skygiants

I can't remember what it was that recently put a couple of Tweets regarding C.L.R. James into my orbit recently -- it does not seem to have been a major anniversary of his birth or death any time in the near past -- but somehow I got to an article that mentioned Rachel Douglas' Making the Black Jacobins: C.L.R. James and the Drama of History, which compares the drafts of James' fiction plays about the Haitian Revolution against both the original printing of The Black Jacobins in 1938 and the 1963 updated edition to examine the evolution of his narrative project.

So obviously I got that out of the library, and while I was at it I also got out James' Beyond a Boundary, his memoir about cricket, a.) because it has always fascinated me that James' two most widely-known works are the most influential history of the Haitian revolution and also memoir about cricket, and b.) because nextian told me I should.

Making the Black Jacobins was intellectually interesting to me but a bit dry -- it's been a long time since I read an academic book of the kind that makes the whole book's main points over again every chapter because each chapter was originally published as a short article, and so after about the third chapter I was like "yes, I understand, James increasingly wanted to write history from below rather than focusing on Toussaint and also you think the unfinished/collaborative nature of drama is inherently the most socialist medium of art, I understood the first ten times you said it." On the other hand everything I learned about James' various process of rewriting and staging his plays was fascinating and I would genuinely love an entire book about the first production of the stage version of The Black Jacobins, which premiered in Nigeria, in 1967, during the Biafran War, while because holy shit! The original director, Wole Soyinka, was arrested for Biafran sympathies, partway through the process; the new director had to deal with not only navigating university politics during a civil war, but also with C.L.R. James constantly airmailing him letters suggesting new scenes and staging up to like a week before opening night. When the author talks about the palimpsest of the drama of history she is really not kidding.

By contrast I think I actually finished Beyond a Boundary understanding actively less about cricket than when I began, but I kept turning pages because every other one I'd get hit with some casual anecdote or aside from James that completely bodied me. The book is more or less a meander through James' personal experiences with and opinions regarding cricket, including but not in any way limited to:

- detailed, thoughtful, and extensive discussions of the racial dynamics at play in the amateur-to-professional cricket pipeline in Trinidad
- a history of how cricket came to popularity in England, combined with a cultural examination of Victorian social mores as expressed through sports
- a passionate argument for Sports In General But Cricket In Particular As Art Form
- a reading list of Teen CLR James' Favorite Novels
- a comparison of sports ethics as variously (and subjectively) experienced by CLR James in Trinidad, the UK, and the US
- mini-biographies of several of James' favorite Trinidadian cricketers
- a casual, slightly apologetic discussion of how James' activities towards West Indian independence impacted his friend and host's Learie Constantine's cricket career

It's fascinating; I'm thrilled to have read it; I love to page through a cricket book and suddenly get hit out of nowhere by James' description of T.S. Eliot as "of special value to me in that in him I find more often than elsewhere, and beautifully and precisely stated, things to which I am completely opposed" -- not only a perfect burn but all the more charming because so contextually unexpected. However, please do not ask me to explain to you anything about cricket.