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Marxism and Cricket

My most important ritual of the year comes at the start of April, when I burrow in cupboards and old boxes for my cricket kit. It is a harrowing process: this year my cricket bat has vanished, and it turns out that I have put on so much weight that I can no longer fit into my cricket trousers. This is an even bigger disaster than it seems because manufacturers appear to have given up making proper cream cricket whites. Sports shops like Lillywhites only offer repulsive stretch-nylon garments that feel as horrid against the skin as they are revolting to the eye.

Furthermore, this April was exceptionally cold and wet, so the cricket matches I had hoped to play were cancelled. I was forced to read about the game instead, but that too was a disappointment. It is frequently asserted that cricket has produced a great literature, but in truth no great writer has ever been inspired by the sport, in the way that Hemingway could be moved by bull-fighting or Tolstoy by hunting. Even P. G. Wodehouse only dealt seriously with cricket in his early school stories. Once he discovered his great comic gift he abandoned the game instantly, never to return. Cricket’s most characteristic literary productions have been delightful but minor works: Hugh de Selincourt’s The Cricket Match or the famous village contest in A. G. MacDonnell’s England, Their England.

Only one masterpiece has ever been written about the game: Beyond a Boundary, by the intellectual and political agitator C. L. R. James. It is a book that transcends all other books on the subject in the same way that Sir Donald Bradman existed in a solitary eminence above all other batsmen. I don’t think that an English writer could ever have written a book of such calibre, because our literary culture has wrongly regarded sport as trivial. By contrast James treated cricket with deep moral seriousness, for in the West Indies, where he was born and bred, the game formed a central part of the culture of the islands. The most important theme of his book is how cricket created a new national consciousness which enabled the West Indies to shake off their colonial oppressors. The development of this argument confers a wonderful amplitude on Beyond a Boundary.

James had originally set out to be a Marxist intellectual. In the first thirty years of his career he wrote a treatise about West Indian self-government, a novel, a widely praised historical study of slave revolt

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My most important ritual of the year comes at the start of April, when I burrow in cupboards and old boxes for my cricket kit. It is a harrowing process: this year my cricket bat has vanished, and it turns out that I have put on so much weight that I can no longer fit into my cricket trousers. This is an even bigger disaster than it seems because manufacturers appear to have given up making proper cream cricket whites. Sports shops like Lillywhites only offer repulsive stretch-nylon garments that feel as horrid against the skin as they are revolting to the eye.

Furthermore, this April was exceptionally cold and wet, so the cricket matches I had hoped to play were cancelled. I was forced to read about the game instead, but that too was a disappointment. It is frequently asserted that cricket has produced a great literature, but in truth no great writer has ever been inspired by the sport, in the way that Hemingway could be moved by bull-fighting or Tolstoy by hunting. Even P. G. Wodehouse only dealt seriously with cricket in his early school stories. Once he discovered his great comic gift he abandoned the game instantly, never to return. Cricket’s most characteristic literary productions have been delightful but minor works: Hugh de Selincourt’s The Cricket Match or the famous village contest in A. G. MacDonnell’s England, Their England. Only one masterpiece has ever been written about the game: Beyond a Boundary, by the intellectual and political agitator C. L. R. James. It is a book that transcends all other books on the subject in the same way that Sir Donald Bradman existed in a solitary eminence above all other batsmen. I don’t think that an English writer could ever have written a book of such calibre, because our literary culture has wrongly regarded sport as trivial. By contrast James treated cricket with deep moral seriousness, for in the West Indies, where he was born and bred, the game formed a central part of the culture of the islands. The most important theme of his book is how cricket created a new national consciousness which enabled the West Indies to shake off their colonial oppressors. The development of this argument confers a wonderful amplitude on Beyond a Boundary. James had originally set out to be a Marxist intellectual. In the first thirty years of his career he wrote a treatise about West Indian self-government, a novel, a widely praised historical study of slave revolt in Haiti, and far too much laborious Trotskyite theory. He spent the middle years of his life, between the late 1930s and the 1950s, living in the United States where he unavailingly sought to bring about some kind of socialist revolution. This long period in his life has always struck me as a terrible waste. Based most of the time in New York, James was exiled from the game that he truly loved, and forced to follow cricket scores from the ‘in brief ’ sections of local papers. It took the best part of two decades of this lonely, deracinated existence for him to work out that the American proletariat was not going to rise up in revolt against the capitalist system. It was only when he returned a disappointed man to the West Indies that, very much as an afterthought, he unveiled his masterpiece. Beyond a Boundary closely resembles Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise, another solitary work of genius by a figure whose career was in other respects a disappointment. Both mix life and work, and contain long sections on early schooldays. The real theme of Connolly’s book is how after Eton nothing remains to be done or achieved. Enemies of Promise is a brilliant book, but it is the product of a sophisticated, knowing and exhausted literary culture. A large part of Beyond a Boundary deals with James’s years at Queen’s Royal College in Trinidad. The school’s syllabus, system of discipline and house structure were laboriously modelled on the English public school and James, born in 1901, was a near contemporary of Connolly. But while Connolly allowed himself to be overwhelmed by Eton, James adhered to the values of his own upbringing. A scholarship boy, he was to be groomed to join the administrative class and rule the island on behalf of the British, but he describes with eloquence how other forces – English literature, cricket and the Puritanism of his lower-middle-class West Indian family – moulded him instead. ‘Our bookseller was an itinerant who came once a fortnight carrying a huge pack on his shoulders. He heaved it off and spread his wares, the Review of Reviews, Tit-Bits, Comic Cuts, The Strand Magazine, Pearson’s Magazine, sixpenny copies of the classics. “The Pickwick Papers,” my father would say, taking up the book. “By Charles Dickens. A great book, my boy. Read it.” And he would buy it.’ Unable to conform to the austere rectitude demanded by his West Indian version of an English public school, James broke away from school to play cricket, or to read, and he studied with enormous sympathy the leading players of his day, of whom the most notable was his close friend Learie Constantine. These great men walk on and off James’s pages alongside Shakespeare, Dickens and Thackeray, and are expressions of the same indomitable spirit. Though James became one of the godfathers of the Black Power movement in the 1960s and 1970s, he remained steeped in literary culture. His admirable biographer Farrukh Dhondy recalls how he ridiculed then fashionable claims that English literature is a private matter for dead white males. For James the Western intellectual tradition was the salvation, and not the destruction, of black culture, and Shakespeare and Keats the expression of profound, civilizing values. Beyond a Boundary is an exuberant celebration of everything that it touches. James uses all that he learned in his long life, his knowledge of Greek drama, modern aesthetic notions and theories of social organization, to analyse the game of cricket. This enabled him to produce passages which explain the game in a deeper way than anyone before or since:
The batsman facing the ball does not merely represent his side. For that moment, to all intents and purposes, he is his side. The fundamental relation of the One and the Many, Individual and Social, Individual and Universal, leader and followers, representative and ranks, the part and the whole, is structurally imposed on the players of cricket.
No Englishman could ever have written a book as marvellous as this, just as, when James was writing it, no English cricketer could play with the freedom and elegance of the West Indian players. James just goes on producing his brilliant insights, remarking, for example, that W. G. Grace was as central to late Victorian culture as General Gordon or Cardinal Newman, and expressing regret that he had not been debunked by Lytton Strachey. This understanding of the centrality of sport is commonplace in the universities today, but it was heretical when James wrote his great book forty years ago. He produced the literary equivalent of the exquisite stroke play of Sobers, Weekes, Worrell and Walcott which dazzled the world as the West Indies came of age and the islands discovered their national identity. In Britain we have allowed second-raters to define our national sports. C.L.R. James’s masterpiece shows how it should be done.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 6 © Peter Oborne 2005


About the contributor

Peter Oborne is Political Editor of the Spectator, and a fanatical amateur cricketer. His book Basil D’Oliveira: Cricket and Conspiracy was William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2004. His latest book, The Rise of Political Lying, is published by the Free Press.

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