C. L. R. James

C.L.R. James: Cricket’s Philosopher King, by Dave Renton (Haus Publishing, ISBN ISBN 78-1905791019, 192 pp)

Urbane Revolutionary: C.L.R. James and the Struggle for a New Society, by Frank Rosengarten (University Press of Mississippi, ISBN 978-1934110263, 282 pp)

In 1979, I watched rioters topple the boundary fence at the Bourda cricket ground in Georgetown and strafe the pavilion with soft-drink bottles. The Packer World Series had been plagued with rain delays, and now the crowd could take no more. Although I was only nine years old, I managed to throw a chair into the outfield before being spirited away to safety. Mounted policemen entered the grounds soon afterwards and used tear gas to bring the local sans-culottes under control.

Had I not seen Vivian Richards face Australia’s demon quicks at this very ground, the riot would have been the headiest moment of my young life. But I had seen him, and thirty years later I cannot forget his electric nonchalance: the leonine grace with which he strolled towards the batting strip, unhelmeted, bat swinging like a sword, while he sized up the fielders as though deciding whom to punish first. Richards was to cricket what Lenny Bruce had been to comedy, or Marlon Brando to acting: his dangerous intensity made it into something else, something closer to prizefighting, perhaps even “the continuation of politics by other means.” His defiance was palpable at a thousand yards. Before he reached the bottom of the pavilion steps, you could feel the atmosphere change. By the time he had taken his guard, we were leaning forward in anticipation, anxious for Lillee and Thomson, Australia’s schoolyard bullies, to get their due. He didn’t disappoint.

CLR James understood this drama better than anyone else. He read cricket, and nearly everything else, in terms of tradition and the individual talent.

When he wrote about it, his inner novelist tended to overwhelm the historian, but they often worked in tandem, recording an experience, then, unobtrusively, decoding it. In many ways, he was the Lytton Strachey of cricket, brilliantly reanimating historical figures within their contemporary world, to show how their lives contained what he called “the future in the present.” Like Strachey, James was always skeptical of received wisdom and easy parallels. While examining WG Grace’s formidable adaptability — to fast bowlers, slow tracks, even the “new phenomenon of balls curling in the air” — he warns us: “WG’s batting figures, remarkable as they are, lose all their true significance unless they are seen in close relation with the history of cricket itself and the social history of England. Unless you do that you fall head foremost into the trap of making comparisons with Bradman.

Bradman piled up centuries. WG built a social organisation.”

James must have seen Richards as a revolutionary, more Dessalines than L’Ouverture, a Byronic figure among the professionals who had taken West Indies cricket to its astonishing ascendancy, someone who delivered the thrill that audiences sought from gangster movies in Depression-era America. “In such a society,” he had written, “the individual demands an aesthetic compensation in the contemplation of free individuals who go out into the world and settle their problems by free activity and individualistic methods. In these perpetual isolated wars free individuals are pitted against free individuals, live grandly and boldly. What they want, they go for.” In 1979, Georgetown was in dire need of aesthetic compensation — though few of us would have called it that. Richards’ batting was one form, rioting another.

In his introduction to Cricket’s Philosopher King, Dave Renton, a sociology professor and biographer of Trotsky, refers to a “disturbing lapse in radical theory”: “that there are not more writers setting out urgently to explain the triumph of Brian Lara’s 375 or the bathos of his 400, the success of Flintoff and Pietersen’s charge against Lee and Kasprowicz at Edgbaston in 2005, the contrast between the weight of India within the sport’s upper echelons and its underperformance (until recently) of the national Test side.”

Renton hopes his book will “persuade Marxists of the joys of cricket, and followers of cricket of the calibre of James and James’s Marxism.” No small task for any book, much less one of 180 pages (at least a dozen of which are given over to lavish black and white photographs and captions). Perhaps inevitably, there are sins of omission.

Renton moves briskly, using footnotes to gloss some of the bit players in James’s remarkable life. James Burnham, Raya Dunayevskaya (Trotsky’s former secretary), Richard Wright, Trotsky himself, and Naipaul are summed up in five lines, the dialectic (in Socrates and Hegel) in eight; George Padmore, Paul Robeson, and Learie Constantine, deservedly, get more than ten. Generally this works quite well, but it soon becomes clear that there won’t be enough room for both politics and cricket. Too often, given the book’s stated aims, politics dominates. Instead of radical analysis of Lara — has Renton read Hillary Beckles? — we mostly get a readable précis of the well-trodden ground of intra-party Marxist squabbling and CLR’s foray into the wider political world of African and West Indian nationalism. Renton does his best to keep the story close to his “cricketing Marxist” frame, but James is too multifarious, his life too Odyssean to conform to the schema.

In a dozen pages we move from Robeson playing Toussaint at the Westminster Theatre, to James researching The Black Jacobins in Paris, then cricket journalism at the Glasgow Herald, his translation of Boris Souvarine’s Stalin, and the famous week-long meeting with Trotsky in Mexico. Each episode cries out for fuller treatment, especially when we briefly detour into James’s colourful private life. In Paris, for instance, living with his fellow activist Louise Cripps, we are told:

“He was humorous. He was a kind and attentive lover. They discussed having children. But she was married; his wages could not feed three. An abortion was required. Their relationship ended, it began again. There was a second abortion. There were also political differences.”

This telegraphese keeps the plot moving, but it is immensely frustrating to anyone who wants to know more about the human complexity of our finest literary mind struggling over one of his masterpieces. We are told that Cripps found him “very proud, and in some ways, a very arrogant man. You had to agree with him on what he thought.” But instead of pausing over these suggestive details, to confirm or refute, the story bounds on to James’s cricket journalism and his opinions of various attempts to modernise the game.

Occasionally Renton goes behind the accepted version and the story takes an unexpected turn. A case in point is the cinema boycott in the Lancashire town of Nelson — “Little Moscow” to some of its critics — where James lived for a time with Constantine. In James’s version, in an essay collected in Letters from London, when the owners of the local cinema tried to cut wages covertly,

“the Nelson people got wind of the matter. There were meetings and discussions. They decided that the salaries of the cinema operators should not be lowered. Complications began. The owners insisted. One cannot be certain of the details. But what matters is that the whole town of Nelson, so to speak, went on strike . . .[until] the company went bankrupt and had to leave. Whereupon local people took over and the theatres again began to be filled.”

The incident is not recorded in the Nelson library, nor in the pages of the North West Labour History. Renton speculates that we might read James’s account “as a statement of what people in the town would have liked to have done, or really ‘should’ have done in light of their local reputation. For the year of James’s arrival also witnessed the well-documented More Looms Dispute of the Nelson weavers.” The discrepancy opens up several intriguing possibilities. Did James knowingly embrace a fictional strike for ideological purposes, did he embellish the cinemagoers protest with the weavers, or did he just stretch the truth a little to emphasise working-class solidarity? Either way, Nelson’s radicals changed James forever. He later wrote: “My labour and socialist ideas had been got from books and were rather abstract. These cynical working men were a revelation and brought me down to earth.”

When James moves to America, Renton’s bare-bones narrative style pays off handsomely. We get, for example, this wonderful vignette of CLR speaking in Los Angeles, seen through the eyes of the beautiful Constance Webb, later his second wife:

“He was over six feet two inches, slim, but not thin, with long legs. He walked easily, with his shoulders level. His head appeared to be on a stalk, held high with the chin tilted forward and up, which made it seem that his body was led by a long neck, curved forward like that of a racehorse in the slip. Shoulders, chest, and legs were powerful and he moved decisively. But as with highly trained athletes, the tension was concentrated and tuned, so that he gave the impression of enormous ease. He was without self-consciousness, simply himself, which showed in the way he moved, and one recognised a special quality.”

The mystery of this thoroughbred’s subsequent entanglement in “what his biographers often treat as the sad conspiracies of a fringe” is deftly handled. Renton clearly appreciates the nuances of the Johnson-Forest Tendency — the Trotskyite sect that consumed most of James’s energy in his American years; “JR Johnson” was James’s pseudonym, “Freddie Forest” that of Raya Dunayevskaya — but he mercifully passes over all but a few of the details. The defection of James Burnham is one of these exceptions and, given the influence he would exercise over American conservatives in the following decades, a well-chosen one.

James Burnham left the Workers Party in 1940, defending an abstract-sounding position, that a “managerial revolution” had taken place in Russia in 1917, 1921, or 1928. Behind this phrase Burnham was saying that the left should support the war effort. The only choice remaining to the world was between American liberalism and German or Soviet fascism. The left had a moral duty to endorse American liberalism. But if socialists endorsed the US then would they remain revolutionary? Was there no choice other than to back either of the empires? “A man of remarkable intellect and great strength of character,” James told Webb, “has crawled out of the revolutionary movement by the back door; today stands nowhere; tomorrow will have to stand with the bourgeoisie, for society offers you no third choice in this crisis.” James was right. Within months of leaving the party, Burnham had become a prominent conservative.

However Byzantine the political intrigues of these years seem now, they clearly engaged James fully. When finally forced to leave America in 1953, he returned to a Britain that had no real place for him. By chance, George Lamming ran into him on Charing Cross Road in 1954, and found James in poor physical condition. “When he said ‘Lamming’ and I said ‘Yes’, I was very excited and a little shocked when he told me who he was.” The ennui of these years sounds dreadful: “Lamming also claimed that James liked to spend his days playing pinball in the arcades in Soho.” The Suez crisis and the uprising in Hungary offered opportunities for “renewed agitation,” and Renton observes that “James should have been the prophet of the hour. Yet following his disappointment in America, and ignoring the major organisations of the British left as if they were moribund, James had little influence on the new movement.”

Of course, the story is far from over. When James returned to Trinidad in 1958, at the invitation of the People’s National Movement, he became embroiled in far more consequential political quarrels. Renton’s coverage of these years adds little to what a West Indian will already know, but he does unearth a few gems. After relations with Eric Williams soured, James told a journalist: “It is [well] recognised that for the first time in the island there is someone who is perfectly able to take care of Williams in debate, public authority, and political competence. That person is myself.” On another occasion, he wrote to ANR Robinson to grouse about the lack of support for the party newspaper, which was James editing:

“In all my experience I have never known or heard of any paper, least of all an official organ, which in editorial range and point, production, advertisements, circulation, starting with a grossly incompetent accountant, a disloyal assistant, an office boy, a borrowed typewriter, one filing cabinet and one desk, has reached where The Nation has reached”

Two late chapters do their best to compensate for the book’s relative neglect of the central role which literary and cultural criticism played in James’s life, and to give a better sense of how Constantine’s cricket revealed to him that “They (the English) are no better than we.” Fittingly, Renton delves into some of the political issues, such as James’s claim in Beyond a Boundary that the decline of English cricket after 1914 was linked to the country’s waning imperial ambitions.

Bodyline was the key episode, as an English cricket team incapable of maintaining its hegemony through talent or influence turned to violence, shredding the vestigial influence of the public school morality. Decline continued through the 1950s .. .(when James observed) a tendency towards the more defensive playing of spin. Such cricketers as Cowdrey, Graveney, and May, had become overly pre-occupied with the defence, James insisted.

“These are the Welfare Staters,” he wrote.

A few thoughts about cricket’s cultural ambivalence (it “can be the means by which racial hierarchies are reinforced or one means by which they can be overthrown”) lead into the question of what connects Constantine to James’s other heroes. A major consideration seems to have been the Procrustean demands of league cricket, which:

“unlike its first-class counterpart, was a single innings game. Constantine’s style in this setting, James argues, was to bat in a way that was both orthodox and dissident: first he would settle, next he would score around the ground, until the field was widely set. Then he would accumulate patiently. Nothing was left to chance, but to talent and the habit of success.”

Here we approach one of the great James questions, namely: how did he believe the genius of the West Indies was expressed by its cricketers? Arguably, most of his heroes — Constantine, Headley, Worrell, Sobers, and Kanhai — were heirs to WG Grace’s restless spirit; they improvised shots and adopted new tactics and strategies as playing conditions changed. They didn’t violate the public school values at the heart of the game (appeal only when you think the batsman is out, never question the umpire, don’t make excuses), but through force of character, and exceptional athleticism, they led it off in new directions.

Some have claimed that James was too embedded in Britain’s imperial culture to achieve the detachment his politics demanded. (As a teenager he read Vanity Fair more than a dozen times, and could quote large parts of it at will; in later life he quipped that “Thackeray, not Marx, bears the heaviest responsibility for me.”) But this criticism does not bear analysis. James was always drawn to writers who seemed to have intuited the future from contemporary political tensions. For him, Thackeray’s send-up of the Victorian bourgeoisie was a natural prologue to Trotsky’s vision of the end to class struggle; Melville’s doubts about the soulless materialism of pre-Civil War America were comparable to Marx’s prescient suspicions, twenty years later, that Europe was about to implode. In James’s analysis, each of these writers glimpsed part of what lay ahead, and they dared to imagine the whole. In many ways, WG Grace is their cricketing counterpart, for he took the game where it had to go: away from the professionals. By opening it up to the common man, he began a revolution (dialectical progress?) that would reshape both the game and the societies that played it.

Cricket’s heroes change their style to suit most technical and political challenges, but when they must they also change the game. James saw hints of this throughout his days as a cricket correspondent, right up to the end. In 1985, writing about Ian Botham, the only English player who could have held his own in Clive Lloyd’s great West Indies side, James observes:

“Botham’s hitting is regulated according to custom and in the tradition of the great orthodox batsmen. He is not exact orthodox. A great batsman never is. The infallible sign of greatness is that somewhere in his method he is breaking the rules, or if not rules, the practices of his distinguished equals . . . Let no one think that an article of a few hundred words can deal with Botham. There will be plenty more later.”

Renton observes that a revised Beyond a Boundary ought to have included a chapter on Viv Richards’s team “taking pleasure in their exuberance with the bat, the ball, and in the field, and commenting on the relationship between Richards and his audience. The end of direct colonial rule was still within the memory of the older players of the side.” He also notes the “generosity of spirit” that led James to dedicate his last pieces of cricket journalism “to the star player in the rival team.”

Frank Rosengarten’s life of James, Urbane Revolutionary: C.L.R. James and the Struggle for a New Society, is an altogether more scholarly affair. Page after page is filled with scrupulously detailed political analysis, unleavened by references to James’s other interests, even though much of James’s Marxism sounds germane to his views on cricket. Consider the following passage, which discusses Notes on Dialectics, James’s laudable effort to demystify Marx and Hegel for the common man. Mutatis mutandis, it could easily be part of Beyond a Boundary:

“. . . the unifying principle of part 2 is the notion of Aufhebung, whereby a historical phenomenon such as a political party or a labour federation not only absorbs into itself the features of earlier forms of organisation but moves beyond and transcends them, thus producing a new synthesis of forms qualitatively superior to its predecessors . . . for James a pivotal point in the Hegelian system is that “things instead of being left in their immediacy, must be shown to be mediated by, or upon, something else.” For Hegel, and for James, thought must always be relational.”

That quibble aside, Urbane Revolutionary is essential reading for anyone interested in the full range of the James oeuvre. Although it is clearly intended for an academic audience, there is much here to reward a diligent general reader. Among the occasionally exhausting analytical passages, there are priceless glimpses of the childlike pleasure James derived from provocative new ideas. On Valentine’s Day in 1955, he wrote William Gorman, a Johnson-Forest colleague who specialised in the history of the American Civil War, to thank him for an essay that contained

“the most amazing thesis that has ever been put forward about American history — that the runaway slave, not slavery, nor the “rebellion of the Negroes,” nor the intelligence and revolutionism of the Negroes etc. etc., but the slave running away, awoke and united all the forces for the Second American Revolution. That is something that is ours, and ours alone. Where else could it come from? How KM and VL and LT would have hugged this to their bosoms.

Would Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky have welcomed Gorman’s thesis quite so warmly? I have no idea, but I find James’s enthusiasm on their behalf very endearing.”

Much of Rosengarten’s book inches its way through with the arcana of the Johnson-Forest debates — was Stalinist Russia an example of “state capitalism,” or Lenin a “crude materialist”? Most of this lies beyond my competence, but I was intrigued by Trotsky’s reservation about Notes, which he thought a “very good book,” but one that suffered from “a lack of dialectical approach, Anglo-Saxon empiricism, and formalism which is only the reverse of empiricism.” Renton, who also quotes this observation, fastens onto the accusation of “formalism” and decodes it into this:

“Trotsky detected in James a tendency to discuss real people and changing personal experiences as if they were categories to be fitted into boxes (philosophy X, error Y), without a need to understand the historical dynamics at work in people’s lives.” I suspect that Trotsky was also onto something with the “Anglo-Saxon” part of his dismissal. Like Samuel Johnson, who famously kicked a stone to “refute” what he thought was an over-subtle piece of philosophising, James does not seem to have yielded to the obscurantism that characterises so much Marxist theory. Elsewhere, Rosengarten tells us that “one of the traits that James most admired in Lenin [was] the courage to break through rhetorical verbiage in order to pinpoint the real problems facing the revolutionary regime at a critical transitional stage in its development.”

Other Anglo-Saxon tendencies explain several of James’s disputes with fellow Marxists. Life in Nelson had given him a problematic belief in what one critic calls “the capacity of the seemingly incoherent crowd, united by common experience and common grievances, to engage in concerted action.” Apparently this was anathema to more than one eminent Trotskyite.

When Johnson-Forest fell out with the US Workers Party, no less a figure than Irving Howe offered the following indictment:

“The basic error underlying Johnson’s [i.e. James’s] approach to every political question is his constant underestimation of the role of the party in our epoch. He constantly speaks of the “self-activity” of the working class as if that were some magical panacea . . . The working class cannot conquer power by “self-activity” or “self-mobilisation”; it can conquer power only under the leadership of a consciously revolutionary and democratic socialist party.”

James met criticism like this with remarkable self-confidence, but he also seems to have been willing to revisit cherished political ideals when real-world circumstances made them grossly impractical. The most striking instance of this came after he formed the Workers and Farmers Party in Trinidad, to compete against the now-estranged PNM. As part of a drive to expand the base of the new party, James had to court “East Indian merchants and shopkeepers, landowners and accountants,” and other ideologically suspect characters. He tried to argue that:

“Throwing in their lot with the nation’s workers and farmers and joining forces with the WFP . . . would mean bigger and better business for you.

Better business, More Profits, More Opportunities for people with energy, an eye for the quick (and honest) dollar.”

It didn’t work and the WFP’s dismal performance in the elections provoked one of the most uncharacteristic responses of James’s whole life.

Rosengarten tells us that “in several letters to friends in the United States he voiced his opinion in words that have become familiar to many Americans during the Bush presidency: ‘They robbed us. Everybody agrees, everybody.

The machines were rigged.’”

The final section of Urbane Revolutionary is devoted to James’s cultural and literary criticism. It is as meticulous as the chapters on Marxism.

Throughout the book, Rosengarten maintains an enviable scholarly detachment from James, a willingness to admit that even Homer nods, occasionally at some length. I’m not entirely hopeful that every reader will approach the question of how James reconciled “Heideggerian and Sartrean existential philosophy with his insistence on the primacy of the social and of the national-popular in the production of literature that speaks to the masses” with the same relish that I did, but if you are prepared to wrestle with this kind of highbrow analysis, then Rosengarten’s volume is indispensable.

In the summer of 1953, we are told, James “assumed the task of challenging English critics who he felt had proven their intellectual brilliance and virtuosity but at the same time had taken the literary-critical enterprise down the wrong path, towards ever more specialised forms of analysis.”

When he discovered that one of the chief culprits, William Empson, lived near his North London flat, James bought one of his books — Seven Types of Ambiguity — but found it unreadable, something which “happens to me once every five years.”

What amazed James about Empson, a poet as well as a critic, was that he had “gotten into a feud about a single line in a Shakespeare sonnet” with another critic, F.W. Bateson, a dispute which James called “the ultimate in foolishness”

Rosengarten adds that it was probably James’s passion for clarity, his “preference for eliminating ambiguity,” that made him reject Empson’s “argument for the polysemous nature of any literary text.” I suspect that his distaste for the cloistered existence which allowed intelligent men to succumb to such navelgazing had something to do with it as well.

“With hindsight, James does seem to have been wrong about almost everything in politics,” said biographer and broadcaster Humphrey Carpenter in a BBC Radio retrospective in 2002. “He was wrong about Africa, he was wrong about America — believing it would become socialist — he was wrong about Soviet Russia and about world revolution. Surely this lowers your opinion of him a bit?” I cannot remember the response from Darcus Howe, James’s great-nephew, but later in the programme Carpenter played a recording of the man himself speaking about his greatest book, and his reply reminded me that some political errors are much greater than others:

I was tired of reading [that] all blacks were in trouble in Africa, then [after] they made the Middle Passage they were in more trouble, then they landed in America and they landed in the Caribbean and they were constantly in trouble, and I got very tired of it. I said I want to find some story where blacks are doing things to people and not being done things by people. So I made up my mind when I went to England, which I intended, I would write about Toussaint L’Ouverture.

Urbane revolutionary or philosopher king? James was both, and much more. Whatever his political failings, however untidy his private life, surely Caryl Phillips is correct when he writes that “in a century that has produced talents as diverse as the economist Arthur Lewis, the poets Derek Walcott and Aimé Césaire, and the novelist Alejo Carpentier, there is little doubt that James will come to be regarded as the outstanding Caribbean mind of the twentieth century.”

C. Searle, 'Cricketing comrade',Morning Star, 13 January 2008
CHRIS SEARLE gets up close and personal to the captivating Trinidad-born Marxist activist and cricket writer CLR James.
Books about CLR James abound, but this is a particularly good one. It's lucidly written, full of narrative interest and explores areas of the great Caribbean man's life and struggles that have rarely been a point of focus.
James was, of course, a classic West Indies all-rounder. Political theorist, literary critic, journalist, sports writer, novelist, dramatist, historian, mass mobiliser and political leader, he was an exemplar during his age of what a conscious human being could become.
Author David Renton characterises him in his title as a "philosopher king," yet, on the two visits I made to his dwellings - one in his homeland of Trinidad, which was a room in the headquarters of the oil workers' trade union in the southern city of San Fernando, the other in Brixton, London, where he shared a terraced house with a group of much younger black militants - there was nothing royal about them, they were hotbeds of political activism.
He was a man of extraordinary cultural and intellectual development who carried his books with him - his bookshelves were filled by close to the complete works of Marx and Lenin, dozens of Wisden cricket almanacs and the novels of Thackeray - but he always lived with and alongside the working class, wherever he made his home.
One of Renton's most insightful sections in his book concentrates on James's very close relationship with his cricketing compatriot and one of the seminal influences of his life - another all-rounder and the greatest West Indian cricketer of his age, Learie Constantine, with whom James lived in Nelson, Lancashire, when he first came to live in Britain in 1932.
Constantine was a Lancashire League professional for Nelson Cricket Club, the best-supported league side in Britain, a magnetic human being and campaigner against racism wherever he lived. My father played against him in the 1930s at Romford and always spoke not only of his all-round cricketing brilliance, particularly his extraordinary fielding, but of his warmth, perspicacity and friendliness in the local pub after the game. He was also the man who wrote the book Colour Bar, a naked exposure of British racism, published in 1954.
Renton describes how James's stay in Nelson with Constantine radically "shaped his entire view of the world." He wrote home to Trinidad about "the magnificent spirit of these north country working people" with whom he lived.
His politics turned from liberalism to socialism. "My labour and socialist ideas had been got from books and were rather abstract," he wrote. "These cynical working men were a revelation and brought me down to earth."
Nelson was indeed a northern centre of socialist politics. Renton concludes that "it is hard to think of a town in Britain that was more radical at this time" and James both observed and strongly supported the 1932 Weavers Union strike and the boycott of cinemas by local people in solidarity with the cinema operatives, when cinema owners tried to reduce their salaries.
James wrote back to the Port of Spain Gazette that "the whole town of Nelson, so to speak, went on strike. They would not go to the cinema. The pickets were put out in order to turn back those who tried to go. For days, the cinemas played to empty benches. In a town of 40,000 people, you could find sometimes no more than half a dozen in the theatres."
That such events in a Lancashire working-class town should have such an electric effect on the man who later wrote such classic 20th century texts as The Black Jacobins, Beyond a Boundary or Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution is remarkable enough and Renton's fine book demonstrates this with cogency and clarity.
The author asserts that his aspiration behind the book is to "persuade Marxists of the joys of cricket and followers of cricket of the calibre of James and of James's Marxism."
It's a noble intent and one which Renton's book will fulfil, hopefully beginning in Nelson itself and the towns which his cricketing comrade Constantine set a light seven decades ago with the glory of his Caribbean cricket.

Matthew Engel, 'Just not cricket', The Oldie, January 2008
The cricket writings of Sir Neville Cardus (d. 1975) enjoyed an extraordinary popularity boom in the decade after his death, and new collections of his work appear frequently. At the time, his sometime colleague on the Manchester Guardian, CLR James, was living obscurely in a small flat in Brixton.
Now Cardus, if not forgotten, is in eclipse. But James, since his own death in 1989, has become an object of veneration. Most of this surrounds not his slender oeuvre for the Guardian, but his 1963 book Beyond a Boundary, described by Wisden as 'the greatest book on the game yet written.' Dave Renton adds the word, 'True.'
At least, Renton says that's what Wisden said. What Wisden actually said (in James' obituary) was that it was 'widely regarded by many as the greatest book on the game yet written'. There were 8,294 entries in Padwick's 1977 bibliography of cricket; we may assume that figure has doubled by now. To state as fact that one book is the best, either (a) you've read the lot or (b) you're a bloody fool.
Renton has apparently read no cricket books at all other than those by or about James. That's implied both by his own list of sources and the text, which is wrong on almost every single cricketing fact and nuance. For starters, E W 'Patsy' Hendren was not Patrick; the great fast bowler Harold Larwood did not repudiate Bodyline as a means of attack; and Sir Pelham Warner – the quintessential Lord's man – was not a West Indian, a bizarre error that turns an entire section into a nonsense.
Let's concentrate on James: Beyond a Boundary was a memoir – rather mannered in tone and a bit disorganised – focussing on the importance of cricket both to a bookish black boy growing up in Trinidad and to the colonial experience in general. In the rush to overpraise it, often patronisingly, the zealots miss its real achievement.
There are five major cricketing subcultures in the world: the traditional play-up-chaps MCC view; the hard-as-nails English professional version, centred on Yorkshire; the even tougher Australian way; the West Indian, carefree-seeming but with angry undertones; and the subtle Indian game. These are caricatures, of course, but fair ones. The last four types all exist in opposition to the first.
James' book provided the intellectual underpinning that enabled West Indian cricket to take its place – for twenty years, the dominant place – in the world game. Had black South Africa produced a CLR James, it would have wrecked the lie that they didn't play cricket, one of the great myths of apartheid.
The book is partly a celebration of the James-led campaign to make Frank Worrell the first black West Indies captain. Other than that, his involvement in the game was surprisingly meagre. He was briefly in England in the early 1930s, acting as an amanuensis of the brilliant West Indian cricketer / lawyer Learie (later Lord) Constantine. Then James became a Trotskyite, not an unreasonable position for a black Trinidadian in 1933, and went to the US where he spent 15 years trying to foment revolution. This was so successful that by 1947 he was involved with something called the Johnson-Forrest Tendency 'which had the support of some six dozen activists'.
Renton is a professor of sociology and, as you might expect of a sociologist called Dave, is far more at home discussing these pointless years of James' life. The dust jacket says that he hopes to 'persuade Marxists of the joys of cricket, and followers of cricket of the calibre of James and of James' Marxism'.
Yup, it was the talk of the last MCC committee meeting.

Stephen Fay, 'A life beyond the boundary', Wisden Cricketer, 6 January 2008
CLR James was known formally by his initials except to a few West Indian intimates who called him Nello. He was a romantic who loved cricket and is revered by readers of cricket books, but he wrote much more about Trotskyism. James was a dedicated if unconventional follower of Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary who was cast out by Josef Stalin, and killed in 1940 by an ice pick to the head. When James wrote in the preface to his classic autobiographical meditation Beyond a Boundary, "What do they know of cricket who only cricket know", he knew what he was talking about.
For 15 years, between 1938 and 1953, James lived in the United States, where his occupation was revolution. He and Trotsky met in Mexico to discuss James's book World Revolution. Trotsky thought it was a good try, though lacking the proper dialectical approach and suffering from Anglo-Saxon empiricism. Although James devoutly wished independence for his native Trinidad, he admired his colonial education and declined to divorce cricket ethics from the public-school ethos. James was an uncritical admirer of WG Grace but, unlike Grace, he never queried an umpire's decision - on principle.
Readers drawn to Dave Renton's readable biography by their love of James's cricket writing will become better acquainted than they ever imagined they would be with bitter disputes between fellow-Trotskyites. But that is precisely what Renton wants: "One hope of this book is to persuade Marxists of the joys of cricket and followers of cricket of the calibre of James and James's Marxism." In this respect Renton's biography is unique in the extensive canon of cricket literature.
James was a good school player and a successful cricketer but his credentials were that he grew up with George Headley and Learie Constantine and that he could write with great speed and fluency. He was a novelist, a reporter, an historian and a propagandist. He knew post-colonial leaders such as Eric Williams in Trinidad and Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana and fell out with them when they lost touch with their working-class supporters, but he did win his campaign to have Frank Worrell appointed the first black captain of West Indies.
One of James's admirers called him a romantic traditionalist, and a sense of it infuses his cricket reporting. He liked players to go on to the front foot and take risks. When he returned to England and cricket, in 1953, he was critical of Colin Cowdrey, Tom Graveney and Peter May for being "overly preoccupied by defence". James thought Don Bradman the greatest batsman he had seen but said he was no artist; what distinguished him was "nervous stamina and concentration".
Reputations of books written more than 50 years ago can become inflated but the cricket writing in Beyond a Boundary is first- class (I checked). Nello was so much better at cricket than making revolution.

Declan Kiberd, 'The cricketing Marxist', Irish Times, 1 December 2007
Biography Ashis Nandy has said cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English. The 11 men seeking to dislodge the batsman are not the real opposition, he contends with a Hindu sigh - the true antagonist is Fate, summed up by fluctuations in weather, wicket or the standard of umpiring.
No West Indian has ever bought into that theory. For a black man like CLR James, cricket represented an ideal of "fair play" and "restraint", utterly English in origin, but one which could be used to criticise the failure of British colonialism to live up to its own highest principles. For him, cricket was like Shakespeare - a weapon to be turned on its sponsors.
Though never a player of the first rank himself, James wrote Beyond a Boundary, the greatest of all cricket books, which explored the ways in which the game became a metaphor of empire, decolonisation and industrialisation. He was himself an enigma: a man of classical learning who loved American cartoons; a Trotskyite who revered the agora of ancient Greece more than any modern state; and a socialist theorist who ended up as a practical counsellor to such leading nationalist figures as Nkrumah in Ghana and Eric Williams in the West Indies.
Dave Renton, a sociologist at Johannesburg University, writes crisply and well about James's politics. He justly praises The Black Jacobins, a marvellous study of a slave revolt led by the "electrifying" Toussaint L'Ouverture against the French in Haiti in 1791.
Well before Eric Hobsbawm or EP Thompson, James had learned to write "history from below", in his meticulous account of how insurgent slaves forced the French to concede that revolutionary principles could not be confined to their own country.
Renton reports that the book had a huge underground readership in apartheid South Africa, where it was banned - but activists typed up chapters and passed them around, samizdat-style, in blue carbon copies.
As a Trotskyist, James believed that revolution must be exportable. You could no more have socialism than you could have republicanism in just one country. He finally met his hero in Mexico, but was confident enough to castigate Trotsky for arguing that Stalin's Russia was a case of "the revolution betrayed". To James, it was merely a dire example of state capitalism. In that analysis, also, he proved correct.
Renton is an admirer, but not uncritical. He laments that James's analyses were often over-abstract, shunning concrete realities. This may help to explain why James's novel Minty Alley is nothing like as good as those of his fellow-Trinidadian VS Naipaul, but also why his literary criticism is almost always far better than the other man's. While working for leftist groups in the US, James wrote a brilliant study of Melville's Moby-Dick, which he saw as a prediction of a scientific technocracy quite incapable of dealing with social crises.
Just as cricket brought out the contradictions of empire, so he saw the US as constructed on a terrible split between republican ideas of freedom and the constrictions of a mass industrial society.
James did write a major book on American Civilisation, but never managed to complete the volume on Shakespeare, whose lineaments he had sketched in a superb essay. This was to argue that outsider-figures, like the Moor Othello, held the key to the meaning of the emerging world. Renton, though he writes with real sympathy of James's own mostly doomed relationships with white women of the left, misses this rather obvious and interesting connection. His coverage of the literary James is somewhat patchy.
James saw cricket as a great leveller, for in the Trinidad of his youth white administrators played against teams made up of black labourers. He believed (though Renton doesn't discuss this) that the workers of Britain had invested all their frustrated artistry, which found no ready outlet on the industrial assembly-line, in the developing nuances of the modern game; and that West Indians in due course did much the same, expressing their exuberance and love of style through the methods of play which they devised. (So much for the idea of cricket as a toff's sport).
What happened later was a tragedy. Instead of an artist, like James's friend Learie Constantine, there emerged Bradman, a run-accumulator devoid of soul, and then Bodyline, "the violence and ferocity of our age expressing itself in cricket". The risk-averse techniques which now pervade cricket (as also soccer, rugby and all professionalised sport) James saw as "the triumph of the bureaucratic instinct in Europe".
Far from analysing sport as a means to distract ordinary people from political questions (a charge Trotsky repeatedly made), James saw it as a direct reflection of the social world; and Beyond a Boundary chronicles the emergence of black men as masters of the English game. Because he affected nonchalance in the manner of so many Marxists, James celebrated the sprezzatura of all-rounders, like Grace and Sobers, who, if they failed with bat, might yet do something with ball. Renton thinks it appropriate that his last two articles lauded Ian Botham, but he seems to have overlooked (or forgotten) the fact that the same James once wrote a severe demolition of Beefy as "a youth of mediocre talent". Even the Homer of Trinidad could nod.
Botham, by the way, has gone on record as saying that cricket is a Gaelic game. Its batsman who stands alone against a whole army of fielders is, he says, recreating the heroism of Cuchulain who stood single-handed in combat against a host. Our players' heroic exploits at the recent World Cup in the West Indies may not be surprising if what they were playing is in fact one of our national games. Croke Park may yet have to be widened.

Lorien Kite, 'C.L.R. James: Cricket’s Philosopher King', Financial Times, 24 November 2007
C.L.R. James was many things: acclaimed historian, doyen of the Trotskyite left, friend and adviser to a generation of Caribbean and African independence leaders, and lifelong devotee of cricket. His Beyond a Boundary is widely regarded as the best book on the sport.
Dave Renton is nothing if not ambitious in his aim to “persuade Marxists of the joys of cricket, and followers of cricket of the calibre of James’ Marxism”. I doubt there will be many converts in the Pavilion at Lord’s, but the Trinidad-born polymath is a worthy subject.
Renton is clearly fascinated by James’s political journey. But he seems unwilling to engage with the contradictions of a man who combined great charisma with a reluctance to commit, either to people or to ideas.

Edward Pearce, 'What do they know of Marxist cricket who only cricket know?', Tribune, 16 November 2007
Interesting book, interesting man. Cyril Lionel Robert James, born in Trinidad in 1901, respectable cricketer, there preferring, in conformity with parental ambitions, the Asian and light-skinned middle-class club Maple to the black working-class (and better) Shannon, made an odd start for a Marxist revolutionary. Odder yet that James combined a carefully thought-out socialism with the cricket (on The Guardian with Neville Cardus), but he stuck quite fast.
Cricketers, if commonly better read than footballers, stay well short of studying political economy – although there is no bleaker image of the downtrodden toiler than a bowler returning 1 for 94 on a dead wicket. Dave Renton has a delightful account of James in the late 1950s, lobbying for Frank Worrell to be captain of the West Indies, ardently backed by the arch-Telegraph man Jim Swanton. Both thought he was a better player than the white choice, FCS Alexander, both thought it was fair. Worrell got the job and won the 1960 series.
However, the subtle point of that episode was James' refusal to argue for the black man as a black man. A generation too soon for talk of Black Power, he was pre-rap, pre-reggae, pre-attitude, pre-noise.
Profoundly educated, he pursued and expounded his Marxism, according to scholarly rules. The leaps of the dialectician charmed him, When he exalts in Lenin it is not Lenin the dispatcher of firing squads, but Lenin the Hegelian.
Similarly, his taste in cricket is aesthetic. Late in life he found words to praise the style of Ian Botham, only, for me, a perfect eye guiding ox strength, and Botham thinks people insufficiently respectful to the Queen should be strung up.
And since we are into Hegel, James' whole life was a synthesis. He combined marginal left-wing activism quarrelling about interpretations of scientific materialist writ with public school virtue. Despite damning us to hell in principle, he set value upon "the British way".
He had a lot of the decent Tory about him, cherishing fairness, restraint and British civil service dispassion. Yet, among many books, he was the historian of Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Hispaniola rising. He had talked with Trotsky, he would be the friend of Kwame Nkrumah, more admirably Richard Wright and, best of all, Learie Constantine, a lifelong model.
He was a puzzling, constant presence on the left, and though the groupuscules of the Fourth International ultimately wearied him, he never moved right. Today's neo-cons, that plague of the earth, descend more or less legitimately from the Trotskyite circles of Burnham and Schactman. James defected to a new theoretical refinement. They ended up supporting Vietnam.
James' devotions to Marxism, English (and French) literature and cricket were exactly that, devotions in the church sense. He had nothing in common with the brutalities of Stalinism and knew it. This was a very perfect, gentle Trotskyist, although Trotsky had killed or ordered killings. But then Renton is describing Wagner's reiner tor, the pure-souled innocent, incapable of corruption and slow to see it in others.
He set value on Nkrumah and chronicled his decay, was long close to Eric Williams, a conventional success story in Trinidad, but turned sorrowing away from the realpolitik. Nkrumah died in Romania, Williams in power and James, with his books and music, in Railton Road, Brixton. Enough.

Review: The Observer, 9 December 2007
CLR James (Haus Books, £ 16.99), by Dave Renton, illuminates a remarkable life. Apart from being one of the greatest writers cricket has known, James was a political activist, an acclaimed historian, and an intellectual. He was also a Marxist, expelled from the USA for his Trotskyite leanings during the McCarthyite era. In addition, Renton explains how his support for colonial revolt inspired a generation of leaders in newly independent African nations. Who said sport and politics don't mix?

Review: Fred Inglis, Times Higher Education Supplement, 16 October 2007
It was John Arlott (I cannot stop myself telling you) who introduced the lanky black stranger to me with the generous words: "This is the author of the best book on cricket ever written." The stranger was C. L. R. James, and the book was Beyond a Boundary. James discovered, with a poetic force and grace matched by no other writer, that the slow rituals and joyful spontaneity of the English national sport, taught during the days of empire to all dominions, were capable of the highest accomplishments of true art - the interplay of power and beauty, of convention and creativity, of high drama and low comedy.
Not only that, its expressiveness and subtle membership was such that the old class barrier between high and low culture could be dissolved by a game and could, moreover, effect a similar dissolution between rulers and ruled, sometime owners and onetime slaves, as the gradual world dominance of cricket by the West Indians taught their people the delicious new quantities of triumph and identity by way of a universally popular art.
Nothing in James's written achievement quite came up to that great work of literature. But his life aimed at a parallel grandeur. He was born in 1901 and died full of honours in 1989. There are many biographies and collected works on his life, and it is not quite clear what Dave Renton's book is supposed to add to them. It has the feel of a textbook introduction, with unsurprising photographs and Renton's rather Martian prose. He goes through the chronicle without ever really bringing out James's fight, or his gaiety and impulsiveness, still less his sudden withdrawals from the world.
This was never more marked than in the marriages and affairs into which he rushed with such ardour (Renton hardly refers to his touching letters to the American poet Constance Webb), but this little book is unnervingly indifferent, for instance, to James's callousness towards the backstreet abortions he compelled his lover to undergo in 1937 and 1938.
Nonetheless, there can be no doubting his stature, whether as writer or as political figure of heroic proportions. Renton tells the story by numbers, but its energy and singularity shine through. James came to London to write, joined The Manchester Guardian as a cricket correspondent, had his pamphlet on West Indian self-government published by Leonard Woolf, moved steadily left through the Labour Party and out the other side, and then in 1938 published his second classic, the history of Toussaint L'Ouverture and the revolution of the slaves in Santo Domingo in 1791. The Black Jacobins made James's name as one of the leading black intellectuals. He remained in the eye of the storm of black power, spent 18 years in the US, was a friend of the exiled Trotsky and a quarrelsome leader of very uneven judgment in the Socialist Workers Party. His belief in revolution seemed to find its moment when the African colonies came to independence. But having given his heart to the cause of Ghana he did not shrink from the bleak eventuality of the country's failure and told the story with regretful fortitude in Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution. It is a shame that, at a time when the Left so pressingly needs calling back to its great allegiances, a new book on such a commanding character should turn out to be so pallid.