It is one of my regrets that I never had a chance to meet CLR James; we never met in a press box; we were never even in the same continent at the same time. When he died in 1989, Times (London) called him the ‘Black Plato’, but such comparisons merely served to diminish him. He was much too large to be squeezed into a single analogy.
Two of his books have been all-time favourites. Beyond a Boundary, the finest book on cricket and life, and The Black Jacobins, the story of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the only successful slave revolt in history when the small island of San Domingo (later, Haiti) triumphed over France, Britain, and Spain.
The Welsh writer John L. Williams has pulled together the various strands of this unusual personality, painting him with greatness not restricted exclusively to politics, art, music, literature, philosophy, activism, theatre or cricket, all areas where he was among the finest to have drawn breath, as theoretician, performer or critic. Williams celebrates the contradictions and consistencies of this astonishing man celebrated across so many fields in a recent biography, C L R James: A Life Beyond the Boundaries.
Earlier biographies of CLR James tended to limit the personality of a man who bursts through and beyond these books. CLR — addressing him by his initials seems as natural as turning his name into an adjective to stand for a variety of values — was large, he contained multitudes.
Already in school, he was known as the brightest boy in Trinidad. The Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott pointed out how hard it was over the years for CLR “to have been so brilliant and yet to have been thought of as a brilliant black man”.
CLR played cricket with the great West Indian all-rounder Learie Constantine (he went to England to write his autobiography), debated with Trotsky (visiting him in exile in Mexico) and Bertrand Russell (“I rolled him around in the dust and won the public vote comfortably,” CLR said later), was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, acted alongside Paul Robeson in a play CLR had written, and interacted with a range of people while travelling widely. He was too a serial seducer and financially ailing most of the time. Complexity and fragility co-existed, not always peacefully.
As Williams points out, “So many of the ideas we take for granted now — of the importance of identity and culture — start with his work. He is practically an academic subject in himself — no discussion of postcolonial studies can take place without his work being front and centre.”
As countries in Africa and the Caribbean gained independence, CLR’s acolytes became Prime Ministers and Presidents: Kawame Nkruma in Ghana, Eric Williams in Trinidad and Tobago and, to a lesser extent, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania.
The historian E.P. Thompson said, “The older James became, the more dangerous he got.” Three decades after his death, CLR is back in our midst thanks to this passionate, well-researched and necessary portrait.
(Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu)
