![]() ![]() ![]() The first joke is the title – a three way pun. One thing it consistently rages against is “categorising intellectualism” that seeks to separate, rank and hierarchise high and low culture, fiction and non-fiction, art and sport. It is full of subtle jokes and lines that are slightly, but very deliberately, awry. It is about politics (“West Indian self-government”), cricket and I. ![]() So what is James playing at?īeyond a Boundary is a book about those things that James was trying to put aside so that he could concentrate on literature. It is a superb piece of scholarship and eminently readable. His “magnum opus” was 1938’s The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, a history of the world’s only successful slave revolt, which liberated Haiti. James’s first novel, Minty Alley, published in 1936, was in fact his last novel – or at least his last book that most people would recognise as such. Contrary to accepted experience, the real magnum opus was to be my second novel.” ![]() “Then,” as he writes thirty years later in Beyond A Boundary, “I would be free to get down to my own business. C.L.R James came to England from his native Trinidad in 1932 with two books to write: The Case for West Indian Self-Government and, as ghost-writer, Cricket and I, the autobiography of the cricketer who later became the Britain’s first black peer, Learie Constantine. ![]()
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