The following of review of John L. Williams, CLR James: A Life Beyond the Boundaries (Constable, 2022) was published on Amazon today. I’m preparing a libertarian Christian evaluation of James’s life and work, to be published, God willing, next year.—A.G.F.
The Boundaries of a Mind’s Quilt
In his biography of C. L. R. James (1901-1989), published the year before its subject died, James scholar Paul Buhle predicted that James’s story “will look different, more complete and more understandable, from the mid-twenty-first century than from” the late 1980s (C. L. R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary, 1). Before even this century’s quarter mark, John L. Williams has mined and elegantly refined much of that progress in completeness and intelligibility.
The subtitle, A Life Beyond the Boundaries, echoes James’s memoir 1963
Beyond a Boundary. That title in turn reflects his passion, as player and commentator, for cricket as well as his intellectual interest in perimeters, those of the game, of society, and of empire.
A glance at James’s literary accomplishments alone before he reached the age of 40 should move the most casual observer to take notice: Minty Alley (written in the 1920s, published in 1936), the first novel by a African-Caribbean author to be published in the United Kingdom; the translation of Boris Souvarine’s first of its kind and massive Stalin from the French (1936)
; the play Toussaint L’Ouverture (1934), in which James performed with Paul Robeson; the ground-breaking The Black Jacobins (1938). Each in itself was a tour de force; collectively (this list is not exhaustive) they almost beggar belief, yet those who knew the polymath came to expect that level of achievement from him.
Williams follows the pattern of his profiles of Shirley Bassey, Eartha Kitt, and Michael X; there as here, he is more investigative journalist than intellectual historian. Having enjoyed this book, however, this reviewer believes it’s about time that CLR (as Williams refers to him throughout) got a more personal treatment. In this respect, Williams has delivered.
Admiring, but not fawning, sympathetic, but not hagiographic, this book is about an intellectual, but not itself narrowly intellectual. Other biographies focus on CLR’s wide-ranging historical, political, and philosophical thought for which his chronology is the narrative context, but Williams shifts the emphasis. He doesn’t shortchange the ideas—they are, after all, why one would care to know about the life—but just when we’d like to know more about any one of them, Williams moves on to the next one.
Williams didn’t write mainly (let alone exclusively) for Marxist intellectuals eager to explore this or that dialectical byway. I was surprised, however, if not also a little disappointed, when he failed to explore episodes that would have illuminated the life he chronicled.
Grasping Hegel’s dialectic is important for Marxists, for example, and so it was for James. Non-Marxists, however, want to know why it’s important, e.g., why James dropped everything for a year during the Second World War to study and write about that arcane topic. What is the allegedly fecund Hegelian insight? What accounts for the obsession with it? The answer would have revealed a lot about the kind of intellectual CLR was. If Williams knows the answer, he kept it to himself.
Williams mentions an Evelyn Novak as the wife of George; this is surely Evelyn Novack (1905-1979; note the spelling), the second wife of the Trotskyist philosopher George Novack (1905-1992). Tantalizingly, Williams refers to the Socialist Workers Party’s notable philosopher merely as “one of CLR’s ideological rivals in the party” from which James and Raya Dunayevskaya split in 1940 (to form the Workers Party and to which they returned in 1947). If anyone could have evaluated what James was up to with Hegel, it was Novack, but Williams doesn’t follow out this line of research. Perhaps it was too “inside baseball” for his narrative purposes. Novack’s only references to CLR that I’ve been able to find are his 1939 (i.e., pre-split) reviews of James’s The History of Negro Revolt and of TBJ.
Only in passing does Williams mention Herbert Aptheker, but as a “Communist historian” (164). He does not note that Aptheker’s historical specialty was slave revolts in the present territory of the United States, including those consequent to the Saint-Domingue revolt that TBJ chronicles. (Arguably, James could have been described as a “Communist historian,” and maybe someone in the FBI or US immigration services so tagged him.) In several articles in the 1940s, then-Trotskyist James lambasted Aptheker’s Stalinist approach to African-American history, but Aptheker did not condescend to rebut him, even though the Leninist criticism came from an older black scholar. But then, no Trotskyist has any right a Stalinist is bound to respect. Given that violent atmosphere, the artistic collaboration of anti-Stalin James and pro-Stalin Robeson in 1936 London is remarkable; Williams notes the joint venture, but its irony seems to escape his notice.) In 2013 The C. L. R. James Journal published my “C. L. R. James: Herbert Aptheker’s Invisible Man,” which provides the details of Aptheker’s neglect of James, a scandal prolonged by the silence of scholarly admirers of both writers. (The essay appears in my Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness.)
Raised and influenced by adults formed in 19th-century colonial Trinidad, CLR rejected its dominant if moribund Judeo-Christian worldview, but Williams never asks about that seminal event. It’s as though CLR’s precocious young mind simply shed the metaphysical backdrop of British culture as so much superstition. In this CLR was like his modernist European contemporaries.
CLR’s sensibility was always modernist, however much James and his admirers may have thought he had gone beyond modernity’s perimeters. (Although, how could a Marxist even think such a thing?) His dialectical materialism implied his rejection of Christianity, but that rejection was as modernist as any other ideology. CLR’s secularist presupposition did not allow him to raise, let alone answer, ultimate questions and, in my opinion, that evasion (which I plan to explore in an essay) rendered his revolutionary ideology a choice as arbitrary as positivism or existentialism. He never—thank goodness!—was attracted to postmodernist skepticism, relativism, and suspicion; neither was he ever tempted to revert to the pre-modern Christian faith of the British empire of his youth, whose modernist culture he had mastered. Williams accepts more than explores this tension.
In 1949 his namesake son (nicknamed “Nobbie”) was born—a source of joy for many years, later of heartbreak—but most of that year’s events marked the beginning of a reversal of fortune (not that he was ever financially comfortable). He was a gifted, brilliant intellectual who survived not on the sales of his writings as on the largesse of those who discerned their value to the always-just-around-the-corner revolution.
That year, at the age of 48, he was diagnosed with heart failure, a year that also saw the publication of State Capitalism and World Revolution in which he expounded his rejection of the Soviet Union as “a degenerated workers’ state.” At the time, however, only the handful of comrades who cared about the vicissitudes of Trotskyist “tendencies” read it. Williams notes the controversy, but doesn’t illuminate it. Why should one care about it?
In December 1949, the very month James published one of his critiques of Aptheker, the aforementioned Communist preferred to debate establishment historian Arthur Schlesinger at Harvard rather than respond to the criticism.
Williams’s narrative presupposes modernism’s approach to the sexual imperative and its rules for managing it, which enterprise sets our species apart from others. For example, the procured abortions to which James was party were par for the course. Had Elizabeth James, however, made that choice, she would have deprived him of his future and us of him.
James was a lothario who put himself first (as self-absorbed intellectuals are wont to do). Constance Webb, his second wife and Nobbie’s mother, was there when he needed her, but CLR had many needs and other women to meet them. Her role in the musical Li’l Abner was the occasion of her infidelity. Despite his formal respect for feminism, women for him were secretaries, or willing refiners of his mind’s literary ore, or sources of sexual release, not necessarily in that order. Williams notes CLR’s double standard, but moves on. If we can excuse the instrumentalizing of women on the grounds of one man’s allegedly indispensable contribution to the revolution, why not another’s racism or antisemitism?
In many vignettes, Williams shows how James rose, fell and, despite his many liabilities, rose Phoenix-like to become an éminence grise for the anti-colonial, pan-Africanist Left. Uncomfortable for those on that end of the political spectrum must have been his warning of the “danger of overreacting to immediate provocations” (Williams’s words). He was referring to British parliamentarian and immigration restrictionist Enoch Powell and his “rivers of blood” speech to conservatives in April 1968. It meant everything to James, however, that Powell had trade union support, particularly from the dockers (361-362). The “readiness to compare England and the race question,” James wrote to Marty Glaberman at the time, “to what took place in Germany on the Jewish question leading to the power of Hitler” is “a very unhealthy sign” (362). In a letter to comrades, he urged them to re-read the Hitler chapter of his 1937 World Revolution to “get rid of not only the hysteria but what I am certain is the malice of many people against the working class, particularly the dockers” (362).
Over seven decades, CLR revised his Marxism, but what survived the revisions? In Williams’s survey, James’s anticolonialism, Trotskyism, Pan-Africanism, and insistence on locating modern historical agency in the working class pass in review, but not with the detail found in more scholarly studies of the man and his work. Again, this biography stands out from the others because of the attention it pays to James’s personal struggles. The book’s epilogue, however, reveals the intellectual as well as personal side of the author’s motivation to write.
Breaking up the text of this well-produced book, which benefits from a generous bibliography and serviceable index, are two albums of never (or rarely before) published photos. As in a novel (or in the author’s other biographies), the book’s chapters are numbered, not titled. As one flips through this tome, the headers of odd-numbered pages offer no clue as to where one is in the narrative. But I quibble.
The Left is always in the hunt for a “usable past,” which invariably means politically exploitable writings. That’s what James sought in Hegel and what many have sought and continue to seek in CLR. My takeaway from A Life Beyond the Boundaries is nonpolitical: good looks will fail; health will fade; ulcers will flare up; a car accident (in 1961) can threaten to snap the tethers that bind one to this world. One day, the writer can no longer write. Death works in each of us and eventually catches up; one can no longer evade the ultimate questions that James burked as a young man. I wish I knew how he answered them when he could no longer dismiss them. Among his instructions for his memorial service: “. . . absolutely no religion.”
This book does answer many questions I brought to it, however, and for that I am grateful to the author.
