THE CASEMENT DIARIES
SIR,-1 must apologise to Brian Inglis for my delay in commenting on his latest article dealing with the Casement diaries and his gracious reference to myself, but 1 read it away from my books and notes. If he will excuse my saying so, the opening of the diaries has left the whole question exactly where it was, still a recurring source of mischief. Mr. MacColl has pronounced the diaries genuine, Dr. Mackey, armed with elaborate equipment for the detection of forgeries, has pronounced them to be fakes, How much wiser are we? Does anybody believe that with Dr. Mackey's equipment Mr. MacColl might have entertained a few doubts, or that Dr. Mackey, lacking it, might have begun to suspect that Casement was the sort of man to keep indecent diaries? What is really needed at this stage is a careful collation of the manuscripts and the Singleton-Gates edition. The latter, as I under- stand it, was set up from a copy of the Scotland Yard transcript. The present owner of this has kindly answered a few check questions of mine and informed me that in one sentence of the Singleton- Gates edition there are three discrepancies with the Scotland Yard text. The question is, how many dis- crepancies are there between the printed.text and the manuscripts. How important this can be may be seen from one single passage in the entry for December 5, 1910—'said "Adios"—dash for ever.' One doesn't have to be a textual scholar to realise that this is dictated, not transcribed. It is no use exchanging views on whether the words are in Case- ment's handwriting. The important thing is to find out if the symbol '—' is written out in the original. If it is, then it cannot be in Casement's handwriting.
The study of handwriting seems to me far too subjective a science to be of much use in deciding the authenticity of these diaries. One of the things that make it impossible for me to believe they are genuine is the colossal textual disturbance that takes place wherever a supposedly erotic entry occurs. Punctuation becomes crazy and syntax simply ceases to exist. 'Portuguse naval officer very charmingly' is an example. Most sentences have no subject, or no verb, explicit or implicit, or else the subject changes in mid-career. Whole words and phrases are repeated aimlessly. And again and again I find that by removing a few compromising words one gets back to an original subject, and to perfect sense. Clearly, it is hard to quote, but let me ask Mr. Inglis as a historian to study the entries for October 28 and 29, 1910, and ask himself if these two entries did not originally read, 'Caught three splendid butterflies on road in fingers—beauties' and 'After dinner talked two, Ricigaros muchachos- one a fine chap. He pulled keys on chain in left pocket looking for cigarettes.'
This is not the least that can be said against the authenticity of these diaries. Mr. Inglis himself in an earlier article stood alone in perceiving the absence of 'erotic impact' in the diaries. (I think this was his phrase, for it described precisely what was only a vague impression of my own.) He might have gone further and pointed out that the absence of erotic impact is caused by the absence of an erotic vocabulary. All the words in the erotic pas- sages are words that Casement normally used liberally in their accepted sense—'stern,' screw,' 'extension,' finger,"stiff,"beauty,"type'; and in fact it would be more correct to speak of the erotic passages as ambiguous. The obvious possible ex- planation of this will occur to anybody of reasonable intelligence—all these words have been traced or photographed and strung together into a vaguely compromising pattern, however illiterate. Once again I can only ask Mr. Inglis to look at the ex- hibitionistic passage in the entry for September 9, 1910, and then turn to the entry for October 7 of the same year where he will find precisely the same words used in their normal sense. 'Again today magnificent display of butterflies; . beats anything I've seen yet.'
I am aware that in writing this I am on dangerous ground. It is quite possible that if Messrs. Eyre and Spottiswoode, instead of uselessly reprinting the Singleton-Gates edition, would give us with it a collation of at least a representative number of the ambiguous passages, I should discover that the extraordinary textual disturbance in these has been caused by careless transcription. As the evidence stands, I can only repeat that I have no doubt whatever that these entries have been interpolated, and that the interpolation was not the work of Roger Casement.—Yours faithfully, FRANK O'CONNOR c/o A. D. Peters, 10 Buckingham Street, Adel phi [Brian Inglis writes : 'I cannot agree with Frank O'Connor that "what is needed is a careful collation of the manuscripts and of the Singleton-Gates edition." The Singleton-Gates typescript (as he long ago admitted) is not always accurate; but it is
astonishing, considering the difficulties presented by Casement's writing and by the magnitude of the task, that so few mistakes were made, and they do not appear to be important. I assume that one Home Office (or Scotland Yard) man dictated from the diaries to another, who typed them—so such things as the "dash" are easily accounted for.
'The change in Casement's style when he deals with his sexual appetites, though it may seem "illiterate" in print, looks natural on the diary's page. It is, after all, common for authors who write a great deal to switch to a form of personal short- hand when dealing with their love-life (on a very different plane, Bernard Shaw is a good example). This does occasionally give scope for ambiguity; but
as Mr. O'Connor will surely concede when he sees the manuscripts, the great bulk of the sexual material (much of it in a diary that was not printed in the Singleton-Gates book) is unambiguous to tltt point of tedium.'—Editor, Spectator.]
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