Williams didn’t write mainly (let alone exclusively) for Marxist intellectuals eager to explore this or that dialectical byway. He doesn’t shortchange the ideas-they are, after all, why one would care to know about the life-but just when we’d like to know more about any one of them, Williams moves on to the next one. Other biographies focus on CLR’s wide-ranging historical, political, and philosophical thought for which his chronology is the narrative context, but Williams shifts the emphasis. In this respect, Williams has delivered.Īdmiring, but not fawning, sympathetic, but not hagiographic, this book is about an intellectual, but not itself narrowly intellectual. Having enjoyed this book, however, this reviewer believes it’s about time that CLR (as Williams refers to him throughout) got a more personal treatment. Williams follows the pattern of his profiles of Shirley Bassey, Eartha Kitt, and Michael X there as here, he is more investigative journalist than intellectual historian. Each in itself was a tour de force collectively (this list is not exhaustive) they almost beggar belief, yet those who knew the polymath came to expect that level of achievement from him. That title in turn reflects his passion, as player and commentator, for cricket as well as his intellectual interest in perimeters, those of the game, of society, and of empire.Ī glance at James’s literary accomplishments alone before he reached the age of 40 should move the most casual observer to take notice: Minty Alley (written in the 1920s, published in 1936), the first novel by a African-Caribbean author to be published in the United Kingdom the translation of Boris Souvarine’s first of its kind and massive Stalin from the French (1936) the play Toussaint L’Ouverture (1934), in which James performed with Paul Robeson the ground-breaking The Black Jacobins (1938). The subtitle, A Life Beyond the Boundaries, echoes James’s memoir 1963 Beyond a Boundary. Williams has mined and elegantly refined much of that progress in completeness and intelligibility. Before even this century’s quarter mark, John L.
James (1901-1989), published the year before its subject died, James scholar Paul Buhle predicted that James’s story “will look different, more complete and more understandable, from the mid-twenty-first century than from” the late 1980s ( C. I’m preparing a libertarian Christian evaluation of James’s life and work, to be published, God willing, next year.-A.G.F. Williams, CLR James: A Life Beyond the Boundaries (Constable, 2022) was published on Amazon today.
0 kommentar(er)
