The Fatal Disease of Ireland

...As Inglis delicately puts it, "He had the opportunity to meet Indian youths whom he could love in a way that was difficult to do in Europe...

...And the duplicity and crippling self-control it required to conceal his homosexuality from his closest friends are repellent...

...Yet to a non-Irish reader, at least, the man remains more pathetic than noble...

...If, in the end, he does not succeed in making Casement's flamboyant idealism and skewed romantic temperament altogether plausible or strongly sympathetic, Inglis has nonetheless chronicled this melodramatic life and death with fastidious competence and thoughtful judgment...

...True, Casement's tenacious enterprise on behalf of the Africans and Indians took great courage, and eventually broke Leopold's satanic hold over the Congo (in the Putumayo the reforms were merely temporary...

...On the long boat trip to the equatorial forest, and during his investigating visits to the Putumayo, Casement recorded each sexual escapade, including the price, with a bookkeeper's finicky care...

...Confiscated by Scotland Yard after his arrest, these incriminating notes were widely circulated among prominent figures during the campaign to reprieve his death sentence, and they effectively silenced many of his supporters...

...A highly respected member of the British Foreign Service whose animosity against the English was growing increasingly hysterical and obsessive, Casement was now caught in an intolerable anomaly...

...Upon returning to Ireland in a U-boat, Casement was picked up by the British police straightaway...

...Yet by the time he retired from the Foreign Service, in 1913, his wildly incautious zealotry about Ireland had moved beyond indignant contempt for the English oppressors to an extravagant admiration for Germany...

...In a time that condemned deviance as "unspeakable filth," he was a practicing homosexual, who for years kept a pedantic record of his brief encounters in the so-called "black diaries...

...Apparently, he was not troubled by the contradiction between his Irish-nationalist Anglophobia and his acceptance of an English title...

...Unfortunately, the Irishman's trust in his faithful "servant" boomeranged...

...However strong the sexual motives for his lingering in South America, he could consciously think of his Putumayo investigations only as a disinterested crusade against appalling injustice...

...Primarily, the trouble was his deplorable skill at keeping the different parts of his fragmented nature hermetically separate and cut off from each other...

...Hence his extreme fanaticism about Ireland's independence—even his Irish comrades were often disturbed by his monomania-seems to have been nourished more by psychopathic derangement than by sturdy nationalist idealism...

...Then, too, he coveted all the perquisites of a gentleman's life as a British consul, while pouring out violent abuse on everything English...

...Still, in his final assessment of Casement as an heroic figure, he is not persuasive...

...This is not the stuff of which authentic heroes are made...

...Following the outbreak of hostilities, he declaimed: "England's crime in this war is the most flagrant of all...

...Christensen, heftily bribed, kept the British Embassy in Oslo informed of his employer's every move in Germany...

...His report on "the appalling iniquity," published in England in 1912, sent shock waves through Europe and America...

...When he undertook his mission to Germany, Casement, with incredible naivete, brought along a Norwegian sailor, Adler Christensen, whom he had picked up in New York, and who supposedly knew German...

...Within a short time the handsome, personable and conscientious young Irishman was appointed British Consul in the Congo, and from this vantage point slowly began over the next several years to unearth the barbarous horror of Leopold's dominion...

...Everyone surely knows the lurid story of the Protestant Ulsterman, knighted for his gallant deeds in the British Foreign Service, who threw himself with such headstrong recklessness into the fight for Ireland's freedom that he sneaked into Germany during World War I, hoping to raise arms and men for his cause...

...When the English finished playing dirty pool and Casement was safely dead, the diaries were consigned to such top-secret oblivion that many people suspected they had actually been forged...

...Another is the mass of fresh material the author could consult when the Foreign Office files were recently opened up to and beyond 1916...

...And Casement is by no means an easily mastered subject, for his foolhardy expedition to Germany was only the last, albeit the most intemperate and bizarre, of his great crusades...

...Despondent, Casement returned on sick leave to Ireland where, at the age of 40, he was snared by "the dream of the Celt...

...On the whole, Brian Inglis has been com-mendably objective in disentangling the labyrinthine snarls and convolutions of Casement's operatic life...

...Needless to say, the flaw is not his homosexuality-in the stringent moral climate of the early 20th century, it certainly demanded guts to act on one's instincts as freely as Casement did...

...Roger Casement paid a severe price for these contradictions...

...The Irish will canonise these things at their own peril...

...But Leopold's propagandists counterattacked, and the explosive scandal fizzled out in that hoary bureaucratic delaying tactic, the Commission of Inquiry...

...As Richard Crossman has caustically written, even in Casement's "most heroic exploits he was always in danger of suddenly mounting his high horse and then falling off when passing a dung heap...

...In addition, Inglis, like Casement, was raised in Ireland as a Protestant and a Unionist, loyal to the British crown, and therefore felt personally qualified to understand why Casement despised the English so violently...

...So artfully did he shroud his secret that in 1911 Casement was knighted for his brilliant exploits on behalf of the African and Indian natives...

...Outraged by these bestial atrocities, Casement sent a blistering report to London in 1904 that made the Congo natives a cause celebre...

...George Moore once remarked, not ironically, that "Ireland [is] a fatal disease, fatal to Englishmen and doubly fatal to Irishmen," and Inglis observes that Casement "was never to recover, until it did indeed prove fatal...

...Brought up to be a gentleman, adhering to rigorous standards of behavior within his own class, he thought of his homosexuality as an affliction best directed at the lower classes, where pleasure could be bought, paid for and promptly discarded...

...Arrested for treason by the British, he was hanged in August 1916...

...God Save Ireland now is another form of God Save Germany...

...The poet Alfred Noyes sanctimoniously expressed the prevailing view: "They touch the lowest depths that human degradation has ever touched...

...One good reason for Brian Inglis' lively and absorbing new biography, Roger Casement (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 448 pp., $8.95), is the fact that he is convinced the diaries—finally made available to scholars in 1959—are genuine...

...Yet Casement, unlike Robert Emmet, John Mitchel, Charles Stewart Parnell, and the other sanctified martyrs in the Irish pantheon, has been a gravely tainted hero...

...He was often neurasthenically ill and, by his 40s, definitely manic-depressive...

...But if the author of the Putumayo Blue Book was eulogized by the press, there was a side to his ardent humanitarianism that was unknown to the public...

...Even the Irish must by now find the flood of words devoted to the martyred patriot a bit much, since Casement's tortured life has been picked over often enough to appease the most rabid Sinn Feiner...

...Thousands of Africans were being conscripted as slave laborers to extract rubber for the King's private profit, and those who did not bring in the brutal daily quotas were starved, flogged, mutilated, and murdered...

...Like many Unionists, Inglis joined the British Army during World War II, but later wrote, "I remained sufficiently Irish to realize that if a conflict of loyalties arose...

...After he was posted to South America in 1908, though, the fatal disease went into remission, for in the Putumayo region of Peru, Casement discovered a "grotesque parody" of Belgian savagery: Indian rubber workers were being exploited more viciously than the Congo Africans had been...

...I would take the Irish side...

...As a 20-year-old, lured by the unmapped adventure of Africa, he went to the Congo in 1884 to work with the intrepid explorer Henry Stanley, who was then developing the region under the aegis of King Leopold II of Belgium...

...During his trial in London, many eminent persons in England and throughout the world—Conan Doyle, Beatrice Webb, Nehru, James Bryce, and especially the prisoner's compatriot George Bernard Shaw—argued that Casement was innocent of treason, but the revelations of the black diaries sealed his doom...