CLR James: A Life Beyond The Boundaries
by John L Williams
Constable £25

IN THE final section of his biography of CLR James, A Life Beyond the Boundaries, John Williams regrets that he never met James, was never able to thank him for life-changing words and insights. He shouldn’t lament too much though, for he has done an enormous service to James’s memory in this finely written and powerful book uncovering many stories, truths, incidents and relationships lived by the epochal Trinidadian writer and eternal activist.

From his early years teaching, playing cricket and writing in Port of Spain to his critical stay in Nelson, Lancashire, living with cricketing genius Learie Constantine who educated him about the practical issues of Marxism and working-class resistance; to his period in the US creating and living through the campaigns and splits of the Trotskyist movement; his elaborate research and determination to write the story of Haiti’s great anti-colonial revolution, The Black Jacobins; his post-war Trinidadian sojourn with Prime Minister Eric Williams including instigating the mass movement to appoint Frank Worrell as the first black West Indies cricket captain and his writing of the classic Beyond a Boundary; his active support and comradeship with Nkrumah’s newly independent Ghana — James lived the fullest of lives of global revolution and popular rebellion.

What Williams does so excellently is to uncover the human being, to put aside the iconography and show an insurgent Caribbean man in many aspects of achievement, weakness, huge strength and final pathos.

His concluding chapters detailing James’s last years in his Brixton bedroom, cared for by his Railton Road comrades is a profoundly moving narrative. When I interviewed him through two afternoons in 1983 he was warm, welcoming and wholly perspicacious as he talked pictorially and insightfully about language and power in the Caribbean, while we simultaneously watched on James’s small television at the end of his bed, the left-handed cover drives of David Gower as he made a century against India.

He rhapsodised about the beauty and artistry of Gower’s batting as he laid back in bed. It was as if the octogenarian James had stepped back into his boyhood, watching the sport he loved through his Tunapuna window, now with a lifetime’s worth and meaning.

Williams tells graphically of the many guests he had in those final Brixton years, including cricketers like Gower, Botham and Viv Richards, and conversations with visiting Caribbean revolutionaries like Maurice Bishop.

For Williams: “CLR returns us to who we are and challenges us to who we could be.” It is a momentous sentence befitting the life of the man he is chronicling, who once said with his characteristic, hard-lived optimism: ‘Times need to ripen, things have to happen in their time, the road is long … life demands a feeling that you are moving. You must have a sense of movement, the sense of activity … to use on the way towards understanding and controlling what makes your life.’

Williams’s account is anything but a one-dimensional praisesong. He writes critically of James’s dependence “on the beneficence of rich believers,” of broken marriages and a virtually abandoned child, of his “self-centred” activism which Trotsky called that of a “freelance bohemian.”

Born in 1901, James lived for most of the 20th century. However you view his politics, he made a difference to millions across three continents, and Beyond a Boundary and The Black Jacobins are books which still ignite consciousness in every conceivable location.

Williams gives us the rawness and rare achievement of his life, and that is an invaluable contribution to now-times and future readers.

The West Indies have, a few weeks ago, enjoyed a powerful Test match and series win over England in Grenada in true rebellious tradition, and in the very same park, now a stadium, where Bishop frequently declaimed his insurgent speeches. How James’s Caribbean heart and brain would have loved the glorious irony of that, as cricketer, artist and perennial revolutionary.