C. L. R. James

C. L. R. James had intended in late 1938 to travel from his London base to the United States. His plan was to work with the Trotskyist movement there, but to return to England in time for the 1939 cricket season. We may well speculate that, in fact, his American sojourn would have extended for far longer than he envisaged, had world history not intervened. Neville Chamberlain’s contemptuous rejection of the ‘piece of paper’ Hitler offered him at Munich plunged Britain into war in the autumn of 1938. James’s Atlantic crossing had to be cancelled, and he spent most of the 1940s and 1950s as a British resident. For much of that period, he was a full-time political activist in tiny far-left groups. The mass of political material he wrote during these years, both alone and in collaboration, is of lasting interest only to those fascinated by the minutiae of ultra-left politics. Still, James’s interests could not be confined in a single political mould: his later British years also produced a study of Robert Louis Stevenson’s sea-stories, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (1953), and above all the remarkable British Civilisation. The latter, never fully completed and only published in 1992 after James’s death, was a pioneering work in many ways; not least in its analysis of ‘popular culture’ – cinema, comic books, radio serials, mass-market fiction – as a key to understanding British society. These were also seminal, turbulent years in James’s personal life. In 1939 in Manchester, he met and fell in love with the eighteen-year old Constance Duckfoot. It seemed a hopeless passion, for Constance did not initially return his love, was twenty years his junior and (still significant, even dangerous, in the Britain of the 1940s) she was white, he black. Despite all this, Nello’s devotion was eventually reciprocated, and he and Constance were married in May 1946. Yet theirs remained an uneasy union, which finally broke down in 1950–51, to James’s lasting sorrow. There is no doubt that the relationship with Constance was the most important of his life. His many, lengthy letters to her,