C.L.R. James: Cricket, the Caribbean, and
World Revolution,
by Farrukh Dhondy (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 190 pp, ISBN
0-297-64613-3)
Review by Nicholas Laughlin
First
published in the Trinidad and Tobago Review, April
2002
In his later years in London, riding the gentle
wave of academic fame thrown up for him by the storms of Black Power,
C.L.R. James surrounded himself with eager young associates —
disciples, one is tempted to call them — who acted as his secretaries,
companions, cooks, and chauffeurs. Since his death in 1989 a few of
these Jamesites have helped swell the rising tide of interest in the
sage of Brixton. Anna Grimshaw has edited crucial volumes of his
writings; Jim Murray heads the C.L.R. James Institute in New York; and
now Farrukh Dhondy, with whom James lived briefly in the early 1980s,
has written an entertaining biographical study, timed to coincide with
the recent centenary.
There’s no question we need a big, authoritative biography of James.
It’s a commonplace to call him the leading Caribbean intellect of the
twentieth century; he was a restless thinker, and that same
restlessness makes him a biographer’s dream, living between the West
Indies, Britain and the United States, interacting with major political
and intellectual figures, embroiled in many of the largest issues
agitating the world in his time. And the mammoth achievements of the
biographical profession in the last half-century encourage large
expectations: exhaustive documentary research, preferably leading to
the discovery of previously unguessed-at facts; first-hand interviews
with the subject’s friends and enemies, when these persons survive; the
investigation of mysterious corners in the subject’s life and the
unravelling of contentious knots of fact and opinion. (Goodness knows
James’s eighty-eight-year life-strand is knotted enough.)
Dhondy does not even attempt such daunting chores. His chief sources of
information, as far as I can make out (his referencing is minimal) are
James’s published writings, and personal conversations with the old
man. His account of James’s childhood and adolescence is lifted
straight from the pages of Beyond a
Boundary. Dhondy is exasperatingly vague about those stretches
of James’s life he happens to know little about, and he hasn’t bothered
to dig for the details. He also offers some startling errors of fact,
for instance making Tunapuna a district of Port of Spain (which may
bemuse Lloyd Best), making George Lamming Guyanese (which may bemuse
George Lamming), and giving Trinidad and Tobago’s Parliament one
hundred members (which might well resolve the present deadlock).
Dhondy can be rather clumsy at arranging his material — too many index
cards, not enough rubber bands? — arbitrarily abandoning his
chronological sequence for a thematic approach, making the middle
period of James’s life a puzzle for the less-than-fully-alert reader.
Unless I blinked too vigorously halfway through the book, there seems
to be a misplaced chapter. And Dhondy indulges occasionally in some
narrative inventions that may arouse the reader’s suspicion. The most
prominent of these is an entire stream-of-consciousness chapter from
the point of view of Eric Williams. Amusing stuff, in its place, but
this biography shouldn’t be its place.
Dhondy’s distinctly personal version of James is necessarily limited,
but his approach does have unanticipated advantages. His first-hand
accounts of the elderly James contribute some of the book’s best
episodes — they make me wish he’d stuck to writing a straightforward
memoir of their friendship. He shows us a side of James previously
undisclosed — he was a demanding and mercurial old man, requiring
Dhondy to take his phone calls, wash and iron his shirts, and boil his
breakfast egg for precisely three and a half minutes. “James was polite
and took me entirely for granted,” is his summary.
But Dhondy also shows us he was a charming conversationalist, eager to
share his life’s worth of insight, responding warmly to intelligent
attention. A young woman “doing research of some sort” pays a call;
James’s eighty-year-old interest perks up. The relationship advances
with some anxiety; one day Dhondy catches them holding hands. The
“courtship” is rapidly snuffed out when James discovers she is living
with another man. And perhaps the book’s juiciest plum is James’s
attempt to avoid meeting a dramatically beturbaned woman named Queen
Mother Moore, whose attendant telephones incessantly, insisting on an
appointment. Eventually Dhondy runs out of excuses. “ ‘Tell them
anything, man,’ Nello indiscreetly prompts from the other room. ‘Tell
them C.L.R. James is dead, he died this afternoon.’ ” (“Nello”, of
course, was James’s nickname, a diminutive of his middle name, Lionel.)
He is decidedly subjective in his treatment of James’s career, but
Dhondy’s obvious affection for his subject does not cloud his vision;
he is no hagiographer. He has a non-specialist’s commonsense clarity
about James’s shortcomings, his role in the failures of his three
marriages, the inconsistencies in his thought, the absurd lengths of
some ideological idealisms at the height of his Trotskyist phase.
Dhondy seems frustrated by the time James spent wandering the mazy
backroads of socialist factionalism during his fifteen years in the
United States. This wry description of the Party’s late-30s anti-war
reasoning is typical:
He notes that James’s “attempts at practical
political intervention had been spectacular failures” in the West
Indies and Africa. James believed in the inevitability of world
revolution, but the soi-disant
“Jamesian” revolution in Grenada turned out a carnival of thuggery. The
Black Power movement of the 70s took him as an icon — the “ultimate
irony” of his life — though he never ceased to assert the authority of
Europe’s cultural and intellectual legacy, which made him the thinker
he was. “He supported the idea but not the ideas of Black Power.”
But Dhondy is equally apt at summarizing James’s genuine achievements.
His polymathic multicuriosity was extraordinary even in an age of
extraordinaires, as was his synthesizing intelligence, performing
repeated acts of creative hybridization. His books of Marxist history
and theory — World Revolution,
Notes on Dialectics — are on
their own terms major accomplishments, yet who do they interest today
but historians of ideas?
From our current vantage point, the works which most unquestionably
matter are The Black Jacobins,
American Civilization and Beyond a Boundary. These are the
Jamesian classics, according to the classic definition of that
category: works grounded in a particular age and place but ever more
deeply and more widely relevant to the present. What they have in
common first of all is their originality of conception. They are tricky
to define or assign to a single discipline, assembling elements of
history, literature, political theory, personal observation and popular
culture (and cricket!). Called upon to name the sum of their
surprisingly disparate parts, one throws up one’s hands, saying,
“life.” They are daring ascents of James’s mind at its most
independent, panoramas of three distinct societies — Haiti in the
throes of revolution, the post-war United States, the West Indies in
the years leading to independence — which illuminate the vaster
landscape of universal history. It is to their virtue that these works
are not definitive: theirs is not the sinking finality of questions
completely answered, but the buoyant thrill of fresh leads for eager
successors. The sheer scale of their intellectual ambition is James’s
most valuable legacy.
But. A sizeable but. I confess that reading Dhondy’s book plucks up in
me the sense of frustrating and vague disappointment I feel whenever
contemplating James’s career. Why? When I weigh the megaton potential
of his talents against his actual achievements, the scale doesn’t seem
to tip the way I wish. For me, the most poignant and most revealing
document of James the man is the series of articles he wrote for the Port of Spain Gazette in early
1932, within weeks of his first arrival in Britain, giving his
immediate impressions of life in London, and at the same time a glimpse
at his thirty-one-year-old personality. He is obviously brilliant,
confident, ambitious. Moving in the Bohemian intellectual world of
Bloomsbury, he finds he is the equal of any and superior to most. “By
instinct and training,” he says, “I belong to it and have fit into it
as naturally as a pencil fits into a sharpener.” He’s rather too grown
up to talk aloud about forging the uncreated conscience of his race,
but one suspects he’s thinking on those lines. One feels the hugeness
of the possibilities open to him: he could have been the Caribbean’s
Voltaire, our Emerson, our Mill. A half century stretched ahead of him,
crammed with incident and investigation, dozens of books and articles,
acclaim in the Caribbean and in the black studies departments (two
parishes from which one fears the world revolution will not rise); but
a certain eminence of influence eluded him, and still eludes. The Black Jacobins, American Civilization, Beyond a Boundary: these are great
works, but none is the Great Work of which he must have felt capable.
Or is it that the Great Work exists, but no interpreter of sufficient
scope has yet arrived to demonstrate it to us? Just as we still require
a really big biography of James, a thoroughly Jamesian biography
registering the precise magnitude of his existence, could it be that we
await the advent of that tirelessly brilliant person who will use
James’s own methods of erudition, observation, intuition and connective
imagination to balance the scale and give us the true weight and worth
of the man’s idiosyncratic achievements?
It is “a colossal task, none more colossal in our time,” as C.L.R.
James once said of something entirely different. +