Beyond a Boundary

Praise for Beyond a Boundary Named one of the Top 50 Sports Books of All Time by Sports Illustrated “ Beyond a Boundary . should find its place on the team with Izaak Walton, Ivan Turgenev, A. J. Liebling, and Ernest Hemingway.” —Derek Walcott, The New York Times Book Review (1984) “ As a player, James the writer was able to see in cricket a metaphor for art and politics, the collective experience providing a focus for group effort and individual performance. [In] his scintillating memoir of his life in cricket, Beyond a Boundary (1963), James devoted some of his finest pages to this theme.”—Edward Said, The Washington Post (1989) “ Beyond a Boundary is a book of remarkable richness and force, which vastly expands our understanding of sports as an element of popu- lar culture in the Western and colonial world.”—Mark Naison, The Nation “ Everything James has done has had the mark of originality, of his own flexible, sensitive, and deeply cultured intelligence. He conveys not a rigid doctrine but a delight and curiosity in all the manifestations of life, and the clue to everything lies in his proper appreciation of the game of cricket.”—E. P. Thompson, author of The Making of the English Working Class “ Beyond a Boundary is technically a book about West Indian cricket in the twentieth century, but it is first and foremost an autobiography of a living legend—probably the greatest social theorist of our times. As a testament to a dying colonial society, and a harbinger of a Marx- ist cultural tradition which views human freedom as its central focus, Beyond a Boundary is a classic.”—Manning Marable, Journal of Sport & Social Issues “ Beyond a Boundary appeared in 1963. It is part memoir and part sports book . but it is really an attempt by James to define the world of politics and the world of art. The great triumph of Beyond a Bound- ary is its ability to rise above genre and in its very form explore the complex nature of colonial West Indian society. It accomplished this by placing at its allegorical heart the most quintessentially English of games. James admired cricket because it was a great team sport and a great individual sport: the game allowed for sudden savage onslaughts of batting or bowling, and suddenly it could turn and demand that the individual subordinate himself to the collectivity. This ‘moral’ game, he maintained, mirrored the unpredictability of life, in that it was both personal and social, highly formal yet open to abuse. As Derek Walcott pointed out in 1984, ‘he [James] loves cricket above everything else, not because it is a sport, but because he has found in it all the decencies required for a culture.’”—Caryl Phillips, The New Republic “ Beyond a Boundary is an extraordinary work.”—David Lammy, BBC History “ Great claims have been made for [Beyond a Boundary]: that it is the greatest sports book ever written; that it brings the outsider a privi- leged insight into West Indian culture; that it is a severe examination of the colonial condition. All are true. This book is where James offers the most complex, literary, and heartfelt synthesis of his preoc- cupations. Using cricket to blur boundaries between white and black, colonized and colonizer, ancient and modern, political and social, he stages a brilliant attack on ‘that categorization and specialization, that division of the human personality, which is the greatest curse of our time.’”—Joseph O’Neill, author of the novel Netherland, writing in the Atlantic Monthly “ James is one of the literary masters of our time. His account tells us about the psychological and sociological meaning of sport in our lives in a touching form that moves us as only significant literature can.” —Warren I. Susman, author of Culture as History: The Transforma- tion of American Society in the Twentieth Century “ A work of double reverence—for the resilient, elegant ritualism of cricket and for the black people of the world.”—Whitney Balliett, The New Yorker “ It is an important part of James’s argument . that cricket is just as important an expression of a culture as the so-called higher arts. His book endures . because it is, among other things, an exact account of a Caribbean upbringing towards the end of the colonial era. Insofar as it is about cricket, it seeks to place the game not just in English history . but in the explosive politics of the 1950s, in the West Indies in general and pre-independence Trinidad in particular.”—Tony Gould, New Statesman & Society “ [James’s] semi-autobiographical meditation on the game of cricket, Be- yond a Boundary (1963), which beautifully blends witty recollection and shrewdly appreciative insight, is a classic of sportswriting, political analysis and esthetic theory.”—William E. Cain, The New York Times Book Review (1992) “ Although C. L. R. James’s Beyond a Boundary is not autobiography in the traditional sense, it is more than a cricket memoir by a major West Indian writer. It is a complex narrative, rich in personal insight, sea- soned with cricket history, cultural mythography, and Marxist polem- ics. In answer to the perennial question what do men live by? James, theorist, historian, Pan-Africanist, and pamphleteer, spins an intrigu- ing, idiosyncratic tale of West Indian cultural emergence within the context of a national sport.”—Consuelo Lopez Springfield, Caribbean Quarterly “ Upon publication in England in 1963, [Beyond a Boundary] was hailed as a ‘classic.’ James affirmed his readers’ deepest feelings: cricket was not a diversion from the important business of life, but an art form no less than poetry or painting and more potent than either in mold- ing individual and national character.”—Theodore Rosengarten, The Washington Post (1984) BEYOND A BOUNDARY The C. L. R. James Archives recovers and reproduces for a contemporary audience the works of one of the great intellectual figures of the twentieth century, in all their rich texture, and will also present, over and above historical works, new and current scholarly explorations of James’s oeuvre. Robert A. Hill, Series Editor BEYOND A BOUNDARY C. L. R. JAMES With an Introduction by Robert Lipsyte And a New Foreword by Paget Henry E R I V S A N R N Y A TH E D I T I O N duke university press Durham 2013 Introduction copyright © 1983 by Robert Lipsyte Foreword copyright © 2013 by Duke University Press Copyright © 1963 by C. L. R. James All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Cataloging-in-Publication information for this title is available at the Library of Congress isbn: 978-0-8223-5563-2 Originally published: London: Stanley Paul & Co., 1963 First American edition: New York: Pantheon Books, 1983 First Duke University Press edition, 1993 Duke University Press 50th anniversary edition, 2013 To LEARIE CONSTANTINE and W. G. GRACE for both of whom this book hopes to right grave wrongs, and, in so doing, extend our too limited conceptions of history and of the fine arts. To these two names I add that of FRANK WORRELL, who has made ideas and aspirations into reality. CONTENTS Acknowledgements ix Foreword by Paget Henry xi Introduction to the American Edition xvii by Robert Lipsyte A Note on Cricket xxiii Preface xxvii PART ONE A WINDOW TO THE WORLD 1. The Window 3 2. Against the Current 21 3. Old School-tie 39 PART TWO ALL THE WORLd’S A STAGE 4. The Light and the Dark 49 5. Patient Merit 66 6. Three Generations 72 7. The Most Unkindest Cut 82 PART THREE ONE MAN IN HIS TIME 8. Prince and Pauper 101 9. Magnanimity in Politics 117 10. Wherefore Are These Things Hid? 128 viii Contents PART FOUR TO INTERPOSE A LITTLE EASE 11. George Headley: Nascitur Non Fit 139 PART FIVE W. G.: PRE-EMINENT VICTORIAN 12. What Do Men Live By? 151 13. Prolegomena to W. G. 159 14. W. G. 171 15. Decline of the West 186 PART SIX THE ART AND PRACTIC PART 16. ‘What Is Art?’ 195 17. The Welfare State of Mind 212 PART SEVEN VOX POPULI 18. The Proof of the Pudding 225 19. Alma Mater: Lares and Penates 253 Epilogue and Apotheosis 257 Index 263 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author is grateful for the use of passages from the following books. Don Bradman by Philip Lindsay (Phoenix House), Maurice Tate by John Arlott ( Phoenix House) and The Island Cricketers by Clyde Walcott (Hodder and Stoughton Ltd.). FOREWORD UNAPUNA at the beginning of the twenty-first century is T a significantly larger town in Trinidad than it was when it gave birth to C. L. R. James at the beginning of the twentieth century. Since his death in 1989, the significance of James’s scholarship has only continued to grow. The secondary literature on him is now so extensive that there is no need for a general introduction to his works to be repeated here. All that I will say in this regard is that the major points in James’s intellectual formation were the following: his decision to choose cricket over another profession such as law or medicine in the early years of his life; the publication of Minty Alley, his first and only novel, in 1936; The Black Jacobins, his classic study of the Haitian Revolution, in 1938; and finally, Be- yond a Boundary, his masterpiece on the game of cricket, in 1963. Between these crucial points in James’s intellectual formation, there were of course so many other great works of political theory and literary criticism including World Revolution, Party Politics in the West Indies, and Mariners, Renegades and Castaways.

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