What I Am Reading: "The Dream of the Celt" by Mario Vargas Llosa

I am hopeful that this will be the last book I read this year that ends with a hanging. I put off reading this book for a while, because I knew it would bum me out. Choosing a subsequent book to specifically cleanse the palette of it helped me bite the bullet.

The book is about Roger Casement, diplomat, Irish patriot, and human rights activist. I didn't remember him well specificity, but he was a key actor in the exposure and activism against Belgian King Leopold II's Congo Free State, the subject of a book I read when I was a teenager, King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild. Casement was an employee of Leopold's company who later became a British consul in the Congo (a career transition that I can shed no light on), and wrote a formal report that galvanized British activism against the human rights nightmare that was Leopold's personal African fiefdom. Casement went on to do the same thing a second time in investigating the abuses of another rubber empire in the Peruvian north, a middle act that the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa gives considerable attention to. Finally, he became involved in the Irish separatist cause, and was executed by the British in 1916 as an ancillary to the Easter Rising.

As someone who spent several years in Massachusetts Democratic Party politics, I have heard a lot about Ireland. Gaelic pride, patriotism, and partisanship tends to fade into background music to some extent when it comes up at every fundraiser in conversation between people several generations removed from their immigrant forebears. For that reason, it was useful for me to reacquaint myself viscerally through this book with the topic of Irish repression by the British, a longstanding issue leading to the tragic, doomed Easter Rising in 1916, and eventual Irish independence in 1922.

For Roger Casement, his dedication to the Irish cause evolved throughout his life. As a young man, he went to the Congo as the continuation of idealistic belief in the civilizing power of European colonialism, working under Henry Morton Stanley, famous colonialist catchphrase coiner. Working in the Congo for over a decade, Casement became disillusioned by exposure to the reality of European exploitation. In the pursuit of rubber, Leopold's mercenary army would forcibly take Congolese tribesmen to harvest and transport their loads, burning down villages and disfiguring people as reprisals for refusal to work. Those who were forced to work received essentially no payment, and still had to use their scant spare time to grow their own crops or otherwise provide for themselves. Millions starved, were worked to death, or were murdered. As rumors and allegations spread in Europe, Casement was detailed to investigate the claims on "the frontier," and report back to the British Foreign Office. His report, detailing near-genocidal atrocities, sparked outrage and some degree of reform. Eventually, the Belgian government removed the colony from its monarch's personal control, and administered it with some greater degree of accountability.

The middle part of this exposition-heavy, didactic book involves a repeat performance by Casement, as he was sent to the Peruvian Amazon to investigate similar exploitation by similar rubber barons, since their company was British-chartered. Here natives also were worked to death, murdered, mutilated, and starved in the pursuit of rubber quotas. Vargas Llosa goes in-depth into the political situation here, as the main rubber company’s muscle is the only Peruvian force protecting their frontier from Columbian annexation, and thus the central government has conflicted motivations, even as whistleblowers and judges are driven off or murdered from the company town in the region. Though Casement himself despaired of seeing the conditions change after this report, it is satisfying to see some small measure of justice enacted as the company's owners and shareholders are put on the hot seat by Parliament. As a government office worker myself, I can celebrate a scenario where the decisive action that precipitates change is the writing of a thorough report.

Throughout these "adventures," Casement came to be increasingly see his native people, the Irish, as the victims of British colonialism, albeit more refined (and therefore more insidious) than that practiced in the Congo or the Amazon. His time in the Congo taught him that the Irish were colonized as well, and cynicism from his time in the Amazon taught him that only armed rebellion would secure freedom for oppressed people, including the Irish. After retiring from the Foreign Service due to his perilous health, he came to be involved in the cause of Irish nationalism, and met many of the leaders of the eventual Easter Rising, such as Patrick Pearse and the others who eventually faced the firing squad. We are told, but not quite shown, that his fervency increased, as Casement (as the narrator) recounts several of his friends telling him that he had become more fanatical. He was in the United States arranging funding and arms shipments when war broke out in 1914, and traveled to Germany to coordinate between the Reich and the Irish support for an eventual uprising.

However, by the time the uprising was planned in 1916, he had come to know that specifically the Germans were not interested in assisting in this instance through a diversionary attack on the British, and generally the Germans had no great commitment to or tactical interest in the cause of Irish independence. The uprising was planned in secret, hidden from some of the more moderate Irish leaders. When Casement was informed of it, it was a fait accompli, but he hurried to Ireland in a submarine with an arms shipment in an attempt to persuade the leadership to hold off. He was captured by the British prior to the Easter Rising's commencement, hearing of its bloody week of street fighting and summary executions only while in prison.

Prior to the book's start and uncovered in its retelling, Casement was sentenced to death for treason. As the book starts (and throughout its interspersed scenes of him in prison), there is an activist effort, this time on his own behalf, to convince the government to grant him clemency from execution. However, beyond his anti-colonial activism and increasing Irish nationalism, the other thing that Casement had been involved in in his travels around the world was a clandestine homosexual lifestyle, with detailed notes on his encounters kept in his diaries. These diaries are apparently a source of historical controversy to this day, with many contemporary and subsequent skeptics saying that they were forged by the British as part of a smear campaign against his clemency. He lives the double-life of British diplomat and budding Irish patriot at the same time he is living a double life as a closeted gay man. Vargas Llosa's portrayal is that the journals are genuine notes on his sexual encounters, but some are fabricated as vicarious enactments of his fantasies after some encounters fail to come about or are not consummated. Living in the era that he did, Casement is of course oppressed by society's condemnation of gay relationships, and longs for some form of lasting love beyond brief and often purchased sexual encounters. This leads him to ruin eventually, as the one man he feels a strong companionship with is a Norwegian rogue who accompanies him to Germany to inform on him to the British.

This German is portrayed by Casement as a narrator, and appears to readers, as totally crackpot. Casement spends his time in Germany attempting to recruit Irish POWs to an Irish brigade, to fight on behalf of the Central Powers. Unsurprisingly, he finds very few takers. His lack of any talent for intrigue means he is a sitting duck for British intelligence services, and leads him to be of little use to the cause. There are some wheels-within-wheels here, as he was unsuccessful in influencing a cause that was, in the microcosm, doomed, but which did lead to Irish freedom in 1922, after more fighting and a reduction in support for moderate home rule in favor of more radical independence.

Ultimately, Casement is a tragic figure. Contra Vargas Llosa's epilogue, my reading tells me that, despite the homophobia of the time, Casement was embraced by freedom-fighters and activists of his time, and his execution caused a firestorm of international enmity towards Britain, along with their brutal repression of the Easter Rising. That will have to be a satisfying result, along with his activism on behalf of native peoples which, while still somewhat paternalistic, was much more humanizing and dignifying than that of his day. This book would have done well to note not just the uproar his reports caused, but the eventual practical results; failure by well-meaning British liberals to effect much change could have also colored one's view of the promise of the moderate, home-rule course towards Irish freedom that eventually failed as well.

Having this book written by a South American writer leads to a lot of attention given to the middle, Amazonian stage of Casement's professional life. This is welcome balance, as I had mainly seen him referenced in terms of the Congo and of Ireland. However, Vargas Llosa's book is very exposition-heavy, as I referenced; in fact, I might say that it is two-thirds biographic essay, with the other third Casement's imagined/assumed feelings, banal activities, and internal monologue. I was not very up-to-date on Roger Casement. I'll admit that I probably would not have remembered his name before this, though the Congo aspect and the German subterfuge aspect both came back to me. I should probably refresh myself on the Easter Rising as well; it’ll make me a better conversation partner at the next fundraiser at O’Connor’s in Worcester.