The C.L.R. James Institute
Special Delivery:
The Letters of C.L.R. James to Constance Webb, 1939-1948
Introduction
Anna Grimshaw
(Part Two)
THE STORY OF THE WEBB LETTERS
During the last decade of his life, James attempted to write his autobiography. He sought to make sense of the journey which had begun at the turn of the century in Trinidad, carrying him to Europe, the New World, Africa, back to his native Caribbean and finally to London, where he died. The autobiographical task he confronted required the creation of a narrative which could reflect this movement and reveal the process by which he developed from a novelist and cricket writer to a major theorist and practitioner of revolutionary politics.
James's commitment to this project, however, was never more than half-hearted. He had left it too late, and he no longer had the energy to write something which would be more than just recounting a series of episodes and encounters over nine decades: such a task required a forward momentum which his life now lacked. For James's interest had always been in movement: “Time would pass, old empires would fall and new ones take their place, the relations of countries and the relations of classes had to change, before I discovered that it is not the quality of goods and utility which matter, but movement; not where you are or what you have, but where you have come from, where you are going and the rate at which you are getting there.”23 But at the end of his life he could only recapitulate the past from a static moment in the present. Thus, although he sought to discover the logic of his life's course as a historical narrative, a progressive movement in which previous stages of development were both incorporated and transcended, James's attempts were always thwarted by the recursive movement of the memory itself.
Working for James during the 1980s, I became involved, like others before me, in his attempt to draft an autobiography. It was a frustrating endeavor. I found out that it was almost impossible to get beyond a certain narrative which James had constructed and to which he clung as the single unifying thread of his life. But the movement implied here was illusory, since the narrative was in fact constructed from a series of timeless moments. Instead of exploring the past in order to situate the present and imaginatively create a future, the past had become a timeless place linked to an immovable present; and his mind was able only to shuttle back and forth between fixed points in the past and present. Indeed so powerful was this recursive movement of the memory that James could dictate episodes to me which were identical, almost word for word, to those taken down by the others before me who had compiled notes and chapters towards his autobiography.
The way in which James chose to remember and construct parts of his autobiography was particularly pronounced in the case of his American years. Repeatedly he asserted that his fifteen years in the United States were the most important for his intellectual and political development. He was, of course, referring to his collaboration with members of the Johnson Forest Tendency; and to the important new positions on key political questions which they established collectively. This work laid the foundation for a new conception of revolutionary Marxism. But in drafting this section of his autobiography James enshrined certain key moments, fixing them in his mind as dominant and immovable landmarks in the midst of a complex and contested terrain. His attempt to impose coherence and order was perhaps not surprising, given that in the intense climate of revolutionary politics, one marked by endless sectarian feuds and fissions, participants at any time were always searching for points of stability in an essentially fluid world.
Occasionally, though, something new and unexpected would emerge. Chance remarks and informal conversations during the long hours we spent together began to suggest different interpretations which subverted the sense of James's life as a straightforward linear progression. One question on which he reflected a great deal concerned women. Conscious of his vulnerability and isolation in old age, and aware of his need for domestic companionship with me, James would sometimes talk about his different relationships with women. This was an area where he readily admitted failure. It was nowhere more strikingly revealed than during his American years, where the remarkable success of his intellectual partnership with a number of prominent women was matched only by the scale of his failure to grasp a new conception of human relationships offered to him by the woman he loved. For despite his choice of female collaborators as intimate colleagues in revolutionary politics—indeed he regarded three of them (Dunayevskaya, Lee and Webb) as among his greatest “pupils”—he still acknowledged the depth of his resistance to admitting women into his life on equal terms. At best, James dealt with them as colleagues and collaborators (though he always sought to incorporate them into his vision of the world); at worst, he used them as domestic servants.
Once James had withdrawn from any active interest in the autobiographical project, I became free to try and fit together the different pieces of his life in new ways. My sources were what I heard and saw; the published writings; and the notes, jottings, letters and documents which constituted his vast, unexplored personal archive.
From the beginning it seemed to me that the full-length manuscript, American Civilization, which had languished unpublished among his papers for more than thirty years, was central to any re-configuration.24 Certainly my understanding of what James was attempting here was greatly enhanced by the Webb letters; but equally I recognized that the correspondence stood alone as a remarkable document in its own right. It was quite unlike anything else in the James corpus.
Although the correspondence with Webb continued over subsequent decades, indeed until James's death, the later writing was of a different kind. Following the breakup of their marriage in the late 1940s a new sort of relationship had to be established; and the bitterness, dislocation and anger were resolved partly through the shared responsibility for their son, Nobbie. This itself was not easy for either of them, given James's forced departure from the United States in 1953 and the difficulties Webb faced raising a mixed-race child.
Over the years, however, Webb kept most of the letters she received from James. During the 1980s she began to transcribe them with a view to publication. It seems unlikely that at the time of writing James anticipated their eventual publication; but he responded with great enthusiasm to Webb's plans to edit them into a volume. Their publication offers a new perspective not just on James's American years, but on his life as a whole.
There is a dramatic narrative to be found in James's letters to Webb. It unfolds over the course of a decade, reaching a climax in 1948 with James's exile to Reno, Nevada; but the conclusion of the story is to be found later, outside the correspondence itself. The process of identifying the narrative involves a sort of detective work, piecing together a coherent story from a mass of documents, with obvious gaps and omissions. Part of the problem also stems from the fact that, by their nature, letters rarely pursue a single argument. Writers zigzag across topics, returning to some, while leaving others suspended and never fully resolved. Thus James's letters may be conceived as a sort of mosaic, a collage of pieces of different materials from which different stories may be told. The richness of the correspondence lies as much in its elusive, poetic qualities as in the dramatic story it contains. By focusing on the latter, which I believe to be the most compelling narrative to be excavated, I am conscious of sacrificing some of the beauty of the letters, and in arranging different pieces into a coherent linear story, I destroy something of the openness of the text itself. For as we approach the climax we cannot be sure how James will resolve the crisis he faces.
Thus in the account which follows I am not concerned to present an exhaustive analysis of the Webb correspondence. Instead, I attempt to highlight the dramatic narrative and its development, drawing on my imagination and on the work concerning James's American period which I have pursued over a number of years.25 I trace the story through four parts, each of which has a distinctive character and yet is integrally linked to the overall movement of the whole. At one level this movement appears to be a linear progression, one of increasing integration as past and present are conceived as stages on the path towards a new future. It mirrors the classic revolutionary vision itself. For the near future is conceived of as a moment of breakthrough, or, as James wrote in Notes on Dialectics, following Lenin, “LEAP LEAP LEAP”—the movement from quantity to quality. At another level, however, the narrative reflects James's attempt to achieve integration in American society through Constance Webb. In the beginning James imagines that these two historical projects can be assimilated to one another. But—as the correspondence increasingly reveals—they are fundamentally at odds.
This is the crisis that James faced in Nevada. In many ways the climax may be interpreted as containing the whole story of the correspondence itself. The drama of whether James will manage to acquire the divorce from his first wife in Trinidad, find his way through a racial and political minefield, change his personal and political life and complete his work on the dialectic are the elements of his final test. We feel with him that if he is able to weather this crisis the future holds immense possibilities. But as James desperately sought ways of establishing a new future with Webb, he was simultaneously forced back, by the difficulties of his circumstances (not least his gambling), into old patterns of dependency on his comrades. The sheer anguish of James's late writing from Reno reflects the extraordinary struggle he faced, between his group and Webb, between Europe and America, between the revolution and his love for a woman.
The last letters James wrote to Webb in 1948 convey the sense of his being on the verge of a breakthrough. We feel that he is poised to LEAP LEAP LEAP, as he senses a new life lying within his grasp; but at this very moment we become witnesses to James's struggle against the forces of his own personality. The contours of the battle, however, have already been established. In a handwritten inscription to Webb which James attached to his essay, “Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity,” in October 1947 we discover that he can only imagine his marriage as an American suburban domesticity, a sort of eternity outside of history, at the very moment that he articulates a progressive vision of humanity and the development of world civilization.
The struggle between the old and the new is manifest in the subversion of the narrative's movement itself. Indeed it is suggested from the beginning by a formal symmetry in the correspondence. For the dramatic narrative which sustains the possibility of progress toward integration is framed by two timeless moments of limbo; and these indicate the possibility of the story being subverted by forces not previously acknowledged.
The first letters James wrote while marooned on board ship, traveling from Mexico to New Orleans are mirrored by those he sent in 1948 while seeking a divorce in Reno, Nevada. What they both share is James's separation from the familiar world of his political group, and his firsthand exposure to contemporary life. There was a curious anomaly in James's existence in America, since his normal day-to-day life as J. R. Johnson, surrounded by comrades who catered to his every need, took him away from society, enabling him to elevate an historical vision in which the present is always sacrificed for the future. But outside the cocoon of the Johnson Forest group, James was forced to confront the here and now, the reality of modern society; and on each occasion his imaginative powers as a novelist were stimulated. But the symmetry between the early and late episodes, between the boat to New Orleans and the ranch in Reno, hides a world of difference. For the character we see at the beginning of the story, the great nineteenth-century romantic hero, has become by its end a divided and tormented modernist intellectual.
The early James, confident, powerful, expansive and brimming with creative energy, believed he could integrate the progressive narrative (revolutionary politics) with the here and now (everyday life). It involved the incorporation of Webb into his imaginative vision. As the story of the letters unfolds, though, we are forced to acknowledge that James is not in control of either project in any realistic sense.
Perhaps at the end of his life James, conscious of his impending death, was able to achieve a kind of integration, if not quite the one he sought with Webb in the turbulent America of his most creative years. For in abandoning his autobiographical project, he finally freed himself from the problem of historical narrative.
I. THE BEGINNING OF A JOURNEY (1939-40)
“I made a long trip, 8,000 miles, I think, and saw thousands of people, and millions of things. It was a great experience in every way and you remain my most vivid and intimate personal experience.”
—James to Webb, 31 August 1939
The letters of the first period open in April 1939 with James's trip to Mexico; and they close a year and a half later, following the assassination of Leon Trotsky in August 1940. In many important ways these letters indicate the distinctive themes of the correspondence as a whole. They reveal the depth of James's commitment to revolutionary politics as well as his instinctive pushing against the limits of such a life. From the beginning James covered a range of topics, moving easily between the immediate political issues which faced the Trotskyist movement at that time and the personal questions concerning Webb's development as an individual personality, between his commitment to the revolution and his love for Webb. His confident writing style and the fluency with which he achieves such transitions suggests the profound connection in James's own mind between the different dimensions of modern life.
If the early correspondence with Webb establishes the seriousness with which James approached the question of individual self-expression, there is no other body of literature which so starkly exposes James's own personality. The different facets of his character emerge, not just through the content of the letters, but in the various voices which he adopts in his exchanges with Webb. It is the intensity of James's engagement in Webb's struggle for self-expression, however, which is most striking; and from the outset we cannot but feel this to be a battle at the core of James's own life.
These first letters reveal the contours of the political landscape which defined James's work after his arrival in the United States at the end of 1938; and we follow the course of his changing political priorities. But outstanding among the early writing is James's extended account of life on board ship as he travels across the Gulf of Mexico. It is as if, marooned at sea and freed from the pressures and responsibilities of his political life, James is suddenly able to open up his personality. He allows himself to feel, to desire, to dream. Interestingly he did not immediately send the two shipboard letters to Webb; rather he held back, referring to them in later correspondence as “a little book” written specially for her. The book was also, as he confessed, a “love letter.”
James creates a short story during his voyage. It is built around sharp observation of certain characters who share the journey with him; and, unusually for James, he too is cast as a distinctive personality within the unfolding narrative. The writing is wonderfully evocative of the sense of limbo which infects everyone, for the ship moves only imperceptibly. Its passengers are trapped, separated from the momentum of their lives and forced to create community with one another. In important ways the experience on board ship returns James to his Caribbean past, specifically to his early aspirations as a novelist. His keen eye and ear for the drama of everyday life are irrepressible; but the account also contains another story, one which he tells through a series of asides to the reader.
Both letters open with a vivid encounter which brings together the major characters around whom James's story is built. There is Tenor (a singer on his way to Rio de Janeiro) and Guitar (an English steward), and the writer himself. But although James humorously describes the life-stories of the crew and his participation in the ship's life as an enthusiastic listener to radio soap operas, we are always conscious of him standing back, a detached observer of the men around him. By contrast, his letters to Webb are a space in which he does not hold back. Rather he imaginatively situates her at his side during the trip, confiding in her many aspects of his personality as if the two of them were engaged in an intimate conversation. In this way, the narrative of James's own personal development unfolds, and we recognize the fundamental shift from a novelist's engagement with social life to a commitment to revolution.
Unlike most of the early letters to Webb, those James writes while on board ship are marked by a striking freedom and expansiveness. These features are enhanced as we return once more to the hurly-burly of James's political life. But already the writing has changed. For although from the beginning James treats Webb as a confidant, signing himself “Nello,” the name used by his mother and close friends (but never by his political associates, for whom he was always “Jimmy”), the intimacy of their exchanges deepens significantly during the course of his trip. Of course, the letters written by James while on board ship are an important turning point; but so too is Webb's willingness to share with him her struggle to find a new life, following the breakup of her marriage. This marks the beginning of James's intense engagement in Webb's self-development. Through it he is able to explore his own personal trajectory, illuminating the many facets of his own character within the contours of a revolutionary's life.
Despite the new understanding between them, however, James's return to Trotskyist headquarters inhibited the development of his relationship with Webb. Indeed he is the first to acknowledge that he is unable to write to her as freely as before. For the urgency of the political tasks which now face the movement—the imminence of war in Europe, the need to develop a clear position and strategy on the race question, and the disarray precipitated by Stalin's pact with Nazi Germany—begin to absorb all of James's energies. As his letters reveal, there was a stark contrast between the disorganization within the movement, especially at the level of its leadership, and the scope of the party's ambition. Despite James's frustration with the internal squabbles, he remains convinced that the world stands at a critical juncture and that his tiny party will influence millions of Americans, if not toward the revolution, then at least against their own government.
The letters written during the second half of 1939 offer a unique insight into the pressures of James's life. For someone so careful about his public persona, James is surprisingly candid about the turbulence of his existence.
But the political crisis was not just external. Not only did it go to the core of the revolutionary movement itself, as he makes clear in his comments to Webb on the leadership. It reached the core of James's life as well. His American immigration visa was due to expire, forcing him to go underground in December 1939. James's “retirement” marks the beginning of the end of the first batch of letters, a closure dramatically sealed with the assassination of Trotsky in August 1940.
The early letters of 1939-40 are important in establishing the narrative which unfolds over the course of the next decade. James's first journey through America stands as a metaphor for the voyage of self-discovery that the correspondence itself charts. As readers, we too embark on this journey, conscious now of the key dramatic elements which have been woven into the story at the beginning—James's wooing of Webb, his decision to operate as an underground political activist, his commitment to a revolutionary path. Moreover the different rhythms of his early writing prepare us for the ebb and flow of the story's movement.
II. A SYMBOL OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION (1943-4)
After a silence of three years, James resumed his correspondence with Webb. The intervening period had been difficult, as James himself had predicted in one of his last letters to Webb in 1940. “It is adversity that tests and makes people. It is easy to sail along when everything is flowing with you. But now we need courage.” The changes in James's own character may be discerned in the writing itself. The later letters are distinguished by a new passionate urgency; the writing is intense and yet always controlled; it is focused and expansive. The distinctive formal features mirror the substance of the second phase of correspondence, as James struggles with questions of the individual personality while seeking to grasp the movement of civilization as a whole. These qualities are particularly notable in James's second letter to Webb of September 1943. But it is important for other reasons too.
It is clear that an important shift had taken place in James's orientation. In many ways this shift was symbolized by the letters James wrote as he travelled by boat from Mexico to New Orleans. He was leaving behind the old European style of party politics, represented by Trotsky, and beginning his journey into the New World. The letter of September 1943 shows how James's renewed engagement in Webb's struggle for self-expression was already becoming linked to his own explorations into the nature of modern American society. But if James is confident he can help Webb to find her way, he acknowledges too that there is much that he can learn from her.
It is clear that by this time James had already begun to immerse himself in American popular culture, confessing to Webb his particular fascination with Hollywood films. Originally movies like Stormy Weather or That Uncertain Feeling offered him a tangible connection with society, breaking the isolation of his private political work; but increasingly he recognized the fundamental connection between his study of the Hegelian dialectic and these forms of contemporary popular culture.
From the letters of 1943 we can begin to piece together the different elements of James's nascent project. His central concern was the relationship between art and society, and he begins by noting, “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.” (1 September 1943). James was seeking to illuminate the process by which cultural forms become appropriated and transformed by a mass audience through his discussion of the changing popularity of certain kinds of Hollywood stars; and by contrasting such figures as Charles Boyer and Humphrey Bogart, Greta Garbo and Bette Davis, he is able to suggest important differences between European and American society.
This question of the dramatic personality, how distinctive social features become refracted and expressed through unique individual personalities was of course implicit in James's early fiction. It remained an important feature in his work; but after experiencing American culture, he began to appreciate the potential of the mass art form and the remarkable power and presence of film stars. Among them was Ethel Waters, the black actress who James admired in Cabin In The Sky. She became a focus for James as he began to toy with the idea of again using drama to explore the dynamics of society and history through the clash of human personalities. He planned to cast Waters as Harriet Tubman in a play built around the Abolitionist movement of the nineteenth century. James first outlined these plans in 1943; and he expands on the proposed historical drama in the early letters of 1944. Indeed he found a role in the play for Webb herself.
This was not the first time James had attempted to write and produce a historical drama. He was mindful no doubt of the unfavorable critical reviews which his play, Toussaint L'Ouverture, had received in 1936. James acknowledges, in his letters to Webb, the difficulties of the playwright's task in achieving the proper balance between character and plot, between human passions and political ideas.26
Although the conflict between slaves and slave-owners constitutes the basic narrative structure of the play James planned to write for Waters, it is obvious that his interest lies equally in exploring the internal dynamics of a political movement. Specifically he wished to trace the changing relationship between key characters as the political struggle unfolds, raising questions of leadership and strategy. But importantly, too, James was fascinated by the intersection of the personal and the political; and, in making Tubman his central character, he throws issues of race and gender into sharp relief.
It is hard not to read James's outline of his play as in part a dramatization of his own circumstances. He knew well the powerful emotions simmering in political life: the love, hate, jealousies, rivalries, battles between men and women, battles between blacks and whites within the revolutionary movement itself. And almost from the beginning of his resumed correspondence with Webb, James's writing reveals such tensions.
Despite the deadly implications of the play for James's own life, he humorously develops it as a drama within a drama through an account to Webb of his attempts to approach Ethel Waters. This time he explicitly casts himself as a character in the scenario. James's sense of theater, however, has a greater resonance. For we cannot help but feel that after 1943 James conceived of his courtship of Webb as a powerful piece of drama. He is highly conscious of his stage presence, casting himself and Webb in different roles. At times James also plays the audience. The play is both comic and tragic; art and life have indeed become inseparable in the world of letters.
The letters of 1943 mark the beginning of the second phase of James's relationship with Webb. Although there is a sense of a new beginning, a recognition that each has changed in three years, something remains fundamentally unchanged; and the original spark of attraction between them continues as a powerful and tangible force in the writing itself. The sheer number of letters James wrote to Webb during 1944 is evidence enough, quickly sweeping aside any residual hesitancy in their renewed exchange. There is, however, an important shift in the circumstances of the correspondence. At the end of May 1944, Webb moved from California to New York in order to pursue her career as an actress and model; and in so doing she effectively ended her relationship with the actor, Jack Gilford, who had drawn her into artistic circles closely associated with the Communist Party. For the first time, five years after their initial meeting, James and Webb now lived in close geographical proximity; but despite this, James continued to write frequently—sometimes lines scribbled as he traveled on the subway, at other times extended and exploratory notes by which he sought to articulate the changing historical relationship between art and society.
The focus of the 1944 letters remains the question of the individual personality. But by taking Webb's personal struggle to find the conditions for the full and free expression of her individuality, James is able to address questions that were central to modern civilization itself. These questions, the relationship between the individual and society, between men and women, between the form and content of creative work, between art and life, are of course implicit in James's “politics;” and yet, as he later revealed (in Beyond A Boundary), they were accorded no proper place in the political sphere. Writing in one of his later letters of 1944, James notes, “politics, art, life, love in the modern world, all become so closely integrated that to understand one is to understand all.” (June 1944).
James's ambitious project concerning the movement of world civilization begins to emerge in the course of the 1944 correspondence. Indeed we recognize that some of the central features are already present in one of the very first letters of that year. Writing to Webb on 5 January, James dissects a recent production of Othello which starred Paul Robeson and Uta Hagen. His critical approach here is characteristic, rooted in his early study of the game of cricket. James deals first of all with the details of the production itself, focusing on the interpretation of the Shakespearean rhythms of speech and key dramatic personalities, before considering the broader questions raised by the play. A combination of technique, insight and imagination are the qualities James identifies as necessary to any modern production; and yet in his opinion neither Robeson nor Hagen succeed in elevating the play above the unfolding of the plot itself. James recognizes that a performance of Othello in the United States represented a political event. But he is quick to point out that the play does not just pose questions about race in modern society; for Desdemona's defiance of all established social conventions also raises critical issues about gender.
Fundamentally, though, James interprets Othello as a play about the relationship between the individual and society. For him, Shakespeare posed the question for the first time in the modern world, writing as he did at the moment in which the old feudal structures gave way to the new bourgeois society. The world of the seventeenth century saw the birth of the individual personality; human beings were now agents in society and history, responsible alone for their beliefs, their decisions, and their actions. According to James, the insights that emerged from Shakespeare's dramatic imagination illuminated the world in which he himself lived, since the America of the 1940s was still, in essence, a bourgeois society; and the problem of the relationship of the individual to it, which the Elizabethan playwright explored five hundred years earlier, was exposed as never before in history.
James's interpretation of Robeson's failure is particularly interesting for the basis of his criticism is Robeson's inability to make the role of Othello his own. By this he means that the modern actor should immerse himself profoundly in the historical drama and yet recreate it for his own time. It is, as James acknowledges later, a Hegelian question—the dialectical relationship of essence and manifestation. Although he does not explicitly refer in his letter of 5 January to his distancing from Robeson, following the latter's close association with the American Communist Party, it is nevertheless possible to read James's criticism as a response to the actor's inability to resist Stalinism. And Robeson's failure to assert his own unique individual personality within the play itself becomes a symbol of the modern intellectuals' failure to respond to the crisis of their time.
This struggle between the individual and society, the means by which the human personality resists the confinement and fragmentation of modern life, becomes the central theme in James's subsequent letters of 1944. He recognizes it to be the animating force of Webb's life. She is a young American woman seeking to find the social expression of her individuality. At first James encourages her to break with her old life in California and to try to make her way independently in New York. Later, Webb's attempts to write poetry and her willingness to share it with James provide a new focus for this question.
James takes Webb's birthday in June 1944 as a symbol of a new beginning. Webb has finally arrived in New York. All the ordinary things to be enjoyed in human friendship now seem possible; and James celebrates with a letter full of poetry. He admits that he is out of practice as a critic; but already, in juxtaposing Webb's work with that of Spender and Shelley, he seeks to understand the distinctive quality of the modern voice. This attempt, pursued in a number of later letters, involves the detailed line by line analysis of the sounds, rhythms and content of Webb's writing and that of her contemporaries, an analysis moreover which is linked to a wide-ranging exploration of the historical roots of twentieth-century poetry.
From the outset James is highly sensitive to the creative process itself. He explains to Webb that the difficult synthesis of imagination and discipline, the instinctive force of creation with the need to find social form, often emerges from intense conflict. But, as James recognizes, there are great difficulties: “The expression of social forces in our time, in art and in life, is a highly contradictory, subtle and complex business. The crudeness and coarseness of the Stalinists here as elsewhere have wrought an incalculable amount of harm.” (14 June 1944). What particularly interests James is Webb's instinctive grasp of modern rhythms and language. For the modern poet, expression is always social, but the problem is to create genuine poetic imagery and not rhetoric or argument. And the more James examines the nature of Webb's poetic voice, the more explicit becomes his appreciation of its distinctively twentieth-century American qualities.
In a remarkable letter of July 1944, James attempts to reveal a sequence of formal developments in poetry, from Shakespeare's development of blank verse to Whitman's complete break with the European style. James's understanding of these formal shifts is built upon their relationship to key moments in the history of the democratic ideal. It is a dialectical process in which moments of innovation are succeeded by convention, freedom by conformity, spontaneity by artifice. Thus James contrasts the ordered eighteenth-century verse of Pope with the burst of poetic innovation—associated with Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley and Coleridge—which followed the French Revolution. Likewise he argues that Whitman's free verse has to be understood in the context of America's early democracy before the Civil War and the rise of mass industry.
As James reminds Webb, her task as a modern poet is to find a way of giving expression to the social forces of her age. That task is an immensely difficult one, as his dismissal of “W.H. Auden and that bunch” reveals. But in James's view, the social responsibility cannot be evaded, for the poet's own creativity depends on it. Describing the thrill he experiences listening to a piano concerto of Mozart or Beethoven, James uses the interplay between soloists and orchestra as a metaphor for this relationship between individual and society. The expansion of an individual's creative capacity is, he suggests, part of a dialectical process, and organically tied to changes in society itself.
We sense a growing intellectual excitement in the 1944 letters. It becomes ever more tangible as James acknowledges that questions of art, creativity and individual personality illuminate the philosophical and political problems with which he is grappling inside the Trotskyist movement—the question of the dialectic, the movement of history and the development of society toward complete democracy. At the same time, however, James's different voices or personalities—teacher, critic, supporter, lover, friend—take on sharper and more contrasting tones. Although there are still moments of gentle playfulness in the writing—humorous self-indulgence or whimsical imaginings which subvert the ferocious and rather forbidding political facade—there is now also an urgency, almost an impatience. For we are increasingly aware of the marked inequality in the correspondence, with James's extraordinary outpouring failing to awaken in Webb any significant response of the same order. It is particularly manifest in letters which read as speeches, rather than as parts of conversation or dialogue between two people.
Occasionally though, James is able to achieve transitions between different personalities within a single letter. The ease of this movement, what James calls the transition between “majesty and the sudden simplicity” which are, for him, the mark of the artist (Beethoven or Shakespeare, for example), reveals again his own distinctive skill as a writer. The letter to Webb of 7 July 1944 is a particularly fine example, evoking James, the renowned political orator, who is able to captivate a whole audience as he did in the church in California where he first met Webb in 1939. And yet, despite this quality, the letter also remains a remarkably intimate document.
James begins with a playful response to a model agency photograph of Webb; but quickly he shifts into an introspective mood as he muses upon his own attraction to Webb and everything she symbolizes. The letter becomes a powerful soliloquy, animated by James's awareness of his changing perception of Webb. And in seeking to clarify this, James offers a powerful demonstration of the Hegelian principle of dialectic that he was seeking to grasp in his political work—that subject and object are linked in a moving, historical relationship and that as the subject changes so too does the object. In his final moving paragraph James imagines Webb, the actress, standing on stage in front of an audience. He confesses that “the most secret, the innermost, the unexpected dream come true” would be if she turned first to him, before all others. But, of course, we see that it is James himself who stands on the stage and in turning to Webb he is in fact turning to face himself.
Reading the letters of 1944, it is difficult not to perceive Webb as a sort of mirror in which James contemplates his own reflection. If he saw clearly the obstacles which faced Webb, it was because he confronted them too. For the conflict between freedom and necessity, imagination and discipline, individuality and social form cut to the core of the revolutionary movement itself. Thus, at the most personal level, these questions find focus in James's desire for intimacy and companionship which his political work leaves untouched, while at another level they illuminate much broader historical issues concerning the development of modern civilization. It comes as no surprise then to discover James's self-conscious exploration of his own trajectory in the later correspondence of 1944. He begins to draft sections of his autobiography, starting with the early years in Trinidad, in the form of letters to Webb. This process of self-discovery is motivated by a sense of movement, a future opening out in which the past can be actively woven into the present (and not just recapitulated as at the end of his life).
But at the moment James turns inward to explore the circumstances of his Caribbean childhood, he is also, in other letters, reaching out to grasp some of the biggest questions facing humanity itself. The confidence with which he approaches the latter stems, in part, from his sense that the collective work of the Johnson Forest Tendency is now coming to fruition. In his letters to Webb of 1944, James increasingly indicates the direction in which ideas in the Tendency are developing—specifically on the race question and the nature of the Soviet Union. Moreover, as James makes clear, these questions go to the heart of modern civilization, opening up entirely new perspectives on the development of humanity.
The excitement of these discoveries explodes in a letter which James wrote following his meeting with Richard Wright. Here James celebrates the fact that the novelist, through artistic means, has reached the same conclusion that he himself had drawn from an intensive study of history and politics. And in anticipating the enormous upheaval of black people against American society, James seeks to place their struggle within a broader context. Undaunted by two thousand years of history, he proceeds, in just a handful of pages, to outline the historical progression towards humanity's achievement of complete consciousness, tracing the process by which ideas once considered advanced and the preserve of a few have become the rights and expectations shared by millions of people worldwide. According to James, it was this tremendous movement of civilization which called forth the unprecedented forces of reaction (fascism). The intensity of the conflict is felt at all levels of modern society—in the workplace, in art and literature, in popular culture and, not least, in the intimate relations between men and women.
The letter to Webb about Richard Wright reveals James at his most magisterial, commanding a broad sweep of history and yet remaining firmly anchored in an understanding of the present. This combination of range and depth finds expression in the writing itself. It is controlled and at the same time explosive—the cold intellectual rationalism matched by an extraordinary passion. In many ways this letter stands as a symbol of the early, expansive phase of James's relationship with Webb. As both the content and tone of the correspondence suggests, it was a period in which James was buoyed by a great self-confidence, an inner certainty which stemmed from his profound commitment to a revolutionary life. It gave him the sense, momentarily, of being able to hold together all the contradictory elements of such an existence. Indeed the tension between them must surely have contributed to the wonderful creative energy of the letters, but it was an equilibrium impossible to sustain. For the conflicts are already discernible in the letters of 1944. Not least because in James's imaginary theater, Webb is expected to play the role to which she has been assigned; but those very qualities James finds so compelling in her make it impossible for her to play such a role.
The 1944 correspondence charts James's increasing objectification of Webb as a symbol of modern America. Webb instinctively grasps what James struggles to understand intellectually. This young Californian woman with her beauty, energy, creativity, and desire for an integrated life, comes to embody for James a new stage in modern civilization. It is distinctively American. But equally, as the letters begin to show, James is faced with a real person, Constance Webb. She has her own will, desire and freedom. His frustration with her is palpable.
James sought to turn Webb into a pupil rather like his others—Eric Williams, Grace Lee, Raya Dunayevskaya, and William Gorman. Her refusal to be moulded in such a way exacerbates the tension between Webb and his closest political associates, which James is forced to recognize. Almost from the beginning it is discernible in the tentativeness or unease in James's writing about his collaborators. Later it becomes more manifest as the collective work of the Johnson Forest Tendency gathers pace.
III. UNCERTAINTY AND ATTACHMENT (1945-6)
James's letters of 1945 contrast sharply with those of the previous year. The enormous optimism driving the early correspondence, the sense of jointly embarking on the same path and riding the tide of history (cosmopolitan black man, young white American woman) begins to dissipate. There are fewer moments of brilliant illumination; and there is neither the same confidence nor control in the writing itself. Indeed, James contemplates breaking off his correspondence with Webb, recognizing that she remains largely untouched by his passionate courtship.
During the spring and summer of 1945 Webb was working as an actress at the Stamford Theater in Connecticut. After seeing her in a performance of Chekhov's The Sea Gull, James writes a long letter to her in which he dissects the play, exploring its dramatic structure. But his interpretation, like his earlier response to Paul Robeson in Othello, is much more than a critical appraisal of that particular production. It casts light on the forces which animate his own life. For his understanding of the play hinges on what he calls its revelation, the moment when Nina recognizes her vocation. “Not fame nor glory; but patience and faith in your work,” becomes the phrase which James ponders. He recognizes the difficulties of translation, considering and rejecting “fortitude” or “capacity to endure,” instead preferring the simple, though much abused notions of faith or patience. Even in Webb's four lines he insists that her acting should be an embodiment of such a conception.
This letter encapsulates much of the substance of James's exchanges with Webb. His emphasis on the notion of commitment, of a faith or vocation, is at the center of his response to Webb's poetry, to her acting, and to her life in general. Again and again James proclaims his own commitment—as much to Webb as to the world revolution. He contrasts his inner certainty with Webb's hesitancy and equivocation. Moreover he believes that it gives him insight into her life which she cannot possibly have. James takes up this question of faith in other letters too. He gently reminds her that whatever failings she may find in his close political associates, she must acknowledge their profound commitment to a certain way of life. For unlike her, they have decisively turned their backs on what James calls “bourgeois society,” resisting its hold in every aspect of their lives, while Webb remains unsure, undecided, tossed hither and thither by her inability to discover fundamental principles by which to live her life. Indeed, for James, Jack Gilford remains the symbol of temptation.
One of the 1945 letters in particular reveals the important shift in James's mood. It is marked by its introspection and hesitancy. Writing after midnight, when the world outside is dark and still, James toys with the idea of whether to respond to Webb's letters. He feels disinclined. To write means to switch on the light and thereby destroy the mystery of the darkness; but that is, in fact, what the letter is about, as James for the first time holds up to the light his own relationship with Webb. Reading his letter seems almost like eavesdropping on an intensely private conversation which James is having with himself. Although on this occasion he stops short of breaking off the relationship, there are other outbursts of irritation, even petulance, which begin to disrupt the progression of the narrative. Indeed, in another letter of October 1945, James confesses that he has destroyed almost all of Webb's letters and photographs.
After almost six years, the disintegration of the relationship seems inevitable. In a letter to Webb of 2 February 1946, James acknowledges that all his efforts to persuade Webb to reject “lights, glitter, self-expression, everything bourgeois” have failed. He now knows that she is unable to commit herself to artistic development in the context of the revolutionary movement. James speaks quite frankly to Webb about what he considers to be her failings; yet the cool, distant and restrained quality of the writing suggests not anger, but resignation. Certainly he never underestimates the scale and intensity of the battle which Webb confronts. It is no less than a social revolution itself.
But it is here that the dialectical law to which James repeatedly returns in his correspondence with Webb becomes manifest. And in the moment that he resolves to break his attachment there emerges evidence of a new intimacy. This dramatic turning point seems to have been stimulated partly by Webb's decision to write a critical essay on the fiction of Richard Wright. It represents a development of her earlier interest in the race question (subject of the 1939-40 letters); and it enables James to take up the familiar position of mentor or teacher—supplying Webb with a reading list and an outline of the method (dialectic) by which she should approach her subject. But it is more than this. James sees it as a possibility for incorporating Webb into his political circle. For the ambivalence of his political collaborators towards Webb is now openly acknowledged; and the brief account James provides of their collective life, admittedly written with some humor, is devastating: “Nettie came specially from Philly [Philadelphia] to see after me. Ike went to Doc B to get Vitamin B and instructions to give me injections every day; Grace and Rae arranged this trip. Then Rae took over getting a new lamp for me. G. arranged for me to see an oculist or something. Both of them went with me on W'y [Wednesday]. Rae stayed behind to pick up the glasses. Grace took me to dinner at her brother's and gave me stationery, etc., she had bought ($12.00) for our work. Nettie helped dispatch me. Rae met me at the train with the glasses—I have them on—and sandwiches. On Monday a.m. both of them meet me—I'll travel through the night—to start immediately on some writing. And that is only half. They keep me going.” [1945 Portrait (Partial) of a Man].
James interprets Webb's commitment to a writing project as evidence of her having made a decisive move towards him. He describes it as her coming back, returning as if from a long voyage. April 1946 is a turning point, and a new voice emerges in the letters. There is now a softness and intimacy in the writing, a distinctive sort of tenderness which follows the climax of a great battle. “Was ever such a play written?” James asks in a letter of 27 April. Although he now emanates calmness and control—indeed we sense an inner happiness—we have never been so aware of his powers. He too is conscious of a surge of creative energy, not just in himself but in Webb too. Always watchful, carefully observant of subtle changes in personality, James begins to see the facets of his loved one differently. And yet he still cannot be sure that he has won her.
A series of letters which James wrote while travelling in April 1946 encapsulates this new phase. Here he creates a private space in which he opens up his personality, echoing the moment of freedom he experienced on board ship as he travelled from his meeting with Trotsky in Mexico six years before. Again, from the intimate tone of the letters we feel Webb to be almost at James's side, not just next to him this time, but travelling somewhere with him: it is as though they embarked together on a journey whose destination is unknown. In these letters James begins to admit his desire, his own vulnerability, and his longing for companionship and an intimate life. This is a striking transition. It reveals James as no longer satisfied with trying to incorporate Webb into his world; rather he can now see what intimacy on her terms might offer him. Later he confesses to Webb: “I have been living in a house with one wall closed. Enough of it is cracked for me to see through. And I don't only see what I never saw before but when I look through the other walls, the views that I thought I knew, I realize that I can only see those as they should be seen if all the walls are open. For me this is not only a battle for you. It is a battle for me.” (13 April 1946).
Despite their regular meetings, James continued to write to Webb right up to the time that they decided to live together and marry in the summer of 1946. The battle for Webb seems finally to have been won. James's letters brim with joy. There is a tremendous surge of optimism, as he feels the two of them are now embarked on something new, undaunted and fearless of what the future holds. At the same time there is a certain poignancy in the images which James treasures of Webb when apart from her—her different appearances (as wife, lover, friend), the quiet shared moments, instances of everyday companionship and domesticity hitherto denied to them.
IV. SEPARATION AND LIMBO (1947-8)
“What people are in Act IV is always present in Act I, in life as on the stage. You cannot perhaps see it at the time.”
—James to Webb, April 1945
The moment of happiness was brief. Barely a year later the letters to Webb chart the beginning of a painful disintegration of their relationship. For the contradictions between the political world which absorbs James and the different kind of life he strives to establish through his love for Webb have never been fully resolved. They quickly surface again as the political pressures on the Johnson Forest Tendency increase during 1947 and 1948.
Writing to Webb from Los Angeles, the buoyancy of James's political mood is tempered by his reflections on the fierce argument which exploded between them before his departure. He is acutely conscious of the distortions such intense work had brought about in his personality, distortions which prevent him being able to respond fully and spontaneously to Webb. James knows that the skills he has for winning people over on questions of politics, his ferocious debating style, his capacity for sustained concentrated work, his rigorous intellect—all these have distorted and restricted his personality. The repression of feeling and emotion runs deep; and the barriers he has constructed between himself and the world seem almost insurmountable. At the moment James feels he is losing her, he begins to realize what it will take to love her. But the battle is now no longer for Webb. It is for James himself.
Perhaps the most intriguing document among James's letters to Webb are the notes he made while seeking a reconciliation with her in September 1947. They are a stream of consciousness—desires, fears, anxieties, pain, frustration, things half-glimpsed and half-understood which reach into his past, into his Puritan upbringing, into the revolutionary life itself. These fragments offer an extraordinary insight into James's inner world.
But there is also a remarkable outburst, scribbled by James on the back of one of his most important political essays, Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity. Here he declares, “This is the man who loves you. I took up dialectic five years ago. I knew a lot of things before and I was able to master it. I know a lot of things about loving you. I am only just beginning to apply them. I can master that with the greatest rapidity—just give me a hand. I feel all sorts of new powers, freedoms, etc., surging in me. You released so many of my constrictions. . . . We will live. This is our new world—where there is no distinction between political and personal any more. I would wash the dishes and sweep the floor so as to have you always with me, literally that. 50%. I want it that way.” (7 October 1947).
James's moment of poetry, reminiscent of the magnificent soliloquy by Mrs. Roach from his Caribbean childhood, which he had described in 1944 in a letter to Webb (What is a poet?) comes from the full realization that the uncertainty, the indecision, the lack of commitment is as much his responsibility as Webb's. Only then could James admit how he has wronged her.
The first letters James writes from Nevada reveal how keenly he feels the separation from Webb. Their battles of the previous year seem to have resolved into a new understanding and intimacy between them. But despite this, James's letters also take us back to the very first ones he wrote to Webb in 1940. For marooned, alone and away from the hothouse of factional politics, which has for so long absorbed his energies, James's writing suddenly becomes freer again, expansive, as he responds to the sights and sounds of everyday life. In short James becomes a novelist once more.
James's letters from the ranch of Harry Drackert may be read as notes towards a novel, or as instalments of one of his favorite soap operas. For there are some wonderful descriptions of particular characters (“Viola is 46, from Ioway [sic], divorced, middle-aged, plump, with a flat voice, and an incurable desire to talk but is so dull that nobody listens”) and of the minor crises which regularly enliven day-to-day existence on the ranch—arguments, sackings, various comings and goings. It is no wonder that James understood so clearly life on the Pequod as depicted by Melville in Moby Dick. This time, however, James does not take up his familiar position as the outsider who observes. He is the central character.
One of the striking features of the early letters from Nevada is James's sensitivity to the racial situation, to the difficulties of negotiating, as a black man, the unspoken conventions of a strange place. This observation may seem odd. But although James refers many times in his previous correspondence with Webb to the race question in the context of the revolutionary movement, it is rarely discussed as a personal experience. The only other occasion we catch a glimpse of what it means to James himself is when he anticipates traveling through the southern United States on his return from Mexico in 1940.
Despite the uncertainties about his situation and the sheer exhaustion of hard, physical work to which James, of all people, was quite unused, the writing for a time conveys a tangible sense of satisfaction. He is freed temporarily from the strains of his everyday life, from being the “leader” responsible for the work of a handful of people and forced to respond to the contingencies of revolutionary politics. James senses that his translation of Daniel Guérin's book about the French Revolution is progressing well; and he is greatly stimulated by the work he is completing on Hegel and the dialectic. Indeed the work on Hegel explodes; it pours out as James works with an intensity he has not experienced for many years.27
But slowly James begins to feel the pressures from outside. In September 1948 his job on Drackert's ranch comes to an end; he begins to worry about money; and he allows himself, as a long distance mediator, to be drawn into the scheming and rivalries which beset his organization. He admits, in a letter to Webb on 20 September 1948, that the fine characters of his two leading associates, Dunayevskaya and Lee, have become cramped and distorted through years of intense political struggle against the Stalinists. Moreover, in his absence, Webb too is implicated in these conflicts. The old division between James's loyalty to his political associates and to his wife re-emerges.
The tangled mess of these relations is exposed nowhere more starkly than in the long letter James wrote to Lyman Paine in October 1948, which he copied to Webb. It was prompted by his need to borrow money, something which, until his marriage to Webb, he depended upon the group, especially Paine, to provide. After his marriage, however, he recognized the importance of financial independence if Webb was to feel that their new joint life was free from constant interference and dependence upon his associates. To this end, James took on the task of translating Guérin's manuscript; and he began to plan a writing project which he hoped would raise money to support himself and Webb. In particular he hoped to write a book on American civilization, bringing together for a general audience both his historical understanding and first-hand experience of living in the United States.
But, as his letter to Paine reveals, James's own position was seriously compromised. For while he was in Nevada he began to gamble, playing the slot machines and losing heavily. As he explains, it is the strain and uncertainty of his situation which pushed him into this uncharacteristic behavior; but although James's letter quickly turns into a polemic against the group itself, his writing is marked by restraint and dignity. He recognizes that the tremendous collective work has been achieved at a terrible personal cost. In the midst of the turmoil—of his immigration case, his divorce, the problem of whether the Johnson Forest Tendency should re-join the Socialist Workers' Party—James's letter to Paine is a plea for a new beginning. For the first time he chooses a life with Webb; and acknowledges that his relationship with his group has now to be placed on a different footing.
James's trial in the desert constitutes the climax of the Webb letters.28 He sees clearly now what a relationship with Webb offers and how he needs to overcome the restrictive divisions which cramp his own personality, the legacy of his Puritan Caribbean upbringing reinforced by his professional specialization as a modern revolutionary. But this new self-awareness does not extend to any recognition of the irreconcilable contradiction which exists between his static conception of married life and the restless movement implied by his political commitment.
The disintegration which followed is as sudden as it is shocking. And James's American period, like the letters, closes with him in limbo once more, marooned in a society of internees on Ellis Island. We must now read afresh his final chapter to Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, and recognize that the demons have returned.29
NOTES
23 Beyond A Boundary, p. 116, London: Stanley Paul/Hutchinson, 1963. [-> main text]
24 American Civilization, see note 18 above. [-> main text]
25 Especially in “Popular Art and the Creative Imagination: The Writings of C.L.R. James 1950-1963,” London: Third Text no.10, 1990 ; an expanded and revised version, published New York: C.L.R. James Institute, 1991; The C.L.R. James Reader ed. A. Grimshaw, Oxford UK and Cambridge Mass.: Blackwell, 1992; and, with Keith Hart, in “C.L.R. James and The Struggle for Happiness,” New York: C.L.R. James Institute, 1991; and the editors' introduction to American Civilization. [-> main text]
26 See note 11 above. [-> main text]
27 This work was originally circulated among members of the Johnson Forest Tendency in the form of extended letters. Later a manuscript was published, Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin, reprinted with a new introduction, London: Allison and Busby, 1980. [-> main text]
28 In explaining his interpretation of the original character, the creative process by which Ahab or Lear emerges in the work of Melville and Shakespeare, James noted: “The great writer . . . conceives a situation in which this character is brought up against things that symbolise the old and the new. The scene is set outside the confines of civilization. What is old is established, it has existed for centuries, it is accepted. But the new will not be denied. It is not fully conscious of itself, but it is certain that it is right. A gigantic conflict is inevitable.” (Mariners, Renegades and Castaways 1953). James might have been describing here his own situation in Reno, Nevada. [-> main text]
29 James's final chapter “A Natural but Necessary Conclusion” was omitted from the second edition of Mariners which was published by members of his political group in 1978. It was only restored to the text in the 1984 edition published in London by Allison and Busby. Wilson Harris offered his own powerful interpretation of James's incarceration in “C.L.R. James as Writer and Literary Critic,” a lecture given at the Riverside Studios, London, February 1986. [-> main text]
Source: Special Delivery: The Letters of C.L.R. James to Constance Webb, 1939-1948, edited and introduced by Anna Grimshaw (Oxford, UK; Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996); pp. 1-35.
This introduction copyright 1996, 2001 Anna Grimshaw. All rights reserved.
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