The C.L.R. James Institute

Popular Democracy and the Creative Imagination: The Writings of C.L.R. James 1950-1963 by Anna Grimshaw

For Jim Murray

Anna Grimshaw is an anthropologist and writer. She is the editor of Cricket, by C.L.R. James (London: Allison and Busby, 1986); the editor of The C.L.R. James Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991); and the author of a memoir, Servants of the Buddha. She was James's personal assistant for the last six years of his life.

The author wishes to thank Keith Hart, Jerome Hasenpflug, and Graham McCann for their editorial assistance.

The author would also like to thank Constance Webb Pearlstein for providing copies of her correspondence with C.L.R. James, 1939-1948.

The front cover photo is of a 1940s sculpture of C.L.R. James by Bronka Stern. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Popular Democracy and the Creative Imagination:
The Writings of C.L.R. James 1950-1963
(c) Anna Grimshaw, 1991

Contents

Preface
I. Letters to Constance Webb
II. The Struggle for Happiness
III. Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways
IV. Preface to Criticism
V. Beyond A Boundary
Notes
Appendix 1. A Short Bibliographical Essay
Appendix 2. Table of Contents from:
  Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (1953)
  Preface to Criticism (1955)
  Beyond a Boundary (1963)

[inside back cover: pamphlet series]
[back cover: quotes from Letters to Constance Webb, 1939-1948]

The photo overleaf [not shown here] shows C.L.R. James at the Acropolis in the 1950s. Photographer unknown, photot courtesy The C.L.R. James Institute. [caption below]

The sure, firm grasp, the clean, unburdened writing, the imaginative power is the mark of the poet--the image complete in itself, concrete, and yet in every line expressing the emotion.

C.L.R. James
(excerpt from a letter to Constance Webb, April 13, 1946)

Preface

C.L.R. James, the Trinidadian writer, historian and activist, died in May l989. The rich legacy of published writings he left behind reflects the scope of his life's work: the fiction and cricket journalism of his early years in the Caribbean; the political and historical writings produced in pre-war Britain; the clarification of theoretical and organisational questions he achieved in the United States; and the classic Beyond A Boundary, his final major work.

At the time of his death, James was preparing two books for publication: The Struggle for Happiness, based on a manuscript called Notes on American Civilisation which he wrote in 1950, and a selection of material, drawing from published and unpublished sources, for a C.L.R. James Reader. This essay draws on my collaboration with James in these two projects; but it also grows out of the particular life, a private world of books, music, art and film, which I shared with James in the six years before his death.

Many people have drawn attention to what they see as the contradiction between James's great appreciation for the arts, not least cricket, and his revolutionary politics. But from the beginning I felt, instinctively, that his conception of humanity was a deeply integrated one. I did not really understand how the different facets of his personality were fused until I recognised the full significance of James's work on American civilisation. The document of 1950, The Struggle for Happiness is the key to this understanding. It contains the fullest statement of James's mature vision and it represents his fundamental break with the old European traditions of intellectual and political life. His experience of America, the understanding of culture which he developed during his fifteen year stay in the New World and its integration into a new, expanded vision of political life formed all his later work.

The writings which followed The Struggle for Happiness, in the course of the next decade, were animated by James's mature perspective; their substance and direction were defined by questions concerning the arts and social life which James first began to address systematically while living in the United States. Beyond A Boundary most concretely expresses the themes explored in these years; but it is impossible for a single book, unique though it is, to convey the range of his discussion and the tenacity with which he pursued the questions involved.

The substance of this pamphlet deals with the ideas concerning human creativity that James had first sketched in his private correspondence during the 1940s and which became the focus of his work between 1950 and 1963. Much of the writing he did during these thirteen years was left unfinished, and largely unpublished. Its excavation, however, sheds light on a particularly productive period in his life and is essential to any assessment of James's distinctive contribution to the twentieth century.(1)

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I. Letters to Constance Webb

C.L.R. James arrived in the United States at the end of 1938. During his fifteen year residence in America James tackled problems of philosophy and political practice which arose within the revolutionary Marxist movement. The results of the collaborative work which he undertook with other members of the Johnson-Forest Tendency began to appear towards the end of the 1940s. The most significant documents were The Invading Socialist Society (1947), Notes on Dialectics (1948) and State Capitalism and World Revolution (1950), containing as they did a detailed refutation of the ideas and method of Trotskyism. These publications precipitated James's break with the tradition in which he had been engaged for more than two decades; but, at the same time, they established his independent Marxist position built upon the works of Lenin.

The year 1950 was a watershed for James. Having worked exhaustively to establish an historical method and having clarified thereby the philosophical foundations of his future political activity, he began to explore new questions--questions of art, culture and aesthetics. These investigations, however, grew out of the new and original conception of political life which James had developed by the end of his stay in the United States. It had been shaped decisively by the conditions of the New World.

From his arrival in 1938 James had been open to the distinctiveness of the United States--its sheer size, its geographical expanse and variation, its revolutionary history and break with Europe, the vitality and independence of its people; and he felt, to his core, the challenge of a new civilisation. At one and the same time his conception of the creative potential of the individual personality and the possibilities for new forms of social life was expanded beyond the narrow confines of European bourgeois culture. Nowhere more clearly and urgently, though, did James recognise the importance of these discoveries than in his own personal life. It is possible to trace in his published work the intellectual and political growth inspired by the new continent and the close political associates he found there. But there is  another body of writing, his private letters to Constance Webb, which more fully reveals the surge of creative energy which America had unloosed within James himself.

James's correspondence with Constance Webb, beginning in 1939 and continuing for over a decade, constitutes a profound meditation on human life. What he was seeking, in particular, the full and free integration of his own personality within the context of his love for a woman, he recognised as a universal in the modern world. Consciously employing the dialectical method, which by the early 1940s he felt he had mastered, James explored the relationship between chance and necessity within his own life. Through his relationship with Constance he began to understand the logic of his life's course, the struggle against the limits of European bourgeois society, the commitment to the revolutionary movement; and the recognition that in its turn that very movement had confined him and made separate essential aspects of his being. “Why am I revolutionary? I dislike intellectual restraint. I like to let everything I have go. Against bourgeois society I can think and write freely--develop my ideas... An expansive personality needs scope and range. At a certain stage society can give that range no longer... I don't want to be constricted. I want to be free--to develop my thoughts, ideas, feelings to the end.”

James's letters showed how far he could extend his analysis, from the very personal details of self-discovery to some of the most fundamental questions concerning the future of humanity. At the centre, however, the place to which he always returned, was Constance and her struggle as a young American woman, independent, vital, uneducated in a European sense, to find the full expression of her individuality within the context of social life. It was a struggle which James saw reverberating throughout American life, from the workplace to the most intimate relations between men and women; and it formed the basis of his insight into the crisis which faced modern civilisation. For him, the crisis was most acute within America where the founding ideals of the new democracy, freedom, equality and happiness were deeply embedded in its culture and in the consciousness of its citizens; and yet were subverted at every turn, in the twentieth century, by the oppressive weight of mechanised, capitalist society.

Thus James's exchanges with Constance cannot be considered apart from the very ambitious project he had set himself in understanding America, not just as a civilisation in its own right but also as containing within its essential features the key to the future of civilisation as a whole. Like his predecessor Alexis De Tocqueville a century earlier, James's interest in America had been first stimulated by political events in Europe; yet he was adamant from the beginning that the United States should be approached and understood on its own terms. For this reason he took seriously the lives of ordinary men and women--their social relations, their living space, their routines of work and leisure; and he paid particular attention to the artistic forms which catered to the mass audience. From his earliest letters to Constance, some of which read almost like short stories, James was open to the experiences of ordinary people: “I have sat for hours in America, listening to people, all sorts of poor working people, telling me all about themselves. It is indispensable for any understanding of anything. It must go side by side with the books.” Indeed it this dialectical interplay between “the books” and James's direct participation in American life which gives the letters such vitality and sudden flashes of extraordinary brilliance.

We see it first of all in James's discovery of Hollywood movies. As he explained to Constance, he began to go regularly to popular films such as Stormy Weather, That Uncertain Feeling, and Cabin in the Sky, as a distraction from his intense political work. Initially he had rather despised them; but he soon found himself reflecting on this new art form which he saw as one of America's most distinctive contributions to the twentieth century. He was concerned with both the form itself, particularly its closeness to life, as well what it gave expression to: “Movies are an expression of life and being made for people who pay their money, they express what the people need--that is what people miss in their own lives. That explains a great deal I think. Why the popularity of the Western? Because young people who sit cramped in buses and tied to assembly lines terribly wish they would be elsewhere; if even, not consciously, yet when they see it they respond. That is the fundamental principle. Like all art, but more than most, the movies are not merely a reflection, but an extension of the actual, but an extension along the lines which people feel are lacking and possible in the actual. That, my dear, is the complete secret of Hegelian dialectic. The two, the actual and the potential, are always inseparably linked; one is always giving way to the other. At a certain stage a crisis takes place and a complete change is the result.”

James underlined this particular approach in another letter of 1943, demonstrating again, with reference to Song To Remember, the operation of the dialectic in popular culture: “A Hollywood director notes the great success of the Tchaikovsky Concerto in B Minor in The Great Lie. He, to make money, works on a new kind of musical. He produces this film. Why? Because the masses are craving for something new. Now if the masses didn't like it, the idea would have died. They gobbled it up. This proved that among all the novelties being presented to them they wanted this. Result, they get more and more. In two years they will know about music. Lenin would have loved this. He said once `We must get millions of reproductions of the great pictures and distribute them so that the proletariat will get culture--know what the bourgeoisie knows.' Thus we see a great dialectical law--the capitalist seeking profit, or Marlene Dietrich seeking publicity with pants, opens up an avenue through which the masses recognise something and at once appropriate it--with all sorts of distortions but yet a step forward. Thus the chance, the appearance, the accident, is the capitalist seeking profit. The social necessity, the social movement is the mass grabbing at culture today as it grabs at everything it can.” (James's own emphases)

James was fascinated by the relationship between the audience and the film makers and stars, for it encapsulated something which he believed to be fundamental and distinctive to modern history--the presence of ordinary people in the process of artistic expression, their participation in the development of a democratic aesthetic form and their appropriation and transformation of ideas, and notions of culture, which previously had been the preserve of the intellectuals.

But his analysis of the particular nature of artistic creativity in the twentieth century operated at many levels, as he moved, within the letters, from the broadest questions concerning art and society to the personalised, the individual struggle for expression. The clarity with which James dissected the elements of the artistic process stemmed not just from the focus of the discussion in his encouragement of Constance's ambitions as a poet and actress; but also because he was drawing on his own experiences as a creative writer. Indeed, at the time he was corresponding with Constance in 1944, he was himself contemplating writing a play for Ethel Waters based upon the life of Harriet Tubman.

According to James what was essential in producing genuinely creative work was the development of the “dramatic personality.” This was something which was partly instinctive and partly developed, through discipline and study. By this he meant the refraction of ideas, of contradiction and movement in society and history through the unique personality of the artist; in short the transmutation of life into art. But he was not referring here to the ordinary, everyday personality of the poet or the musician or the actor; rather he was interested in the unique, particular artistic personality which was expressed in their creative work. There is a wonderful passage in one of the letters where he tries to explain this process with reference Beethoven's music:

“You know the first movement of the Eroica well? The next time you happen to hear it listen carefully to the fierce outbursts of baffled rage at contradictions which Beethoven could not resolve. In the midst of the smooth almost caressing melody, Beethoven suddenly lets out some fierce chords--the whole orchestra, bang, bang, bang, bang. And it does it once more. But he battled with it, organised it, and then lo and behold, in the Fifth, he made that his main idea and mastered it completely, and having exhausted that, went on still further to the Ninth and then took personal refuge in the last quartets.”

Much of James's detailed comment on the creative process, however, concerned poetry. This was one of the most direct connections he could make to Constance's struggle for self-expression, and he coached and encouraged her in her writing of poetry almost as though he were coaching a cricketer in questions of technique and play. He never underestimated the sheer work involved in creating something new. What matters, James wrote, was “the urgent need to express the personality;” the desire to break the limits placed by society on the individual imagination; but from there he took up questions of structure and the formation of the poetic image, emphasising always the centrality of emotion, and not ideas, in artistic work.

But, above all, James was aware of the distinctiveness of Constance's creative work. It was the expression of the experiences of a twentieth century American woman. He saw Constance as a product of the most conscious age in human history; growing up with the material advantages unknown to her European counterparts and taking for granted as the property of everyone some of the most advanced political ideas known to mankind. Her poetry reflected this. But it also inescapably, at its core, gave expression to the conflict which raged throughout modern society, nowhere more intensely than in America--the conflict between her highly developed sense of her own unique personality and the form of society which fragmented and stifled all creative energy.

James highlighted what Constance, largely instinctively, was seeking to achieve in the form and subject matter of her poems by referring to the work of some of the great poets in history--Shakespeare, Pope, Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley, and not least Walt Whitman. His focus was on the writing itself, the text, and what tools the individual artist could use in his or her work. James drew particular attention to the tension which often existed between form and substance, (this was what he had already referred to in his interpretation of Beethoven's music) and, for him, it was that struggle which often produced the greatest, the most original, work. But this was not accidental. His understanding was dialectical--that the tension within the individual artist grew out of his or her sensitivity, usually unconscious, to the more general movements within society, particularly to the deeper currents of history as one era gave way to another: “The sonnets, rhymed verse, concentration on the beloved as inspiration...mark a poetic expression of a certain stage in human society. It is connected with forms of language, with a continuing literary tradition... But the dividing lines are clear. The 16th century in Britain saw the maturing of the magnificent blank verse form--the Shakespearean. I believe that this form, so sharply opposed to the stanzas of Chaucer, marked the great freedom of expression which was required by a new and more expanded society. Shakespeare and the Elizabethans needed a new verse form to express a new world. After that outburst, verse slowly swung back to the artificial couplets of Pope... the verse of an ordered society. They had left behind them the Shakespearean blank verse line. But immediately after the French Revolution, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth and Coleridge broke away from the type of verse Pope and the 18th century specialised in--the change had been coming a long time--and once more English verse became a medium of great freedom.”

Whitman, in turn, broke away, but in his case from the European tradition itself. He was the first to give poetic expression to the new democracy of the United States. What Whitman did in his artistic work James recognised as laying the foundations for a distinctively new art form which catered to a mass audience. It reached its fullest expression in American popular culture of the twentieth century.

In engaging so deeply and intimately with these questions, James felt, palpably, the expansion of his own creative powers. It filled the letters he wrote to Constance Webb. Slowly, too, he recognised that the need to discover new ways of expressing himself would carry him beyond the narrow confines of political work; and that his developing notion of political life, rooted in the unique conditions of America and its people, was inseparable from a fundamental change within his own personal life. By the late 1940s he was also conscious of certain tensions within the Johnson-Forest Group. He knew that he and his associates had produced remarkable work collectively over ten years, but he now saw that they were all cramped by the very circumstances in which they had once flourished.(2)

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II. The Struggle for Happiness

During 1948 when James spent several months in Reno, Nevada, he began to reflect on the future course of his work. He had recently married Constance Webb and she was expecting their first child. Uppermost in his mind was the need to find an independent and secure income. For years, particularly since he had worked largely underground, James had been dependent on the support of the other members of his political group. Now he thought that a book on American civilisation, drawing on the detailed study of its history, literature, culture and everyday life might raise a good advance from a publisher and assist him in his struggle with the US immigration authorities.

Many of the themes for such a work James had already outlined in his private correspondence; moreover, as his letters to Constance revealed, he had been working over many years to develop an original, integrative method which he could use to expose both the complexity of modern society and its historical depth, exploring the dialectical relationship between what he had called “the books” and the lives of ordinary men and women. This dialectic was built into the narrative of his manuscript, Notes on American Civilisation. It was symbolic of the more general movement James saw in history, as common people emerged in the twentieth century as the force for civilisation. And yet the title of the chapter which decisively marked the shift from ideas to the lives of men and women, “The Struggle for Happiness” (the title under which James, at the end of his life, prepared the work for publication), conveyed what was distinctively American in the history of civilisation. In James's view, happiness, the search for wholeness, the free and expansive integration of individual and society was as essential a human desire as the struggle for liberty and equality.

However, at the time James began to draft his manuscript, 1949/1950, the very future of civilisation seemed to be in question. The two superpowers, facing one another across a ruined Europe, threatened repression and destruction on a scale previously unknown in human history; and the Cold War rhetoric, freedom versus repression, symbolised the bitter struggle within American society itself.

Against this background James took up the questions of political life posed by De Tocqueville in his classic study, Democracy in America. De Tocqueville, writing in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the subsequent upheavals in Europe, examined the Enlightenment ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity in the foundation and functioning of a new society. James's manuscript, written a hundred years later, explored the central contradiction of mid-twentieth century America--that the original ideals of freedom and equality had been sacrificed in the twentieth century to an oppressive system of mass production which paradoxically made the achievement of these goals materially feasible.

James understood the crisis faced by 1950 America to be the most extreme form of the crisis which was facing modern society as a whole. Its origins were to be found in the development of civilisation itself. Everywhere people recognised the uniqueness of the individual personality; yet the need for social life was equally strong. The growing sophistication of human consciousness was an integral part of the civilisation process; but in the twentieth century the two sides of this dialectic were in contradiction, as the increasing awareness and self-knowledge among ordinary people confronted limitations imposed by society in the form of centralised political and economic power. By 1950 the problem of the relationship between individual and society had become sharply focused in the question of totalitarianism.

For James, however, the growing power and awareness of ordinary people was part and parcel of the more general movement in the modern world towards integration. The expansion in communications, the centralisation of capital, the accumulation of knowledge, the breakdown of national boundaries, were all part of this process; but, so also was the reconstruction of the human subject or what he called “the creation of man as an integral human being.” He understood that the desire of modern people to bring into contact the separate elements of their lives was a process fraught with danger. It could lead, on the one hand, to totalitarianism where, by making individuals submit completely to state power, the human personality was integrated through its destruction. Or it could lead, on the other hand, to a genuine democratic society of the sort which had flourished in Ancient Greece, where the full expression of individuality was achieved through an integrated and expanded conception of social life.

This theme, the struggle between democracy and totalitarianism in the modern world, formed the unifying thread of James's dense work on American civilisation. In The Struggle for Happiness, James attempted something new. He was seeking to fuse the essential movement of American history and society with his detailed grasp of the lives of ordinary people; and at the centre of his original, synthetic interpretation lay certain key works of the creative imagination.

James's concern in the first part of the book was to establish the distinctive history of the United States. This he built upon a critical reading of the work of two nineteenth century writers, Walt Whitman and Herman Melville. For James, they wrote at a time of transition, as America left behind the old “frontier spirit” phase of its development and entered the era of industrial capitalism marked by the Civil War; and he attempted, through a detailed examination of the form and content of their work, to uncover the currents, the developing historical forces of the age in which they lived. In his view both writers were struggling to articulate the dialectical relationship between individual freedom and social life. Whitman's lyrics celebrated individuality, yet this “singer of loneliness” craved for social interaction. But if, according to James, Whitman failed to resolve the contradiction in the themes and substance of his poetry, it was through the development of a new form, free verse (“a chant to be sung by millions of men”), that he succeeded in establishing contact with his fellow Americans. In contrast, Melville from the beginning placed his characters within a social setting, recognising that the individualism Whitman celebrated in its extreme forms threatened to bring about the destruction of society itself.

For James, Melville's creation of an original character in Ahab (“the modern totalitarian dictator”) mirrored Whitman's formal poetic innovation, as both authors, sensitive to the dynamics of a changing world and seeking to give expression to its essential movement, found themselves pushed to the limits of their creative imagination.

But, in arguing for the contemporary significance of Whitman and Melville, the insight they offered into the postwar world, James took great care to stress that they were not writers of “political treatises.” His interest was in the nature of their particular literary contribution, its situation in history; and he was trying to develop a method of criticism which would enable him to expose, through an analysis of work of the creative imagination, hidden currents of American society.

James took this approach further in The Struggle For Happiness. He placed a discussion of the entertainment industry at the centre of his understanding of twentieth century America.(3) His chapter on popular culture was the crux of the book, not just because of the originality of the interpretation he was offering of modern society; but also because it was here, for the first time, that the creative potential of ordinary people as the force for civilisation was fully revealed. Hitherto their presence in history had only been glimpsed through the work of the great nineteenth century writers. James held that it was in the experience of the popular arts (and not in the writings of Hemingway, Faulkner or the intellectuals), that the problem Whitman and Melville struggled to grasp, namely the relationship between individual and society, received its sharpest and most concrete expression.(4) Furthermore, the mass art form itself was uniquely related to the complexity and range of modern needs. It represented a new stage in the history of civilisation.

Although his discussion in The Struggle for Happiness focused largely on popular films, James was drawing more widely on his first-hand knowledge of soap operas, jazz, comic strips and detective stories. He found here not just the expression of the hidden tensions and frustrations of American life, but also a tremendous creative force. In the early phase of the American film industry, this force had produced some the great works of twentieth century art, nowhere more evident than the films of Charlie Chaplin. James's interpretation included the recognition of the audience's role in artistic creation. He held that an open, free relationship between an artist and audience was essential for the development of creative work; and he understood that the close, uninhibited relationship Chaplin enjoyed in his early films had both nourished his unique talent at the same time as it had enabled the whole society to become involved in the contemplation of some of its central features as refracted through the character of the Tramp. But, according to James, the remarkable artistic personality developed by Chaplin was brought to an abrupt end by the Depression. The political climate of the 1930s stifled all genuine creativity. The popular audience thereafter sought to express its rage and frustration against an oppressive society which denied, at every level, their free individuality, through the synthetic star system and the Dick Tracy, Edward G.Robinson type of gangster/detective figures.

Thus, the central place James accorded to the popular arts in The Struggle for Happiness stemmed from his recognition that they contained, in essence, both the movement and the crisis of the modern world. The early history of the entertainment industry, the original and expansive phase prior to the 1929 Crash, represented for him a new stage in the evolution of human society, transforming the social conditions of artistic life. The distinctive contribution of the United States was the development of new artistic media, of genuinely popular forms which broke down the conventional divisions between artist and audience, art and entertainment, culture and political life. In James's view only these forms could encompass all the complexities of modern life; and yet, at the time he wrote, he saw the increasingly violent and distorted expression of this tremendous creative potential. For him the popular arts were part of the twentieth century movement towards integration; and they opened a window on a future in which art and life were in an active, evolving relationship: “It is not difficult to imagine a social situation in which, by means of fine artists and gifted performers, there will be an almost day-to-day correspondence between the ordinary experiences of many millions of human beings and their transmutation into aesthetic form. There enters into the field of art a closeness to life unknown in past periods of human history which will not fail to have far-reaching consequences on both.”

The chapter on popular culture formed the bridge into the second part of the book, preparing the way for James's treatment of its political counterpart. Here he turned his attention to an examination of “the actual and intimate lives of the population” and isolated those sections--the industrial workers, blacks and women--where the contradictions of democracy were most keenly felt. It was here, he believed, that the struggle to achieve “an active, integrated humanism” would result in the evolution of a new conception of political life which encompassed all the elements of the modern personality (economic, political, domestic, aesthetic).

The fine symmetrical structure which distinguished James's ambitious work was underlined by his return, in the concluding chapters, to an explicit consideration of the theme which informed his entire approach--a critique of the intellectuals. In The Struggle for Happiness, James attempted to move beyond the dualities built into the European tradition, “old bourgeois civilisation,” specifically, the oppositions--art and culture, intellectuals and the people, politics and everyday life. He was seeking to break the hold of the intellectuals over political and cultural life, thus clearing the way for his assertion of the decisive role to be played by ordinary people in the creation of a new society. What James discovered in the New World, and it was reflected in the tone of his writing and in his attempt at an original synthesis, was an immense vitality, creative energy and developed political perspective among ordinary men and women. It was this population, unburdened by Europe's past, which he believed would be central to humanity's future.

Although much of James's theoretical and activist work brought him to this point, it was, above all, his experience of living in America which irrevocably changed his perspective on the world. The Struggle for Happiness was a landmark in James's life, for it contained the fullest statement of his political vision as he reached the peak of his creative powers; and at its centre was his understanding of America as a civilisation. He had found deeply embedded in the consciousness and everyday life of the American people the fundamental current of world history--the struggle to achieve a more complete democracy in which free individuality in all areas of life was expressed in harmony with social forms.

In a narrower sense what James was seeking to establish in his 1950 manuscript was a method through which all of human experience could be approached. It was necessary in the modern world, given the complexity and close interrelation between the different facets of life; and, for him, it was through works of the creative imagination that one could best approach this. Thus, the integration of art and culture was central to James's new, expanded conception of political life, though it was not until Beyond A Boundary that he successfully achieved the synthesis he sought within his own writing.

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III. Mariners, Renegades and Castaways

James intended to expand his ideas about art, literature and culture and to use them as the foundation for a body of work directed at a general audience. His impending deportation, however, gave a sense of urgency to the task and he embarked upon his programme of writing with a study of Herman Melville.  Mariners, Renegades and Castaways was written in l952 during James's period of internment on Ellis Island. His experience as a detainee brought into sharper focus his interpretation of Melville's novels, particularly the importance of Moby Dick for understanding forces at work in the modern world. The main theme of Mariners was conveyed in the book's subtitle--“The Story of Herman Melville and The World We Live In”--containing, as it did, the central question James posed: “how could a book from the world of 1850 contain so much of the world of the l950s?” He sought to answer this in a number of ways: through a critical reading of Moby Dick (an analysis of the story and the major characters); through an examination of the creative process; through a discussion of the historical context of the artist and his work; and finally through an autobiographical exposition.

The three oppositions which James established in his reading of Moby Dick (man/nature, man/technology, man/man) provided the structure for his discussion of complex social and political forces in terms of individual personalities and their human relations. He was interested in society, society as represented by those on board the Pequod; and he had no interest in the whale as such, except as a symbol of nature in relation to human life.(5) The insights James offered in his reading of Melville's novel and the clarity of his depiction of its key characters, however, derived from his identification of similar social forces and personality types in the world around him. He was not content, though, to leave these connections at a superficial level of correspondence; rather he set out to root them in the historical conditions of Melville's original work.

This required an account of the artistic process itself, an exploration of the complex interplay between the particular times in which the author lived and the operation of his creative imagination. James's account focused largely upon the towering presence within the novel of Captain Ahab and he traced his evolution through Melville's early work until he appeared in Moby Dick as “that rarest of achievements...a character which will sum up a whole epoch of human history.” He described this character as becoming “a kind of revolving light illuminating what is around it” and continued: “Everything else grows and develops to correspond to this central figure so that the original character, so to speak, helps the artist to create a portrait not only of a new type of human being but also of the society and the people who correspond to him.” (6)

Melville's creative instinct led him beyond the consciousness of his age and, in digging up “strange stuff,” the raw material of the imagination, he caught the movement of a world in transition. James understood Ahab as the expression of this, the embodiment of the fundamental conflict between the old and the new. Just as he anticipated a world to come, Ahab was also part of the past, “a rebel, a man who is dissatisfied with the old and must have something new”--a character in the tradition of Prometheus and Lear.

James devoted an entire chapter in Mariners to the figure of the intellectual (“the neurotic personality of our time”), the Ishmael of Moby Dick and the Pierre of Melville's later novel. He again drew attention to Melville's ability in isolating and characterising a particular section of society, one easily recognisable by a contemporary audience, and posing the problem it faced. For that special class of people, the intellectuals, the crisis they experienced arose from their alienation from the world and James saw the characteristics of Ishmael and Pierre in their twentieth century counterparts who sought, by drowning themselves in endless self-examination, to escape from the problems of the modern world. He found its expression in the style and preoccupations of much modern literature which he described, rather sweepingly, as “a catalogue of misery and self-centred hopelessness.”

It was not accidental that James devoted a good deal of his book on Melville to an examination of the role of the intellectuals, for his discussion here was part of the much fuller treatment he gave to this subject in his earlier work, The Struggle for Happiness. At one level, a critique of the intellectuals was a necessary stage in the evolution of James's original vision of political life which he developed during his stay in the United States, built upon a recognition of the essential humanity and creative energy of ordinary people. At another level, by seeking an integrated critical perspective which opened up artistic life and the imaginative process, James confronted the dominance of the intellectuals and their approach to questions of art, literature and culture. He knew intimately the tradition he was now struggling against, and it was not surprising that his writing, at this point, has a particular urgency, reflecting his own personal struggle to achieve the intellectual and political breakthrough he believed lay within his grasp.

If The Struggle for Happiness set the agenda for James's work over the next decade, it was Mariners, Renegades and Castaways which initially gave focus to the ideas and critical method contained within the more comprehensive 1950 manuscript. Although James wrote his book on Melville for the general reader, he also hoped, with little success, to engage American critics in a discussion of his interpretation of Moby Dick and the methodological principles which lay behind his reading.

After a five month period of detention, James was released from Ellis Island. Despite the fact that he had been served with a deportation order, he continued to fight expulsion and to seek public support for his case against the US immigration authorities. This was one of the reasons which lay behind the lectures he began to give towards the end of l952 and in early l953. But also they offered him the chance to explore, with a general audience, his ideas concerning artistic work and its ability to highlight those questions which were central to human society. James's approach to these questions was always to take his audience's particular understanding of the world in which it lived as his starting point, and from here to explore its response to works of the creative imagination in a way which pushed well beyond the limits of conventional intellectual or literary discourse. James's most well known series of public lectures was delivered in the autumn of l952 at the Columbia University Institute of Arts and Sciences in New York. The title was The Idea of Personality in Great Literature; and James devoted six talks to tracing and developing this theme in the writings of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Milton, Rousseau, Melville and Dostoevsky. It was a theme which echoed what he understood as the central theme in the history of civilisation--the relationship between individual and society. Its changing form through history was reflected in the tradition of literature as the new, expanded notions of the individual, expressed through original characters, came up against the limits of society.(7) The historical connections which James was able to establish in the creative work of six great writers grew directly from his prolonged study of Melville, inseparable as this was from his experience of living in the United States; indeed, it seemed almost as if Melville alone held the key to the personal synthesis of literature and politics which James had long sought.

The centrality of Melville in the formation of James's mature writings stemmed from the deep resonances in his vision of humanity and in the method of his creative work. James found at the heart of Melville's finest novel Moby Dick, a recognition of the emergence of common people as a force entering the stage of history and their collective movement as a force for civilisation. The Pequod's crew, heroic, spontaneous, its own master of the advanced techniques of the whaling industry was, for James, the symbol of modern humanity in opposition to the destructive force of unrestrained individualism (Ahab), and the equivocation of those specially trained to lead (Ishmael, Starbuck, Stubb and Flask). James recognised that at the time Melville wrote he could not see how a harmonious society could be formed, and thus he sent the Pequod to its doom. But, although the future of humanity looked bleaker when James was writing Mariners in 1952, he did not concede the impossibility of such a goal, rather he underlined the tremendous development of creative powers in ordinary people and the need, even more urgent, for their full and free release.

Furthermore, James sought to expose how Melville's artistic method was an integral part of his vision. He hoped, in turn, to develop such a fusion within his own work. James was fascinated by the creative interplay in Melville's writing between the real and the symbolic (what he had already understood, following Hegel, as the dialectical relationship between actual and the potential)--the movement between the detailed descriptions in Moby Dick of the productive processes of the whaling industry, where the writing itself had a distinctive vitality, and the powerful symbols Melville created as he extended his imaginative range from a grasp of the concrete particulars to the widest reaches of the universal.

At the beginning of a long, discursive letter to Jay Leyda, a Melville scholar, James rejected the idea that the trenchancy of Mariners was motivated by his imprisonment. He wrote: “I am primarily interested in the social crisis of our time. I studied literature and criticism for years but then I dropped them for political writings. But I continued to read certain classics. The divorce between criticism and life haunted me. Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Milton. I felt them real and living. And T.S.Eliot and I.A. Richards and the rest of the critics--fine intellects (I was trained enough to see that) but remote. Over the years I have bridged the gap. Melville (1851-1951) and my public audiences did that for me. This is not `feelings.' It is work, method.”(8)

James went on to outline to Leyda the principles of his critical method, a method which would relate the classical works of literature to contemporary life. But he was also anxious to distinguish his approach from that of two major schools of criticism in the l950s--the crude materialism of the Communist critics and the narrow interpretations offered by those writers influenced by the tradition of psychoanalysis. He was attempting to bring together ideas about literature and society which, as he acknowledged, required “great sensitiveness, subtlety and both imagination and discipline--otherwise they become caricatures.”

At first James had adapted, from The Confidence Man, Melville's theory of the creation of original characters. This James had used in Mariners; but now he sought to extend it and through its use offer not only insight into certain key works of literature, but establish connections between the original characters created by different writers. For James, the literary text was primary, its form and content were an expression of the age of the author and of his or her deepest responses to its movement. The critic had to begin there, “working back to the author's unstated assumptions,” by placing the characters in context, delineating their social roots, tracing their development in relation to the problems of the age, assessing the resources of tradition and imagination upon which the artist drew in creative work.

A glimpse of the kind of analysis generated by such a method was given by James in a letter to another critic, Meyer Schapiro, written shortly after his exchange with Leyda. Making explicit reference to his public lectures, James set out to clarify aspects of his interpretation of Shakespeare's tragedy, King Lear. He sought to highlight, through a brief discussion of its structure and characters, the process by which the playwright dramatically transformed conflicting forces at work in the Elizabethan world. He had already explained in his correspondence with Constance Webb his understanding of Shakespeare's use of the blank verse form as expressive of changes in society; now he considered how these were reflected in the substance of the drama itself. Like Melville, Shakespeare opened up a world to come, anticipating the development of the human personality in his creation of Hamlet, “the embodiment of one of the greatest new freedoms--freedom of the individual intellect.”(9) For James, Lear was a further development of this type; in the great scene on the heath, Lear, in his madness, posed fundamental questions about the individual and society, but he could not resolve them. It was this theme, the contradiction between free individuality and social responsibility, embodied in the figure of the intellectual, which James had pursued in the rest of his lecture series, highlighting its changing historical form through an examination of different texts.

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IV. Preface to Criticism

Although James's struggle with the United States immigration authorities forced the development of his ideas concerning art and society, it led him, at the same time, to fall back on the old collective working methods of the Johnson-Forest Tendency. This delayed the fragmentation of the group and prevented James from making the decisive break with the old pattern of life which now cramped his work. Although many of his collaborators became involved in the new phase of writing he planned, particularly on American civilisation, they only touched his vision in parts and it remained essentially an individual vision, the product of a remarkable imaginative leap, and one James never fully realised in his life's work.

At the time of his departure from the United States, late in l953, James had sketched an outline of the books he intended to write over the next few years. The great ambition of his plan clearly revealed James's sense, at this stage in his life, of his own intellectual power and confidence. It included, initially, a revised edition of Mariners, the completion of The Struggle for Happiness, a study of Walt Whitman, a biography of the West Indian cricketer, Learie Constantine; later, James anticipated writing a book on modern politics and revolutionary movements and arranging for the publication of his Columbia lectures, The Idea of Personality in Great Literature. His intention was not just to publish a succession of books, but through a carefully planned writing programme he hoped to create a coherent body of ideas and to steadily build an audience of readers in Europe and America. James described the subject matter of the project as the United States, but his perspective was more general, encompassing the nature of the modern crisis and the future of civilisation.

What was of particular interest in James's writing plans was the inclusion of a cricket biography. It was evidence of the fundamental place cricket occupied in his conception of the world and, although he had not seen a match for fifteen years, his experience of American popular culture had sharpened his awareness of the game as a particular kind of mass art form. In his publishing proposal James wrote: “Cricket and games are very superficially treated by cricket journalists. These games are the only means by which modern man meets with his fellow in a great mass and expresses intense feelings freely and without inhibitions. Cricket is also a game of singular aesthetic beauty. It is therefore an authentic form of mass artistic expression.” (10) It took James another ten years before his understanding of cricket had matured and he was able to weave the threads of his American years into what became a classic book, Beyond A Boundary. Indeed, this work, specifically the development of his ideas concerning the creative process, the notion of the dramatic personality and the social and historical context of artistic production became the focus of his energies in exile. Although he continued to pursue the larger questions established by his stay in the United States, James failed to find the conditions in which to complete his ambitious project on human civilisation.

Nonetheless the letters and documents he wrote between 1953 and 1963 offer valuable insight into the development of his ideas concerning culture and their centrality in his understanding of the modern world. James did not just add culture to a set of ideas concerning society, a problem for those who worked (and still work) within the European tradition. Rather he conceived of something which was expansive (including both “high”and popular art forms) and integral to the new vision of revolutionary politics he had articulated as a result of his stay in the New World. The distinctive quality of James's discussion of aesthetic questions came out of his grasp of the artistic process itself; for, always, his highest priority was to understand what the artist was actually doing in the production of his or her work, before he began to address the more general questions concerning its social basis.

Having devoted a good deal of his attention, however, to character, to the artistic personality, James turned his attention to a consideration of the social context of creative work. In understanding the role of the audience as a distinctive part of the creative process itself, he sought to place himself in the tradition of Aeschylus and Shakespeare. Both writers had made the participation and response of the popular audience the foundation of their work; but it was the severing of this close relationship, through the historical appropriation of culture by a small, educated elite, which James interpreted as one of the major constraints upon expression in the twentieth century. In his view, artists had been gradually cut off from the creative source of life itself. Ironically, James's exile from the United States forced him to work once more within European society; but he was focusing on those very themes which had been so decisive in his new orientation towards the New World and which he first outlined in the long, original chapter on popular culture which lay at the centre of The Struggle for Happiness.

In a paper entitled The Popular Arts and the Cultural Tradition, given at a conference in Paris in 1954 (11), James argued that the twentieth century film makers, most notably, Griffith and Eisenstein, were the true successors to the great dramatists. It was Melville's Moby Dick, however, which most closely anticipated the form and substance of their work. Its panoramic vision of nature and society and the presence of the ship's crew as a symbol of humanity against isolated individualism James took to be powerfully expressive of some of the central features of the modern age. Melville had sought to capture the social totality, the integration of individual, society, nature and technology; and in so doing his artistic insights had propelled him into a new age, the age of film. The technique of Griffith and Eisenstein, the mobility of the camera and the use of the flashback caught the complexity and movement of contemporary society; the close-up shot penetrated the enigma of the unique human personality. Moreover, their concern was not with the isolated individual subject, according to James the finest creation of the age of rationalism beginning with Hamlet, but now a stranglehold upon modern artistic work; rather, it was a concern with humanity itself. The early twentieth century film makers worked with the mass audience in mind, creating as their hero the ordinary guy, the anonymous characters of Griffith's Intolerance or the Tramp of Charlie Chaplin; but, in James's view, Eisenstein took this further--in Potemkin, for example, the mass itself became the hero of the film.

Here James began to refer to the criticism of Aristotle, with its base in the response of the popular audience to creative work. He had included an extended discussion of the arts in ancient Greece at the end of the chapter about popular culture in The Struggle for Happiness; now, taking the Greek city state as his model, he set out to work again at the relationship between society and the artistic process.

It is important to recognise that James was not advocating a crude formula,”art for the masses;” he had already taken care to distance himself from those critics who held such a position. He was seeking to unravel the complex, organic relationship between the artistic process and social life, how everyday experiences become transmuted into aesthetic form.

James believed that the achievement of the great artist was the integration of two axes, the horizontal, covering the known world and the vertical, what Melville called “strange stuff,” imaginative conceptions opening a window on the whole, the whole of history, the whole of civilisation. What the artist achieved instinctively, however, the critic had to establish systematically, using a method which opened up the imaginative world to a general audience: “Modern criticism has to reckon with the fact that modern man, the ordinary everyday citizen, feels that he requires to know his past in order to understand his present. This knowledge he can only learn in art, and above all, in literature. So that criticism today has a popular function to perform. It will cease being merely culture or perish. The great creative works of Aeschylus and Shakespeare... were not produced as culture. And it is noticeable that the greatest of all literary critics, Aristotle, did not know drama as culture but as popular art.” (12) In James's view, modern criticism, the preserve of specialists, had lost itself in the pursuit of ever more intricate forms of analysis; the interpretations offered by the critics served more to illuminate their own intellectual crises than the creative work itself.

James dealt with these questions in Preface to Criticism, a document of almost a hundred pages which he wrote during l955.(13) At the time he was deeply immersed in studies of the ancient world. It was an area in which he had always retained a serious interest, ever since his boyhood classical education at Queen's Royal College in Trinidad. Much of his writing in the second half of the l950s addressed certain questions raised by the civilisation of the Greeks, as shown most clearly in the pamphlet, Every Cook Can Govern : A Study of Democracy in Ancient Greece which James published in 1956.(14)

The Preface, however, was built around a discussion of Aristotle's  Poetics. James's thesis operated at two levels. First of all, he went beyond the outlines of the critical approach he had alluded to in many of his earlier writings and made explicit his method. Secondly, using this method, he offered an original interpretation of a number of Shakespeare's plays.

James believed that Aristotle was the finest of literary critics because his method was comprehensive and integrated. At its centre was the popular audience of ancient Greece, the community itself, drawn into issues of national importance by way of dramatic devices, specifically the plot. He endorsed Aristotle's view that the tragedy, created for public performance was artistically superior to the epic, directed at a small cultivated class; and, it was here, in the dramatic experience of the popular audience, that modern criticism had to begin. Rejecting vigorously the notion that drama, or the arts in general, were vehicles for the expression of ideas, James was interested in the process by which social movements became translated, by the artist, into human terms, and thereby drew the audience into an experience beyond anything which could be achieved by the writings of the philosophers or historians.

By shifting the focus of his critical insight from the original characters of great literature to the intense and complex response of the popular audience, James was attempting to use Aristotle's method to shed a different light on the creative process. He began by taking the film version of  Julius Caesar (starring John Gielgud and Marlon Brando), substituting the modern audience for the original Elizabethan audience, and analysing the reasons for its dramatic failure at the end of Act 3. The mistake made by the critics and the film makers was the old one, one James had already identified in the course of his study of Melville. It stemmed from the elevation of individual character (the hallmark of intellectual activity) at the expense of an organic conception of the whole; thus, the film's climax became the murder of Caesar and the oration of Mark Antony, and it neglected to resolve the more general questions raised about the state of Rome. Aristotle's sense of a cathartic experience, structured through the use of the plot with its beginning, middle and end, was, according to James, obscured; and the film audience, denied the solution to problems posed by the dramatic action, quickly lost interest.

James considered this to be a general problem in the modern interpretations of Shakespeare and he went on to illustrate his argument with an extended discussion of King Lear. At every point, in his exposition of the play, he considered the relationship between what Shakespeare did on the stage, the development of the plot, and the expectations of an Elizabethan audience. Later he considered the nature of the popular audience itself.

The greater part of James's discussion focused upon the storm scene on the heath. Here the contradiction between individual freedom and social responsibility, posed from the beginning of Act l with the King's violation of the accepted rules for the division of his kingdom, reached its dramatic climax. For James, the moment was first anticipated in Hamlet; but, now it received its most concrete expression in the arraignment scene. Lear, outcast and distraught, was caught between the collapse of the old order and the brutality of the new; and at this point Shakespeare introduced Poor Tom, a vagrant, “unaccommodated man,” a symbol of the population displaced by the decay of the feudal structures. In this confrontation between Lear and Poor Tom, the Elizabethan dramatist placed before his audience the nature of the insoluble crisis it faced. He went further and underlined its essential features using the device of a mock trial in which Goneril and Regan were arraigned by the council appointed by Lear, comprising the Fool, Kent and Poor Tom. For a brief period, Lear was able to transcend the duality until the crisis was resolved through his madness. Thereafter, the plot or dramatic action descended by degrees as Shakespeare brought it to a conclusion within the realms of the world familiar to his audience. (15)

James, having made the question of the relationship between the artist and audience central to his Preface, began to explore its historical dimensions, taking ancient Greece as his model. He was originally interested in tracing the development of tragic drama as an integral part of the movement towards popular democracy; subsequently he examined what he believed to be the replication of this pattern in medieval Europe. His general concern was to establish that the break with the old aristocratic order and the beginnings of democracy, built upon the recognition of individual personality, was accompanied by a great outburst of creativity and the evolution of new artistic forms. They were an expression of the changing dialectical relationship between individual and society, between art and life; and James, in a series of rough notes, jotted down his observations of Michaelangelo's work as constituting one of the finest examples of this historical movement: “I believe he understood Greek civilisation (expressed most completely) in sculpture better than most; sculpture was his job. And so in his work you get the religions, i.e. the religious ideas of his time in constant comparison with the nude, his feeling for the possibilities of a society like the Greek in the modern world. That is his secret. And his nudes in the Sistine Chapel on the ceiling are the most beautiful things I know...Yet Michael Angelo's nudes are not Greek. They are modern people filled with reflection and in the later work, tortured within by the struggle to free themselves, resulting in violent and dramatic gestures, hitherto unknown in art. This is his form. Furthermore he hated to paint. When he painted he was always architectural. And all his life he wanted to do big monuments, with portraits, sculptures, symbolical statues etc., which is to say he always saw man in a social framework. Again that is his form.” (16)

The documents written during the 1950s, in which James explored these themes, clearly reveal the range and facility with which he handled different artistic mediums--art, drama, literature, sculpture, film and music. It was as if the successful integration of his life-long appreciation of the arts with his mature political perspective had released the same kind of creative energy in James as in the artists he wrote about during the 1950s. This was palpable in the volume and quality of his writing.

Gradually, however, James distilled his general explorations of art and society into a particular question--the relationship between popular democracy and the expansion of the creative imagination. In the second part of the decade, this question became alive within the specific historical movement towards decolonisation. It was at this time, too, that James began to write Beyond A Boundary, weaving together the different strands of his thought on aesthetics, culture and political life to create an original work. The key ideas, as the unpublished manuscripts clearly showed, were explored and developed by James over many years; but, their distinctive form, and above all their integration within a developed political perspective, derived from his l950 text, The Struggle for Happiness.

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V. Beyond A Boundary

James returned to Trinidad in l958 after an absence of twenty-six years. He saw the approach of independence in the Caribbean as a unique historical moment, one leading to the foundation of a new society in which fundamental questions concerning political life, the relationship between individual freedom and social responsibility, were posed anew. He was tireless in his efforts to involve the Caribbean people in the examination of these questions; and through public speaking, writing and journalism, and political organisation he sought to make the population aware of its history and potential for independent action. In general he anticipated that the extension of the understanding of democracy, inevitable in the founding of a new nation, would release the creative energies of ordinary people.(17) In particular, he believed that artists, writers and musicians would play an integral part in the struggle to establish a national consciousness.

Given James's already developed ideas about the place of great artists in history, and the process by which the forces emerging at moments of social transition become caught in the form and substance of their work, he clearly saw tremendous possibilities at this time for the unleashing of creative energies in the Caribbean. He likened conditions to those in the ancient Greek city states or Florentine republics where there existed a close, integrated relationship between art and life: “The immense creative power, in all fields of life which distinguished the Greeks and Florentines was precisely this wholeness. Life and art and religion were all one... The power, political and artistic, of these people is beyond our comprehension today. We can only marvel at it.” But he continued: “Socialism aims at the creation of that power in modern man, or rather its release. As I write this and I think of Trotsky and his `nationalisation' and `the development of the productive forces,' I feel to spit. Socialism is the development of people or it is nothing.”(18) It was hardly surprising then that James so readily seized the chance to be part of the movement towards independence and that he conceived of it as much more than the replacement of colonial rule by a Caribbean government.

During his four year stay James devoted serious attention to the questions raised by colonial emancipation, and he hoped to stimulate a general discussion about the importance of creating conditions for artistic work in the Caribbean. He made these explicit in a lecture delivered in l959, The Artist in the Caribbean. Later, continuing on this theme, James declared the Calypsonian, Mighty Sparrow, to be the first example of a home grown artist, shaped by the unique conditions of the Caribbean. He was developing a genuinely popular and native artistic form. For James, the writers of fiction, Lamming, Naipaul, Selvon and the cricketers were engaged in a different sort of creative process, seeking to make their own those traditions previously established through the history of colonialism. The particular nature of their original work and contribution to the establishment of an independent Caribbean identity was something James recognised and shared, for Beyond A Boundary was part of that same effort.

The question around which James built his book: What do they know of cricket who only cricket know? (an adaptation of Kipling's famous remark about England, and the original working title of Beyond A Boundary) enabled him to explore and integrate all those elements essential to the complete understanding of a particular cultural activity. Moreover, he felt that, through the analysis of the game of cricket, he could extend his analysis into areas of human experience which were both universal and fundamental.

James began with a description of the circumstances of his childhood, seeking to excavate the formative influences, cricket, literature, art, politics, social life, and to establish the basis of the connections between them. He was returning to an examination of the world which, as a boy, he had intuitively grasped as an integrated whole long before he knew how or why. Writing in the late 1950s, with over a decade of work already spent on these questions, James attempted to go beyond the superficial perception of cricket as just “entertainment,” arguing for its cultural and historical significance, for its deep roots in society and in human experience.(19)

His approach, made clear in the opening pages of the book, was closely tied to two early memories; first of all, to his impression of Matthew Bondman (the ne'er-do-well who could bat) as a distinctive personality in society; and secondly, to his awareness, watching the failure of Arthur Jones's batting, of the extent to which the spectators were involved in the drama of the occasion. These were the two points he had already established as his basis for examining the changing relationship between art and society--the work involved in the creation of an original character and the response of a popular audience to artistic work. James also followed the critical premise made explicit in his earlier writings that the artistic work itself must be the starting point for an exploration of the broader context, of the process by which social and historical forces become refracted through a particular creative personality. In Beyond A Boundary, this meant focusing upon what happened on the cricket field, on the technique and styles of play. James's understanding of particular cricketers, George John, Wilton St Hill, began with an analysis of the distinctive nature of their game; and he took this approach further in his discussion of the great inter-war players, Learie Constantine and George Headley.

Seeking, in part, to dispel “the persistent illusion of West Indian spontaneity,” James analysed their cricket in terms of their mastery of conditions, their creative innovation and, in so doing, he echoed the themes of his writing on Shakespeare and Melville which explored the artistic process. In the case of Constantine, James interpreted some of his “explosions” on the field as expressing the contradiction between his status as a cricketer and as a black man in a colour-stratified colonial society. His portrait of cricket artistry, drawing heavily on a long friendship and close collaboration with the cricketer, led him into other areas of Constantine's life, to a consideration of his social and political being which James acknowledged as important in his own personal growth.

“Cricket had plunged me into politics long before I was aware of it. When I did turn to politics I did not have too much to learn,” James wrote in Beyond A Boundary; but what he knew all too well, after two decades of serious work on theoretical and organisational questions arising from his involvement in revolutionary Marxism, was that his politics had neglected a large area of human experience. Its expression, as he had first discovered in America, was to be found in the arts, sport and in other forms of popular culture. James understood the enthusiasm with which cricket was followed by people, both in its country of origin and abroad, as evidence of the depth of its penetration into society. But, he argued, the rise of cricket as a national institution had been overlooked in the writings of the professional historians. In his view, however, this development formed an integral part of the history of nineteenth century Britain.

James set out to show the artificial separation made between those events considered to comprise a respectable study for historians and those associated with mere sports or games. He took the career of W.G.Grace in order to highlight more general changes underway in British society. Indeed, it was these changes which prepared the ground for Grace's establishment of the game during the Victorian era. The nature of his play, its creativity, the adventurous heterogeneity of his strokes, James took to be an expression of the fact that Grace, like all great artists, straddled two ages--the pre-Victorian age in which cricket first emerged as popular recreation among a cross-section of society, and the Victorian age in which games became organised. Grace took what had been a common pastime and, through the foundation of a method and an arena of play, almost singlehandedly transformed it into a form of national culture. It was in the response of the audience to Grace's play, in the worship of him as a popular hero, that James sought an answer to the question which neither the intellectuals and politicians of the period nor his own politics had penetrated: “What do men live by ?” James was now ready to examine cricket as the embodiment of fundamental aspects of human experience. He had reached the climax of the book.

In Beyond A Boundary, James discussed the connections between organised games and popular democracy, for in nineteenth century Britain both appeared to expand in roughly the same period. Although the parallels with organised games in ancient Greece were historically suggestive, he was careful to note, that the growth of popular democracy in ancient times needed a new form of cultural expression, tragic drama, and that the games were relegated to a second place. But cricket was unusual; it was a game and yet it also possessed a developed dramatic structure. This was most clearly seen in the Test matches. James attempted to show how the dramatic effect was achieved in cricket and he hoped, thereby, to cast light on the origin of Greek drama.

If he failed, in Beyond A Boundary, to satisfactorily resolve the conundrum, the relationship between the forces of democracy and forms of popular culture, James's thesis hinged upon his understanding of democracy as involving the expansion of the human personality. This led to new relations between individuals and between individual and society and, in turn, necessitated the development of artistic forms through which these changes could be expressed--the ancient Greeks turned to the drama of Aeschylus, the Victorians to organised games, particularly cricket.

For James, cricket in its structural foundations was perfectly integrated, containing “(the) fundamental relation of One and the Many, Individual and Social, Individual and Universal, leader and followers, representative and ranks, the part and the whole.” Inseparable from this whole was cricket's aesthetic dimension; and James recognised the game's capacity as a visual art to enhance the spectators' sense of objective reality and to unlock an experience unmediated by the aesthetes, the custodians of “culture.”

Having situated the game within the dialectical movement of history, as a manifestation of social and political change, at any one time embodying, through distinctive styles of play, those hidden forces at work in society, he now sought, through cricket, to explore deeper currents of human experience. He had returned to the point where he had begun, and to the central theme of The Struggle for Happiness--that the movement of the modern world was towards integration, a movement in which the expansion of the individual personality was part and parcel of profound social transformation. James had excavated the different elements--artistic, political, social, emotional, historical--which constituted human experience and established the relations between them. He wrote “the end of democracy is a more complete existence” and, for him, cricket, at its core, integrated all the fundamental features of human life.

Beyond A Boundary was a strikingly imaginative work. In writing the book James had created something new; and its originality was immediately recognised in the great critical acclaim which greeted its publication in 1963. Like all the creative work which he had studied over the years, Beyond A Boundary was as inseparable from James's own unique personality as it was from the particular social and historical forces which moulded the world in which he lived.

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NOTES

The intention behind my essay is to sketch the full range and scope of James's work on questions of art and society, taking The Struggle for Happiness and Beyond A Boundary as the key texts to anchor such a discussion. Given this aim of providing the reader with an overall picture, it has been impossible to discuss each document in detail; moreover, many of the documents from this period are fragmentary, unfinished or consist merely of outlines and jottings. A number, however, will appear in the C.L.R. James Reader, edited by Anna Grimshaw, to be published by Basil Blackwell in 1991; others, listed in the appendix, are available in the James archive.

The reader may find it helpful to consult the first pamphlet in this series, C.L.R. James and The Struggle for Happiness by Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart. Many of its themes bear directly upon this essay, though its perspective is slightly different. It contains a very detailed analysis of James's American work and a biographical account of his life. [-> main text]

2. See appendix for the details of James's working method. [-> main text]

3. Many of the ideas he outlined here concerning popular culture were later presented in a polemical letter James wrote to a critic in early 1953:”You told Saul Blackman that you liked the parts of my book [The Struggle for Happiness] you had read, but that you hoped, when I spoke about my admiration for comic strips, I was speaking with my tongue-in-cheek. First, I would never speak tongue-in-cheek to the general public. But that is not why I write to you. My perspective on artistic development in the civilisation of the United States is rooted in comic strips, soap operas and jazz; the gangster films, the television comics, the great men of the movies up to 1930. Lest you be so horrified by it that you do not take me seriously, I hasten to add that my ideas of art and society, like my literary criticism, are based upon Aristotle and Hegel. I doubt if there are many besides professional scholars who read and re-read Aeschylus and Shakespeare as much as I do, but it is precisely these studies that have led me to see comic strips and soap operas as I do. You see, at any rate, that my attitude is not an idiosyncracy or some sort of mental game.” James's letter to Bell, a tour de force, will be reprinted in the C.L.R. James Reader. [-> main text]

4. James was dismissive of many modern novelists and devoted much of his attention to clarifying the relationship between Melville's imaginative vision and that articulated by the twentieth century film makers. He did, however, briefly consider the connections between Moby Dick and the work of two young American writers, Norman Mailer and William Gardner Smith. His l950 review of The Naked and the Dead and The Last of the Conquerors, written in the same year as The Struggle for Happiness, argued that both writers grasped in actuality the crisis portrayed in artistic terms by Melville. They failed, however, to go further creatively, to conceive of collective humanity as a fundamental social force; and, in their creative failure lay, what James called, “the whole retarded political development of the United States.” Two Young American Writers, l950 reprinted in Spheres of Existence, volume two of James's selected essays, Allison and Busby 1980. [-> main text]

5. For a fuller discussion of James's critical reading of Moby Dick see Grimshaw and Hart, 1991. [-> main text]

6. James was drawing upon the ideas Melville expressed concerning original characters in The Confidence Man. [-> main text]

7. James traced two parallel lines in his historical examination of personality in literature. The first he identified as the rebel, an individual pitting himself against the constraints of society with such an intensity that society itself was threatened with destruction. For James, Prometheus, Lear and Ahab were examples of this same general type, but each, through his rebellion against something historically specific, was marked with particularity of his own age. The second line established logical connections between characters such as Orestes, Hamlet and Pierre, “intellectual” types whose personal ruin stemmed from the conflict within their own personalities which could find no social resolution.

On other occasions, however, James used a dialectical method in order to explore the relationships between those characters whose conflict was expressed externally and those whose conflict raged internally; such that in his overall assessment of Shakespeare, for example, he saw Lear as the logical development of Hamlet. [-> main text]

8. Letter to Jay Leyda, 7 March l953, to be reprinted in the C.L.R. James Reader.[-> main text]

9. Letter to Meyer Schapiro, 9 March 1953, James archive. The character of Hamlet was particularly important to James. He reflected a great deal on what Hamlet represented in the development of the modern world, not least in literature. Although James placed Hamlet at its very threshold, he recognised that the freedom and isolation of the intellectual, once revolutionary, had by the twentieth century become the greatest obstacle in the way of creative expression: ”The habit of thought was no flaw in Hamlet's character. It was his character. If it was a flaw, it was a flaw in the whole construction of civilisation from the sixteenth century onward. And inevitably, with this polarisation of action and thought in social function and personality, there developed in the men of thought a sense of isolation, of impotence, of melancholy, because you wandered through eternity, you voyaged in strange seas of thought, alone; that is to say, with an ever-growing consciousness of the divorce between the boundless exhilaration of thought and its divorce from reality.” Notes on Hamlet, to be reprinted in the C.L.R. James Reader. For an account of James's devastating critique of the modern intellectuals in The Struggle for Happiness, see Grimshaw and Hart, 1991.[-> main text]

10. Proposal to publish, 1953 unpublished ms., James archive. [-> main text]

11. Popular Art and the Cultural Tradition, l954, reprinted in Third Text, number 10, London, spring 1990. [-> main text]

12. Ibid. [-> main text]

13. To be reprinted in the C.L.R. James Reader. [-> main text]

14. The childrens' stories James wrote to his young son, Nobbie, convey in a striking and unusual way his preoccupation with ancient Greek civilisation. The Nobbie Stories, James archive. [-> main text]

15. Some twenty five years later James made more explicit his evaluation of the central role of Edgar/Poor Tom in taking the play to its conclusion: “Edgar, by his origins, by his experiences as Poor Tom and the various crises through which Shakespeare puts him emerges as the embodiment of a man not born but shaped by a society out of joint, to be able to set it right.” James went so far as to suggest Vanessa Redgrave for the role in a modern production, underlining the potential impact of such an interpretation on an audience by adding that “To play Edgar in those terms is a colossal task, none more colossal in our time.” Letter to Frank Kermode, September l982, James archive.

James had spent most of his life working out ideas relating to the development of Shakespeare's plays, specifically themes which concerned politics and government. His failure to write the book he had long planned on Shakespeare is one of the starkest reminders that he never found the conditions in which to complete the original writing project animated by the vision of his American years. [-> main text]

16. To Whom It May Concern, unpublished ms, September 1955, James archive. [-> main text]

17. The two most outstanding articles written by James when he was the editor of The Nation, his essay on Abraham Lincoln and his campaign for Carnival, have the stamp of his American years all over them. Both will be included in the C.L.R. James Reader. [-> main text]

18. To Whom It May Concern, unpublished ms, September l955, James archive. [-> main text]

19. Although James wrote a great deal about the entertainment industry he discovered in the United States, he did not include American sport in his general discussions of popular culture. James was always reluctant to write about anything he had not fully mastered, and it is likely that the life he led in America, functioning underground and engaged in intensive political work, made it impossible for him to undertake a comprehensive study of any particular sport. Furthermore, he had never played baseball or any of the other popular American games. By contrast, James played cricket and soccer from his childhood through his 30s. [-> main text]

[-> Contents]

Appendix 1: a short bibliograhical essay.

C.L.R. James spent most of his life working closely with a small handful of collaborators; their loyalty to one another was always fierce and exclusive. The most important group, the one with which James was associated during his American years, was the Johnson-Forest Tendency. A letter James wrote to Constance Webb in 1945 offers valuable insight into his collaborative working method: ”We are at Rae's[Raya Dunayesvskaya]. Grace [Lee], Rae, I and another friend. We have just worked out the basis of a defence of Germany--pointing out its great contribution to civilisation in the past and the necessity of its incorporation into the Europe of today--a serious contribution--the only contribution I fear that will be made to any serious understanding of the problem of Germany. It is going to be fine. As we talked I felt very very pleased. One person writes but in the world in which we live all serious contributions have to be collective; the unification of all phases of life make it impossible for the single mind to grasp it in all its aspects. Although one mind may unify, the contributory material and ideas must come from all sources and types of mind... The best mind is the one so basically sound in analytical approach and capacity to absorb, imagination to fuse, that he makes a totality of all these diverse streams.”

But James's work was also formed by his exchanges with artists, critics and, as much as possible, with ordinary men and women. What he liked to do was to ask his associates in the group to read a certain book or study designated passages, watch a film or listen to a piece of music and then send to him their detailed comments, and if possible include the comments of their friends or others. He used these materials as much as the standard “authorities” and both gave direction to the development of his ideas.

In the James archive there are many sources which reveal how he worked. For example, the letters of 1952, written during the time of his internment on Ellis Island, paint a vivid picture of how James depended upon the group to supply the materials he required for his critical study of Melville's Moby Dick. The later letters to critics, such as Leyda, Schapiro, Frankel and Geismar reveal, however, the eagerness with which James sought to engage with the more established traditions of literary scholarship.

The most interesting documents concerning James's ideas about art, literature, film and other work of the creative imagination are to be found within his personal papers. An important exception is the correspondence with Constance Webb which is held at the Schomburg Institute in New York. In many ways the themes James explored in the unpublished writings, the relationship between the creative personality and social life, reflects the dialectic within his own life.

At various points James faced the contradiction between the importance, as he acknowledged in his 1945 letter, of having a social context for work and his own personal need to go beyond the limitations of any particular collectivity. This was the crisis he faced in 1950. The Struggle for Happiness, one of the most important manuscripts in the James archive, was a work of singular originality. It grew out of the themes James had pursued individually and collectively over many years; but above all this manuscript looked to the future and its completion required a new social basis.

James failed to find in Britain in the 1950s conditions conducive to completion of his work on art and society. The archive contains many letters James wrote throughout the period, offering his services as a writer and teacher, as he tried to make a new connection with society and thereby develop his ideas within a social context. This correspondence is a stark and depressing reminder of the difficulties of his situation after he left America in 1953; and yet it contrasts sharply with the vitality and originality of the documents on art, literature and criticism which he was drafting during the same period.

Much of James's writing in the archive, dated soon after his departure from the United States, concerned the American civilisation project and his own sharp memory of life in the United States. At the same time, though, his correspondence with Grace Lee, of the 7th and 12th December 1953, focused on the problem of breaking the hold of the professional literary critics over the interpretation of creative work. These ideas may be traced in various fragments of writing as he began to work towards a first draft of Preface to Criticism (1955). The development of his argument in The Struggle for Happiness about mass art forms, specifically film, is contained in the notes he made for his Paris lecture of 1954 (Popular Art and the Cultural Tradition). These jottings are available in the James archive; so too are other short pieces on Shakespeare and literary criticism. James's later note to Grace Lee, of 6 May 1957, along with the memorandum, To Whom It May Concern, (20 September 1957) reveals his interest in broader question of the relationship between artistic work and the extension of democracy. This question was central to Beyond A Boundary, James's last full-scale work. The book was the symbol of his desire to discover, by returning to the Caribbean, new conditions in which to make his individual vision part of social life.

Again James was thwarted; and he spent much of the remainder of his life teaching and lecturing to audiences in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and America. As he had always done over the years, James continued to seek to engage as wide an audience as possible in the discussion of his ideas and he took seriously whatever contributions it made. He also maintained an extensive correspondence with those closely involved in creative work--cricketers, writers, artists, critics, theatre and film directors. For example, in James's archive some of the most memorable letters are those he exchanged during the late 1960s with the Guyanese novelist, Wilson Harris and the art critic and writer, John Berger, for they convey the seriousness and humanity which always marked James's approach to questions of creativity.

Much of the work James had done on art and society in the 1950s eventually found expression in his public lectures. A number of these were reprinted in the three volumes of James's collected writings; and the reader should consult the extensive bibliography in At the Rendezvous of Victory, Allison and Busby 1984 for a full listing. Transcripts of the 1963 BBC radio talks on Shakespeare and James's Channel Four lecture on King Lear may be read in the James archive.

Although the short pieces which became well-known in James's later life are often highly suggestive in the interpretations offered of creative work, they provide only glimpse of the much larger project which James pursued with remarkable tenacity, consistency and, above all, with great imagination throughout his life.

[-> Contents]

Appendix 2

This appendix contains the Table of Contents from each of the works discussed in this pamphlet. The contents for The Struggle for Happiness can be found in Grimshaw and Hart, C.L.R. James and The Struggle for Happiness (New York: C.L.R. James Institute, 1991).

Mariners, Renegades and Castaways
by C.L.R. James (1953)

Table of Contents:

Introduction
Preface
1.   The Captain and the Crew
2.   The Crisis
3.   The Catastrophe
4.   Fiction and Reality
5.   Neurosis and the Intellectuals
6.   The Work, the Author and the Times
7.   “A Natural But Necessary Conclusion”
Afterword

Table of Contents:

1.   The Principles of Literary Criticism.
2.   The Dramatic Performance: The Oresteia
3.   Shakespeare: Julius Caesar and King Lear
4.   Beyond Aristotle

Beyond A Boundary
by C.L.R. James (1963)

Table of Contents:

Part One Window To The World

1.   The Window
2.   Against the Current
3.   Old School-tie

Part Two: All the World's A Stage

4.   The Light and the Dark
5.   Patient Merit
6.   Three Generations
7.   The Most Unkindest Cut

Part Three: One Man In His Time

8.   Prince and Pauper
9.   Magnanimity in Politics
10.  Wherefore Are These Things Hid?

Part Four: To Interpose A Little Ease

11.   George Headley: Nascitur Non Fit

Part Five: W.G.: Pre-Eminent Victorian

12.   What Do Men Live By?
13.   Prolegomena to W.G.
14.   W.G.
15.   Decline of the West

Part Six: The Art And Practic Part

16.   “What is Art?”
17.   The Welfare State of Mind

Part Seven: Vox Populi

18. The Proof of the Pudding
19. Alma Mater: Lares and Penates
Epilogue and Apotheosis

[-> Contents]

[inside back cover]

Popular Democracy and the Creative Imagination: the Writings of C.L.R. James 1950-1963 is the second pamphlet in the series published by the C.L.R. James Institute. The Institute was established in 1984 with James's full support and approval and it is committed to the dissemination of his life's work. Just as James in 1953 wrote Mariners, Renegades and Castaways to publicise his case, his threatened deportation from America, so too the writing of these pamphlets is intended to publicise the case for making his work more widely and easily available. The series will explore the major themes of James's writing, examining particular texts and inviting discussion from anyone interested in the remarkable legacy of this major twentieth century figure.

Since James's death in May 1989 it has become increasingly difficult to obtain his books. The few volumes which are in print are almost impossible to find and the bulk of his other titles remain out or print. Furthermore, there is a vast quantity of James's work which has never been published; the most outstanding is, of course, his great work on American civilisation--The Struggle for Happiness. This pamphlet has drawn attention to some of the documents contained in the C.L.R. James archive which are indispensable for a full evaluation of James's contribution to modern history. A number will appear in the C.L.R. James Reader (edited by Anna Grimshaw, Basil Blackwell 1991); but a complete annotated list of the papers contained in the James archive will published in a forthcoming pamphlet of the Institute.

Also forthcoming: As ever, Nello: Explorations in the C.L.R. James Archive, by Jim Murray.

The Institute is eager to receive comments on the pamphlets themselves as well as suggestion for future activities.

For further information, please write

Jim Murray, Director
505 West End Avenue 15C
New York, N.Y. 10024.

[-> Contents]

[back cover]

The poet reacts to life emotionally--and without that, though he were the wisest man in the world, he could not write a line of verse. But the more humanity develops the more the emotional response depends upon a conception of the world which does not so much guide the poetry, but releases and expands the personality, integrates it, opens horizons, and thus gives the emotional responses a range and depth and power impossible otherwise. This is to live.

(1944)

Maybe one would wish to write a poem or poems purely about some aspect of this or that. But the point is for the writer to decide or rather his interior consciousness decides. The point is to break down the limitations that our rotten society have placed around the imagination and the mind. The genuine writer breaks them and extends the range of the human consciousness by his inward necessity.

(February, 1946)

The more genuinely yourself you are, the more you express your own genuine personality, the easier it is for people to recognise that you express something which is inside of them. Often they don't know it. The artist expresses something by strenuous effort. And people say “Yes, that's wonderful.” They mean, “I have felt that all along”.

(September 1, 1943)

C.L.R. James

(from the Letters to Constance Webb, 1939-1948)

[-> Contents]

Editor's note, 2001: The Struggle for Happiness was published, after a long struggle, under the title American Civilization (Cambridge, MA; Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993).

Original publication (c) 1991. Web page (c) 2001 The C.L.R. James Institute. All rights reserved. Essay published on the web by special permission of Anna Grimshaw. 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, 30 March 2001

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