To understand the strengths and weaknesses of C.L.R. James’ contributions to cricket literature, we need to appreciate how he was both a “fierce critic and committed devotee of Western culture, as refracted through the public-school code.” This key insight is explored brilliantly throughout John L. Williams’ recent biography, CLR James: A Life Beyond the Boundaries, from which that quote is taken. James was a Marxist who loved tradition; an intellectual who rejected capitalism but was enamoured of a sport that was spread by colonialism. This article applies that insight to a critique of CLR’s writing on cricket, the most famous of which is of course his 1963 classic, Beyond A Boundary.
Williams’ exploration of James’ childhood includes the disturbing revelation that CLR was frequently beaten by his father in ways that left permanent physical scars. However, Williams does not consider whether this affected James’ approach to cricket, especially the possibility that CLR obtained therapeutic value from seeing masculine aggression channelled into a sport that produced beauty and grace. Great bowlers such as Learie Constantine and George John could inflict violence on a batter’s body but it was done via beautiful athleticism and a visually pleasurable bowling action. Constantine could be brutal with the bat, scoring at a very rapid rate, but Headley was more likely to steer his aggression into long, patient innings through a technique perfected in the Lancashire League. A boy who experienced violence from his father could a find a new, healthier vision of masculinity in this sport.
CLR’s other therapy was European literature, from the Greeks to the Victorians. However, this led to one of his primary theoretical weaknesses, namely a false dichotomy between European and African cultural influences. In 1967, he revealingly described himself as a “Black European” in order to distinguish himself from US Black Nationalists, such as Amiri Baraka, who exaggerated the degree to which blues and jazz were exclusively African in origin. As Selwyn R. Cudjoe has argued, this led to James insufficiently considering African influences on Trinidad’s culture during and after slavery. It also caused him to overstate the degree to which cricket in the West Indies was developed by the white ruling class and passed down to the other strata. He therefore omitted the degree to which, as Clem Seecharan and Michael Manley both described, black men developed their own culture of fast bowling through the jobs they were given bowling to whites, first on slave plantations and then in white-dominated clubs. Although he mentions the fact that bowlers like Joseph ‘Float’ Woods would turn up to the nets in bare feet to bowl at white batters, he does not anchor that fact in a historical consideration of fast bowling as an adaptation of African athletic culture to an artistic activity that expressed pride and eventually a kind of resistance, converting pain at racial exclusion into aggression that could be channelled into the bowling of fast missiles at white batters.
Another false dichotomy in CLR’s work appeared in 1933 when he wrote in The Case for West-Indian Self-Government that Trinidad had “race prejudice” but not “race antagonism”. James clearly did not mean that there was no racial conflict, as he noted that groups were “torn by…colour distinctions” and provided a brilliant analysis in Beyond A Boundary of how Trinidad’s cricket clubs were stratified by race, class and cultural barriers. What he seems to have meant was that Trinidad did not have the total segregation that characterized apartheid and Jim Crow. However, this still led James, in my view, to downplay the violent effects of “colour distinctions.” For example, the physical abuse that CLR’s father inflicted upon him may be partly explained by the pressures of raising a gifted child in a society where his opportunities were so restricted that the father felt he had to beat his son in order to compel him to focus on his studies. Any racist society will be a violent one, but the violence manifests in different ways depending on how racism operates in particular cases. James did recognize this in his analysis of crowd disruption in the 1959-60 West Indies v England Test series, where the crowd expressed its anger at perceived umpiring bias in favour of the colonial English side (bias in favour of the ruling class, in effect) but it was a late realization that conflicted with his over-emphasis on social cohesion in the development of West Indies cricket culture up to that point.
A problematic section in Beyond A Boundary is in Chapter 15, in which the eras of W.G. Grace and Jack Hobbs are contrasted with that of bodyline and Bradman to claim that the greater ruthlessness and “win at all costs” approach of the 1930s was a decline from the public-school values that characterized both Grace’s career and the Golden Age. This argument now looks extremely weak in light of the gamesmanship and manipulation of expense payments by Grace that has been outlined in books such as the Grace biography by Simon Rae. English cricket’s distinction between Gentlemen (amateurs) and Players (professionals) was an aristocratic pretension but it also placed working-class cricketers in a precarious and dependent economic position, just as English footballers were “wage slaves” of their clubs. The capitalist mentality James deplores in 1930s cricket was already there in the 1870s, albeit disguised by discourses of tradition.
Brutality in cricket was also not new: there had been a cartoon in Punch back in August 1863 satirizing the injuries inflicted by demon bowler John Jackson: “the first ball ‘it me on the ‘and, and the second ‘ad me on the knee; the third was in me eye; and the fourth bowled me out’”. In fact, the virility cult and muscular Christianity had done much to foster violence in public school sports. The ability to withstand pain was seen as preparation for the manly virtues needed to regulate the colonies. CLR’s dichotomy between the virtues of 1890-1914 and vices of 1929-47 is simply not sustainable and is far too skewed by his generational bias and desire to impose his public-school model on the sport’s development. Furthermore, as Bernard Surin has argued, CLR’s focus on individuals in Beyond A Boundary places far too much historical weight on their shoulders at the expense of social structures.
Williams’ biography is very strong on CLR’s intellectual and political relationships with women, with whom he collaborated on numerous projects. Williams also notes that girls were largely excluded from secondary education and not eligible for scholarships in Trinidad. However, this also exposes a silence in Beyond A Boundary: the absence from women’s roles in the lives and careers of cricketers. As Anima Adjepong has shown, CLR’s childhood reminiscences show that women in his family took an interest in cricketers, but they disappear from the book thereafter.
It is possible that CLR’s desire to find a wide audience for Beyond A Boundary (partly due to financial strife) caused him to dilute the role of class conflict and racial antagonism and emphasize the cohesive and uplifting functions of cricket at the expense of recognizing the coercive effects of its imposition of colonial muscular Christianity via a violent sport. He certainly failed to apply a feminist lens, despite his partner Selma becoming an activist for women’s rights with his encouragement. However, the fact that he still provokes readers to think about these questions in a book where his Marxism is relatively self-suppressed is itself a testament to his greatness as a writer, opening up the imagination to the social implications of an often elitist sport.
Cricket Described 