Among Marxists he stressed the importance of race amid black radicals he maintained the centrality of class. Even James himself claimed he watched Hollywood movies only to cope with the stress of intensively studying Hegel.Ĭulture wasn’t the only party line James crossed. In the 1940s it was an insight too radical for many radicals. What they want but cannot have.Īnd any politics based upon the capacity of ordinary people to transform society ought to pay close attention to what ordinary people actually want. It was, James wrote, an extension of that world, an expression of the desires of ordinary people: of what they sense is possible in their lives, but not present. Popular culture wasn’t, as some Marxists construed, an inert subsidiary to politics, a phenomenon external to the material, meaningful world.
Both The Oresteia and a cricket match, he explained, grasp “at a more complete human existence”. Not that James would recognise a distinction between the two. It was in his adored cricket: an interest as constant and as all-consuming as his devotion to high culture. It was in the Marxism he adopted and then reinvented. It was in the literature he spent silent hours and days engrossed in: Balzac, Hazlitt, Melville. James claimed he watched Hollywood movies only to cope with the stress of intensively studying HegelĪrt’s “central action” for James – the working out of societal and existential dynamics in the struggles of the individual – was present in every aspect of his life. The literary leads to the social, and the social leads to the literary, as James put it, decades later. Twelve years before James’s move to Britain and conversion to Marxism – 18 before The Black Jacobins, his vaunted study of the Haitian revolution – and we already glimpse one of James’s key commitments.
To James’s delight, the all-Black student body “picked up the Shakespearean rhythm to perfection”.
That appetite – that audacity – was evident from James’s first job, as a teacher in Trinidad, organising, choreographing and directing a school play of his choosing: The Merchant of Venice.
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