Neglected Authors - CLR James

“Our house was superbly situated, exactly behind the wicket. A huge tree on one side and another house on the other limited the view of the ground, but an umpire could have stood at the bedroom window. By standing on a chair a small boy of six could watch practice every afternoon and matches on Saturdays. From the chair also he could mount on to the window-sill and so stretch a groping hand for the books on top of the wardrobe. Thus early the pattern of my life was set.”
 
So begins CLR James’ Beyond a Boundary, possibly the finest book on cricket ever written.
 
James was born on the island of Trinidad in 1901. In 1932 he moved to Nelson in Lancashire, where his friend Learie Constantine (later Baron Constantine of Maraval and Nelson) was playing in the Lancashire Cricket League. James had two manuscripts in his luggage – the autobiography of Constantine, and The Case for West Indian Self Government. With the help of another great cricket writer, Neville Cardus, he obtained work as a cricket reporter on the Manchester Guardian. He also joined the Labour Party and became a leading Marxist theorist, later changing to Trotskyism, finally describing himself only as “a Leninist”.
 
During the 1930s James wrote some of his best-known works of non-fiction, including World Revolution (a history, praised by Trotsky, of the Communist International), and The Black Jacobins (an account of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian revolution).
 
James later moved to the United States where, despite his disapproval of American lack of sportsmanship and fair play, he stayed for twenty years until deported in 1952. In a vain attempt to remain he wrote a study of Herman Melville and had copies of this privately-published book sent to every US Senator. He then lived in Trinidad and Ghana (becoming involved in the Pan African movement) before returning to England, dying in Brixton in 1989.
 
But it is for Beyond a Boundary that James will be best remembered by cricket aficionados. The book's key question is: “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?". James uses this challenge as the basis for describing cricket in an historical and social context, its psychology and aesthetics, the strong influence cricket had on his life, and how cricket meshed with his role in politics and his understanding of issues of class and race. Written with great lyricism, it is full of shrewd analysis, forthright opinions, and fascinating snippets of autobiography.
 
Later James intended to expand these ideas in another book built around an interpretation of photographs of cricketers in action. He wished to investigate here the sculptural dimensions of the game, approaching the player in action as a form of public art, where “man is placed in his social environment in terms of artistic form”; and he was concerned to situate him within a historical tradition which began, in his view, with the shift from sculpture to tragic drama in early Greece.
 
(A version of this post first appeared in The Chap magazine.)