‘Broken Archangel’ by Roland Philipps review

In 1937 W.B. Yeats wrote that: ‘The ghost of Roger Casement is beating on the door.’ Just under eight decades later, as the country marked the centenary of the Easter Rising in 2016, it seemed as though Ireland had finally welcomed Casement’s ghost inside and invited him to get comfortable. A year on from a referendum that saw Irish voters approve marriage equality by a landslide, and with a peace agreement in Northern Ireland still holding, the Irish public appeared ready to claim – and acclaim – Roger Casement and all his complexities and contradictions.

That summer I attended a panel discussion about Casement at the Kilkenny Arts Festival. Most of the audience’s questions suggested national pride in Casement as a suitable hero for a country buoyed by its newfound status as a progressive nation. But one audience member was at odds with the wider consensus: he accused the panel of slandering the dead patriot by accepting the authenticity of diaries in which Casement recorded his homosexual encounters. The ghost of Roger Casement, it seemed, was receiving questions from the floor.

A century on from his execution, Casement’s contradictions still incite passionate responses – and not only in the atypically febrile atmosphere of Irish history Q&A sessions. Casement, as Roland Philipps underlines in his new biography of the humanitarian and Irish rebel, was a modern figure. Broken Archangel is a biography that sets out to provide a portrait of Casement’s career in its entirety. It is a book that will particularly suit readers who may have only encountered Casement briefly in the footnotes of someone else’s story.

Casement’s life is an attractive proposition for a biographer. Born in 1864 in Sandycove, Dublin, he was raised by relatives in Antrim and Liverpool. He entered the British consular service after extensive travel in Africa as an explorer, surveyor and customs official. Casement rose to prominence as a critic of colonial abuses in the Belgian Congo and through his investigation of atrocities committed by the rubber industry in the Putumayo region of the Amazon. For his service to the British Foreign Office, he was knighted in 1911. But Sir Roger Casement had already committed himself to a rebel’s path that would ultimately lead to his trial for treason. An extended period of recovery in Ireland from 1904-06 allowed him to engage with the Irish language and cultural revival, fostering his commitment to Irish nationalism.

His final act saw Casement confront British imperial rule in Ireland by negotiating with German imperialism, a high-risk wager that cost him his life. Efforts to spare him the death sentence he received from a British court were railroaded by a plot that Philipps describes as a ‘stain on the official treatment of Casement’: the exposure of his ‘black diaries’. These diaries contained terse yet explicit entries that revealed Casement to be a prolific cruiser through global currents of homosexual transactional sex.

These are the broad contours of Casement’s life in historical memory. They provide the frame beyond which Philipps, in this well-researched and engagingly narrated biography, rarely strays. Philipps guides readers through Casement’s life in a broadly chronological order and only briefly strays into Casement’s afterlife and legacy. For those looking for an accurate, fluidly written account of Casement in his own era, this biography is easy to recommend. Readers interested in the aspects of Casement that still incite argument and new research – the authenticity of the ‘black diaries’, for example, or Casement’s place within Irish and world literature – should supplement their reading with Alison Garden’s recent study The Literary Afterlives of Roger Casement, 1899-2016.

While drawing on the existing and already extensive biographical literature, Philipps also draws from a range of primary sources, chiefly Casement’s own diaries and letters as well as written reflections on Casement by his contemporaries and the occasional literary artefact. Sometimes I sensed a frustration common to many biographers working with the paper trails of those who kept their inner lives opaque. Casement was a prolific but colourless diarist, whose journals could read like financial ledgers. The ‘black diaries’ applied the accountant-like tone of his other journals to concise descriptions of transactional sex: ‘Lovely. Young – 18 & glorious. Biggest since Lisbon July 1904’ reads one typical entry. Some details of an emotional life can be gleaned but overall these are, as Philipps points out, ‘sketchy’ documents. Casement’s poetry, meanwhile, did not excite publishers and provides only moderately useful fodder for historians today.

For this reason, Philipps’ recounting of Casement’s early life and relations with his family lacks the sense of pace and intrigue that he finds in Casement’s public career. Irish historians or those interested in the history of sexuality will not necessarily find any revelations in these pages. However, in the final – and stormiest – of Casement’s ‘tempestuous’ lives Philipps deftly marshals the richest material in his story. Casement’s Irish republican mission in wartime Germany, his disastrous journey home to Ireland ahead of the Easter Rising and his subsequent treason trial are ably transformed into a page-turning finale.

Philipps treats his subject with sympathy while writing critically about a figure who emerges from this biography as someone guided by impulse. For his title, Philipps chose a line that T.E. Lawrence used to describe Casement: ‘a broken archangel’. Although poetic, it is a less effective summation of the man than a description from Casement’s literary counterpart Joseph Conrad, which Philipps also quotes. For Conrad, Casement was a ‘creature of sheer temperament’ who moved through life ‘by sheer emotional force’. Philipps portrait of Casement aligns neatly with this statement.

• Broken Archangel: The Tempestuous Lives of Roger Casement
  Roland Philipps
  Bodley Head, 400pp, £25
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Maurice J. Casey is a Research Fellow in the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queen’s University Belfast. Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism’s Forgotten Radicals is forthcoming with Footnote Press.