C. L. R. James by Dave Renton

Author:Dave Renton [Dave Renton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908446039
Publisher: HopeRoad
Published: 2013-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

6

Constantine’s Influence

Through the 1950s and 1960s, James failed to settle. London was his usual home, but in 1958 he returned to Trinidad, where he became a leading figure in the national independence movement. Finding disappointment there, James travelled more widely than ever before, revisiting the United States and lecturing in Ghana, where James’ former protégé, the post-independence leader Kwame Nkrumah, was for several years an ally. There were also tours of Canada, Cuba, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda.

The departure from America in 1953 had a number of consequences. Living in Willesden, James began a third marriage, with New Yorker Selma James. A supporter of the Johnson-Forest Tendency, with an interest in the labour movement, race questions, and above all the politics of radical feminism, she brought to the marriage a condition of intellectual equality. They were together for ten years. George Lamming’s 1972 novel Natives of My Person contains two exiled revolutionaries, ‘Surgeon’ and ‘Surgeon’s Wife’, often said to have been based on the couple. ‘He had married her because he needed her support’, Lamming wrote, ‘but the marriage had gradually withered away.’ We can be more prosaic. The marriage seems to have begun in a condition of some euphoria, but was worn down by James’ poverty as an occasional public speaker and freelance sporting journalist. Selma worked in the day as a typist, and repeated the role for James in the evenings. When Selma married James she was in her mid-twenties, and such a life may have seemed tolerable to her. It must have been harder for James, who was 30 years her senior.

James’ one-time friend and fellow Trinidadian V S Naipaul published after James’ death another novel, A Way in the World, which contains passages set in 1950s London, at a time when Naipaul was a friend of James. Its author constructs a composite figure, Lebrun, who shares some of James’ history: a period in America, the membership of small Marxist groups. He is also in many ways unlike James. Lebrun has a longer period of association with the cause of Trinidadian independence. He is also, crucially, a Stalinist: a device which enables the novelist to portray Lebrun’s causes as unequivocally wrong, damned by history and complicit in suffering. The most interesting passages in the book, the ones which best convey the James of the 1950s, and the ones with perhaps the most historical truth, are those that recall the start of the relationship between the narrator and Lebrun, which show an initial sympathy with the older man. ‘He was slender and fine-featured: he took care of himself. Close to, he was delicate, smooth-skinned, with a touch of copper in his dark complexion … He was born to talk. It was as though everything he saw and thought and read was automatically processed into talk material. And it was all immensely intelligent and gripping. He talked about music and the influence on the composers of the instruments of the time. He talked about military matters. I had met no-one

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