C. L. R. James: A Critical Introduction. - Review - book reviews

African American Review, Winter, 1999 by Paul Buhle

Aldon Lynn Nielsen. C. L. R. James: A Critical introduction. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1997. 224 pp. $18.00.

The aged C.L.R. James (1901-1989) was, during his last two decades, very much a living legend. Palsied, thin, and frail-looking, he outdid himself regularly by rising to the occasion, whatever it was, speech or interview. Many current events and personalities fascinated him (and he often had slyly amusing comments to make about them), but it was the past which served as his main subject. He had been present at the birth of modem Pan-Africanism, and he was eager to tell the stories and to laud even those giants (most especially W. E. B. Du Bois) from whom political differences had kept him distant.

James had, of course, a unique perspective on the value of this history, as a prelude to those of African descent absorbing the fruits of Western civilization and making new sense of society's potentialities. Like the Marxist vision of the proletarian victory dissolving old boundaries between the city and the country, mental and manual labor, it was the revolutionary, even chiliastic contemplation of an extraordinary mind. He saw what might happen, if only the world took a spin in the proper direction.

Half a dozen author/editors (including this reviewer) and several dozen essayists have sought to make sense of this life and its importance. One of them, anthropologist Anna Grimshaw, knew James very well as his secretary/confidante during his severely declining last years. But only one, Aldon Nielsen, was actually a student of his at Federal City College in Washington, D.C., during James's teaching stint of the 1970s and his last period of real intellectual vigor.

Neither has any writer until Nielsen, an English professor at San Jose State University, sought to examine James's work at large as literature rather than history, criticism, and theory. This approach has a large potential virtue. Beginning his career or odyssey as a novelist and short-story writer, James had a literary sensibility which never left him and proved, for the general reader (of Black Jacobins and Beyond a Boundary, his best accepted books), his greatest strength. Nielsen, his student, follows James along this literary route, stop by stop, from beginning to end.

Nielsen lapses from this standpoint into a more general examination of James's work (and to a lesser extent, his life) far too often for the good of C. L. R. James: A Critical Introduction. It is not that he makes errors of fact or judgment; his scrupulous attention to detail is noteworthy throughout. But where the ground has been covered in greater detail, Nielsen has little fresh to add, and A Critical Introduction works poorly as an introduction: The political imperatives which drove James from the beginning of his Marxist days onward are vague and uncertain here, as perhaps they would inevitably be in this kind of study.

But the book stands upon its virtues. Even when the language is stiffly academic Games spent his whole life "conceiving of literature as socially transformative"--but never describing it that way) and so specialized in vocabulary that many lay readers will be left behind, Nielsen has something important to say about James and the narrative. The reappreciation of English literature by the rebellious but still well-bred colonial, the forceful interpretation of Herman Melville (still little appreciated by specialists), and above all the track of the color line across all American (and also West Indian) culture is seen and described memorably. Readers will not want to start or stop their James studies with this volume; but when they come to it, and look back upon it, they will be grateful to Nielsen for having done his work.