A Novel Truth about Casement’s “Irish” Identity Sabina Murray (bio) I first became fascinated with Roger Casement—Irish revolutionary, humanitarian, and gay icon, hanged for treason in the First World War—in the summer of 1999 while on holiday on the New Jersey Shore. I had purchased W. G. Sebald’s novel The Rings of Saturn at the local Barnes & Noble. This was an odd choice of beach reading; Rings, as with all of Sebald’s writing, is steeped in an erudite gloom. Or maybe it was the perfect reading: an escape. Included in its peregrinations was a chapter on Casement, whose story intrigued me. By strange coincidence I picked up a copy of Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost at my publishers in September of the same year. A hefty chunk of the work was devoted to Casement, his humanitarian works, his role in outfitting Conrad for his journey up the Congo and into modernism, his unfortunate end. These encounters with Sir Roger goaded me in a way that I did not fully understand, and I looked him up, learning with some surprise that we shared a birthday. I felt that this held a meaning, but did not know what this might be beyond the banal fact that we were both born on the first of September, although some years apart. Sebald, a German writer born in 1944, also had little in common with Casement, but as Sebald’s writing takes psychological distancing as a defining element, this would seem to have been by design. Hochs-child, as a historian writing on the Belgian Congo, had obvious reason to address Casement in his book; it would have been irresponsible not to include him. Historians can write about anything and anyone as fact demands it, but, ironically, in fiction there is often a desire to connect the invented with the real, the character with the author. The identity of the author is too often a factor in judging a novel’s authenticity, regardless of the book’s merit. My qualifications to write the novel might be questioned. Although I was drawn to Casement with that strange empathy that draws one to make characters of figures, [End Page 167] I still comprehended the significant distance between his experience and my own. Casement’s Irishness gave me pause. I associate Irishness with feistiness. It comes with an Australian childhood, in my case one spent with Loreto Sisters in Perth. Being a half-Filipino, half-American child, I had few points of connection with the other students beyond being Catholic, which everyone was, except for the Greeks and the two Jewish children who were enrolled at Loreto Nedlands, more willing to try their luck with the Catholics than the Church of England. We were mostly the children or grandchildren of hardworking immigrants, predominantly of Irish background, to which I pretended nominal belonging, courtesy of my surname. Our hero was Ned Kelly, our loyalty sealed by having grown up on the eponymous 1970 film that starred none other than Mick Jagger. Reenacting the life of Ned Kelly was a playground staple, but it was very hard to find actors willing to play for the other side, even for the final martyr-producing shootout. In Australia our heroes were bushrangers, and we knew in our blood that the criminals who had been sent to our distant shores—whose history we inherited despite our relatively recent arrival, just as all Americans inherit the legacy of slavery—were largely victims of injustice. When Oscar Wilde visited America in 1882, a visit historical for its epic remark-making, he observed, “The Americans always take their heroes from the criminal classes.” Yes, he was referring to Americans, but it took an Irishman to notice. In the early days of my research, I traveled to Belfast to meet with the mural artist Danny Devenny and his wife Deborah, a social worker active with Sinn Féin. Danny had spent some significant time in H-Block during the Troubles and, as I learned in the bars of Belfast, was to many a local hero. The Devennys did not identify so much with their Protestant neighbors as with oppressed people...