The C.L.R. James Institute: "Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Acid Test" by Ralph Dumain

The C.L.R. James Institute

Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways:
The Acid Test

by Ralph Dumain

James's study of Melville ranks among his most brilliant works. It crystallizes in a highly readable format all the major themes of James's thought, especially as developed in his American period: the theory of state capitalism, the connection of art and society, the original personality in literature, the relation of the individual to society, the critique of intellectuals, the character of American civilization. So central is this work, that in order to falsify James it is above all necessary to falsify Mariners. Paul Buhle¹ set the pace for such falsifications, and others have followed in his footsteps.

Buhle starts out by claiming that this "may be in some ways the least representative of his major works" [p. 106], where in fact it is the most representative. For Buhle, Ahab is a symbol of the ruling class gone mad and even of racist narcissism. In one of his patented non sequiturs, Buhle finds it necessary to reference feminism in order to challenge James's claim that Ahab is the nineteenth century's greatest literary creation [p. 107]. Buhle singles out for criticism James's lack of empathy for the American left intellectual and his tendency to dismiss him as a neurotic. As an outsider, James was wont to complain that "American thinkers had failed terribly to convey the spirit of the masses":

From his limited perspective, the Communist movement had only intensified the problem, corrupting and confusing the frail alternatives to aesthete and upper-class culture. [p. 108]

Then Buhle spews out a list of noted artists and writers from Jack London to Nelson Algren, whom James unfortunately has "seemingly brushed aside", acting like an impetuous young man instead of the mature man he was [p. 108].

A worse falsification of James's meaning is impossible to conceive. James does not deal at all with the cultural products of Communists, socialists, fellow-travellers, etc., either favorably or unfavorably. His critique has nothing to do with Woody Guthrie or Clifford Odets, nothing to do with the lofty categories of modernist high culture, popular culture, or Popular Front culture. James's concern is with the fundamental character of the modern alienated intellectual drowning in "self-centered despair", whether drawn into the orbit of Stalinism or not.

Similarly, Buhle admonishes James for failing to acknowledge the commitment, sacrifices, and sufferings of real American Communists, especially considering that James was relatively detached from a substantial mass movement and hence was not subject to more intense persecution [p. 109]. The latter point is well-taken, but the former is a diversion: the virtues or faults of Communists was not James's subject. The subject was Stalinism in general as a phenomenon and its corrupting influence even on well-intentioned people, especially alienated intellectuals consumed with guilt over their rootlessness and individualism and primed to accept authoritarian structures in order to belong, to be socially useful at last.

Bringing in Bakhtin and Lacan to support himself, Buhle clearly fails to understand James's critique of Freudianism as a mode among intellectuals [p. 110]. Detached from society, cynical and self-absorbed, the self-centered intellectual adopts psychoanalysis as the master key for the interpretation of human behavior just because it absolves him from serious consideration of the impact of social relations in their entirety on the individual character. Buhle doesn't see this at all, but one of his heroes he name-drops, Leslie Fiedler, is a perfect example of the kind of social-climbing, Freud-spouting, narcissistic snob that James targets.

Finally, Buhle criticizes the notorious final chapter of Mariners, on James's internment at Ellis Island, omitted from a subsequent edition by Martin Glaberman [p. 110-111]. In it, James paints his apparently benevolent Communist fellow inmate in very negative terms. The tone of the chapter suggests that James has adapted himself to Cold War anti-Communist rhetoric in order to save his own skin. This was my initial reaction to the chapter as well, and I still have some reservations. (Examination of other contemporaneous documents is necessary for an adequate appraisal of James’s strategy for avoiding deportation.) Another opinion, held by Glaberman himself, is that this chapter, as a personal plea to remain in the United States, is extraneous to the rest of the book.² At first I reacted this way as well. Though I do not repudiate the former reservation even now, I nonetheless realized that I was wrong about the second, and that the final chapter in fact recapitulates the theme of the rest of the book, i.e., in describing the relations of the imprisoned Communists to the prison authorities, James brings out both the heroic and potentially dangerous aspects of the disciplined Communist Party member, congruent with the state capitalist theory. Though Glaberman, Buhle, and company do not see this to this very day, Wilson Harris was perceptive enough to capture the essence of the matter.³ According to Harris, the question was not the moral character of the individual Communist described, but rather the seductive character of what he represented. Though motivated by courage, a high sense of duty and honor, and the most noble of intentions, that Communist, however exemplary his behavior, was in a grip of a monolithic force -- the centralized, authoritarian party, which could use those good intentions to any effect. It is that monolithic force that is to be feared, all the more so because of the temptation it induces.

Not only does Buhle not see this, but, starting from a few reasonable observations, he gets lost way out on one of his tangents [p. 111-113]. So narcissistic is Buhle that he ignores the real import of the book, to score some politically correct brownie points by criticizing James for not taking the ecological implications of the book to their logical conclusion [p. 113].

Can it be accidental that Buhle misses the central point of the book, that it is both a devastating critique of the self-centered intellectual and a magnificent popular illustration of the doctrine of state capitalism? To think that the book is an escape from radical politics requires a lot of effort to ignore passages such as these at the very beginning .... [See the quotes gathered under the title C.L.R. James on Moby Dick & State Capitalism.]⁴

NOTES:

¹ Buhle, Paul. C.L.R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary. London; New York: Verso, 1988. 197 pp. All page citations in brackets refer to this book.

² Glaberman, Martin. Letter to Ralph Dumain, Detroit, 1 April 1993, 3 pp.

³ Harris, Wilson. "C.L.R. James as Writer and Literary Critic." Ms. of lecture given at the Riverside Studios, Hammersmith, London. 19 February 1986. 19 pp. Ms courtesy of The C.L.R. James Institute.

⁴ This essay is an excerpt from my unpublished ms., "On Paul Buhle’s Distortions of C.L.R. James", 31 August 1993; edited 6 June 2001.

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Uploaded 6 June 2001