Black sheep or scapegoat?
Aidan Carl Mathews
Casement: The Flawed Hero Roger Sawyer
(Routledge and Kegan Paul £12.50) On 5 August 1868, at a clandestine ceremony in a Welsh Catholic church, a Jesuit priest administered baptism sub c'nclitione to Roger David Casement. The Child's mother, an Irish Catholic with Ascendancy connections, was in the know; his father, an Ulster Protestant and sometime soldier of fortune, was in the dark. Roger himself, all of age four at the little, was, in a way, neither here nor there, though he would later recall details of the Scene while awaiting the gallows in Penton- v, file. Like the author of this book, he may have been half-inclined (the whole of his life is in that verb) to lay his mixed fortunes at the feet of the very mixed marriage which Produced him. It is not important, this story of a covert sacrament, but it is telling. Conditional k ,'41),tisITI is a sort of qualified acceptance, and qualified acceptance is all Casement os ever got. In England, his championship ,.the enslaved doesn't quite tide him over treason against the realm (a halo for Itch, weitzer, a noose for Spartacus); in ,,e`and, on the other hand, his enrolment in '.e Martyrology is more or less nobbled by his sexual pastimes. Parnell's seamy 111enage is kosher, but Casement's cubby- hole are beyond the pale- aced. To this day he remains the tenant of til,11-rnan's land, his life a truly grey area: uree Parts blacking to one part whitewash. The Posthumous wrangles aren't a patch on the man's own divisions. If Casement intibbed the half-castes he met in America, meWas only because he shrank from the ortgrel in himself. Neither native nor set- ID' his attachment to the Irish cause was culture, by a rival attraction to metropolitan 'lire, while his Government duties in the ec),11go and Putumayo seasoned a taste for 14emptive endeavours of the kind which bung h,irn by the nose into the ashpit of a ied Putsch. He lived, as the colonised Est, m a deadlock of prostration and 1-tu-rentMent, man whose cornerstones kept sa Ping into stumbling-blocks, his advert into models. sci,,orn.ans will think a Gallo-Roman witn''°Id. The Irish knew better. Any man " (Me foot in the door will, like the god Brendan before him, wear a double profile. A 00tndan Bracken and a Lord Haw Haw are Thir °PPosite poles; they are identical twins, thel'or images. In the case of the colonised, 0,eq'Posite of love is not always hate; it is 4111;11e disappr' ointed love. Casement's life is
1. it not unitary: the two parts — in-
_ectioMst and imperialist — are as close a mutual stranglehold. Sawyer's word for all this is 'am- bivalence'. A murmurous hold-all, it crops up everywhere, but it says nothing. This is a great pity since the book is scholarly in its procedure, secretarial in its sobriety. The style lacks gusto, almost to the point of defeatism, and the writing is sometimes plain sloppy, as when legations make allegations, men accompany companies, or parties depart. But infelicity is a peccadillo. A more serious lapse informs the work. The Flawed Hero has no thesis. There are microfiches of new information in it — on the family tree and the consular thickets but they don't add up to very much beyond a general desire to bury the hatchet.
To be fair, Sawyer has hunches. Case- ment's mother died when he was a toddler; could this connect with later proclivities? There's also a shot at linking espionage with homosexuality on the ground that secrecy is basic to both. But no attempt is made to in- tegrate the man's body and soul, his sex and sensibility; little light is shed on his skid towards militant nationalism; and even less is said of the velocity with which British opinion transformed the parfit, gentil knight into a latter-day Count Vlad. It all seems to strike the man out of the blue.
A native in a colony is a child of the House of Tantalus. The ruling power is his sine qua non — its benediction is grace; but it's also his ne plus ultra — its ranks are closed. It won't eliminate him, but it will make him liminal, a lodger on the margins. Casement was oppressed by this discovery, and forgot it only by devoting himself to the discovery of oppression elsewhere. Ironically, he was then recreated by a posse of Anglican prelates and Yellow pressmen as a paragon of service, a chevalier of British paternalism. No wonder he started lionising midshipmen, like Martin Luther King carousing in motels. The exemplary life must be hell to live with.
Another irony. Casement's gallantry was smudged in his own eyes by the fact that self-sacrifice brought self-advancement. Heroic failure, on the other hand, would be spotless. That may be why the bravura of the last phase — silly challenges to Sir Ed- ward Grey, capricious self-exposure in Berlin, the last lunatic escapade which land- ed him in the Tower — reminds one of St Stephen before the Sanhedrin or Camus's outsider in his death cell. The theme is ela- tion, justification by fate alone.
Sawyer's book has a splendid title. The Flawed Hero looks to the texts and contexts of the Greek tragic canon. Alas, the author doesn't stop to stare. Tragedy, the etymologists tell us, is a trag odos, the route of the goat, a ritual of tactical killing. Whether a black sheep or a lamb of God, Casement is certainly a scapegoat. But a fall
guy or a Guy Fawkes isn't new. Every ship of state keeps a Jonah to jettison, just as every city-state needs a Polyneices who can be pitchforked to the wildcats. So perhaps it's time to think again about Casement, not as a special case but as the represen- tative of a species. 'When everyone agrees upon the guilt of the accused,' says a wise Talmudic precept, :let him go. He may be innocent for that reason.'
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