The C.L.R. James Institute: Jim Murray Memorial Address by Ralph Dumain

Jim Murray Memorial Address

by Ralph Dumain

Welcome, everyone: friends, relations, acquaintances, colleagues, neighbors. And special thanks to Avis Lang for organizing this event. I am Ralph Dumain, Jim’s closest friend and associate during the latter years of his life, and the librarian and sole surviving representative of The C.L.R. James Institute.

Some of you know of Jim’s association with Trinidadian writer C.L.R. James and know of Jim’s role as Director of the C.L.R. James Institute. Others may have never heard of C.L.R. James, whose intimates called him “Nello.” Jim once said to me: “When Nello died, I didn’t go to the funeral, because Nello wouldn’t be there.” I can see Jim’s point, and I feel now much as Jim must have felt then. Jim detested the mentality behind fame and celebrity and would never want a sanitized image of himself packaged for public consumption. Furthermore, the veneer of official ceremony and celebration presents an impersonal façade which gives people license to avoid dealing honestly with the personal relationship with Jim they actually had.

You will hear abundant words of praise for Jim today, as I have already received through numerous communications. The recurring themes are enthusiasm and generosity, both of which could be summed up in one of Jim’s many catch-phrases: “What are your needs?” A large part of Jim’s personal magnetism was his enthusiasm for you, for your projects, for your aspirations, for your endeavors to express yourself. But what was the inner man behind this benevolent exterior thinking? The benevolence was genuine. But Jim, who enthusiastically encouraged everyone, could also be sharply critical of people’s limitations and neuroses and above all of the dehumanizing effects on personality of people's upbringing, social environment, and stunted interpersonal relations, just as he keenly felt the dehumanizing impact of his own upbringing. Jim had strong opinions, ideas, a point of view and a way of thinking. We can and will talk for hours about all the things Jim did for us, but we should not permit the inner man to be obscured by a collective portrait of Jim as everyone’s Santa Claus.

Jim was not so naïve about how others would receive his generosity. He was alert to any deference shown to him because of his perceived class position when he might not be taken seriously otherwise. At different times Jim would lend the lion’s share of his material support and attention to a particular person. Many times over the years he told me that whenever his attention shifted from one person to another, the person who was, so-to-speak, “demoted,” always resented the perceived usurper. Jim told me of people who resented me for now occupying the number one spot. In my case you can bet that academic elitism and class snobbery factor into this resentment.

When Jim faced a crisis in the months leading up to his move from the Upper West Side to Washington Heights, he became sorely disillusioned with fair-weather friends who failed to support him when his back was to the wall and he could no longer play the role of benefactor. Jim’s attitude toward them changed permanently, just as he was happy to close his quarter-century chapter of life on the Upper West Side and start a new life in Washington Heights, which was to last shy of a year.

But now I want to tell the story of my relationship to Jim, and true to the very nature of our relationship, I’m going to analyze its meaning.

When I first met Jim in April 1991, I discovered to my surprise that he was looking for me. He had read a letter I had written which was published without my knowledge or intent. It took me years to understand Jim’s enthusiasm. It is consistent with an attitude he repeatedly expressed to me, from his experience in political organizations before I knew him. Jim was never content to rest within an inward-looking subculture. He always took the position of the next person to show up, the newcomer, the outsider.

I entered Jim’s life at a pivotal moment, at the time of publication of Anna Grimshaw’s pathbreaking pamphlets on C.L.R. James, which augured the James boom of the 1990s, which was to include the publication of several books from Blackwell beginning with The C.L.R. James Reader.

When I met Jim he was still running his desktop publishing business, which was gradually phased out as the decade progressed.

Jim was also in the process of extricating himself from the political and artistic subcultures in which he had been immersed. Jim was very much a part of these subcultures, but even as he withdrew into his apartment, he maintained that the goal is to be part of society, not just a part of the left—the phraseology is his. Jim was phobic about celebrity; he shunned any attention he might have attracted for his organizing activities in the ‘60s. He said he was only looking for community, and he had it for a while in the political movement, and in the cultural movement, but then other people moved on to build their careers. I didn’t know what to make of such a criticism, as most people have to hold normal jobs and take careerism seriously. Jim both needed community and opposed the concept: he said that whenever the word “community” was brought up in a meeting, it meant he would be excluded.

Others are more qualified than I to detail Jim’s activities in the New Left, the anti-war movement, the women’s movement, and the cultural movement. Jim retained aspects of this identity, but it is also important to understand the ways in which he had distanced himself from people he knew.

Among Jim’s first words to me were: “Welcome to New York, where socialism is who you know.” At first I was puzzled by this quip, but, after spending more time in New York, I figured out what he meant.

Jim’s world was very different from mine. The Upper West Side is not Buffalo, and the neuroses of his crowd were somewhat different from the pathologies I had known either in my home town or further South. During an early visit, while we were sitting in his kitchen, Jim quipped, “Ralph hates all my middle-class friends.” He wasn’t wrong. The 1990s was a learning experience for the both of us.

Jim had a remarkable array of street smarts for someone who had come from wealth and got through most of his life without holding down a job. He was remarkably down-to-earth, though occasionally he would slip up. But at his best he had a keen sense of the circumstances under which people unlike himself really lived. Describing himself, Jim used to say: “I’m just a waste-o from the ‘burbs”, and, “I’m half-Jewish, and all WASP.” Jim was always informal. His favorite photo of himself showed a young Jim with his shirttails hanging out, working on his car.

He had a knack for making friends wherever he would hang out. He met Moshidi in a coffee bar in his old neighborhood and Danny in his apartment building in Washington Heights. He would do things for his favorite doormen in his old building.

In this way Jim set his pace for the 1990s. In addition to people he would meet through academia, most of the friends he made in the ‘90s were very different from people he had known. This explains part of his enthusiasm for the then-unknown Ralph Dumain. I was somebody outside of the creepy James world as it then existed and therefore a refreshing presence for Jim.

We shared a unique personal and working relationship. We discussed and analyzed everybody and everything, uninhibited by the usual diplomacy Jim exercised with others. Neither of us pulled any punches with the other. Jim craved the candor, transparency and objectivity of our relationship, which gave Jim something he could not get from the other people around him, even as he enthusiastically engaged so many of them on a personal level, as I could not in many cases. Of course Jim genuinely loved other friends, but he also had tremendous flexibility in relating to all kinds of people, up to the point of maintaining friendships with people he neither trusted nor respected. I found this perplexing, and admonished him repeatedly about his boundary problems.

Jim had a different characterization of what this was all about. From time to time he would say to me: “But Ralph, you’re the idealist. I’ve never met anyone like you. I’m actually much more cynical than you’ll ever be. You have such high expectations of humanity and always get angry when you are disappointed. But I expect nothing from people.”

This would make me angry. Despite our differences, we shared a sharp awareness of how people are psychologically and intellectually compromised by the institutions in which they are embedded. Jim applied the insights of C.L.R James’s work on American civilization to analyze what we experienced in our personal lives: the essential issue is not the institutions imposed from without, but the institutions ruling us from within our brains.

We learned from our work the same lessons we learned from our personal lives. For twelve years, we discussed our work, at every step, in every aspect, and not just the work, but the underlying philosophy of the work. Jim commented frequently on the uniqueness of this working relationship, and I had never experienced anything like this before. Jim and I shared an inner perspective of our work that was not perceived by the external world.

The cost of liberating James from the sectarian left was to engage with academia. We knew all along, though, that we had to make this bargain with the devil in order to get James out to the public. The ultimate measure of success was a sizable chunk of shelf space in bookstores filled with James books, mostly from academic publishers. We told one another that it would take another half century for people to absorb what we were doing in our archival work and the understanding embedded within it.

Jim was an inveterate schmoozer; he would extemporize on any subject, whether he knew what he was talking about or not. When he put his mind to it, he was also capable of highly disciplined reflection. He and I had our independent intellectual projects and trajectories. Occasionally we would independently discover comparable underlying analytical principles. Jim’s brilliant intellectual achievement of the ‘90s was his essay “The Boy at the Window”, based on an insight into James’s assumptions no one else had thought of, but the importance of which I instantly recognized, as it ran parallel to my own interests. This essay was published in a collection of essays on James. While it was by far the best essay in the book, it was segregated from the rest of the book and relegated to the status of “Afterword,” because it was not an academic essay. This experience gave us further evidence that academia could never be trusted, and that its intellectual standards were as low as its moral standards. The existing secondary literature on James was derisively referred to as “the second shelf”, because books about James happened to occupy the second shelf of the Institute’s James bookcase.

Jim’s essay was the first installment of a book in the works, which he nicknamed “The Boy—The Book.” He actually had a contract to write a textbook on James, but Jim’s book on the boy at the window would have been original and exceptional, and it breaks my heart that we shall never see it.

Many people passed through the Institute over the years. Many became our fast friends and most fervent supporters. They have all had their own lives to lead and their careers to advance, and the Institute was instrumental in many of their successes. We provided a space and services of a kind that nobody else would offer. It has been up to others to take advantage of these resources and of the liberated space we provided, according to their own mentalities, proclivities, requirements, and ambitions. Jim of course was unequivocally encouraging of all their efforts. However, Jim and I shared an understanding of the underlying philosophy and import of what we were doing that no one else, not even our most devoted supporters, completely grasped. Jim stated this repeatedly over the years, and more emphatically with the passage of time. In the last year of his life, Jim stated once again: nobody else really understands the meaning of what we’re doing. And by ‘nobody’ he meant ‘nobody’. He named some names of people who had been close to us who still didn’t get it, but I’ll keep those to myself, for now.

Jim and I observed the various people passing through the Institute and assessed their capability of taking full advantage of the liberated space we provided, which in the end always depended on what they brought with them, and the degree to which their minds were imprisoned in the limiting institutions of society, including academia and the left. Jim and I learned to develop our minds from the practice of what most people lack in their lives, the expression of individual autonomy in common association. People are dying inside for want of that one conversation they most need to have. Jim and I lived long enough to learn what it was like both to be deprived of that conversation and to experience it.

By no means did we necessarily agree in our specific judgments of people and their work at any given time, but we did agree on the underlying dynamics. Jim and I expressed ourselves differently; he, in terms of his cultural activist background; I, in more abstract and impersonal terms. Jim endorsed my perspective, which was formulated in my mission statement that can be found on the Institute web site.

In his final months, Jim expressed his view that the future of James does not lie with academia, but with the general public. All of the foregoing explains why our number one priority has been to maintain the independence of the Institute. Neither academia nor the left is trustworthy.

Among Jim’s many catch-phrases was a slogan he repeated over the past dozen years: “As the Left goes down, James goes up.” This never made sense to me, until two weeks ago. It suddenly dawned on me: Of course! C.L.R. James must be freed of his iconic status. His method cannot emerge full-force until he is liberated from the inhibiting constraints of the left. And one day he will have to be freed from academia before it buries him.

This was to be our year of triumph, in which everything would come together. It turned into a year of tragedy. Now I’m left alone.

And now that Jim has receded into history, will the truth about Jim and who he became in the last dozen years of his life be covered up or disappeared by those who have a vested interest in refusing to face who he really was and what their real—not imagined—relationship with him was? Everybody wanted a piece of Jim, but how many have troubled themselves to dig deeper beyond what they wanted to see, in Jim or in themselves? Will prevarication and hypocrisy prevail?

I don’t know who among you cares about the pursuit of truth, but I now feel a burden lifted from me. Jim would be proud of me for disallowing pretense to prevail. And to those of you who have betrayed Jim’s legacy and violated every principle he lived for: I ask you to reconsider what you’re doing. It’s only too obvious that none of us lives forever. Do right while you still can.

Finally, I want to quote from my farewell message to Jim, interred with his ashes: “I know that if you were here, you'd know what I was thinking and how I would perceive the inner truth of the situation that no official memorial could or would articulate. The truth must be preserved for the future somehow. Maybe someday someone will understand what we shared. There are those who care enough to know there was something there worth supporting, as there are others who have already betrayed it. . . . I wish I could protect you somehow, and I wish you could protect me. No matter what happens, at least I can say, I know. What else can I offer now but my tears? Goodbye . . . Ralph”

Ralph Dumain's Farewell Message to Jim Murray

Memorial Tributes to Jim Murray

In Memoriam: Jim Murray

The C.L.R. James Institute—A New Model of Scholarship in the Social Division of Labor

Ralph Dumain, Librarian/Archivist & Webmaster

Uploaded 10 November 2003