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Luminous Traitor: The Just and Daring Life of Roger Casement, a Biographical Novel
"Martin Duberman is a national treasure."—Masha Gessen, The New Yorker Roger Casement was an internationally renowned figure at the beginning of the 20th century, famous for exposing the widespread atrocities against the indigenous people in King Leopold's Congo and his subsequent exposure—for which he was knighted in 1911—of the brutal conditions of enslaved labor in Peru. An Irish nationalist of profound conviction, he attempted, at the outbreak of World War I, to obtain German support and weapons for an armed rebellion against British rule. Apprehended and convicted of treason in a notorious trial that captured worldwide attention, Casement was sentenced to die on the gallows. A powerful petition drive for the commutation of his sentence was inaugurated by George Bernard Shaw and a host of other influential figures. A gay man, Casement kept detailed diaries of his sexual escapades, and the British government, upon discovering the diaries, circulated its pages to public figures, thereby crippling what had been a mounting petition for clemency. In 1916, he was hanged. In this gripping reimagining, acclaimed historian Martin Duberman paints a full portrait of the man for the first time. Tracing his evolution from servant of the empire to his work as a humanitarian activist and anti-imperialist, Duberman resurrects and recognizes all facets—from the professional to the personal—of the fantastic life of this pioneer for human rights.
288 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 6, 2018
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106 people want to read
About the author
Martin Duberman
65 books88 followersMartin Bauml Duberman is a scholar and playwright. He graduated from Yale in 1952 and earned a Ph.D. in American history from Harvard in 1957. Duberman left his tenured position at Princeton University in 1971 to become Distinguished Professor of History at Lehman College in New York City.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
November 6, 2018
The word "novel" should not be used to describe this book, which is in fact an overlong Wikipedia article. Casement may have been "luminous" and "daring" but Duberman has done everything he can to suck the life out of his story. Even the "fictionalized" scenes of dialogue are painful recitations of plot points and political arguments--something found in, say, a freshman seminar essay. Casement's sex life is mentioned, but it feels more like cursory allusions: Duberman does nothing to explain or investigate or inhabit Casement's sexual desires and behaviors. This is book as recitation, and if readers want to understand or get to know Casement, I suggest they look elsewhere.
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August 23, 2018I am currently reviewing this book for a forthcoming issue of The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide.
February 25, 2023
A fair amount has been written about Roger Casement, but there has been a dearth of material that treated his queerness honestly and respectfully. For that, Martin Duberman is to be praised.
Less praise, perhaps, should go to some of Duberman’s stylistic and narrative choices. It becomes immediately clear, for example, that Duberman invented scores of pages of conversation, along with the physical gesture, tones of voice, and reactions of third parties, which is a technique one either will or won’t embrace. Duberman himself classifies the book as a “biographical novel” and explains his approach in an author’s note that formalizes the liberties he takes; again, one may or may not find the method exasperating. Personally, I remain ambivalent: sometimes it worked but it just as often did not.
Duberman also chose to present 99% of the book in an “historical present” tense, common in some languages but less so in English, which I suppose was meant to lend verisimilitude to the conceit of the novel. I found it hugely irritating. What’s more, he has the tic of calling Casement “Roger” throughout the book while referencing virtually everyone else by surname or title (even more confusingly, he occasionally jumps back-and-forth between the two modes). It’s distracting, and I never felt I understood WHY he was doing it.
The very long section in a very long chapter (Ch. 4, “Ireland”) that traces the years of struggle, violence, and politicking for and against Irish home rule, and which continues on through the prodrome to and beginning of WWI and the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Uprising in Ireland, is detailed to the point of tedium. Duberman seems to keep losing sight of Casement, remembering that the book is supposed to be about him, throwing in some sort of connection (however tangential) between the main subject and the machinations of British-Irish politics, and then forgetting all over again. The result is whiplash.
One understands the relevance of the context to Casement’s politics and ultimate trial for treason, but Duberman’s insistence on providing a week-by-week, and sometimes day-by-day, chronicle of developments will challenge most readers’ patience.
Finally, though Duberman accepts the premise that Casement’s so-called “black diaries,” which detail his sexual adventures with men, are authentic, it would have been useful to know (even perhaps as part of the author’s note) how Duberman arrived at that determination or which claims about the diaries he discounted and why.
More fatally, Duberman never manages to connect Casement’s sexuality with the rest of his life, politics, or sensibility. We learn he was a size queen and liked getting railed, but the information Duberman reports about Casement’s sexual contacts comes with almost no sense of what Casement himself made of them, what he thought of the men he tricked with, or how he incorporated his sexuality into his life (other, that is, than feeling intermittently and briefly guilt-wracked about it).
Casement himself denied having written the infamous diaries, a disavowal that would hardly have been unusual under the circumstances, except that he did nothing else to save his own life once he was on trial and, given that, could have chosen to acknowledge the diaries or simply to ignore them. Perhaps it was a question of what Casement wanted his legacy to be, and his fear that the heroism of his Irish nationalism would be tarnished.
But the fact remains: if we accept that Casement actually wrote the diaries, then why he did so, and especially why he never destroyed them, demands to be explored. No less intriguing, however, is how he managed, for decades, to keep his sexual life so completely secret from absolutely everyone who knew him, or so it would appear from the fact that even his closest friends and associates never knew about it and largely believed both that the diaries were faked and that Casement could not be the “degenerate” the press wanted him to be. If Casement was that successful at keeping his sexuality hidden, it’s legitimate to ask whether he might have been lying about anything else.
Less praise, perhaps, should go to some of Duberman’s stylistic and narrative choices. It becomes immediately clear, for example, that Duberman invented scores of pages of conversation, along with the physical gesture, tones of voice, and reactions of third parties, which is a technique one either will or won’t embrace. Duberman himself classifies the book as a “biographical novel” and explains his approach in an author’s note that formalizes the liberties he takes; again, one may or may not find the method exasperating. Personally, I remain ambivalent: sometimes it worked but it just as often did not.
Duberman also chose to present 99% of the book in an “historical present” tense, common in some languages but less so in English, which I suppose was meant to lend verisimilitude to the conceit of the novel. I found it hugely irritating. What’s more, he has the tic of calling Casement “Roger” throughout the book while referencing virtually everyone else by surname or title (even more confusingly, he occasionally jumps back-and-forth between the two modes). It’s distracting, and I never felt I understood WHY he was doing it.
The very long section in a very long chapter (Ch. 4, “Ireland”) that traces the years of struggle, violence, and politicking for and against Irish home rule, and which continues on through the prodrome to and beginning of WWI and the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Uprising in Ireland, is detailed to the point of tedium. Duberman seems to keep losing sight of Casement, remembering that the book is supposed to be about him, throwing in some sort of connection (however tangential) between the main subject and the machinations of British-Irish politics, and then forgetting all over again. The result is whiplash.
One understands the relevance of the context to Casement’s politics and ultimate trial for treason, but Duberman’s insistence on providing a week-by-week, and sometimes day-by-day, chronicle of developments will challenge most readers’ patience.
Finally, though Duberman accepts the premise that Casement’s so-called “black diaries,” which detail his sexual adventures with men, are authentic, it would have been useful to know (even perhaps as part of the author’s note) how Duberman arrived at that determination or which claims about the diaries he discounted and why.
More fatally, Duberman never manages to connect Casement’s sexuality with the rest of his life, politics, or sensibility. We learn he was a size queen and liked getting railed, but the information Duberman reports about Casement’s sexual contacts comes with almost no sense of what Casement himself made of them, what he thought of the men he tricked with, or how he incorporated his sexuality into his life (other, that is, than feeling intermittently and briefly guilt-wracked about it).
Casement himself denied having written the infamous diaries, a disavowal that would hardly have been unusual under the circumstances, except that he did nothing else to save his own life once he was on trial and, given that, could have chosen to acknowledge the diaries or simply to ignore them. Perhaps it was a question of what Casement wanted his legacy to be, and his fear that the heroism of his Irish nationalism would be tarnished.
But the fact remains: if we accept that Casement actually wrote the diaries, then why he did so, and especially why he never destroyed them, demands to be explored. No less intriguing, however, is how he managed, for decades, to keep his sexual life so completely secret from absolutely everyone who knew him, or so it would appear from the fact that even his closest friends and associates never knew about it and largely believed both that the diaries were faked and that Casement could not be the “degenerate” the press wanted him to be. If Casement was that successful at keeping his sexuality hidden, it’s legitimate to ask whether he might have been lying about anything else.
March 28, 2019
I knew of Casement from his involvement in the Condo Reform Association but I didn't know he was Irish or gay it about his work in South America. Duberman does a wonderful job of constructing a story of Casement's life from the sources, including his diaries. He's a sympathetic character and Duberman speculates a little about things we can't know for sure, like why he keeps sexual diaries that can only be a potential threat to him, and how he may have thought about his sexuality, given the prevalent view that it was, at best, a disease. Nor does Duberman try to justify Casement's (to my mind) disastrous time in Germany during WWI, where he attempted to train Irish POWs for an invasion and liberation of Ireland, theoretically but only slightly supported by Germany. Rather than coming across as a human rights hero, Casement seems like a complex, generous but sometimes shortsighted character, grappling with the impact of empire throughout his life.
March 1, 2020
Even knowing almost all of Rodger Casement's story already, the ending of this book made me tear up a little, and I think that's quite the accomplishment. Telling the story of Casement's life from birth to death, this book was studiously researched and meticulously put together. From Casement's time advocating for the rights of native people in Africa and South America to his dedication to Irish nationalism, he was a hero who thoroughly deserves to be profiled. I also liked the emphasis on Casement's sexuality, a major part of his life that many of his admirers brush aside. My one annoyance with this book was that sometimes the "biographical novel" format didn't really work- for example, conversations between "characters" seemed out of place. The book was also ridden with typos. Still, this was a well-written account of a great man's life.
October 24, 2019
A frustrating book, which could have been great if much longer, or if more creative license had been taken. In academic fashion, it crams in every detail of Casement’s biography regardless of any sense of life or pacing. The imagined conversations that render this a “novel” are amateurish and strictly expository.
If you’re going to abandon traditional biography, why not go further and imagine Casement’s mind and emotions, or explore his sex life? Such a missed opportunity!
If you’re going to abandon traditional biography, why not go further and imagine Casement’s mind and emotions, or explore his sex life? Such a missed opportunity!
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews