IRISH HISTORY: The cover of this publication gives the title as Roger Casement: The Black Diaries, with a Study of his Background, Sexuality and Irish Political Life and carries on the bottom right- hand corner a scarlet banner bearing the words: "Authentic book of record including the never before published 1911 Black Diary".
Sir Roger Casement put against any background would cut a dashing figure - tall with a well-proportioned physique, athletic posture and striking good looks. He was also possessed of a deeply compassionate nature and strong humanitarian impulses. These impulses, which compelled him to identify with the underdog, led him to expose the heart of darkness that was King Leopold's Congo and subsequently to reveal the similarly bestial crimes committed against the Putomayo Indians in Brazil. That he applied these tropical lessons to the colonial situation in his own land displays an extraordinary bravery and moral consistency, the very qualities that paradoxically led in the end to his arrest and trial as a traitor.
But Casement was also a homosexual, and unlike other romantic humanitarians of the 20th century, such as Wilfred Israel and Raoul Wallenberg, this aspect of his personality was not sublimated but expressed, and expressed in a series of promiscuous relationships meticulously documented in the diaries here published. These diaries are still a cause of contention, unsophisticated Irish nationalists refusing on the whole to believe that this dashing Captain of the School could also be, in their narrow moral terms, the Rotter of the Remove.
My Senate colleague Dr Martin Mansergh is quoted in the preface as veering towards the forgery theory on the basis that the author of the Diaries, if indeed it was Casement, "had absolutely no conscience in regard to his own sexual life and no obvious concern about its impact on his life's work if ever revealed". The good doctor is also quoted as expressing the view that the diarist was "as predatory towards the natives as those he criticised . . ." This opinion would in my view be hard to sustain in the light of the fact that the predatoriness of the colonisers was expressed in terms of mass murder, the mutilation of children in front of their parents to inculcate discipline and fear, and policies that were tantamount to genocide. Against this background, Casement's sexual fumblings which, although carried on pretty indiscriminately, appear to have been universally welcomed, paid for and mutually pleasurable and were clearly of a different order.
Casement, of course, like that other generous and tragic figure Oscar Wilde, was much more deeply subversive than any mere rebel, and his very being fundamentally challenged social assumptions.
Both men were destroyed by the imperial establishment and then subsequently denied their essential nature by their own people. Both were humiliated in a gross way by their accusers and in a manner whose moral obscenity surely backfires on their tormentors. Both were victims of the late-Victorian notion that sex was essentially filthy, Wilde being cross-examined about faecal stains on sheets that were not, in any case, from his bed, while Casement's dead body was subjected, at the direction of the Home Office, to prolonged rectal examination with the intention of demonstrating that he habitually took the passive role in sodomy. It would be difficult to find a more eloquent testimony to the unhealthy anal obsessions of mainstream society at that time, or a more effective contrast between the instinctive sexual activities of Wilde and Casement on the one hand and the neurotic investigations of medical jurisprudence on the other.
The author of this book, Jeffrey Dudgeon, was a courageous and stalwart colleague of mine in the fight for gay liberation in Ireland for the last 30 years and so has a committed position on the subject of Casement and his diaries. It is also a subject of which he has an encyclopedic knowledge and on which he has campaigned for many years. We should be indebted to him for his perseverance and scholarship.
It is unlikely, however, that this book will reach the top of the best-seller list for it is in every way a weighty tome, being both physically heavy and also a dizzying agglomeration of factual material. I have never been myself particularly interested in the Casement controversy, apart from anything else because my training in literary scholarship indicated very early on to me when I read the diaries as published by Maurice Girodias and the Olympia Press that both from a textual and from a literary point of view there could be no question as to their authenticity. However, when political sympathies are engaged people will believe what they want, and in circumstances such as those through which the British administration made very effective mischievous use of the material which so fortuitously came into their hands, this wilful blindness is almost understandable.
Jeffrey Dudgeon has done us a service in the publication of this material. However, despite what the author says, the diary entries will scarcely be regarded by any sane person as "erotic". They consist of brief repetitive exclamatory accounts of sexual encounters usually accompanied by a note of the monetary exchange involved. One would need a compulsive fascination with the history of sexuality, which I at least do not possess, to maintain an interest over 600 pages of variations on the simple theme "saw beauty - enormous - huge - wanted dreadfully".
There is also sometimes an unconscious comic tinge to this longing, as for example September 14th, 1911: "saw enormous one on poor dungaree boy (17 or so) from hotel window, watering spare ground in front. Bare feet and it a huge soft one wobbling under pants". Few of us are immune from this kind of sexual speculation but it must surely be everyone's nightmare that the public should be permitted to eavesdrop upon our sexual stream of consciousness. One hopes that Jeffrey Dudgeon shares an appreciation of the tragicomic elements in his material as for example when he glosses the entry, "Augosto. Entered hard. Saw my crested screamer in zoo", with the explanatory note concerning the "Screamer" - A bird !. It is unusual however for the editor to content himself with a comment of a mere two words. Sometimes a comparatively brief diary entry, as March 28th 1903, precipitates two to three pages of fractious argumentation in heavy type. On this point, I personally found it a slightly irritating elevation of the role of editor that his comments should be given prominence by the use of heavy type as against the comparative reticence of the type face used for Casement's own words.
Perhaps the most significant elements of the book concern the analysis of the character of Adler Christensen (a blubbery youth, in appearance very like W.H. Auden's flabby American boyfriend, the late Chester Kallman) and the remarkable discovery of the real identity of Casement's long-term boyfriend, heretofore referred to as Millar as if it were a surname, and identified authoritatively by Dudgeon as one Millar Gordon who subsequently married, produced two children and died from degenerative heart disease in Greystones as late as the mid-1950s. This is a remarkable and important historical discovery.
The book is well furnished with a series of haunting photographs such as the slightly creased print described merely as "well-dressed Iberian with bright protruding tie". There is something poignant about the fact that these unnamed photographic images and a series of equally anonymous references to sexual encounters are perhaps the only surviving trace of the existence of these human beings.
In the preface Dudgeon refers to being gay as having become in the new Ireland "if not de rigueur at least modish, in metropolitan circles". Somehow I doubt this and it certainly wasn't either de rigueur or modish in Casement's time. Letanyone who is inclined to condemn Casement on the grounds of his promiscuity consider what alternative was left to a man in his position in Edwardian society. He could hardly have announced an engagement to Millar Gordon in the columns of this newspaper for example. It is right that Casement's sexuality should be honestly addressed. It is not something that should be fudged. It may well help young gay people in the Ireland of the 21st century to know of the nobility as well as the fallibility of one of their own ilk in earlier times.
Dudgeon does honour to Casement in summarising his character, admitting his frailty but continuing: "His virtues were nonetheless many and varied: indifference to discomfort and pain, courage in the face of physical violence, persistence, love of humanity, kindness to animals, a refusal to see those of other races as subordinate by definition, and political effectiveness". Would that we could all be worthy of such an epitaph.
• David Norris is an independent senator representing the graduates of Trinity College, Dublin
Roger Casement: The Black Diaries. By Jeffrey Dudgeon
Belfast Press, 680pp. £25