The C.L.R. James Institute: "Remembering C.L.R. James" by Anna Grimshaw

The C.L.R. James Institute

Remembering C.L.R. James

by Anna Grimshaw

[This talk was delivered in acceptance of the C.L.R. James Society's "C.L.R. James Award" at a dinner during the Society's April 2000 conference on James (co-sponsored by the James Institute) at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.]

I wrote my book Servants of the Buddha in the corner of the tiny Brixton room where C.L.R. James spent his last years. Each day started the same way. Pushing open the door, I called out greetings as I negotiated a path through the discarded books and papers which lay abandoned around James's bed. Always I found him propped up against his pillows, waiting. His slender arms rested above the bedclothes. From long into the night he had lain there, patiently anticipating my arrival as the release from the hours of darkness in which sleep never came. I approached the bed. James held out both hands and grasping mine he squeezed them tightly. Now life began again.

I opened the blinds. Slowly the grey London light crept in. The day unfolded according to a familiar pattern. Each phase was marked by its particular tasks and the rhythm of their succession was the routine which anchored our world.

One morning I was working at my desk when James called me over to tell me about a horse race he had watched in 1910. He described in vivid and concrete detail the course of the race which had seen an old horse snatch victory from the favoured competitors in the last few strides. James's recreation of this scene from his Trinidad childhood some seventy-five years later seemed remarkable to me in its clarity, its precision; but equally his mastery of the narrative, the careful modulation of its dramatic rhythm reminded me of his early days as a writer of fiction. Striking, too, was the change I observed in his appearance when he recounted the story. James's eyes suddenly brightened. Leaning forward in his chair, his whole body seemed to fill with life as he shrugged off the weight of old age. Conjuring up the images in his mind's eye - the details of the landscape, the character of the horses, the different moments of anticipation and suspense, the shifting emotions of the crowd - all of this generated a new energy or vitality which animated James's whole being.

I often thought about this episode. For in its own way, like the horse race, it became lodged in my mind's eye. Slowly I began to understand what it revealed about James - his intense observation of the world and his unusual visual memory. I suspected that these features were fundamentally intuitive; but I knew, too, that they had been greatly strengthened by the discipline of watching and writing about cricket which James began as a young boy in Trinidad. Later these characteristics found literary expression in the novel and short stories he wrote during the 1920s and 1930s. Despite his abandonment of literature in favour of revolutionary politics, the distinctiveness of James's vision - his sense of people, their presence and movement within the world remained unchanged. This is manifest in the texture of the writing itself. The prose is seemingly effortless. It is controlled and yet expansive, concrete and yet wide-ranging; personal and yet sternly analytical. Always the writing is unmistakably Jamesian, expressive of a highly developed selfconsciousness. But if the voice is unique, one also hears its sound as part of a wider social conversation.

The poet Derek Walcott, in his own key-note address at the Wellesley conference of 1991, describes James's writing as being distinguished by its "balance", its "confidence", its "rhythm". There is, as he notes, a warmth within the perfection of syntax. A sensibility ready to absorb everything. But finally Walcott settles for one word to describe what it is that he finds unique in James. The word he chooses is "grace". For Walcott, "grace" evokes the distinctive "natural light" that emanates from James's writing.

I came to James from one of those Lancashire mill towns he knew well from his first days in England. He liked the distinctive combination in people of a sort of puritanism with the fiercely radical and independent spirit which had so fired his own burgeoning political imagination. Fifty years later, in becoming one of the last links in a long chain of people who cared for James (who made his breakfast, typed his manuscripts, unearthed his pen from the bedclothes, organised his books, found his TV remote, preserved his documents), he would often say how I reminded him of the redoubtable women he'd encountered in the leftwing politics of pre-war Britain.

That tiny Brixton room was my refuge. I was in flight from academia. I was hostile to its privilege and to its narrow specialisations. Moreover I had been trained in anthropology. It was a discipline more compromised than most. Many of the leading figures had a distinguished record of subservience to the needs of colonial rule. There was, too, a stubborn attachment to images of native society which denied both history and agency to millions of human subjects. If anthropology was deeply flawed as an intellectual enterprise, it nevertheless had one unusual feature which offered interesting and radical possibilities. This was the practice of fieldwork.

Central to James's understanding of the modern world was his recognition that people were the force for civilization. No longer to be glimpsed through the writings of established intellectuals, he argued that twentieth-century people were conscious of themselves as never before in history. Their struggle was to create new forms of society expressive of their own complex subjectivities. Anthropologists, at turn of the last century, were unusual in their acknowledgement of this fact. Certainly it set them apart from other intellectuals and from their predecessors. For the new anthropologists, unlike their Victorian counterparts, sought to make visible those peoples previously excluded from existing conceptions of humanity and civilization. Equally they recognised the importance of understanding subjects within the context of their own lives. This acknowledgement precipitated a revolution in the methods of social enquiry. Like the Impressionist painters of the late nineteenth century who left their studios to investigate the world first-hand, so too the twentieth century anthropologists horrified their colleagues by leaving the comfort of their Oxford studies in order to experience directly the worlds they described.

The innovative potential of anthropology's fieldwork revolution was, however, quickly extinguished. The modern ethnographers, in their pursuit of professional status and disciplinary respectability, emptied out people from their work, replacing individuality and movement with static analytical categories which classified subjects as objects and ordered them according to the political demands of their colonial masters.

From the beginning of my time with James, he wanted to know about my own experiences of fieldwork - what kind of life I had shared with a small group of Buddhist women in the Himalayas. Characteristically, he sought out the small details, the concrete particulars of everyday life. What did the women look like, what did they do, what did they eat, where had they come from, what did I do. Invariably James became impatient if my account slipped into generalisation or explanation. He wanted to be able to conjure up that Himalayan world in his mind's eye - to see those women moving and working across a harsh, mountainous landscape. The conversations I had with James began to have a curious effect upon my own understanding of these fieldwork experiences. Slowly they brought into focus what had become lost to me in a morass of academic abstraction - I had lost not just the subjectivity of women with whom I lived and worked, but my own subjectivity too.

I often spent afternoons with James watching old Hollywood movies on television. Many of them, classics from the 1940s, James had first seen during his fifteen year stay in America. There was something unusual about the way he watched these old films. His interest was held not by the plot or by the dialogue; but by something at once more concrete and elusive - what might be called " presence". James's attention was held by how Gary Cooper or Rita Hayward occupied cinematic space, their distinctive screen presence: "See how Cooper walks, the way he holds his body - watch him, watch him closely - did you see that movement?" he would exclaim animatedly as if watching the perfect stroke of a batsman, his long fingers pointing to the screen. For James, character was always expressed concretely - materially - through the body itself.

For me what is distinctive about James as a writer is the concrete presence of people in his work. It is anchored in what I call his developed ethnographic sensibility - his active engagement with what people do in the world rather than what they say about it. His writing is not emptied out of people. Indeed his characters, Matthew Bondman, Mr Quildan, Aunt Judith, Mrs Rouse, Toussaint L'Ouverture, George Challenor, Sidney Barnes inhabit our imaginations in striking and vivid ways. For they are unique personalities, not abstractions. They are there, asserting a subjective presence which, in turn, demands from us a response cognisant of its own subjectivity. But, as I discovered myself when I began to draft Servants of the Buddha, putting people back into one's work changes the understanding of writing itself.

For once people inhabit writing, they have a way of transcending the words on the page, exerting their own power and presence beyond the limits within which we, as intellectuals, confine them. They remain fugitive, escaping from the specialist language and analytical categories by which we try to explain the world. Acknowledging this fact means a struggle against the limitations of established forms. And what I find special about James's writing is not just its unusual texture, or its indeed its much noted breadth - his ability to range widely, challenging the conventional limits of intellectual enquiry. It is also his refusal as a writer to settle for any one literary form. James wrote letters, biography, political polemic, criticism, short stories, essays, a novel, a play, journalism, political history. He didn't live long enough to write e-mail; but I am certain he would have had no hesitation about exploring its potential as a new form!

Recently I spent a year with Eric Wade, a Lancashire working man, whose life had been devoted to racing pigeons. To use a pigeon-racer's expression, I realise that I've become adapted to being "cooped up" with elderly gentlemen living in small spaces. Thinking over the nature of that experience from my place within the university, I found myself once again having to struggle against abstraction. I had to resist the categorisation of knowledge and the conservatism of academic form. In short, I had to start all over again. This is how I began:

I sat on my small wooden stool outside Eric's hut. He was walking back and forth through the long weeds which now grew over the path. Eventually he came over to me, the tall stems of grass rattling against his boots as he moved. Reaching into his jacket pocket, he crouched down on the step of the hut and lit a cigarette. I watched him. Eric smoked, settling back against the baskets; and he took several long, deep breaths as he began to draw on the cigarette. I noticed, though, that he didn't really appear to be at ease. Squinting against the sun, his eyes were constantly in movement, darting back and forth acros the clear summer sky. We were sitting high up over the valley. Below us we heard the steady hum of traffic as it moved along the main road, the noise occasionally broken by children who played out in the narrow streets which ran between rows of stone terraced houses. Eric and I sat together in silence. I watched him, he watched the sky and we both waited for the birds to come home.

Reading that passage, I imagine James's bright eyes and his wry smile. Yes, I think he'd be happy with it. For, as a beginning, it is full of all sorts of unknown possibilities.

This talk is published here for the first time by special permission of Anna Grimshaw. All rights are reserved. This text may not be published, reprinted, or reproduced without the express written consent of the Director of The C.L.R. James Institute.

Web page prepared by Ralph Dumain, Librarian/Archivist, 24 January 2001.

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Uploaded: 25 March 2001