlet in which he could acknowledge a life that had otherwise to be kept a deep secret, or that they represented a means of keeping track of his full and busy life: weather, social engagements, bodily health, and financial transactions are equally documented in these ledger diaries. They are not the lengthy literary diaries of so many Victorians, but short notes to help him sort out and perhaps reconstruct his busy days.
Or perhaps he too was a collector in that Victorian tradition, a collector of his own experiences. The way he describes the men he desires and his encounters with them almost resembles an entomologist’s notes—and entomologists have passions and pleasures too. In fact the constant harping on measurements—in his case of penises, in heterosexual men’s accounts often on other quantifiable zones and scores—reminded me of fishermen and athletes, whose triumphs also tend to emphasize the quantifiable. Perhaps it is appropriate that Casement should be monumentalized by a butterfly, in a museum that is itself a monument to the variety of the world, to the imperial project of the British Empire, and to the desire to collect and classify. It is a last ironic footnote that the word butterfly in Spanish—mariposa—is
a Latin American slang term roughly equal to faggot or fairy.
To read Casement’s reports and journals is to recover a sense of how limited the possibilities of the body were supposed to be. The Victorian body, conceived of as incapable of inflicting and experiencing torture or other than narrowly defined heterosexual pleasures, seems a curiously wooden, inert realm, the dark continent that they were avoiding with their excess of action on every other front. Casement’s sexuality sheds a different light on his rootlessness, suggesting that perhaps those other cultures far from Ireland were better locales for him to come to terms with and live out his desires. For a San Franciscan such as myself, the 1903 and 1910 diaries, which were published by Grove Press in 1959, seem quite mild, hardly as experimental or explicit as what one might read in the gay men’s classifieds in many big cities. What stands out is that at a time when almost any kind of sex was laden with shame and a sense of dirtiness, Casement appreciates his partners and enjoys himself with them, be they longtime lovers or casual pickups of any race. Compared to, say, Henry Miller, who two decades later wrote so publicly of his own casual and commercial sexual encounters, he is admirable for neither boasting about himself nor denigrating his partners. It seems peculiar from this perspective that a culture which could bear Casement’s revelations about torture couldn’t stand his private narratives of pleasure; and it may be his sexual identity as much as his Irishness that let him see things from an unprecedented perspective, let him recognize the effects of power from a point beyond the range of its magnetism, and let him give voice to what had been silent.
Homosexuality undoes the simplicity of gender roles, leaving us with only a few possibilities: either that the conventional roles themselves are in fact social conventions narrowing down the broad spectrum of possibilities for each gender or that any divergence from the sanctioned roles is a crime, a disease, an aberration. Either gay men and lesbians are not normal or such normalcy is a majority fiction. Male homosexuality is particularly threatening to the status quo. That men can be objects of desire as well as possessors of it, that they can be penetrated as well as penetrating, undoes the unilateral imagination of the dynamics of power and gender. The response to Casement’s sexuality suggests that masculinity was even more primary an element of identity than race and empire, and if it could be unsettled, everything might be open to redefinition. Casement, with his reports and his liaisons, was undoing authority at boThends of the spectrum, in the Empire and in the bedroom. In his labor and pleasure he reinvented men as various creatures, capable of many configurations, of more cruelty, more vulnerability, more possibility. Ireland has since its revolution become famous for sexual conservatism promulgated by the church and state, and most gay men there nowadays, a lesbian poet from Dublin told me, are still as closeted as Casement was.
First Casement described the world of torture and became a hero, and then he described the world of erotic pleasure and became a villain, but both his reports shook up his auditors’ worldview. In the Grove Press volume on Casement, the reports and diaries are printed side by side, two versions of reality. The official, left-hand one leaves out time and locale to provide a dry summary of the testimony encountered and the conclusions reached; Casement appears only as an eye and an ear judging the material at hand. But the right-hand pages give us the whole body of unsorted experience, of eyeing handsome native men, interrogating officials and survivors, mixing with expatriate Europeans, tending his own mild ailments, recording the rise and fall of rivers, swimming, chasing butterflies, having sex, and admiring the scenery. It is odd, and honest, this mix of activity.
Casement converted to Catholicism on his deathbed and went to his death, he said, with the body of his god as his last meal, seeming at last to understand the symbolism of sacrifice around which Pearse had organized the Easter Rising. He was hanged on August 4, 1916, victim of the same violence against the bodies of empire he had spent so much of his life exposing. His own corpse was tossed into quicklime, so it disintegrated while his tropical butterfly lived on, dry and remote, in the Natural History Museum, evidence of an interlude in the rainforest when he left off chasing torturers to pursue the visions of dazzling color he describes. His remains were exhumed in 1965 for a state funeral and burial in the private plot his sister had bought him forty years before, his tiny allotment of the land he helped liberate, or didn’t. He inspired Yeats to write two poems, one assuming that the diaries were perfidious forgeries, the other seemingly partaking of Casement’s melodramatic style itself, with its refrain, “The ghost of Roger Casement is knocking at the door.” He had jokingly promised to return as a ghost in clanking armor contemporaneous with the statute that condemned him, and in the 1970s it was reported that Casement’s ghost did make frequent appearances—but in Calabar, Nigeria, where he had been a consul at the beginning of his involvement with British imperialism. “The apparition was always said to be of a kindly nature,” the Nigerian report added.
5
The Beggar’s Rounds
It was scenery that would hardly interrupt a dream, and I kept waking up to glimpses of green fields with square ruined towers in the distance and little towns where everyone seemed to have a purpose but me, then drowsing off again on this busride from Dublin to Cork. Halfway between the two cities, the bus stopped for an hour at a pub, and all the passengers dismounted and drank tea or beer, the twin elixirs which pour forth in such abundance to fuel and modify the national temperament. By early evening we were in Cork. It didn’t feel like a city at all: all its industry (and that industry’s infamous pollution) was out of sight from the center of town, and that center was nothing but a long curving main street that scraped up against the big university and then petered out.
More and more students are choosing to stay in university through graduate school, one of the University of Cork graduate students told me in a pub called The Thirsty Scholar, as a way to keep out of the abysmal job market as long as possible. He offered to meet up with me the next day and show me around, and when we reconvened, he told me of his plans to work in Italy upon graduation as he sped me through the sights. We practically sprinted through the local museum, with its old farm implements, dishes, commemorative certificates, and pictures of local history. Even the military memorabilia of the guerrilla fighter Michael Collins, who survived the war of independence against England but not the factional squabbling that came afterwards, couldn’t diminish his pace. He slowed down outside to speak with tender enthusiasm of the details of football culture in Ireland, of how the whole country organized itself around live World Cup broadcasts, and of the impending World Cup. When I asked him whether he and his peers followed politics at all, he shrugged and said, Football politics. Like many younger people I met, he spoke of the conflict in the north more as a brutal mess than a meaningful struggle and saw nationalism and national history as another generation’s passion.
The four older people I had dinner with in a little house in the heart of the city still regarded the war of liberation as unfinished and themselves as parties to it. We’re still fighting, they said over a table crowded with curried eggs and pastas and salads and water goblets of Waterford crystal followed later by whiskey and coffee, and at midnight we were still talking. I had met the archeologists Lee and Paddy seven years before. She was from Colorado, a cousin of the man I’d come to Ireland with on that first visit, and had been settled with Paddy in southwestern County Cork for many years. In a country without divorce, however, they could never marry, and so Lee was still a foreigner and Paddy still had a wife around somewhere (divorce finally became legal in 1996). Magnificent with her long graying hair piled up on top of her head and her straight back, Lee would look good driving a chariot. Paddy was mild and scholarly with his white beard and blue eyes, fairskinned like his sister Mary and her husband Dennis, the hosts of our feast.
All through the meal and into the night, they told me stories, and the conversation rolled forward in a series of anecdotes that brought forth ot
her anecdotes. American conversations tend to be dialectical, a give and take of short statements, or even more laconic, the kind of monosyllabic exchanges so popular in tough-guy texts and television. In the West and even more particularly in the Western, silence is a sign of strength. Ireland has a different conversational economy, one in which the ability to talk well is a gift and perhaps even a weapon, for the political disenfranchisement and powerlessness of the Irish people and the Irish language under an English government are often described as silence. Someone once suggested to me that styles of speech resemble the landscapes they emerge from, that one can trace the flatness of the plains in raw midwestern accents, desert silence in western taciturnity, the lushness of the southeast in its denizens’ dulcet tones. The same could be said of Ireland, whose intricate, winding landscape is so densely and intricately scored with the stones and wounds of history, and whose musically rising and falling speech can hardly proceed without anecdote.
A Book of Migrations Page 7
