The C.L.R. James Institute: Texts: Conversation with Anna Grimshaw

The C.L.R. James Institute

C.L.R. James in the 1980s:
A Conversation with Anna Grimshaw

The following is a slightly edited transcript of a conversation held by Kent Worcester, Jim Murray, and Anna Grimshaw in New York City on April 24th, 1991.

Kent Worcester: Tell us about how you first met James, and what household life was like with James.

Anna Grimshaw: I met James in early 1983. I had gone through a university education in the 1970s, at Cambridge in anthropology, and I’d never once come across James’ work there. It wasn’t in circulation amongst the intellectuals or academics that I knew. I came across it in the early 1980s; at that time I was living in Manchester, I was working in television and through my television work I’d become friendly with an Indian writer, Farrukh Dhondy.

Now, Farrukh Dhondy was close to James, and James was extremely fond of Farrukh because he had graduated in literature and his knowledge of English literature was very extensive. He was a great lover of Shakespeare and James found it quite hard to find people to spend afternoons going over the Shakespeare plays with him, which Farrukh was very happy to do. Farrukh took me to meet James in early 1983; at that time Jim Murray was working as his assistant, and James was very keen for me to help him write or finish his autobiography. I didn’t know then that there had been many other people involved in the autobiographical project from something like the early 1970s. Jim had recently acquired James’ papers, documents and letters from his ex-wife Selma and was in the process of sorting and cataloging them.

So when I began to working with James in August 1983 I had no real idea what the work would be or how long it would last. The pleasures of that kind of work were having this open access to books and papers and being able to read freely through these boxes and boxes of documents, being able to dwell on things that were interesting, pass over others that seemed less interesting, but also to be in the same room as James, to be able to engage in conversation, to listen in on interviews and other conversations he had.

It must be remembered that he lived in one room. And when I first went to work for him he didn’t have any chairs to sit on -- other than a chair at a desk -- so he lay in bed all day which wasn’t good for his health, to be lying in bed getting no exercise or circulation. I encouraged him to get up everyday, to get dressed everyday, and I think that psychologically made a difference to him, to feel that

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he was part of society in some sense. In the early months of my working for him he still went out to address public meetings, so I took him to several of those which was interesting, given his reputation as an orator. He retired in early 1984 from public speaking, though he continued to see many people in his home. Again, when I first worked for him he was a very avid reader -- new books as well as going back to his favorites, like Thackeray and Shakespeare. His reading declined from about the mid-1980s; he had less and less energy or concentration, so I increasingly encouraged people to come and spend time there, not just to interview him but to simply spend time with him watching TV or having lunch or simply keeping him company. And I think that played a part in keeping him feeling that he was in touch with things, given his declining energy.

Jim Murray: And, Anna, it has to be said that the company that he most desired was that of yourself. It meant a great deal to him to succeed in wooing you into my place.

Anna: That’s true, I think, he was very vulnerable in his last years, and lonely. One of my greatest pluses was that I was completely reliable. If I said I would be there at such a time I would be, and having been there stranded so often or feeling dependent on people who didn’t turn up to make his breakfast or get him out of bed was something that he very much valued.

Jim: And being able to call you.

Anna: Being able to call me. I think he really felt he could depend upon me. We also shared a lot. I was interested in my own work, it gave me space to do a lot of my own writing, and it gave him enormous satisfaction that I was there in the room, that I wasn’t bothering him and he wasn’t bothering me. I had my work to do. We got along very well.

Kent: Did James take an interest in your life?

Anna: Oh, yes, like with everyone else he was constantly asking me questions about who I was and where I came from, and what my history and origins were. We talked a lot. And he had a remarkable memory for these things. It wasn’t as if he just asked these questions and immediately forgot the answers to them. He really liked to be able to place somebody.

Kent: Was there something in particular he focused on?

Anna: Well, there were various things. First of all, I came from a part of Lancashire that he knew well; it was six or seven miles from Nelson. My mother and her friends he was very fond of, because in a sense there were similar to Harry Spencer and the people he knew in Nelson. The Oxbridge education I’d had was something

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he was interested in, given that all the teachers he’d had as a boy at Queens Royal College were Oxford or Cambridge graduates. And anthropology -- he was very interested in the details of how other people lived, and from individual details to societies, and we talked a lot about what work I’d done, or what I’d read or studied. And I was a woman; he was interested to know how young women thought.

Kent: Do you think of him as an anthropologist?

Anna: Do I think of James as an anthropologist? Yes, in some sense... I wasn’t so aware of what the connections were between my anthropology and James’ approach to the world. I now see that they were very deeply and intimately connected, that he always began from what people actually did, how society worked, what people did in society, and of course that’s the whole basis, or was the whole basis, of anthropological inquiry. It may not be so in the 1990s, but the real foundations of anthropology in the early 20th century were fieldwork, ethnography. And that was where James began.

Jim: Also, he identified you with the women that he knew from the 1930s, who worked with blacks in London and who he’d had a very positive experience with. I’m quite certain that that is how he defined you in the beginning, because I was there when he’d call you every afternoon. He used to tell me, and other people, about you, and the way that you established your relationship with him -- it has to be said -- included a great deal of the peculiarities of the English in terms of the rhythms of the way that you two charmed each other with language. It was stunning to anyone who ever saw the two of you together, that you were like an old couple for the steadiness and relentlessness of all the private rituals that you engaged in in that small space. Keith [Hart] describes it as a sense of equality that you had. One aspect of this tangible intellectual equality was the way Nello relied on your special knowledge of his work.

Kent: When did he first need a relationship like this?

Anna: It’s very difficult to say. I think that this is what he sought from Constance Webb. The courtship of Constance Webb made him really aware of what was missing in his life, that it lacked wholeness, and what creativity could come out of that wholeness if he would only grasp it. He failed to grasp it, and it’s my feeling that the ‘50s and ‘60s and ‘70s were ones which he knew he wasn’t completing the work, the intellectual work, that his personal life was one of migration, and I know from talking to one woman in particular in London who he very much hoped to marry in the 1950s that he really did feel that something very large was missing from

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his life. He said many times to me that his regret in life, now he was in his 80s, was the fact that he’d never really made a relationship with a woman, that he’d always seen the personal relationship as something secondary, as something that distracted him from what he regarded as his real work. It was something that he felt keenly that he’d missed.

Jim: You asked about Nello’s interest in Anna’s life. It should also be said that whenever Anna did anything, like going to a cocktail party, or going to the movies, or outings with her spinster friends to cultural events or whatever, Nello would grill her for all of the possible gossip value and this was just one of the many rituals that they performed that entertained them.

Anna: That brought him news from the outside. The idea that he was connected to what was happening outside that room.

Kent: So who really spent a lot of time with him, from 1983 on?

Anna: Well, Martina Thompson, a woman he’d met after he returned in England in 1953. She was a consistent visitor. There were other people that I’d encourage, many friends of mine who would come by. He spent long periods by himself, or having me as his only companion -- people didn’t always drop by to see him. Partly his living condition made that difficult, that there was a history of getting access to James, which deterred people, and many people didn’t really know how he lived, or how he desired company.

Jim: Some explicit things should be said about the role of Race Today. Before Anna, they served as gatekeepers in ways that we don’t even know. What people in London knew was that if you wanted to get in touch with James you got in touch with Race Today. A lot of people did that and never got to James. Also, much has been said in the press about the presence of a collective of young blacks putting out a publication living below him as a source of sustenance and support for him. It was a little more complicated than that. Leila Hassan was on a daily basis very helpful to Nello, but unfortunately Race Today could never really count on anyone (except Anna) to be there for Nello in the morning, which was so important to him. They would pop their heads in the door, they would come visit or watch TV, Nello would always be asking people to run errands, but for the purpose of this discussion I want people to understand that Nello and Anna between them had a lot of privacy and equality. And, as I said when I introduced Anna at the James Conference at Wellesley, she provided a very special service in making sure that anyone who wanted to see Nello could do so easily.

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Kent: How did James feel about dying?

Anna: He didn’t very much talk about his dying, he was very conscious of his vulnerability. He was anxious not to become some bed-ridden invalid; he didn’t like being alone. I moved to a house that was literally across the road from him about four or five months before he died, which meant that I spent more or less all of my time there, and in retrospect I’m very glad that I did. I would work from 8 until 5, and go home for an hour or two and then go back around 7 and watch TV. Many times he would plead with me not to go, because the idea of being there alone waiting for me to come back in the morning was something he found very hard.

Jim: When I was there in this capacity I didn’t understand how much he needed that. When he spoke of his age it was that he didn’t like being old. And I didn’t hear the loneliness in that that Anna heard and responded to. Naturally, anyone who wanted to see him could come, sure, right away, but I wasn’t sensitive to him in the more natural human way that Anna was in that sense.

Kent: How much of the autobiography was written?

Anna: It’s patchy. I worked on drafts that had already been done and I made some tapes with him. It’s quite strong on the early years, in fact I think that is its strength. There are manuscripts from ‘32 to ‘38 and from the American period, but they’re very, very uneven. Then there are a few bits and pieces from later. What he always said to me was — and I really understand what he meant now, although I didn’t then — was that he never wanted to write an autobiography, but he had been told many, many times by people that he should and so he felt obliged historically to do it. The problem, as he always said, was that the autobiography had to be more than just a series of people and events, and he had no inspiration...

Kent: No narrative?

Anna: Well, it had to be more than just a mere chronological narrative, and he had no inspiration or energy.

Jim: He had no interest in writing the kind of autobiography that we in this country anyway would want him to write. But he did discover that the autobiography was a good way to get people to come help him. There are many, including me; Terisa Turner in the summers in the ‘70s spent time with him accumulating hundreds of pages of memoir.

Kent: Why wasn’t the book on Shakespeare ever written?

Anna: Again, after he left America in ‘53 1 think his life was extremely difficult. He had some very ambitious plans and if he’d had the right conditions, I think he would have produced some very

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original work. As it is, I think he really only produced Beyond a Boundary after 1953 that stands out. Throughout the fifties and sixties he was struggling to keep going. To read any of his papers in the 1950s or even in the 1960s. . . he was literally desperate financially, and it was difficult for him to concentrate on a big writing project, although he always hoped that some publisher would take up his work, particularly in the early sixties when Black Jacobins was picked up by Random House. I think he really thought that there was a chance for some of the earlier work to be put back in print and for him to get an advance to do some of these big works. But the Shakespeare book is interesting. It’s my argument that his understanding of Shakespeare clarified a great deal during the period of independence, that Shakespeare was something that he’d always been interested in throughout his life. What I also understand now as a result of doing the archive book is that what interested him about Shakespeare was the dramatic quality of the work. He always stresses that Shakespeare has to be seen on the stage and not read privately in the study, and that for him was the fundamental problem with all contemporary criticism of Shakespeare.

Kent: Too textual...

Anna: Too textual. People retreating into the study instead of situating their criticism in the performance, in the public performance of Shakespeare.

Kent: So it’s the audience as well as the actors.

Anna: Yes, that was something that obviously mirrored his approach to cricket and other forms of art. Throughout the fifties and sixties, when he talked about writing his book on Shakespeare he was also talking about writing a book that captured that period of independence. He felt that that period was a unique period, it was a period when questions concerning political life were unusually clarified, the relationship between the individual and society, the sort of government leaders, and he became more and more convinced that King Lear was the real crux of Shakespeare’s work, because in King Lear the theme of government, the central theme of "who rules" whether someone is born to rule, or whether someone through their experiences in society becomes fitted for rule (such as the character Edgar) was for him what the independence politics threw up.

Kent: It wasn’t about the transition from feudalism to capitalism.

Anna: No; he was very sensitive to where Shakespeare lay in history, that the Elizabethan period was a period in which one world was giving way to another, and that the old feudal notions of

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government were breaking down. Particularly the plays Hamlet and King Lear for him revealed Shakespeare’s sensitivity to the birth of the new order. James had a very sophisticated and consistent thesis about the development of the problem of government in Shakespeare’s history plays.

Kent: And the problem of leadership. Which is a key problematic in James’ work.

Anna: Shakespeare enabled him to clarify an awful lot of questions that were floating around within what you may call more conventionally his political work. He could have written a book on Shakespeare. He had an original thesis and he had a very consistent and developed argument, and if you look in his unpublished writings you see quite clearly how carefully he thought out his position. It was really by looking through his unpublished papers that I was able to make sense of the references he kept making in the ‘80s to Shakespeare and King Lear which many other people refer to without being fully aware of what a tip of an iceberg it is.

Kent: There’s a project that you seem to identify in the pamphlets which starts with the letters to Constance -- although there is the glimmer of it in some of the pre-Marxist stuff -- and which plays itself out in Notes on American Civilization (The Struggle for Happiness), in the unpublished Preface to Criticism, in Beyond a Boundary, and in this unwritten book on Shakespeare. Is there something else?

Anna: There are other writings. What’s distinctive is that he didn’t ever confine his approach to art -- either to high art or to popular art -- that he had a very inclusive notion. Also, he moved with remarkable ease from music to film to drama to literature. Again, within his unpublished documents there are documents say about Michelangelo, about Picasso, about Jackson Pollock, which I really now see as being part of this very developed notion he had of the relationship between creativity and democracy. There are particular historical moments when societies are changing, when there’s an expansion in the understanding of democracy, when there’s a release of creative energy which finds its expression in new creative forms. The way he approached Shakespeare was the way he approached Michelangelo. He didn’t make any divisions; these were all part of the same moment of creativity and finding its expression in artistic relations. So there are things on the visual arts within his papers that also add up to something substantial.

Kent: I left out Modern Politics. In a way it seems like Modern Politics is the most inclusive of this work.

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Anna: Yes, it’s a rather tantalizing but rather unsatisfactory attempt...

Jim: The thing about Modern Politics is the same thing about Shakespeare. You can’t grasp the dramatic moment of the number of people who came to those lectures and what they meant in terms of turning the independence movement into a school. Look at what happened in Cuba in the same period. And in other parts of the world. The civil rights movement was doing it at the same time. Bringing people together, and finding anyone who could make sense of the world and talk about what’s going on. No matter how long it took, the people would come! People would come and listen to Fidel speak for four hours because he had four hours of things to tell them. In repressing that book, what Eric Williams was trying to do was take away the experience from all of the people who had had it.

Kent: Does Fidel have four hours of stuff to tell people now?

Jim: No, I mean that’s one aspect of the Cuban revolution, it got shorter and shorter.

Kent: Martin Glaberman says that James never in a million years would have called Notes on American Civilization "The Struggle for Happiness."

Anna: The Struggle for Happiness was actually the title of a chapter in James’ unpublished work, Notes on American Civilization. He had chosen that title himself. The title of that chapter marks the bridge in the book, and really reveals the ambitiousness of the project, in that James within that one book was seeking to fuse historical and literary sources with detailed accounts of day-to-day lives, and to give some particular insight into American history and its society at a particular moment in history. At that moment when he stepped into the contemporary lives of Americans he called his chapter "The Struggle for Happiness."

It’s a phrase that appears again and again in James’ writing after 1950, and happiness is something that he was aware of for its historical ramifications. It was not a trivial term, which in some senses it has become. He understood its symbolism obviously within America’s foundation, and for him it summed up what was distinctive about the 20th century, that the ideas of liberty and equality, which were in a sense the achievements of the European revolutions and European civilization were not adequate enough for the human condition in the 20th century. And what America’s great contribution was to the understanding of humanity is this notion of happiness, by which he meant integration of the individual. That the individual would be free to express himself or

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herself as fully and freely as they wished, but within an expanded conception of social life. This was the struggle he saw within America, raging at every point in American society from the personal through to relations in the workplace. At the end of his life, when he returned to Notes on American Civilization and was preparing it for publication, he agreed that this title was something that captured the work. And so it was being prepared under that title, The Struggle for Happiness, when he died in 1989.

Jim: Glaberman says that the title is trivial, but he doesn’t pause to ask any questions about the other title, that he assumes is not trivial (Notes on American Civilization), which is totally unspecific, totally vague, and for Glaberman I guess what would make that be untrivial as a title is that it would go with the name C.L.R. James, and that it would be addressing such a large, great topic. His attack on that title actually shows why the book was never published by that group. The group was not there to put forth the idea that the struggle for happiness mattered. Nello always said that he would study America on America’s terms. And the more you read of what his views really were, the more you realize how he was coming to America not from America’s terms, but that he was representing a much longer European, trans-historical outlook. To him it was special because he was looking at it from such a distinct, well-defined other place, which was the long battle for liberty and equality.

Let me elaborate. I wrote up that little TV anecdote on the back of pamphlet four, the one with the introduction to Anna’s James Reader. The thing about Nello looking at the whole picture of the village on TV, not just the political content of the story being covered. At the James conference in Wellesley last week a longtime member of Johnson-Forest asked me why I told that story, why I put it on the back cover. Like it was so trivial. What Anna is emphasizing about Nello is just a part of him that they have never recognized.

George Rawick told the story of going to see Dr. Zhivago with Nello. Nello said every revolutionary should see that movie, for two reasons: one, you don’t play with revolution, and, two, the first test of any revolution is how it treats artists. By that standard the Western left in this century has a lot to answer for. And I don’t mean in power; I mean the everyday denial of the creativity and skills of ordinary people.

I couldn’t clearly answer the question of why tell that TV anecdote, but afterwards I thought: to sell books!

Kent: I meant to ask this before. Did James watch television as an anthropologist?

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Anna: The television was always on in James’ room. He didn’t always watch it. He was very interested in watching old films, because he was fascinated by how actors moved around. He watched a film as he watched a cricket match, and was less interested in the story than in the particular characters people created on screen. He was also interested in soap operas, and watched American, Australian and British soap operas. He had seen the importance of soap operas as a modern art form, that they gave a chance for a new relationship to be constructed between audience and artist, between life and art. But he saw quite clearly that the modern soap opera was a distorted form, that it in fact was not an expression of creative form but was quite the reverse. He had a very good, critical sense of British soap operas. He often said, watching Eastenders or Coronation Street, which are held up as insights into English working class life, he would say "that’s how the middle classes see the British working class -- they’re not like that at all."

Jim: You can’t forget his favorite show -- every afternoon, while it was still on -- Crown Court. There would be no interruptions during Crown Court, and I would watch this as avidly as he did. It was the same level of abstraction from real social conflict as his view of Moby Dick, that you have the conflict presented, you have the real people presented, but you have all the rest of the stuff torn away. The law is serving its role to get at the facts or whatever -- to be able to see the people that directly, participating in organized relationship to each other. . . There was no talking during Crown Court, not to the end of the show. They were always about everyday crimes. They were exactly like Judge Wapner. Nello got into the appeal of those programs in exactly the same way that anyone else in the society would have. That was the cricket match happening outside his window.

Anna: But he would never watch talking heads programs. He would say "I’m not listening to intellectuals talk at the end of the 20th century," and would switch immediately to some dire soap opera.

Jim: There are so few channels in England that everyone is watching the exact same thing, and he developed his own, personal reaction to the individual characters who appear on British TV everyday.

Kent: There’s a sort of Jamesian line on technology, which is, obviously, interested in social relations, how people use things. How did he respond to the new technologies that came along -- the computer, the Walkman, virtual reality?

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Anna: It was just part of the development of communications. He just saw it increasing people’s ability to make connections over huge distances.

Kent: So he never felt self-conscious; he never played up his ignorance.

Anna: No, he would want to know how it worked, what was the benefit? He would want to know what you could do with these things. One of the biggest things about the twentieth century for him was communications.

Jim: He had a boom box. And in the twenties in Trinidad he had a turntable. He wanted to hear music, and that was the form in which it came to him. We think of technology as the level you’re not at, and the only way we use it is in New Left terms of being against it. But he didn’t have any of that at all. He wasn’t concerned with that debate at all, not at all.

Kent: Was he an environmentalist?

Anna: People kept telling him to read Rudolph Bahro in the early ‘80s. And he kept saying, "there’s nothing there, I can’t discover anything there, Lenin was the last writer who ever meant anything to me." But you only have to read Mariners, Renegades and Castaways to see that James understood the relationship between nature and society, and that if you talk about nature you’re talking about society, that they’re inseparable.

Kent: There is a quibble, though. Maybe it’s a quibble, maybe it’s not. Which is that Marxism, all post-Enlightenment thought, doesn’t give us a nuanced appreciation of the autonomy of nature, that it doesn’t offer us a platform on which to develop a politics where we would want to see certain habitats essentially left alone. The Enlightenment, and Marxism and Lenin, don’t give you a basis to talk about the fact that the whales of the Atlantic cannot communicate across the same distances that they used to be able to because of all of the noise that’s being made.

Anna: James would have no problem with environmental politics. He was interested in society, but I don’t think he ever saw that as separate from the environment.

Jim: The way a topic like this came up the most was related to the anti-nuclear movement in the early eighties. Maybe it explains something about James to say that his interest in that movement was that people were doing it. He didn’t join it, in the sense of "yes, I want to share this concern, this is what I have to add to the movement." He regarded it as a genuine social movement that he wasn’t going to judge or condemn because of its adherence to his own

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political philosophy, but in fact they were the subject of his study all along.

Kent: Did he see that approach as Leninist, or as Bolshevik?

Anna: What approach?

Kent: Of not trying to judge social movements by some political norm?

Anna: As Jim says, he was interested in what made people mobilize, and what happened in the process of that mobilization. Whether it was whales or nuclear power, whatever the issues were, the political process involved, in people getting together. . . I know when people came to see him for advice about a whole range of issues they were concerned with, he always wanted to know what they were doing, what they were doing in terms of publishing, writing, organizing, and he was less interested in the validity of their case or not. His support was always for the activity itself.

Kent: That sounds more "anthropological" than I think of Lenin. I wonder if there isn’t an inconsistency.

Jim: No, no. You’ve put your finger on it. Nello had a view of Lenin which emphasized the anthropologist in Lenin. He said so, over and over again, that what was different about Lenin was that he watched what the workers were doing. That’s what Nello said about Marx also.

Two quick things about Nello and Lenin: One, he always emphasized, in "Lenin and the Problem" and elsewhere, Lenin’s testament as being educate the peasants and abolish the state apparatus. Two: the notion we have of Leninism as being equivalent to the vanguard party and opposed to prefigurative politics is not Nello’s notion of Leninism. Nello never denied or modified his own Marxism or his own Leninism even though his theory repudiated the vanguard party.

Anna: But Lenin was sensitive to more than just the workers. Lenin’s world was bigger than that.

Jim: The reversal of the process of a political person’s relationship to social change is what Nello is about. The Left thinks of itself as needing to control and guide and mobilize social change and social movements, but Nello says what can we learn from people and movements.

Kent: I still think that it’s an idiosyncratic reading of Lenin.

Jim: Of course it is.

Kent: Did he think of himself as a Bolshevik, as having Bolshevik habits? Did he use that word, or that kind of language?

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Anna: No, he would always say to me the person who matters is Lenin, that if you want to learn anything about politics, about revolution, about government, but as far as I know he never called himself a Bolshevik.

Kent: Because in the letters to Constance he says "I’ve really mastered the method." It really was striking.

Jim: It’s interesting that you would ask about environmentalism first. (A generation ago the question might have been about race as a category in left discourse.) The 1983 issue of Cultural Correspondence, which Nello said was about the movement he had seen coming, was about the art of the anti-nuclear movement, and it was about individual voices of alienation, among other things. We can see now from the point of view often years later that he was plugged into what was going to be happening, what was happening internationally. Not to mention Eastern Europe and the political upsurge in the Soviet Union.

Kent: It is often said that the 1960 car crash in Jamaica was a major turning point in his life. What’s your sense of that?

Anna: I don’t think so at all. I think the fifties and sixties in general were very difficult times for him, because he was financially in difficult circumstances; he was not surrounded or part of a community which supported the work he was doing. I’m not saying that what he needed was Johnson-Forest or to have remained, because I believe that Johnson-Forest was by 1950 finished anyway, and that in fact it was prolonged beyond that period by the political circumstances, probably to many people’s detriment.

Kent: That’s actually a major claim right there.

Anna: I’ll get back to it, but I want to say that after James left America he found no connection within European society for the ambitious project that he was hoping to do. He didn’t have the money to concentrate on full-time writing, but he was also arguing against the established literary critics, going against them in some fundamental sense, and he had really no base to do that. His personal life was unsatisfactory. Selma was not an intellectual companion, she did not share his artistic interests, she did not share the interest in this bigger project, which he had planned following The Struggle for Happiness. She obviously did a great deal of work for him, but I don’t think she or anyone of the other Americans he worked with had any real sense of that project. Constance I think is the exception. I don’t believe any of the others really shared in that vision he had.

Kent: Let’s talk about Johnson-Forest.

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Anna: It’s my feeling that by 1950 Johnson-Forest had done the original creative work which it had done, and that it was really time for the group to go their separate ways.

Kent: And what does that mean?

Anna: Well, I think that James was very anxious to get down to this big study of American civilization, to do a biography of [Walt] Whitman, to write something on cricket, maybe to do something on Shakespeare...

Kent: These are all parts of that big project.

Anna: According to Constance Webb, and it is also my feeling, he was ready to launch himself as a writer in a very general sense. The American civilization book would be the first.

Kent: To really re-launch himself as a writer, because that’s what he was doing in ‘32 and ‘33 and ‘34...

Anna: Yes, and the fact that the group was being hounded, and the fact that he was interned on Ellis Island, meant that he had to fall back on the group to help him out, to support him, to make arrangements for him. In a sense this artificially prolonged this form of a group which had produced very good work for ten years but whose time was over.

Kent: What work should they have done?

Anna: I think they probably should have disbanded. Obviously, had they disbanded, the chances of them actually breaking very violently with one another would have been much less likely. Maybe they could have continued in a looser and more creative way.

Jim: You can’t say of a group they should have disbanded. What you can ask is, why didn’t they develop in any of the ways their previous work suggested they might have.

Kent: Even as the first issues of Correspondence suggested.

Anna: All of the people in the group needed to be freer to develop, to go on to the next stage, to discover what they wanted to do. They were prevented from doing that by this struggle around James’ being able to stay.

Kent: Why did James spend so much time, then, after leaving for London in communication, writing the long letters?

Anna: It was a struggle within his own personality. He knew that there was an intense struggle going on between that sort of conventional revolutionary and a much broader, romantic, artistic, human experience, and he really thought that America had enabled him to bring them into an active connection. He was very isolated, and

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dependent upon them financially and socially after he arrived in London.

Jim: Nello’s whole personal life was a series of extreme dependencies that explain a lot of anomalies. It is certainly anomalous that he spent so much time in the fifties working things out when the situation was already so contradictory. Because of the leadership role he had with them, and how they viewed him, and how they constructed his social and material identity in this country in that way, that it wasn’t possible to break it properly. He was stuck with the unresolved nature of the extreme situation he was in with them.

Kent: So Facing Reality doesn't justify...

Anna: I don’t think so. Obviously some good work continued to come out. But it prevented him and probably Grace Lee and Raya [Dunayevskaya] also felt that it prevented them from doing something new.

Kent: Did you have any dealings with Dunayevskaya?

Anna: No. I think that the violence of the breaks with Raya and Grace are an indication of how tense and unsatisfactory the situation was in terms of people being able to express their own creative and intellectual qualities.

Jim: The book Facing Reality represents the fact that Hungary [‘56] happened, on top of their ideas. That book came out, and it did reach some younger people in this country. A lot of people would say that Facing Reality is what started them.

Kent: Paul Berman mentions Facing Reality.

Jim: That’s what you read of Nello if you were active in the ‘60s and someone turned you on to Nello. So that’s a real achievement. But the confirmation of what Anna is saying is that there wasn’t anything in Facing Reality that they hadn’t done ten years before.

Kent: Let me just ask, have you seen Alex Callinicos’ book on Trotskyism?

Anna: No.

Kent: It’s very well organized. And for a short description of Trotskyism it’s very good. It has a sort of three-fold analysis of Trotskyism after Trotsky: the orthodox Trots, the heterodox Trots, and the heretics. It calls attention to a number of statements that James made after 1963 where it didn’t seem as if his anti-Stalinism was consistent -- in terms of Castro, in terms of African socialism, and in terms of social democracy (Michael Manley). . .

Jim: Third world regimes.

Kent: Yes, third world regimes, but mainly one-party states.

[15]

Anna: The Pan-African section of the archive book is very interesting and very strong, because over and over again he identifies a major problem in the new nations between the people who took over after independence and the masses of people. I don’t think that James ever backed a one-party regime, and he saw the entire period of independence in Africa to be one of instability, because this problem had not been solved, because fundamentally a new society has to be formed. That was why he responded so openly to [Dr. Julius] Nyerere, for all of the problems that he had, because he really saw that this was the first recognition that something genuinely African had to be built. One had to get away from colonial structures which continued to dominate these new nations. But always James was aware of modern African peoples, or modern peoples everywhere.

Jim: What Nello is watching in the third world from the fifties on was not issues of government or debates over political theories, he’s watching changing societies, and his message is always "get the government out of the way." The criticism of him of not having the correct anti-Stalinist position comes from the fact that he wasn’t interested in maintaining the correct anti-Stalinist position.

Kent: I would want to go back and read this literature.

Jim: In Cuba, he always distinguished between the revolutionary movement and the government. He never was pro-Fidel.

Kent: What were his experiences in Cuba?

Anna: All I know is that be went to a couple of conferences of writers and intellectuals. For him the intellectuals were a big category in the independence period, he didn’t just mean university teachers. He meant by that people who had been educated abroad and went back to these countries to lead them to independence. That was the tension that dominated all of his writing, between the leaders, the intellectuals, and popular aspirations.

Jim: The particular thing about the congress of revolutionary intellectuals that happened in 1968 was that it was an extraordinary act of leadership by the Cuban revolution. Nello went there and said intellectuals don’t matter and didn’t say anything good about the government. Nello never had any fondness whatsoever about the Cuban government. Andrew Salkey has a passage about Nello in Havana.

Kent: In the eighties was he reading Plato and Aristotle?

Anna: No, he would refer to works that he regarded as critical in his formation but he wasn’t actively reading them. He had a great number of books on Greek philosophy and Greek civilization. It was important to him to have these books in his library. He

[16]

rediscovered Rousseau, though I don’t really know the substance of the importance of Rousseau for him. Unfortunately, there is nothing on Rousseau in the archive, except for the references in Modern Politics.

Kent: There’s nobody more interested in the integration of the individual and society than Rousseau.

Anna: That was clearly there.

Kent: Did James have an epistemology?

Anna: What exactly do you mean by that?

Kent: A theory of how we know things.

Anna: [Long pause.] Not something that he would articulate in such a formal way.

Jim: Skilled labor. The experience of working together.

Anna: Society.

Jim: He had a theory of relationships that dominated his study of society. It wasn’t just Marxism or class conflict.

Kent: That’s classical. It’s only with say, Descartes or Bacon that you get a real separation of mind and body, in the "bourgeois" sense of these two spheres. With the Greeks there really is a sense that you just take for granted the existence of physical objects and the sense that language can at least be used fruitfully in a way that will explain something that’s outside the speaker, outside the audience, even as it’s the audience itself that makes history, that makes itself. In a way, I’m sorry that nobody talked to him about Plato and Aristotle or about the Greeks.

Anna: I think the ‘50s and ‘60s was the time when he went back to that stuff --Preface to Criticism, etc. Every Cook Can Govern is not really the best example of his really serious interest in classical works.

Jim: I once joked to Nello that Every Cook Can Govern is an insult to cooks. On NeIlo’s "classicism," the example that comes to mind is that he once hoped to put out a sequel to Beyond a Boundary that was a book of photographs of cricketers playing.

Kent: Sculpture.

Anna: That is what it was.

Jim: Going back to television, that was what interested him about horse racing, which is on practically everyday in Britain. Not just sculpture, but the grace of motion. It fascinated him that the small ankles of horses could support so much weight.

Kent: Did he have a sense of eternity?

[17]

Jim: [Long pause] Since he was invited by a lot of churches, especially in the black community, he had a sort of standard reply, at least when I was there, which was that spirituality wasn’t of interest to him. He didn’t make a big deal out of it. What he did make a big deal of was Alice Walker’s description, in Meridian, of black people in the South coming together in church.

Anna: But he wasn’t a strict rationalist, either. I mean, the artist in him was very interested in those areas which artists excavate. I remember an encounter when this person rang up and said they wanted to see C.L.R. This very respectable gentleman from Jamaica showed up, in his fifties or older, very proper, old-fashioned sort of gentleman, and he sat down and told this story to us of how he believed his house had been bewitched. He lived in Cambridge, and he told this tale of his neighbors and how they had bewitched him and his wife. It went on for about an hour. C.L.R. was there nodding, asking questions, taking it as a serious account. The story was resolved successfully, as the neighbors moved and the bewitching ceased. Afterwards, James said to me, "What did you think of that?" I said, "It’s an interesting story." He said, "Well, I found it absolutely fascinating. These things can happen you know." There is one letter in the Constance letters where he talks about enjoying being a novelist and hearing people tell stories which were odd mystery stories. The one he tells in his letter to Constance is a similar sort of ghostly story in which a house had appeared and then disappeared.

Kent: "La Divina Pastora."

Jim: Exactly, but there was actually that element in all of the published short stories -- but not in Minty Alley. There’s a piece in the archive which is a three page typescript on dreams, and in it Nello basically endorses the traditional West Indian view that dreams are predicting the future. He always totally rejected psychoanalysis.

Kent: Although somewhere he has something respectful to say about Freud.

Jim: As a creative thinker maybe. Not psychotherapy.

Anna: For him, what Freud exposed (as America did) was the human personality in all of its layers and complexities. But once you remove that from society... well, isn’t that the fundamental error of psychoanalysis?

Kent: What did James make of the counter-culture?

Anna: What do you mean by "the counter-culture"?

Kent: Maybe that’s an Americah expression. The late sixties. The really singular way in which literally millions of young people

[18]

formed a kind of imaginary community based on specific forms of music, drug use, language, costume, etc. which played itself out -- and is still playing itself out in different parts of the world -- as the living expression of "the personal is political."

Anna: Again, he was interested in modern forms of political mobilization. He was interested in the activity much more than the actual labels one would give it. He was always very open to what people were doing, he was very interested in people trying to find new forms of societies, forming new relationships, making connections between things. That was the stuff of politics for him.

Jim: He wasn’t in touch with it on the American side, but he wasn’t against it as a Marxist. That’s really important. There’s probably not a single comment that I ever came across where he says anything explicit about the counter-culture. What you’re talking about is the white counter-culture.

Kent: There was a generation gap in Detroit just as there was in Scarsdale or wherever.

Jim: Like everything else, he was interested in what young people were doing. But he had much less contact with it than you would think, because he wasn’t here. No one in the counter-culture invited Nello to speak.

Kent: Is there any secondary literature on James that is worthwhile?

Anna: There’s very little. We all know what there is. There’s nothing outstanding amongst it. That work is waiting to be done. I really have a sense that we can look forward to very good work coming out on James. Not only do we have a mass of new materials to be working on, but those old debates are done, and there will be new generations of people who don’t come from the Old Left or from the Black Studies programs where positions have really ossified.

Jim: There is a book for which I have a particular fondness. The secondary book that influenced me was the Urgent Tasks compilation, the Life and Work that Paul (Buhle) edited for Urgent Tasks and Allison and Busby republished with a few changes. That book taught me the importance, to James, of autonomy. I can’t name another book that I have the same fondness for, but Anna and Keith’s essay on the America book does come to mind. They offer a sustained argument which is inspiring for the thoroughness and the virtuosity of its analysis.

Kent: In a sense, it’s much more Jamesian to think of the books that have been inspired by James than works on James specifically.

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Original publication (c) 1991. Web page (c) 2001 The C.L.R. James Institute. All rights reserved. This text may not be published, reprinted, or reproduced without the permission of The C.L.R. James Institute.

Web page prepared by Ralph Dumain, 4 April 2001

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