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.