Beyond a Boundary
C.L.R. James
Yellow Jersey Press. First published 1963.
C.L.R. James was a black intellectual from Trinidad, born at the turn of the 19th-20th century - a leftist scholar, a commentator, an essayist, a newspaper-editor and a cricket-lover. He was involved in the West Indian struggle for freedom from British imperialism. But despite this, going by the evidence of this book, he had thoroughly internalized many of the values of Empire, in particular those that pertained to the game of cricket. 'Beyond a Boundary' is a much-celebrated book, mentioned with respect and even awe, whenever sports books are discussed. James has written other books, some with titles, such as 'The Black Jacobeans', that make obvious their subject matter. But none of these have been so widely read as this one, especially by the readership in the cricket playing nations of the commonwealth.
Rather than being about one focused theme, the book uses cricket as a leitmotif to discuss a set of disparate topics - personal history, West Indian politics and the aesthetics of sport. Thus it is a series of essays on these topics. Several are about specific cricketers - George John, Wilton St.Hill, Learie Constantine, George Headley and W.G. Grace. Others explain the background politics and the social scene. One or two talk about cricket as Art. At the time of his youth, the 1920s, the islands of the Caribbean were all ruled by one or the other of the European colonial powers. This meant that the majority population, black and 'coloured', would be treated as second class citizens, lorded over by the white expats. But rather than a binary division into black and white, James talks about an almost continuous class hierarchy, correlated with skin colour, that pervaded every aspect of life in the islands, including cricket. In a chapter titled 'The Light and the Dark' James quotes from his own political writings as follows. "The Negroid population of the West Indies is composed of a large percentage of actually black people and about fifteen or twenty percent of people who are a varying combination of white and black. From the days of slavery these have always claimed superiority to the ordinary black, and a substantial majority of them still do (though resenting as bitterly as the black assumptions of white superiority)....Where so many crosses and colours meet and mingle the shades are naturally difficult to determine and the resulting confusion is immense. There are the nearly white...Then there are the browns...And so on and so on. Associations are formed of brown people who will not admit into their number those too much darker than themselves..." All very familiar from Indian society!
Cricket was at that time played in clubs. In Trinidad there were three main ones, with the most prominent and the richest of them being the Queen's Park club. A working class black man such as George John could not aspire to that club, no matter how good a cricketer he was (and he was a wonderful fast bowler). So he joined one of the others. And when a team was chosen to represent all the West Indies, he was overlooked to favour a less talented white man. This was the fate, approximately, of some of James's other heroes as well. St. Hill did not make it to the WI team, despite being a terrific bat. Constantine gave up all attempts to play useful cricket in WI, and migrated instead to English county cricket, where he did very well, though not perhaps to his actually great ability. It was only after independence that WI cricket was fully relieved of prejudices of colour. Frank Worrell, a black man, became captain of the WI team, but only after a sustained campaign in his favour by James and others.
James makes much of the British 'public school spirit' fostered by cricket. He is a through believer that battles such as Waterloo are won on playing fields such as those of Eton. His main grouse is that black people were not allowed to fully participate in all the rituals of that way of life. He is full of respect for the rituals themselves. In a section to introduce W.G. Grace, he places him among the three pre-eminent Victorians, and then talks about the other two, Charles Dickens and Thomas Arnold, the great headmaster of Rugby public school. While James has great admiration for the values set down by Arnold for his students, he says he disagrees with Arnold in the relative lack of importance that the headmaster set on games, and in particular cricket. This, James says, is where W.G. Grace showed the importance of being a great sportsman, as much as being a great scholar. James here labours to make a point which was no doubt important for him, but is rather abstruse in today's context. He tries to establish that W.G. Grace served to bring the spirit of agrarian, pre-industrial England into the more democratic era of Victorian England. Concepts such as 'stiff upper lip' and 'playing the game' and so on, that make cricket a gentleman's game (as opposed to football, I suppose), were, according to James, almost entirely due to W.G. Grace. In this section especially, there are a lot of lovely descriptions of cricket, not complete matches or even innings so much, but specific strokes and particular overs.
Rather curiously for a self-confessed Marxist, James is full of admiration for all these feudal rituals in cricket. The concept of 'gentlemen' (i.e. amateurs) for example, as opposed to professionals, being in some sense better sportsman, is a concept carried over from the time when men with no need to do the slightest work for their luxurious living could spend all their time becoming good at games. But, to my mind contrarily, James disdains purely defensive cricket, which, as demonstrated only last week by the South Africans in India, can be as exciting, and as much of a joy to watch. He prefers the quick scoring and fast bowling of most West Indian cricketers. He also argues for shorter games and praises the half-day versions of county-cricket that were then in vogue. I might have thought an author like James might curl his lip at T20 cricket. Perhaps he would hate the commercialism, but the concept of reducing the game to a better version of baseball surprisingly finds favour with him.
He is rather ambivalent about Bradman. he recognizes his great talent, but does not consider him to be all alone in the 'Bradman Class'. George Headley, he considers, and maybe Constantine as well, were in the same class, except they had less opportunity to display their talents. He is however full of praise for the way Bradman faced up to bodyline bowling, but is contemptuous of the Englishmen for using such 'ungentlemanly' tactics.
He discusses cricket as an art form, considering it on par with classical Greek theatre in engaging the common man with high ideals. He describes many of the batting strokes and bowling actions explicitly in comparison with sculpture and painting of human forms. He opines that other sports lack such grace of body movement. My own appreciation of cricketing action was heightened after I read this book, so clear and lyrical are his descriptions.
The final few chapters talk about his time back in Trinidad, after a couple of decades away in UK and USA, editing a newspaper and fighting for independence. One form this fight took was the fierce and finally successful lobbying that he carried out to have Frank Worrell appointed as the first black, indeed non-white, captain of the West Indian cricket team. This was the late 1950s and the beginning of the subsequent nearly four decade long dominance of world cricket by the West Indian team. Sobers, Kanhai, Griffths, Hall and Gibbs are mentioned in the book, but Lloyd, Richards, Greenidge, Roberts, Garner, Holding, Marshall, Lara, all these came later. The present day West Indian team presents not even a pale imitation of that greatness - one can think only of Chris Gayle as a batsman who might have found a place in the teams of the sixties, the seventies and the eighties. One wishes there was another James now to write and revive cricket in the Caribbean.
