BiographyAshis Nandy has said cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English. The 11 men seeking to dislodge the batsman are not the real opposition, he contends with a Hindu sigh - the true antagonist is Fate, summed up by fluctuations in weather, wicket or the standard of umpiring.
No West Indian has ever bought into that theory. For a black man like CLR James, cricket represented an ideal of "fair play" and "restraint", utterly English in origin, but one which could be used to criticise the failure of British colonialism to live up to its own highest principles. For him, cricket was like Shakespeare - a weapon to be turned on its sponsors.
Though never a player of the first rank himself, James wrote Beyond a Boundary, the greatest of all cricket books, which explored the ways in which the game became a metaphor of empire, decolonisation and industrialisation. He was himself an enigma: a man of classical learning who loved American cartoons; a Trotskyite who revered the agora of ancient Greece more than any modern state; and a socialist theorist who ended up as a practical counsellor to such leading nationalist figures as Nkrumah in Ghana and Eric Williams in the West Indies.
Dave Renton, a sociologist at Johannesburg University, writes crisply and well about James's politics. He justly praises The Black Jacobins, a marvellous study of a slave revolt led by the "electrifying" Toussaint L'Ouverture against the French in Haiti in 1791.
Well before Eric Hobsbawm or EP Thompson, James had learned to write "history from below", in his meticulous account of how insurgent slaves forced the French to concede that revolutionary principles could not be confined to their own country.
Renton reports that the book had a huge underground readership in apartheid South Africa, where it was banned - but activists typed up chapters and passed them around, samizdat-style, in blue carbon copies.
As a Trotskyist, James believed that revolution must be exportable. You could no more have socialism than you could have republicanism in just one country. He finally met his hero in Mexico, but was confident enough to castigate Trotsky for arguing that Stalin's Russia was a case of "the revolution betrayed". To James, it was merely a dire example of state capitalism. In that analysis, also, he proved correct.
RENTON IS AN admirer, but not uncritical. He laments that James's analyses were often over-abstract, shunning concrete realities. This may help to explain why James's novel Minty Alley is nothing like as good as those of his fellow-Trinidadian VS Naipaul, but also why his literary criticism is almost always far better than the other man's. While working for leftist groups in the US, James wrote a brilliant study of Melville's Moby-Dick, which he saw as a prediction of a scientific technocracy quite incapable of dealing with social crises.
Just as cricket brought out the contradictions of empire, so he saw the US as constructed on a terrible split between republican ideas of freedom and the constrictions of a mass industrial society.
James did write a major book on American Civilisation, but never managed to complete the volume on Shakespeare, whose lineaments he had sketched in a superb essay. This was to argue that outsider-figures, like the Moor Othello, held the key to the meaning of the emerging world. Renton, though he writes with real sympathy of James's own mostly doomed relationships with white women of the left, misses this rather obvious and interesting connection. His coverage of the literary James is somewhat patchy.
James saw cricket as a great leveller, for in the Trinidad of his youth white administrators played against teams made up of black labourers. He believed (though Renton doesn't discuss this) that the workers of Britain had invested all their frustrated artistry, which found no ready outlet on the industrial assembly-line, in the developing nuances of the modern game; and that West Indians in due course did much the same, expressing their exuberance and love of style through the methods of play which they devised. (So much for the idea of cricket as a toff's sport).
WHAT HAPPENED LATER was a tragedy. Instead of an artist, like James's friend Learie Constantine, there emerged Bradman, a run-accumulator devoid of soul, and then Bodyline, "the violence and ferocity of our age expressing itself in cricket". The risk-averse techniques which now pervade cricket (as also soccer, rugby and all professionalised sport) James saw as "the triumph of the bureaucratic instinct in Europe".
Far from analysing sport as a means to distract ordinary people from political questions (a charge Trotsky repeatedly made), James saw it as a direct reflection of the social world; and Beyond a Boundary chronicles the emergence of black men as masters of the English game. Because he affected nonchalance in the manner of so many Marxists, James celebrated the sprezzatura of all-rounders, like Grace and Sobers, who, if they failed with bat, might yet do something with ball. Renton thinks it appropriate that his last two articles lauded Ian Botham, but he seems to have overlooked (or forgotten) the fact that the same James once wrote a severe demolition of Beefy as "a youth of mediocre talent". Even the Homer of Trinidad could nod.
Botham, by the way, has gone on record as saying that cricket is a Gaelic game. Its batsman who stands alone against a whole army of fielders is, he says, recreating the heroism of Cuchulain who stood single-handed in combat against a host.Our players' heroic exploits at the recent World Cup in the West Indies may not be surprising if what they were playing is in fact one of our national games. Croke Park may yet have to be widened.
Declan Kiberd's most recent book is The Irish Writer and the World (Cambridge University Press)
CLR James: Cricket's Philosopher King By Dave Renton Haus Books, 202pp. £16.99