(Some Thoughts On Broken Archangel by Roland Philipps) 

Reading the latest biography of Roger Casement by Roland Philipps, a few things struck me that may be of some interest. I don’t think Philipps’s work is particularly original. It seems to be largely an elaborate development of ideas thrown out sketchily by Jeffrey Dudgeon in his large edition of The Black Diaries.

   Philipps takes the Black Diaries as given and uses them very frequently, even when not pursuing the sex theme.  However, he tries to create a more comprehensive picture of Casement than Dudgeon attempted.  What he contributes is psychological speculation, written in a style that The Tablet reviewer calls “calm, authoritative and sympathetic”.

   Philipps’s argument may be summarised as follows.  If Casement’s mother had been a better mother and if his father had been a better father, and if that better father and mother had not both died when Roger was a child, and if he had gone through Oxford or Cambridge instead of leaving school at fifteen, and if he had married someone and had had children and lived a conventional family life, then he would have been a better-balanced human being and British public servant, and he wouldn’t have ended up the way he did!

   Or, to quote the biographer’s words:  Casement was—

“a complex man, forced to live a double life by the contemporary legal and moral constraints, whose silencing of his own voice allowed the voiceless to be heard.  He had carried himself from an unanchored childhood to barely charted West Africa and the first of his three destinies, yet the same impulses that generated global renown as the first great humanitarian reformer of the century also sowed the seeds of strategic chaos and eventually brought him to Pentonville.”

   This is cited from the Prologue (page xviii) in which the reader is primed.  The unanchored childhood afterwards becomes “emotionally disjointed” (p3), a “bewildering childhood that left him emotionally hollow” (p84) or, alternatively, left him with an “emotional hole” (p132).

   Then, remarkably enough, great hot masses of raw emotion afterwards poured out through this hole!  However, unfortunately, the emotion so emitted was “untutored” (p160) and was focussed on causes rather than personal relationships.  While this was OK in the beginning (ie, while Casement was still in good standing as a British public servant!), in a longer perspective one must see it as  “Casement’s increasingly uncentred, emotional passage through life” (p75). From the turn of the twentieth century, “many of his actions… were fuelled by pure emotion without profound thought” (p82). 

   At this stage, Phillips still tries to maintain some measure of restraint in his use of language.  But all restraint has disappeared by the end of the book.  Winding up, he approvingly cites Joseph Conrad’s notion of Casement a—

” ‘a creature of sheer temperament—a truly tragic personality’, who had made his way through life by ’emotional force… sheer emotionalism that has undone him’…” (p324).

   The biographer’s method can be seen fairly clearly in his treatment of Casement’s mother, who died when Roger was eight.  Roger invariably spoke highly of her, according to his aunt’s testimony.  Phillips, however, finds that her death certificate gave cirrhosis of the liver as the cause of death, which to him suggests alcoholism.  It might indeed suggest alcoholism if there was any supporting evidence—since alcoholism is only one of the major causes of cirrhosis of the liver!  Philipps provides no supporting evidence for his remark.

   Roger’s mother died apart from her family in a boarding house, but that is evidence of nothing:  we do not know the circumstances.  But Philipps’ ignorance provides no obstacle to the biographer’s flight of fancy:

“She died apart from her family shortly before her fortieth birthday in a boarding house in Worthing, and her alcoholic absences, both emotional and actual, would be a critical factor in her son’s make-up:  his inability to regulate and override his emotional responses as a result of the lack of guidance in early years was one of his campaigning strengths, but also a significant catalyst in the tragedy of his last years” (p82).

   The book is full of such ‘bargain-basement’ psychology!  Roger’s father died five years later, when Roger was thirteen.  He was not said to have cirrhosis, but that doesn’t stop Philipps from suggesting, as usual with no evidence, that the father also was over-fond of the bottle!  

It does seem that Casement senior found it hard to adapt to humdrum civilian existence, having previously been a soldier and enjoyed the military life.  (Roger liked to relate his father’s favourite story, of how he had once played a crucial part, as a messenger, in the rescue of a Hungarian rebel force led by Kossuth when they were trapped;  the biographer is forced to concede, in the most grudging language conceivable, that the truth of the story is well substantiated (p80)). 

   The family, bereaved of their mother, were desperately poor at times. Roger, aged eleven, and his elder brother were caught shoplifting books, which they intended to resell, and were brought to court. The judge made their father sign acknowledgement of liability for any recurrence, and let the boys go.  There was no recurrence.  Another biographer would have emphasised precisely this, that the incident did not establish a pattern.  Philipps, of course, says nothing of the kind.   Though he mentions the incident briefly, by his placing in context he milks it for all it is worth, as supposed evidence of Roger’s disordered childhood.

   From what evidence there is, the truth seems to be that Casement had excellent relations with his brothers and sister and other close relatives, and warm memories of both his deceased parents.  In adult life he proved capable of forming long-lasting friendships and retaining the loyalty of many of those friends under very difficult circumstances.  And the notion that he was emotionally undeveloped, undisciplined, and uncontrolled, is incompatible with the facts of his career.  There could never have been any such career if he were like that! 

How could an emotionally uncontrolled man—familiar with what was going on in the Congo—have met the King of the Belgians two days running, kept his temper, and spoken effectively so as to make the monarch as uncomfortable as that creature was capable of being?

The Unashamed ‘Black Diaries’ !

   Roland Philipps, anyhow, has no evidence for the case he is trying to make.  This means he is forced to make considerable use of the Black Diaries, where Casement allegedly recorded, in the same ­laconic way he recorded other things, his promiscuous homosexual experience.  Quite like some other diarist might write about shopping (‘Marks and Spencer, green sweater. Pricey, cashmere, really nice. Best since the one I got in London’), the Black Diarist writes, allegedly in Rio de Janeiro, about his pick-up:  “Lovely. Young—18 & Glorious. Biggest since Lisbon July 1904.”

   One must agree with Jeffrey Dudgeon about this much:  the writer of the Black Diaries is ‘guilt-free’.  This is something Roland Philipps has failed to appreciate: 

“None of Casement’s annotations of his sexual encounters in port cities carry any personal freight, as shame overwhelmed the possibility of any analysis of emotion, and there seems no practical reason for listing them as he does” (p52).

   Shame! What shame?  The author of the Black Diaries is entirely shameless!  This ‘Casement’ has so little shame that he can put one of his casual sex encounters right next to a meeting with his sister, for example!  The shamelessness of the Black Diarist is extraordinary, in fact, in his place and time.  If any emotional quality attached to any of his encounters, this Diarist would not be dissuaded by shame from analysis or description.  But he never gets beyond the skin, the hair and the genitals, which is rather remarkable.

   On the other hand, Philipps is surely right in thinking that there was no evident practical reason for the Diarist to list his encounters like this.  And, even if he personally thought that casual sex with an unknown young man was quite as natural as meeting his sister, he must have been well aware that society and the law thought differently.  If he wished to record these highly illegal acts, which could destroy his life if publicised, would it not have been wise to commit them exclusively to a special diary, guarded with special security (and not casually left in a trunk in an apartment in London, where we are told the Black Diary of 1903 was found)?

   We are invited to believe that Casement, as the Black Diarist, wanted a personal written record of practices that were illegal and punishable by law and regarded as morally reprehended by mainstream society, though to him they were as natural as the experience of shopping!  But, although in other respects an argumentative person, he never seemed to feel any need to affirm this naturalness in argument, even privately in his remarkable diary;  in fact, on the one occasion where he expressed a view on homosexual practice, he called it “a terrible disease” (Dudgeon, The Black Diaries, p124). 

Be that as it may, to enhance the feeling of naturalness, he set down many details of his unproblematic overground life alongside the underground entries, all in a similar style.  And, because it never occurred to him that this way of doing things was dangerous, that a double-life diary was not a good idea, that being too casual about his diary might cause his ruin, he kept several such double-life diaries in the space of nearly a decade, if not longer!  And, even then, he left double-life diaries lying about .  .  . !

   The ‘Berlin Diary’ of 1914-16, on the other hand, is strictly single-life.  Had the addict conquered his addiction, at least to recording his double life?  There are no sex entries, even though at that time, according to Philipps, Casement was having his one truly romantic homosexual experience, with his manservant Adler Christiansen.  (Again there is no evidence, just a conclusion one half-crazy British diplomat jumped to!)

*********

Intellect And Poetry

   Undeniably, the Casement that emerges from the pages of Roland Philipps’s book is complex. So complex that he simply can’t hold together, he makes no sense at all.  Having hollowed out Casement emotionally, Philipps proceeds to hollow him out intellectually and poetically.  Casement was—

“inadequately educated” (p3).

“He was entirely without the intellectual underpinning, cynicism and instinct to compromise to be able to strategise through the rough seas of wartime” (p326). 

“He had no conditioning in how to process his feelings, nor in how to look at them with the paradoxical detachment that a true poet requires”  (p82).

   On the first point, one must note that Philipps steers well clear of Casement’s essay on The Keeper Of The Seas, which is wise of him.  But I leave this to a later time. 

On the poetry—well, I would not claim that Casement belongs in the first rank of poets.  But I think he’s well in the top half of the very numerous field, and he has his particular successes.  I’d like to include one of them here, which should be sufficient comment on Roland Philipps’s pretentious dismissal. 

   New Year’s Greeting is a poem about friendship.  It is warm, but not excessively.  It conveys emotion with due poetic discipline and control.  Maybe it isn’t perfect, but the critics have done well if they have produced something better!

John Minahane

New Year’s Greeting      

by 

Roger Casement

Some wish their friends gay Christmas cheer

And others wish a happy year

         But all in cold and printed phrase.

Then what shall I wish thee today?

For those are things that all can say

         And rarely soft emotion raise.

I want to let you know that one

However swift the years may run

         However friendships may decay

Will think of thee with kindly thought

With heart with loving wishes fraught

         On every coming New Year’s Day. 

And not at this glad time alone—

But when the Autumn leaves are blown

         In rustling showers on the Earth,

And when the yellow primrose peeps

From mossy cell when April weeps

         Yet weeps but in her joy and mirth,

And when the Summer’s golden blaze

Grants night small room between the days

         And robes the Earth with waving green,

Then still my thoughts will backward flee

And memory winging swift to thee

         Forget all else that lies between.