The C.L.R. James Institute: "The C.L.R. James Institute and Me" by Jim Murray

The C.L.R. James Institute

The C.L.R. James Institute and Me

by Jim Murray

"To demonstrate for independence is good, but to think independently is much better."

--C.L.R. James

In 1981 I was a 32 year old writer. I defined myself as a radical doing cultural activist work. I had been a Draft Resister, a New Left historian. Going to Cuba in 1968, and attending their Hundred Years of Struggle celebration, had gotten me interested in studying and teaching history. I drifted away from that when I moved to New York City, started writing and performing poetry and working with artists against the New Right. That is when I met Paul Buhle, who came on the artists' bus to the first national demonstration against Reagan, 3 May 1981. In October 1981 Buhle introduced me to C.L.R. James in Washington.

Meeting James was not my idea. Paul had persuaded me to take over Cultural Correspondence, a small radical magazine he had published since 1975 as an outlet for New Left intellectuals, mostly historians, to write about popular culture. I felt very strongly that the new cultural movement I was working with needed literature it could put into the hands of new people. The new CC would be for the voices of artists and activists themselves. Buhle pointed out to me that if I was going to publish a magazine, it wouldn't hurt to get C.L.R. James to write for it.

That same week I had introduced Paul to my teacher at Rutgers, the historian Warren Susman. Susman agreed to lean on his friend André Shiffren, then editor at Pantheon Books, to publish James's Beyond A Boundary. When we presented this idea to James in Washington, he was skeptical, since Americans only know cricket as an annoying insect, at best.

A month later James stayed at my apartment when he was speaking at a large New York rally for Polish Solidarity. When I met him at LaGuardia Airport he gave me an audio cassette, `Here, publish this.' It was one of his London talks on the American black women writers, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange. I had not yet published a single magazine, and yet C.L.R. James had no other US publisher to whom he could give this material. I saw to its publication in the magazine and in three books: At the Rendezvous of Victory: Selected Writings, by James (1984); Popular Culture in America, edited by Paul Buhle (1987); The C.L.R. James Reader, edited by Anna Grimshaw (1992), in which it is the final piece.

That was the only time James told me what to do. It was his style to respond to the initiative of others; indeed, it is his whole philosophy of life and history. (This doesn't mean he tolerated spontaneity on the Breakfast Question, and nothing made him more impatient than my dawdling on the way home from the bookstore with a new title.) In 1982 he sent me a few pieces which he said needed some editorial and research work. Then in early 1983 I went to London to work as his assistant on his autobiography. It turned out he wasn't fully committed to completing that project, although he had dictated some four or five hundred pages of memoirs in the 70s. Instead I got interested in cataloging his unpublished papers and he got more interested in having Anna Grimshaw as his personal assistant.

Anna was a young well-educated woman from Manchester who reminded James of Dorothy Padmore. James pursued her for several weeks, calling her almost daily at her job as a researcher for Granada Television, where she was working on a series about immigration to Britain. Anna and I fondly recall the day she asked me for advice about taking the job. I had no idea who she was, where she was coming from, how right all her friends were to advise against the unknowns of the situation. I only knew how much James wanted her around; fortunately I was able to offer her my support as well.

The C.L.R. James Institute was created in 1983. It is the only agency for which James formally authorized the use of his name. I have directed it ever since. James was not interested in the papers himself, although he was certainly pleased when others published his work. I never used the name of the Institute publicly until 1988, and I never let my name appear prominently in association with James projects. As James's assistant and archivist I felt that my job was to support everyone and everything and not let myself be identified too closely with any one project. All of which is to say that I had the luxury of James's support for my work. I didn't have to get drawn into all the political and personal jockeying that was taking place around him. I had my work, reading a mountain of disorganized papers, and James made sure no one interfered with me.

Reading the unpublished manuscripts, I developed a particular perspective. I defined my James work in general as a cultural activist project, involving democratic communications, excavating a lifework from the rubble of circumstance. I came to James as a member of the public, not as someone working on a career. My attraction to the James papers has always been: people fifty and a hundred years hence are going to want to read this material. I don't know many things about those people, but that doesn't stop me from acting as their agent now. This perspective includes what I call the cultural emphasis: it is not for me to decide which material is more important, it is not for me to censor or edit or make political judgments about whose C.L.R. James matters most. It is not for me to treat one form of expression as more important than another. In a sense, the entire corpus is about the role of the writer in society, the role of the intellectual in society, the role of the activist in society, because James never did his work as part of what we would today understand as a career, academic or otherwise. He left the publication of his work, and the organization of his legacy, to whomever may have come along. The job I created for myself was not one he had envisioned anyone doing.

The C.L.R. James Institute has a certain trajectory over its sixteen-year history. In one sense, it has always been doing the same thing: gathering, gathering, gathering, cataloging, cataloging, cataloging, putting the work of C.L.R. James into the hands of others, putting work about C.L.R. James into the hands of others, frequently accompanied by information about what else there is that people haven't heard about yet. More unpublished material has made it into print, but I still find myself insisting that there are several more books by James that could be published. For the whole sixteen years, I have stocked and sold at wholesale prices all the James and James-related titles available.

The first stage ended in about 1986, when Allison & Busby, James's London publisher, lost its independence and had its offices locked up. Until then, Anna and I worked closely with Margaret Busby on a long term publishing plan. Margaret had published two volumes of selections (Spheres of Existence and The Future in the Present), and three other books: The Black Jacobins, Notes on Dialectics, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, when I arrived in 1983. Anna and I worked on At the Rendezvous of Victory, with its bibliography of work by James and many pages listing newspaper and magazine articles about James. That bibliography set a standard I have not forgotten; it also documented James's impact around the world, without the aid of computerized searches.

In that period we worked on the A & B edition of Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, with its final chapter, `A Natural but Necessary Conclusion', restored. The first book from the unpublished archive was Cricket, by C.L.R. James, edited by Anna Grimshaw, which was quite a success for A & B. That project, which I proposed to Anna and Margaret, had to be kept secret, even from James, because there were men around James who would never tolerate a woman's name on a cricket book. Also, Pantheon did bring out a US edition of Beyond A Boundary, and for about a year James exclaimed to every visitor, `The Americans have published my book on cricket!' I was his agent for that book, and, unfortunately, I was unable to persuade Pantheon that it was more than a sports book. (The editor at Pantheon, Wendy Wolf, associated black people with sports.) Although it was widely reviewed in the mainstream press, and praised as a literary classic, the Pantheon edition failed. Duke University Press's 1990 edition connected Boundary to Cultural Studies in the academy, and it is still going strong.

Other 1980s projects: the film Talking History: C.L.R. James and Edward P. Thompson, by H.O. Nazareth of Penumbra Productions, was a good example of cultural activist collaboration. Cultural Correspondence had made a audio/slide show, `We Want to Live! Artworks for Peace, June 12, 1982', which was seen in many countries. A dozen images from that slideshow were incorporated directly into the Talking History film. Also, I did a lot of publicity and distribution work for that film in London and in the US. The film coincided with `The Best of C.L.R. James', a series of six half hour lectures by James on Channel Four, also produced by Penumbra. Summer 1983 in London was a moment, for me, of stunning contrasts. I was finding material in the unpublished James corpus which was unknown to the world at large, and at the same time the British media was making James a public figure, which was not exactly what he had in mind for his 80s.

Another major project was the mid-80s production of James's play The Black Jacobins by Yvonne Brewster at Riverside Studios in London. The play was accompanied by a gallery exhibition of James's life which Anna Grimshaw curated and for which she wrote the catalog, and by a series of thoughtful public lectures on James by his associates from the US and London. Finding a copy of the play to send Brewster took a few weeks, because James's papers were so disorganized at the time.

There were countless other projects in the 80s, as a result of the success of Allison & Busby's book series and Anna Grimshaw's efforts to make James available to interviewers and visitors. She not only mastered the archive but expanded it with her own research on James in the 1930s. Anna also interviewed James on many important topics, and made archival materials available to researchers and authors in London.

James died in May 1989, but I date the next period in the trajectory of the Institute from 1987 to 1995, because of the work on the four books in the Blackwell series. Cultural activism, in its obsession with democratic accountability, is about learning new skills and, especially, breaking down hierarchies of mental and manual labor. Thanks to the personal computer I became a desktop publisher and professional typesetter. In the mid-80s James asked me why people would want a computer in their home. At the time I didn't know, but in the early 90s I used one to typeset three fat books of his work. Working with me as the typesetter as well as the archivist meant Anna had much better control of the editorial process; it also meant that the Institute would have chunks of James's work in electronic form.

It was also in this period that Anna found an editor, Simon Prosser at Basil Blackwell, to replace Margaret Busby. In 1983 Margaret had handed me a manuscript, `Notes on American Civilization' by James, which had been written in 1950. She said, `Here, I don't know what to do with this.' It had just been sitting on the bottom of a pile on her office. Robert Hill had sent it to her, having gotten it from an associate of James, Nettie Kravitz, who had left it for three decades in a drawer in her Detroit home. I carried that manuscript around, photocopied it for a few dozen editors and professors, turned Anna (whose background was not in American Studies) on to it, and she got James to agree to publish it under the title `The Struggle for Happiness'. It was published in 1993 as American Civilization by C.L.R. James, edited by her and Keith Hart. Anna also outlined the contents for The C.L.R. James Reader (1992), edited by herself, for James's approval before he died.

The third Blackwell volume is Special Delivery: The Letters of C.L.R. James to Constance Webb, 1939-1948, edited by Anna Grimshaw. Constance had been married to James, and is the mother of James's only child. She decided to excavate from her own archives and transcribe for publication the extraordinary love letters James had written her forty years earlier. I don't think the James work I was doing particularly influenced her, but introducing Anna to Constance accelerated the process of bringing Constance back into history, not just as (I would argue) the most important person in James's life, but also as the first biographer of Richard Wright.

The James Institute published a series of pamphlets to sell at the 1991 academic conference on James held at Wellesley College, organized by the C.L.R. James Society. They were intended to build support for the publication of James's work in general and the Blackwell series in particular. That pamphlet series was the first significant public act by the James Institute as such. The pamphlets sold very well in the US, UK, and also found their way to the West Indies.

In the mid-90s, around the completion of the Blackwell series, a new stage of the Institute's work began. Up to then, the main priority had been publishing James's own work, but I also supported the work of James scholars and writers on James, with archival materials, editorial and publishing advice, and distribution. Several books and many articles on James came out in the 90s. One in particular that I helped edit (and typeset) was the fourth Blackwell volume, Rethinking C.L.R. James, edited by Grant Farred. The Afterword in that book, `The Boy at the Window', is the first published piece of my own writing on James.

Up until the mid-90s, the Institute resembled what the James Papers might look like in a Special Collections Division of a major research library. Its strength was in primary documents, unpublished manuscripts, and media, by James and the people around him, as well as written material about James. A special feature of the collection, in addition to the depth and range of the documents themselves, is the database in which the holdings are cataloged. I met the Institute's archivist/librarian in 1991. Ralph Dumain is a professional librarian with experience in computer applications. We planned this project in 1991, deciding to create a database uniquely tailored to our needs but simple enough for the average person to use.

While most archives have a finder's guide, we know of none as bibliographically detailed as ours. Our database is being turned into a 600-page oversized book called The C.L.R. James Resource Guide, which Cultural Correspondence will publish in 1999. We have entered the bibliographic information about each document, published and unpublished, or some cases groups of documents, and have written hundreds of annotations, many of them including subjective commentaries as well as further objective information. We have also designed every conceivable type of index the user might need, rather than limiting ourselves to the usual subject and personal names indexes. The subject index is so large we have provided a thesaurus to guide the researcher in finding all relevant material on any subject. The database is particularly important in that dozens of researchers have been able to benefit from it for years preceding publication, as I can easily send people reports on the Institute's holdings on any particular topic.

Ralph Dumain has also pursued an aggressive acquisitions policy, tracking down ever more primary James material in all formats, published and unpublished, published and manuscript secondary material on James, and other material related to James's associates and interests. In addition Ralph assists researchers, whatever their interests, while contributing his own independent vision to the Institute's activities.

In 1995 the Institute's first Research Fellow, Brian Alleyne, from Trinidad, suggested that I expand the collection to include more Caribbean literature. That was a good idea, and if that was a good idea, why not more Caribbean history? And why not more US radical history? Ditto African American history and literature, the history of the British left, the French Revolution, international abolitionism, postcolonialism, African philosophy, Trotskyism, the New Left, Blacks in Britain, Pan Africanism, and so forth. The slogan of the C.L.R. James Institute became, `What know they of Nello, who only Nello know?' (The working title of Beyond A Boundary had been, `What know they of cricket, who only cricket know?' Nello is James's nickname.)

I began in the early 90s to tell people that I was especially interested in supporting work that was critical of James. Anna Grimshaw and I wanted to get James's own work published so that the next stage, critical analysis of that work, could develop. Claiming that James is a major twentieth century writer is one thing; treating him as such is another. Boosterism, and the perception of cultism it led to, was not doing James Studies any good. Then, in the mid-90s, with as many as eighteen James titles, half of which I had worked on in some capacity, spread over five or six sections of a good scholarly bookstore, I decided that the goal of the James Institute would be to make itself useful to people who weren't necessarily researching James. James himself would appreciate that idea, not because he was modest but because he thought people should not limit their reading. Since 1994 the Institute has added about a thousand books, and a fair amount of audio and video material, as well as keeping up with the increasing volume of articles and papers dealing with James. Already we have attracted a variety of non-James scholars. The non-James material also shows in greater depth what James's work has really meant. A new book on, say, the literature of abolitionism may not list James in the index or The Black Jacobins in the bibliography, but that doesn't mean it doesn't belong in the C.L.R. James Institute.

The Institute has expanded its Fellowship Program (a dozen Fellows over four years and counting) to include non-James scholars and non-academic writers. The Scholars Program (ad hoc users of the archive) includes professors, graduate students, and undergraduates. In 1997, Brett St. Louis, a Resident Fellow funded by the British government to research his James dissertation here, and Nicole King, a Faculty Fellow here, using her Ford Fellowship to turn her James dissertation into a book, suggested to me that the Institute host a Colloquium Series, which has become a popular format for people to present their work. These convivial evenings include Cuban food, small group discussion, and people from all walks of life, including luminaries like Edward Said, bell hooks, Gil Noble, and Anna Grimshaw as well as high school teachers and undergraduate students. The Institute has also hosted readings and published a literary chapbook, by William Mills, Resident Fellow. Some of the small group discussions we have had after listening to audio tapes and screening videos have been among the most intellectually stimulating evenings of my life.

I am extremely proud that the Institute is affiliated with the African Studies Centre of the University of Cambridge. I was also proud to chair a panel at the 1998 American Studies Association conference, at which Brett St. Louis and Nicole King presented outstanding work. I am sometimes amused that James's name would be attached to an Institute, and that I would be an Institute Director. But as long as younger people find the space supportive, it makes sense as a project with a life of its own. If James could support me, I can support them.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Ato Quayson, Anna Grimshaw, Ralph Dumain, William Mills, Gautam Premnath, Nicole King, Brett St. Louis, and the Associate Director of the C.L.R. James Institute, Brian Alleyne.

(1 December 1998)

This commissioned essay was published in the "Insti/tutions" section of the journal Interventions, vol. 1, no. 3, 1999, pp. 389-396. All rights reserved. This text may not be published, reprinted, or reproduced without express written permission.

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

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