A Microcosm of the World

In May 1976, the Jamaican-born cultural theorist Stuart Hall sat down in the BBC’s studios in West London to interview the Trinidadian-born intellectual C.L.R. James. They were being filmed by Mike Dibb, who had produced John Berger’s Ways of Seeing four years earlier, for a planned BBC Two broadcast commemorating James’s seventy-fifth birthday. Hall was forty-four. The conversation was a torch-passing of sorts, from one West Indian intellectual who made his name in Britain to another.

The tape of that interview was lost before it was ever aired. More accurately, it was destroyed—wiped before transmission. That November the broadcasting executive Aubrey Singer circulated a surly, not to say ignorant, internal memo: “Sorry, but I have no interest in a 45” conversation with C.L.R. James.” The two men made a second attempt for Channel Four eight years later. The second session can still be watched online: Dibb filmed it in the Brixton flat where James saw out his days under the patronage of the racial justice advocate Darcus Howe. But by then James, at eighty-three, had begun to decline. 

“I am very, very sorry that the first interview wasn’t transmitted,” Hall told the anthropologist David Scott in 1996, because in the first session James “was still very cogent, very lucid.” A transcript, however, survives in several copies scattered across archives, including James’s papers at Columbia and the C.L.R. James Library in East London. In September 2023 an excerpt of the London text appeared in an issue of Representology, introduced by the journal’s editor, K. Biswas. What follows is, to my knowledge, the transcript’s first unabridged publication, drawn from the Columbia copy, lightly edited for clarity and to minimize repetitions.¹ 

James was born in Tunapuna in 1901, Hall in Kingston thirty-one years later. Both were societies indelibly shaped by centuries of transatlantic enslavement, immigrant indenture, and colonialism—places where color compounded class. James and Hall, middle-class boys who grew up knowing people of different classes and ranks, were both well-placed to apprehend their workings. Through this “small conspectus,” James tells Hall, they won “a certain comprehensive view.” They belonged to the black Caribbean intellectual tradition of, among many others, Frantz Fanon, Aime Césaire, George Padmore, and Marcus Garvey—thinkers, in James’s words, “who come from those miserable scraps of dirt and really have some sort of impact upon the intellectual life of the world.” 

In Trinidad, James went to Queen’s Royal College, the best secondary school in Port of Spain, after which he worked as a teacher, wrote fiction, and participated in anticolonial activities; he never attended university. He first went to England in 1932, the year Hall was born. Arriving in the town of Nelson, Lancashire, at the invitation of the cricketer Learie Constantine, he soon found work as a cricket reporter for The Manchester Guardian. By 1933 he had moved to London and gotten involved in Trotskyist and Pan-Africanist circles. 

Hall—who attended Jamaica College, a school of similar status to Queen’s Royal—arrived in Britain as a Rhodes Scholar to study literature at Merton College, Oxford, in 1951. He abandoned a Ph.D. on Henry James in the aftermath of the Suez crisis, having joined Britain’s burgeoning New Left. In 1960, at twenty-eight, he became the founding editor of the New Left Review, working alongside figures such as Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson, whom he also knew as part of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. In 1964 he moved to Birmingham University as deputy to Richard Hoggart in the newly founded Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. He became a prominent critic of Thatcherism, “authoritarian populism,” and the postimperial condition of late modern Britain.

James and Hall both resolved to think through race and class together, showing how Marx could be articulated with analysts of colonialism and empire such as Garvey, Fanon, and W.E.B. Du Bois: as Hall famously wrote in Policing the Crisis (1978), “Race is the modality in which class is lived.” In The Black Jacobins (1938), James showed that the ideals of the French Revolution were realized in Port-au-Prince before they were realized in Paris. His preface to the book’s first edition adapts Marx: “Great men make history, but only such history as it is possible for them to make. Their freedom of achievement is limited by the necessities of their environment.” Thinking perhaps of those “miserable scraps of dirt,” he continues,

In a revolution, when the ceaseless slow accumulation of centuries bursts into volcanic eruption, the meteoric flares and flights above are a meaningless chaos and lend themselves to infinite caprice and romanticism unless the observer sees them always as projections of the subsoil from which they came.

James’s great works—The Black Jacobins, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (1953), and Beyond a Boundary (1963)—pick through the whole social world and understand the balance of forces that might tip it into revolt. They do so with a firm sense of what makes a story: at various points Hall called The Black Jacobins “a grand majestical sweep” and “a powerful, rolling, historical narrative, which catches world history on the turn.” When Edward Said described James in 1993 as an “an anti-Stalinist dialectician” whose “basic metaphor is that of a voyage taken by ideas and people,” he was naming this relentless drive to kindle the spontaneous energies of ordinary revolutionaries. 

James’s Trotskyism was undergirded by his commitment to a strain of revolutionary, democratic, international, anti-bureaucratic Leninist Bolshevism, which he saw as harnessing the self-emancipatory capabilities of the working class rather than, as under Stalinism, autocratically seizing power on their behalf. Eventually, in 1947, James seceded from the Workers Party (WP), a Trotskyist group, with Grace Lee Boggs and Trotsky’s former secretary Raya Dunayevskaya, forming the Johnson-Forest Tendency. They broke from the WP in their analysis of the class character of the Soviet Union, which they saw as a form of “state capitalism” rather than a bureaucratic collectivist society. They were also dismayed at the lack of interest in organization around the question of race within the party—the “Negro question,” as it was then called. James urged socialists to support anticolonial nationalist movements that were emerging around the same time in places such as Ghana and Algeria.  

Together they rejoined the Socialist Workers Party—from which they had earlier broken—and sought a return to fundamentals, rereading Hegel, Marx, and Lenin. By the 1950s James had deepened his belief in the need for the autonomous self-organization of the working class. The revolution, he insisted, had to come not from a vanguard party but from the bottom of society.

In 1976 Dibb made an hourlong film about James, Beyond a Boundary, inspired by James’s influential cricket memoir of the same name. The documentary followed him both to Trinidad and the cricket-ground in Lancashire he visited as a reporter during his first years in England. When some spare studio space came up at the Television Centre in White City, Dibb and the filmmaker Barrie Gavin, who had worked with James on the cricket film, had the idea of producing a long conversation between James and Hall. The interview was first typed up by James’s wife, the Brooklyn-born feminist Selma James née Deitch, one of the founders of the feminist Wages for Housework Campaign, along with Silvia Federici. Selma James sometimes undertook transcription work for the BBC; this time she was paid £20. (The footage is thought to be lost.)

The C.L.R. James we meet here is a spirited, loquacious interlocutor whom Hall, with courteous restraint, tries to keep on course. The sense of something passionate and unruly in James hints at the distance between them: in his own career as a public intellectual, Hall cut away from the revolutionary humanism James embodied, adopting a chillier and more schematic outlook that skirted invocations of “human nature” in keeping with the skepticism of a deconstructionist, postmodern moment. Their conversation ranges widely among topics: James’s education, upbringing and parenting; his time as a schoolteacher; his encounter with Trotsky in 1939; the writing of The Black Jacobins; the social and political analogues he found in Herman Melville; his pupil Eric Williams, who later wrote Capitalism and Slavery and became the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago; his complex relationships with figures like Padmore, Constantine, Dunayevskaya, and Paul Robeson. 

“He was the master,” Hall told Scott in 1996. Whether or not “you agreed with everything James said,” he offered “an image of what it would be like to be an independent Left intellectual,” a blueprint for “how to be in the world.” In a 1992 essay on James, Hall reflected on Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, a book about Melville that attributed revolutionary significance to the bubbling tensions among the Pequod’s crew. James wrote the book while he was imprisoned on Ellis Island for “passport violations.” It was “a wonderfully Jamesian” way of resisting deportation, Hall writes: 

He attempted to present Mariners, Renegades and Castaways as testimony to the fact that he was a much better American than the immigration authorities. It was as though he was saying, “You do not understand your greatest artist, Melville, and I do…. It is because you do not understand what your own author is telling you that you can expel me. You should welcome me—not throw me out.”

Hall compared him later to another great American. “For Du Bois,” he wrote, “double consciousness was a burden. In James it is a gift.”—Phoebe Braithwaite

Stuart Hall: C.L.R. J., you were born in Trinidad in 1901. Into what sort of family?

C.L.R. James: It was a black middle-class family. My father was a teacher, headmaster. He had been trained at the Tranquillity government training school for teachers, which meant he was above the ordinary. My mother had been sent to a special school run by some Wesleyan ladies. To this day I don’t know anybody who, given her circumstances, read more books than she. We didn’t have a lot of money. But my father used to play the organ in the church and he would do shorthand writing for the newspapers, and they paid at the rate of a penny a line or two lines, or two lines for three cents, and my mother read everything. So the circumstances were narrow and our opportunities to expand in the world were limited. Yet the time came when my father bought a piano for my sister to learn to play. That’s the kind of middle class that we lived in, the black middle class. Which in those days didn’t go too far. Perhaps when I was about twenty-odd, they began to think of making a black middle-class teacher an inspector of schools, but—

Which is not very high.

—that was the furthest he could go. 

And then you went to school at Queen’s Royal College.

I won the scholarship. There were four scholarships every year. The first year I sat I was only nine or eight, and I came seventh. To this day people tell me that I really had won. But I was so young, I had three more chances, so they said, let him stay behind, and they gave the chance to somebody else. I have no facts about that, but I know I was no brighter the next year than I was then. I was really bright at all that school business.

Yes. What kind of education was that? Because that’s the big boys’ school. It was the aspiration.

You mean the Queen’s Royal College?

The Queen’s Royal College. What kind of education did you get at a school like that?

I went there in 1911; I left there in 1918. Latin, French, elementary mathematics, advanced mathematics. They did some statics and dynamics, all sorts of history, all sorts of literature, and the very last year we shifted over from the Cambridge Senior examination to the Higher Certificate examination. In my last year in 1918 we had a French paper, and in mine I had Théophile Gautier, Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Balzac—a whole lot of them for one paper. That was the first year in which we went into the Higher Certificate. I believe that that had been moderated, but that first year I made 70-something percent in that paper, because I read far beyond the books that they gave us. They told me to read Balzac’s Les Chouans, which I finished in about ten days and I went off and read a lot of other Balzac. I read Gautier and a lot of others.  

The education was extremely good. By the time I left, I and the other boys who were in school with me were well-educated as anybody in England should be. That is to say, from the point of view of books. We had about nine masters; eight of them were Oxford or Cambridge men. That was the atmosphere in which we lived.

And then you became a teacher yourself, as well as a journalist.

I became a teacher. I worked at a sugar estate for about eight or nine months, but I didn’t do any proletarian work. I used to go every half hour, take some sugar, and then at the end of the day I mixed it all together and put it through something and gave the percentage. But I could see what the workers were doing and they had a big strike. I saw much that was part of my education, but chiefly from outside. 

Then Mr. Regis, one of the black teachers, who were a formidable lot of men, died, and they asked me to come and teach. I went there to teach at the school that Mr. Regis had taught, a [different] private school. But I hadn’t been there for long when they asked me to come to Queen’s Royal. And for the next ten years I was always acting [as a teacher]. I would act there for two or three years at a time. Until about 1929, I was permanently at the Government Training College for teachers, where I taught history and literature.

This is obviously the first period in which you are being formed, not just as an intellectual but as a political intellectual. But what is the political climate in Trinidad at this period?

I had taken very little interest in the political climate in Trinidad. But somewhere about 1927 I began to listen to Captain Cipriani; he had returned from the war, and they had asked him to take part in politics.² The British gave us seven members to be elected of some twenty-odd members of the legislature, and he was elected for Trinidad. I didn’t take much interest at the start. But I grew up, I kept reading, and I would go to hear one or two of his meetings. 

To be quite frank, what struck me most about Captain Cipriani was not what he was saying, but that periodically he would say, “This is what we want, this what they have to give us, and if they don’t know I know I only have to raise my little finger.” He would raise his little finger, and there would be a tremendous roar from the crowd. I was aware that in addition to politics that you would read in the papers, there was some politics that was concerned with the raising of the little finger. 

So I got very interested and began to follow Cipriani about 1928 or 1929. I began to listen to him. Before that I hadn’t paid any attention. I was reading history abroad. And then I decided, I had it in my mind to come to England. Because I wanted to write. I had had stories published in England before I left.

Before you left?

Oh yes. A man named Edward O’Brien used to publish the best short stories of the year and he published one of my stories. Which created quite a sensation in Trinidad, and no one was more surprised than me. 

You also wrote a novel in that period, a more substantial literary project.

I wrote that novel about 1929. It was published in 1936—I wrote the novel practicing the art of writing. I used to be very friendly with Alfred Mendes, and I can’t say how much I owe to Mendes; all I can say is he probably owes as much to me.³ We lived very closely together, we were concerned with literature, and one vacation I wrote this novel. That was a novel for me; I wrote it a chapter a day. And the chapters are brief. That was merely to exercise myself; I didn’t write it for publication. It got published by accident when I came to England. 

But the thing that is important was that when I decided to leave and come to England, I felt that I should do something political. Because I was a government servant and in those days government servants didn’t intervene in politics. But I went to Cipriani privately and told him, I would like to write your biography. And he said, by all means. Cipriani was always ready to take part in anything. He gave me all the information. I went and looked up all the old books and papers; I went to the public library. They were all in holes and corners, rotting away; I got them all out. I wrote The Life of Captain Cipriani before I left Trinidad.

What are the political demands which somebody like Cipriani was making at this time that struck a young man like you?

Cipriani was demanding self-government. He was demanding pay for illness that you had sustained during [work], and things of the kind. But the things that mattered were that he put himself forward as what he called the champion of the barefaced man. That’s the phrase that must be remembered. Slogans he was putting forward were: self-government, federation.⁴ I tell you frankly I was not too much interested in federation. But the self-government I was interested in, and his interest in the barefaced man, I had a natural instinct whereby I felt that—

But why? But how? Look, you’re from a middle-class background, and an intellectual one as you describe it, with books and reading and so on. 

And a lot of music.

You go to the big boys’ school on a scholarship and you’re given a very formal education. Good, but formal education. You’re a writer, you’re aspiring to write. That’s a recipe for the intellectual being divorced from the “barefaced man.” So what is it that enables you to write a novel like Minty Alley, which is about ordinary people?

Another short story which I’m very fond of is called “Triumph,” about the life of the ordinary people in the yard. I don’t know. It is beyond me. I have often thought about it, and I believe that there is something about it which I can speculate on. The general ideas of the British and the European intellectual—those I had been taught. My parents’ life was maybe limited but they also had those general ideas: Protestant and middle-class attitudes. But their lives were somewhat narrow in passion, attitudes, violence, and so on. 

Among these ordinary people whom I knew, their angers, their rages, their need for happiness, their anger at what was disturbing them—that attracted me because Shakespeare and Aeschylus and these people I read were the people who taught me what the passions in life were. But among the black middle class, those passions were not there. We had to be very careful because around us were all these people who lived how they could. There was a great deal of prostitution, a great deal of vice and violence, and they—

Survival. A life of survival.

Yeah, they attracted me. Because I know today, after thinking it over a long time, that the people I was reading about in the Shakespearean tragedies, the tragedies of Aeschylus—the people who were expressing those ideas were those people. Not the middle class. My mother, I never heard her say a harsh word to anybody. Never. My father might pass a remark, but he wouldn’t do anything. They lived a very steady life. That’s what I grew up in. Therefore I was stimulated to people who were doing other things by the books I had read, which told me that that was not the ordinary kind of life. I think that accounts for most of us who came abroad. We had learned the attitudes of the middle-class Englishman, a concern with ideas, but we soon saw, when we reached an age, that those were not being applied in the island in which we lived. And when we came abroad that was worse. Britain, where those ideas had come from—they were not being applied there.

Well, tell me about that, because for any West Indian coming abroad, intellectual or ordinary worker, that is the shock, the encounter with the—

I don’t know what it was with you all, but I know: for Padmore,⁵ Communist Party; me, Communist Party; Aime Césaire,⁶ Communist Party. I came late, so I was able to join the Trotskyist party. Frantz Fanon: a great deal of Fanon is Marxism. Although he didn’t have to learn it from books so much; he practiced it in Algeria and France, which was a revolutionary upheaval. We got the general ideas of parliamentary democracy and decent behavior and then found that, politically, neither at home nor abroad were those ideas a reality, which drove us in the direction that we all went. I don’t know what you joined but I saw you writing with E.P. Thompson about these political matters. In that way you are a typical West Indian of those educated in the better-class schools in the Caribbean. Coming abroad, we all are shifted in a certain direction. That I think is why we are as we are.

One of the first things that you do—after all, you come with books and a certain amount of writing already about the labor movement in Trinidad and about the situation and aspirations of the people there. And one of the first things you do is actually to turn back to that history, and to reconstruct it. The book on Toussaint Louverture and the books on Negro revolt are written in those very early days in England.

Yes. Those are Marxist books. Now I tell you how I came—

But how come they’re Marxist books? You’re not a Marxist when you leave Trinidad.

No. Not at all. I had not read one line of Marx. All I knew was that in the history books of those days you’d see: “In 1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had written The Communist Manifesto.” That was all I knew. All I knew about Marxism when I came was about eight or ten lines. But I had read a lot of history. I had been concerned about the ordinary person, and I read history in various parts, and I was attuned. I came here with one thing in mind: I was to write a novel. I was to try to do some work. But I was tired of hearing that the West Indians were oppressed, that we were black and miserable, that we had been brought from Africa, and that we were living there and that we were being exploited. There must be something else to West Indians than being oppressed and exploited. 

So I said, I’m going to write the history of the Haitian Revolution. That’s where it came from. I had made up my mind to do that before I left the Caribbean. But I came here and just at the time, 1932, Maxton and company had left the Labour Party. A lot of people were leaving the Labour Party.⁷ Sir Stafford Cripps was very hostile to what the Labour Party was doing. And I came and got swept up in the hostility to the Labour Party. 

So it’s in the Independent Labour Party milieu that you first started reading Marx. 

It’s in the Labour Party milieu. I began to read about Marxism; I didn’t belong to anybody then. I was reading it as something new, in which there was an attitude to history and an attitude to people that I hadn’t met before. But I had all the knowledge of these facts that an ordinary person could have, much more than the average person who joined the movement for social and practical reasons. I didn’t. I had read a great deal, and in English, Latin, French, and Greek, and there was Marxism—which put all these things to order, brought some shape to them.

So I went into Marxism very rapidly. And then I knew—well, I had read the History of the Russian Revolution by Trotsky, and he had said that Stalin had been telling a lot of lies. So according to my bourgeois parliamentary habits I went to read Stalin, compared the two; then both of them were referring to Lenin, so I went and bought volumes of Lenin, and all of them were referring to Marx, so I went and read Marx. That is the way I went into it. Nobody taught me anything. 

And when I’d finished I said, well, Marxism says that you have not only to read but to be active. I couldn’t have been very active in Trinidad; I would have lost my job and been in disgrace with my family. But here I could be active, so I said, where are the Trotskyists? I went and they told me, you can find them there, in Hampstead, and I went and found the Trotskyists. That was the procedure by which I went. Others went their different way. Padmore went to America. 

I want to come onto Padmore in a moment because I think that’s an important story. But I want to ask you about Black Jacobins first. I once met a Haitian intellectual who told me the story about how astonished people were in Haiti to discover that Black Jacobins was written first by a black man, secondly by a West Indian. Because of course it had come back to them through London, through Paris.

I’m aware of that. 

I think you should say something about what that thesis was because it’s one of the first, most important books about the black revolution in the Caribbean written by a black intellectual. 

There are two things about that thesis that are important. One of them is—I had learned this in France; I didn’t discover it but French historians had made it clear—that the movement towards the abolition of slavery came from the capitalistic element who were tired with the poor production of—

Of slavery.

—feudalism and slavery. I had learned that, so I put it in the book. And the second thing: by that time I was already studying Marxism, and reading, and—I brought this one with me from the Caribbean—I was very much aware of the ordinary man who wasn’t able to read and had not studied very much in the Caribbean but was a highly civilized person, highly developed. Many of them were more developed than the average English worker who lived in a certain narrow sphere. In Trinidad and Jamaica, you knew who the lawyer was, you knew who the doctor was, you knew who the parson was, you knew who was the Member of Council, you read every day in the paper what they were doing; life was small and you had a small conspectus of society there. We brought that and could apply that, but the average Englishman living in Halifax or in some part of Manchester is not able to see the whole thing as a whole unless he’s an intellectual. But we brought that. At least I brought that with me; Padmore had it too. We kept on seeing the whole thing as a whole.

Let’s talk about Padmore, because you knew Padmore in Trinidad.

We were very friendly. Padmore used to come up to Trinidad to spend his vacation. His father was a remarkable man: Hubert Alphonso Nurse, who had left the Anglican religion and said he was a Muslim. I believe he was following the man who wrote Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race. You know that man, that Barbadian.⁸ I believe he was following him. There was nobody else for him to follow. But he got into a quarrel with the education department. He resigned. He used to give private lessons, but he had a great volume of books; I’ve never seen so many books as in the small room where he used to live. He and my father were very good friends. My father used to hear him talk, because Mr. Nurse knew a lot of things. And I knew Padmore used to come to Arima. All vacations, July and August, morning after morning, we used to go into the Arima River to bathe at the bottom of the hill where the ice factory is. And then I came here. 

But then your paths diverged because Padmore goes to the United States.

He went to St. Mary’s College,⁹ but I still used to meet him. Because I was bright and used to read, and Padmore used to read, although even in those days he read more of Du Bois and Booker T. Washington than I did. He had that instinct from early. 

And Garvey.

Garvey. I read Garvey too, and I read Du Bois. But I didn’t read them with the insistence and concern that Padmore did. He was always talking to me about them when we used to meet. And he went to the United States and I went to England. I used to hear in England about a George Padmore. I joined the Trotskyist movement and they were glad to have me, because I was very fluent in the history.

But Padmore had joined the other side. Padmore joined the Communists. 

Padmore had joined the other side. I knew Padmore as Malcolm Nurse. One night I heard that Padmore was coming to speak at Gray’s Inn Road, and I had heard a lot about Padmore for years. I didn’t know who he was. I went to the meeting because when I came to England the first time, I went everywhere to see everything I could. After about ten or fifteen minutes of waiting, in steps the famous George Padmore—Malcolm Nurse. So I said, hullo, Malcolm. He says, boy, how are you? 

Although he remained a member of the Communist Party and a big functionary, we never quarreled. He asked me, when did you come? I said, I came here in the summer—in the last part of the winter of 1932, about March or April. He says, you were here in March or April 1932? I said, yes. He said, man, I was here in March or April looking for people to take to Moscow to educate them and to join the movement. If I had seen you I would have asked you to come. And I told him, well, boy, if you had met me and asked me to come to Moscow in 1932, I would have come like a shot. 

But you wouldn’t have gone then. 

Well, by that time we had separated.

Yes. He was by then the African Secretary in the Third International, in the Comintern.

He was the head of the Profintern.¹⁰ I don’t know if any black ever had been that up to that time, or had the situation of power and status that Padmore had in Moscow. When they used to have their celebrations on the first of May and Stalin and Molotov and the rest of them used to stand on the platform, Padmore used to be up there. He had offices in the Kremlin. He had the whole Communist International literature and money at his disposal. And you know why he left them.

He left in 1935, is that right?

He left about 1934, 1935, yes. They told him, George, we are going to change the policy; you know, in Marxism, you have to change.

The policy towards Africa, towards the African revolution?

No, the policy towards the Europeans. They said, we now want you to show in your work a certain sympathy and understanding of Britain, France, and the United States. Those are the parliamentary capitalists, the democratic capitalists. But you be sharp and hostile to Germany, Japan, and what is the other one? 

Italy, Spain.

Germany, Italy, and Japan. But Padmore said, how can I do that? Germany and Japan have no colonies in Africa. So, what? They tell him, well, George, but that’s the new line that we have worked out. He says, but that can’t be. Britain has the colonies in Africa that I’ve been writing about, France has the colonies, and America has been one of the most race-conscious countries in the world. You expect me to call them the parliamentary democracies and to attack Germany, Italy, and Japan? They said, but George, that’s the line now. And he said, Okay. And he did it. And that’s why he came to England, leaving them behind.¹¹ He came here and found me a member of the Trotskyist movement. But he founded an organization—and I worked with that. 

And that is the Pan-African Congress. 

That became in time Pan-African. It began as the International African Service Bureau. George Padmore is one of the great politicians of the twentieth century. He never let a comma pass, he never let anything or anybody—absolute concentration. He had a principle that I have always borne in mind. If anything happened in Bechuanaland [Botswana], or in Nigeria, or in the Congo, George held a meeting. We might have only twenty people. On big occasions we would have eighty people. But George would hold a meeting and we would pass a resolution. Next morning down to the Colonial Office to hand it in or write them a letter. He said, never let anything happen without your doing something about it. Because if three or four things happen and you don’t do anything, they will go further, and when people protest, they will say: these people don’t care, the whole while things have been going on, and they never pay any attention. He never let anything pass. 

Among some of the twenty in your small meetings were the cream, the men who really led the African nationalist revolution. 

They came after—they came to the 1945 congress. But then there were about ten of us. There was Padmore. I used to edit the paper while I was here. There was another man called Makonnen,¹² absolutely invaluable, and there was somebody whom people were apt to forget. There was Padmore’s wife, an Englishwoman, Dorothy Padmore. She used to cook. She was an educated person. She used to translate for Padmore. I believe originally she had been in the Communist Party too. She would cook rice and peas, she would cook fufu. Anybody from abroad who came to London came to see Padmore, she would cook for them. 

I would see her cooking and yet being able to take part in the work that was going on. She, Makonnen and two other men, one named Ward and two other Barbadians—we were the essence of the organization. The other people who came to the organization and became leaders afterward came to the 1945 congress. Before that, the organization had been small; there were not too many blacks in Britain at the time. Padmore kept that organization going. 

Something I ought to mention, which they’re only now beginning to learn in the United States: I was editor of the Trotskyist journal, and I was editor of Padmore’s paper. It didn’t matter. They would sell some of our papers and we would sell theirs. I moved from one to the other. That there was any antagonism didn’t matter, because he was for the world revolution concentrating on the European situation. My Black Jacobins had a lot to do with Africa, so we got on. It was when I went to America [that] I found that the blacks felt that they had a special—maybe they did, a special—

But at the same time as all that is going on, you’re writing about cricket. You’re a cricket correspondent for The Manchester Guardian?

I get a job with The Manchester Guardian. I was very well trained in cricket in Trinidad. 

Did you play?

I played a lot. But I played with the first-class cricket. Constantine,¹³ St. Hill, George John, Archie Wilde, Andre Cipriani, we played league cricket every Saturday, sometimes on a Sunday. I was very friendly with Constantine. He had brought me here. I had told him, I am coming to England to study writing when I get some money. He said, come on at once. If you get into any trouble, I’ll help you out. Constantine was here already.

Playing league cricket?¹⁴

Playing league cricket. He had begun in 1929, and I came in 1932. He soon disappeared and I went and lived with him in Nelson, where I had a glimpse of the cricket and league cricket and so on. I wrote an article one day about Sydney Barnes.¹⁵ I said, this is a wonderful man. And Constantine told me, when I said I didn’t know what to do with it, “send it to Neville Cardus,¹⁶ and write in the letter that I told you to send it to him.” 

Cardus read the article and the next thing I get a letter from him: come and see me at The Manchester Guardian office when you next are in Manchester. I rush into Manchester and he says, I’m looking for somebody to assist me. I can’t do all the Lancashire work; there are matches that I have to do, but Lancashire needed—I want somebody to assist me, will you? I said yes. In fact, that helped me on a great deal. I was able to make some money during the cricket season and, during the winter, write, do my studying and reading. 

Did you see Constantine play in the tests in that period?

All the time. I used to go to Nelson and many of the Lancashire matches. I used to go to Old Trafford and report, and I always went to see Constantine afterwards. I saw him play in the test matches. Oh yes. He was a remarkable man; I used a phrase about Constantine that I like to repeat, not because it’s such a marvelous phrase but it says something: that in league cricket you would find test cricketers who would be playing league cricket. Constantine was not. After 1929 he became a league cricketer who would go and play tests. That was a different [thing]. He would leave league cricket and go and play test matches and be absolutely at home in the test match. He was a marvelous man, really.

Is it in that period when you are watching and writing reports that you first come to see cricket as something really important in terms of the whole historical presence of the West Indies? 

No. No. I had always seen cricket in a manner beyond the ordinary. Chiefly in the writings of C.B. Fry,¹⁷ who to this day I know as one of the finest nonintellectual writers of the twentieth century. He analyzed cricket with an insight and a severity and yet with a breadth of view that you don’t find normally. I had been trained on him. I had been brought up on his books. Then I played cricket in Trinidad, where we all played together. I was not an international cricketer, but I used to play with Constantine, and Wild, Cipriani, and the rest used to play with him. 

Then I come here and I get mixed up with cricket in the Lancashire League. On a morning, a Saturday morning in Lancashire League cricket in Nelson, there would be 10,000 people present; there were many Lancashire League matches that were far more interesting and important than county matches. So I got into that, and I got into county cricket reporting for The Guardian, reporting test matches. And I only began to think about it when I went to the United States—that I had accumulated a great mass of information. 

What happened was that the war came, and we were all certain that during or after the war [the revolution] would take place, as it had done in 1914 to 1918. So in 1945 it hadn’t taken place, I’m in the United States, and I begin to think about what Trotsky had been teaching us about Russia. I begin to think about what is “culture” and “the popular,” and I have information in my head. I’m not a theorist. I had played cricket, I knew a lot of cricketers, I had reported on cricket. So I began to think about cricket. I had the material in my mind, you see. Same as when I came here and I studied Marxism, I had already been prepared in the Caribbean by a tremendous study of history and a teaching of history. 

It is there I began to put in my mind after the war: now what is it? I used to go and watch baseball matches, and there I began to work out what finally became the cricket theory that I’ve put forward and that is part of my book. But in the United States I was taught many things. Political attitudes. The war and the end of the war and Hitler and Mussolini and the degeneration in Russia as I saw it, 1945–1946—

Crystallized things.

Crystallized a lot of ideas in my mind. Now I may as well say the question was: was Russia the—

Well, I’m going to stop you because I think we ought to take a pause because the American period is a period on its own.

All right. Good. It most certainly is the most important period in my life. 

[Here there is a gap in the transcript where it appears the film ran out and was restarted.]

You obviously are already going up to school a bright and well-read and informed young man. I mean, what sort of things are you reading in that period?

Well, I put it all back to my mother. She used to read everything. I remember she had a copy of Vanity Fair in the house. When I was about seven or eight, I read that book. I had nothing else to do. In the Caribbean unless you were playing cricket there was nothing else to do. So I read the book and I found it very interesting; for one thing, it was so long I didn’t finish it for a long time. I would read other books and, as soon as I was finished with them and didn’t know what to do with myself, pick up my Vanity Fair. I remember reading novels that she had by Mrs. Henry Wood. There was another novel called John Halifax, Gentlemen. All these books were in the place: magazines, The Captain, The Boys’ Own Paper, and the rest. I just read everything. 

So by the time I reached college in 1910, I was way beyond the average boy, because I had been reading. We used to use a kerosene lamp. I lived in the country for a while. And at nine o’clock my parents would go to bed. I would have bought a candle. In my room where I slept—my father always put me alone by myself—I would light my candle and read till about two or three in the morning. That’s when I was six or seven years of age. It was an instinct that I had. But the instinct could have faded away were it not for the particular circumstances in which I found myself, and that I had had the West Indian upbringing, came to England in 1932, and got the push. But I had the instinct—somehow I had it—and must have got it from my parents. A very good physique too I got from them. My father was not a great reader himself but he was an educated man; he had been trained. 

It’s a childhood in that sense not at all distinct from a real Victorian, Edwardian childhood.

Middle-class.

Middle-class Victorian childhood, except that it was four thousand miles away.

He would have had more to do. He wouldn’t have concentrated so much on books. But the concentration on books, this was my father’s attitude. The man selling books, a sixpenny copy of The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens: “Here, my boy, that’s a fine book.” He hadn’t read it himself, but he would know. Tom Brown’s School Days—he’d buy all these, so that by the time I was ten I had a little selection of books and kept on adding to them. Then I became very friendly with Carlton Comma, who was working at the library,¹⁸ and that went on for years, until 1932. But it started very early. 

So I was very fortunate. I had some instincts which I gained from both my parents, who were very serious, and people of an intellectual cast of mind; my father didn’t read many books but he was a good teacher. I remember he used to train boys for the exhibitioner’s examination. He taught a boy named Chin Aleong in Arima. And when Chin Aleong didn’t win, I remember my father wept. Chin Aleong meant nothing to him, but it mattered to him to teach. 

Now I want to ask you a question about Black Jacobins. We’ve talked about its importance not only in describing that movement in San Domingo and the slave revolts and so on, the republic, but also the fact that it’s been written by a black West Indian. But I think we also have to say something about what that thesis advances, because it’s an interpretation, after all, of that revolution in the Caribbean, different from the one that you would have gotten from traditional French historians. From everybody. 

From everybody. Not only from the French historians. I got those ideas from French historians. Reading French historians—reading Jaurès¹⁹ and reading other men and preparing for The Black Jacobins—I saw that the movement for [the abolition of] slavery had been assisted by the drive of the French capitalists to finish up with this slavery. Then there is something else. That’s what I did there. And Williams²⁰ came to me—

Eric Williams. 

He used to come and ask me everything because I was the senior. I used to teach him at college, and we were very friendly indeed. I used to take him to Paris with me to work at The Black Jacobins. He would go, and we would meet Damas²¹ there, and Damas would go with us to the public library and help us out, and we’d go on. And Williams came to see me and he said, “James, I’ve got a first in my examination and I want something to do. They have offered me a doctorate, I could study for a doctorate. What should I do?” I tell him, this is what you should do, and I took a piece of paper and I wrote the thesis down. I tell him, that’s the thesis that is fairly well known in France. Go and write that in English. And Williams then went and did that magnificent piece of research and organization.

That’s on the abolition movement in England. 

The abolition movement in England. It had not been done at all before. But I had picked it up from the French writers. Of course I was quick to see it, you follow? To make something of it. But I told him, go and do that; that isn’t done in England at all. And he went and he did it, and I must say here at once that the kind of research that Williams did on that is something that will last forever. 

That’s in his doctorate and in the book Capitalism and Slavery. 

That’s in the book Capitalism and Slavery, and that book has a reputation today. Some people today are challenging it. They are saying, well, there are other causes.²² But I’m not worried about that. Williams did research, he went everywhere; he would travel fifty miles, go to some library where a certain book might be. That research he did. But the original idea came from me, I wrote it out for him, and I got it from the French historians. Oh yes. 

Now I want to move on because you’ve said the period in America is in some ways the most important in your life. Why do you feel that? It’s a long period, but you go there having done a lot of things.²³

I did a lot of things, yes. When I went, in 1939,²⁴ here a lot of people—some highly educated revolutionaries, Trotskyists and Marxists—had come from Germany, after Hitler, and had come to England. I used to meet some of them here and some of them in France, and they were very much struck with me being a well-educated Trotskyist. In fact, in the Trotskyist movement, I was the Third World complete. There was nobody else. They used to tell me, you know, Russia is not a workers’ state, you know. And I would say, the property has been nationalized, Russia is a workers’ state. But they would give me arguments. 

This is a break inside the Trotskyist movement, really. 

Inside the Trotskyist movement. 

Is this what shifts you away from that commitment to Trotskyism?

That shifted me. Now, something happened. Something that is very important in my life. When the shift took place, I went with those who left the official Trotskyist movement. But two things. I had to decide what I was going to do because I came to this conclusion: if we split with Trotsky on the Russian question, it is not a split on the Russian question. 

It’s a split on the whole theory.

A split on the whole basic theory. And I didn’t know what it was but [I knew] we [had] to look for that. I didn’t know what to do. Should I do that here in America, or should I come back to England, where I had a job? I was working with the Glasgow Herald. Summer. That was safe. What to do?

But I don’t quite understand that. I mean, wasn’t the thesis principally about how to understand the developments in the Soviet Union? How to assess them? Why did it cut across the whole commitment to Trotskyism?

I believed that if we disagreed with Trotsky on the Russian question—the case where he said defensism and we said defeatism was not the Russian question²⁵—it meant that we were looking at it from philosophic, economic, and political points of view that were different. You couldn’t differ on the Russian question and yet be correct on the others. That’s very important for me. That was one contribution that I made, I think of great importance. Because everybody used to argue the Russian question. I said no. If we are going to split, if we have split with Trotsky, we have to find out where this came from. And it took us ten years. But we really worked at it. 

I know a girl, she’s now called Raya Dunayevskaya, who worked with me. She translated everything that she could find by Lenin. And Grace Lee—Ria Stone²⁶—she’s married to Jim, James Boggs, she knew German. So I was familiar with French, and English we all were familiar with; she knew the Russian, and Grace Lee was a Doctor of Philosophy from Bryn Mawr. So we got to work. It took us ten years. But then we came out with a doctrine that the Trotskyist doctrine was not: this question of the nationalization of the property, it did not [alone] make a socialist society. 

Now what I want to know: what is the essence of that position? 

That the working-class movement has to change and become dominant in all aspects of life. Even Marx says that philosophy has to come from the proletariat. That doesn’t mean the worker in the plant is going to write philosophy. But view that what is needed is his intellectual development, that everything must come from there—that we found out. We realized that we had been falsely analyzing Marx’s economics, we had been falsely analyzing Lenin, in that we were trying to form the vanguard party. And we realized Lenin—

But isn’t that the essence of Leninism?

Lenin had not formed the vanguard party. When the Russian Revolution took place, the left social revolutionaries were members of the government. The vanguard party ruling Russia was a product of circumstances, but Lenin used to tell the West, that is the way we have done it in Russia. You will have to go your own way. He said, for example: the bourgeoisie, we took their property away. But we didn’t put them out of the soviets. They could have stayed in the soviet. We took their property, but they left the soviet. You all may do what you like. But this is what we have done under the circumstances, and that’s what we applied. And we dropped the idea of the vanguard party. 

This is a major shift in perspective.

It was a major shift. Absolutely. 

What—straight to the self-activity of the proletariat itself?

No, we don’t say that a party cannot be formed, or an organization cannot be formed. Certainly, they can. But the idea of putting yourself forward as the revolutionary party with the doctrine and the ideas, without which no revolution can be made—we said that is not so. There were special circumstances which drove Lenin along those lines. But after 1933 and the complete defeat of the Communist Party, even to say nothing about its capitulation before Hitler, that movement is over. We can form organizations and everything, but the idea of putting forward a Marxist party as a vanguard party, that is through. We were conscious of the break. But we were not worried about it. 

By now a lot of people think that way. Oh yes. But in those days it was difficult. People used to say, “but Lenin, the vanguard party!” And we showed that Lenin didn’t begin with the concept of the vanguard. He said, my party must be this and that, and you are wrong. But he didn’t say, unless you join us. No, he didn’t. He said, you are wrong, and in that line, he invited the other parties to join the Bolshevik Party. But they couldn’t make it. They were afraid.²⁷

You go to see Trotsky in this period in Mexico. 

I got to see Trotsky in 1939.

Is it about this question or about a different set of questions?

I raised this question with him, and that has been published in the French volume.²⁸ He gave me ideas at that time—I hadn’t developed a position but it was in my mind. The question that I asked him was this: I have been going to France regularly from when the French revolution²⁹ began in 1934, 1935, right up to 1938, and what I have noticed is that the French masses join the trade union movement, join the Communist Party, and become more and more militant, but the Trotskyist party goes down and down and down. How do you explain that? That meant I was already bothered. He gave me an explanation. He says, well sometimes, you know, in Russia at one time, we were up, we were down, and so on. And I never said a word. 

It didn’t satisfy you. 

It didn’t satisfy me because I said nothing. You will see the discussion reprinted, in which I ask the question, and then say nothing—made one remark in reply to what he said.

What sort of figure is Trotsky like at this period in Mexico?

Trotsky was always a man who had the style and manners of a European nobleman of the old school, number one. He spoke languages with great ease. He was a man of tremendous personality without being aggressive. He was always ready to listen to what you had to say, but he knew what he had to say. I believe at the time I got to see the Russian Revolution and Lenin’s policy, they had become for him the things by which [to interpret] the rest of the world. The great mistake was China. I remember Mao Tse-tung [Zedong] was developing, and Trotsky insisting with him that a peasant party will never be able to do it. 

That’s the classic position, the classic Trotskyist position, too. 

That’s the classic position, and we broke away from that. We said no. And then the Trotskyists used to get into a fuss over whether to support the Labour Party with critical support. We said, enough of that. We will support or not support, we have a way to go. The vanguard party we were against, and we laid complete stress: there is no socialist party unless the proletariat and the classes next to it occupy a dominant position. Today we have gone further. We say there will be no revolution at all unless the mass of the population has already organized itself in a socialist way; that in other words the socialist organization of the people will make the socialist revolution. 

And not the other way round. 

Not the other way round. That’s where we are today. 

You were in the States in this period, at the end of the 1930s and 1940s. And [you were there] really [for] the break with Trotsky and in the development of a whole new political tendency. Around you are also another set of struggles, the black struggle and so on, figures like Robeson. 

Yes, but Robeson was all tied up with the Communist Party. 

You knew Robeson earlier than that.

I knew Robeson. Robeson had played here in London, and I had met him in London because before the war Robeson in London was quite a figure. In every branch of society Robeson was somebody whom everybody worshipped, and we in particular; in those days black people were considered nothing. And there was Robeson dominating wherever he was. We decided—some of the people who knew me—to get him to play Toussaint Louverture in my play. He read it and said yes. Those were six or seven exciting weeks during which we were rehearsing. There were lots of professional actors and Robeson rehearsing, and I got the opportunity to know him well and see him at work.

And you were in it.

I was in it by accident. We had a man playing a role and at the last minute we said, look, that man is not doing it well—James, you have to fit in. I got very fed up because I wanted to go and sit in the back and watch the play, to get an opportunity of the play, not be mixed up in it. But I dressed myself up and played it. But what I was playing was not important. It was to fill in a hole. And in 1938 when I left here, I met Paul in Manchester. And he said, well, James, we are going to do that play again, you know. I will play Toussaint, you can play Dessalines, and then I will play Dessalines and you can play Toussaint, we will be able to. But by the time he had come back to the United States and I was there, Paul was tied up with the—

Communist Party.

Not the Communist Party, I don’t know whether he joined or not. But some great jokes he and I used to make. I would meet Paul in New York or somewhere: “Hullo, James. How are you?” I’d say, “Well, Paul, I’m glad to see you.” He says, “Man, we haven’t met.” “We haven’t talked at all,” I say. He says, “Look, I’m going to Romania, then I’m going to Czechoslovakia to sing. I’m coming back here in April, and as soon as I come back we have to get together and talk.” And I would say, “Sure. We’ll look out for that.” And we’d shake hands, both of us knowing that that wasn’t going to happen. But still it was an expression of goodwill, to show that although we were politically apart, nevertheless between us as individuals, that if it wasn’t for the politics, we would have got on well together. 

I have written about him; he is the most marvelous human being I have ever met. Nobody knew, except you knew Paul, there was something you missed. This tremendous sense of power and strength and gentleness. Paul could speak, but he would listen to you, in a most sympathetic way. I’m sorry we haven’t time for me to tell you some of the things that I know about Paul. 

I want to know at this point what you—it’s a massive involvement for you in America. This is the third time in which you’ve got deeply involved in the politics not only of another country, its international politics. 

No, but it’s the politics of the black.

But also of the culture of America.

Yes. But first of all I want to say [something] about the black question in America. When I went there what I took to Trotsky was a document, in 1939. I said, these people, these Trotskyists, they don’t know what to say. I said, the black people, I know them, and I had known them in the Caribbean. I said, they don’t need the leadership of the Marxist party. A Trotskyist can join—become a Marxist. But they don’t need the leadership of the trade unions. They don’t need the leadership of anybody. The black people in the United States are fully able to organize themselves and produce leaders and carry on. What we ought to do is to be telling them that. Trotsky agreed. It stayed below, but in time to come that happened, in the Sixties. And everybody in America knows that that was the document I put forward. 

I want to come onto the Sixties but I want first to know, when do you leave America?

In 1953.

And you write just before that or just after a big book which includes a long section on Melville.

Now, it isn’t a big book.

I mean a big book in terms of what it tries to cover.

I will tell you what happened. 

It’s a small book.

I was a bit tired of many things. I was tired of the American Marxists who were a very deficient lot, talking about the intellectual culture—the superstructure—being based on the material basis. Everybody was saying that but to say that was to say nothing. I read Herman Melville and at the same time I was studying the history of the United States. I was a stranger there. So I wrote essays. Those essays may be somewhere—I believe Raya Dunayevskaya may have them. On Hawthorne. On Poe. I wrote essays on various people, and finally I wrote an essay on Melville, and then some people read it and said, well, this ought to be a book, you know. I lectured on it and so on. I sat down and wrote the book on Melville, and it was published about 1952. Today everybody accepts that as one of the books on Melville that matter. But publishers don’t publish it. 

You saw something in Melville—and especially in Moby-Dick, but the whole of Melville’s work—which you call really essentially American. What is it about Melville that is essentially American for you?

Have you seen a picture called Dog Day Afternoon?

Yes.

Do you notice the attitude to authority of that young man? He hasn’t any clear theoretical idea in his head, but there are certain things he wants to do and he’s not going to let anything stop him. When it comes to his attitude to the police he’s prepared to tell the police and FBI to go to hell; he doesn’t care anything about them. It is that instinctive readiness to go for what you’re after that you find in the United States. And that is very different to Europe, where everything is organized and you have a long tradition. 

That’s what Melville has got. He’s got the real instinctive revolutionary development, and the people. But it isn’t organized according to the party. And that I think is clear. I think most people recognize it. 

But you also see something important. It’s not only in Melville, it’s when you write about Aeschylus, it’s when you write about Shakespeare. You see something about the coincidence of a great historical moment and a great work or a great artist. 

I believe that to be absolutely natural—that at a certain stage when the society is about to go through or just has gone through tremendous changes from what it has been before, you find in literature or in art the expression of that sentiment in the work that people have done. We are seeing that today. Solzhenitsyn’s books are in my opinion absolutely astonishing. They come from a society like Russia. They wouldn’t come from Britain or France or the United States. But that tremendous book comes from a tremendous, massive societal upheaval. It is clear that things are going on there which he is aware of in the sentiment of people that has now to be shaped into some form of structure. Solzhenitsyn isn’t talking about that. He talks about Christianity or something. But he obviously has left that alone; that’s not his business.

You mean the power of the word doesn’t have anything to do with how the artist himself understands it. 

I can’t separate the individual artist—this tremendous power is expressed by an individual artist. The individual artist has some qualities which he absorbs from previous history and which are unique to him. That’s what makes the artist great. He sees something now and he needs new methods of expressing them. That is the origin of the great individual artist. That’s the origin of Aeschylus. That’s the origin of Shakespeare. 

It’s in what he does. I remember there’s a sentence of yours in one of the essays about Picasso where you say, I don’t know what he thinks or what he does, I don’t know if he thought that or not, but what I’m interested in is what he paints, what’s realized. 

That he’s painting. That’s what happens. I spent a lot of time looking at Picasso and drawings. From the time I was a boy I was fascinated by Michelangelo. Particularly heaven. His idea of God was the idea I had as a small boy of God. And then the time came when I dropped the idea of God with his moustache and the long beard. 

White, of course. 

But I still remembered it as something that I had believed and lots of other people had believed. Then I saw Guernica. I was very much interested in Guernica. Then I went to the Vatican and I saw Michelangelo and some paintings in the Cappella Paolina, not the ordinary paintings in the Medici Chapel, but some paintings, one of them of Saint Paul being struck down and another of Saint Peter being crucified. 

Web Gallery of Art/Wikimedia Commons

Michelangelo: The Conversion of Saul, 1542–1548

Wikimedia Commons

Michelangelo: The Crucifixion of Saint Peter, 1546–1550

Crucified, yes.

Those are in the Cappella Paolina. A book has recently appeared on them.³⁰ I saw those. In the United States working at Trotskyism, working at Leninism and Marxism of our day, getting rid of certain things I believed that Lenin would have got rid of if he lived in our day, getting hold of the black question, clarifying these things, I came here and I was able to look at the Medici Chapel. I went to Greece and saw the Olympia statues there,³¹ and then I saw Guernica and I am absolutely certain there is a connection between the three of them, once you get the feeling that the great artist is not painting for artistic people who are connoisseurs of art. He is painting primarily for himself, but he’s also painting for the general public. Michelangelo was not painting for any people who could read and write critiques about him. That marvelous statue of Apollo at Olympia. What do those statues have? The general structure—the Olympia statue, the pediments, you notice the temple was that way. Then if you look at the Michelangelo, the second—

“The Crucifixion.”

The Crucifixion of St. Peter, it goes the same way. There are the horsemen, there is Peter, and then there is another set of people there. When you look at Guernica, it’s the same thing you are watching. The people up there, a woman being burnt; then comes the movement this way, and then there is the triangular center, but whereas Picasso does not need two paintings, the other all needed two lots. Picasso needed only one. He had this thing in the center, and he put two at the side. I believe that in the Olympia statue, you have the struggle between the centaurs and human beings. That is, between the human and the cultured instincts that exist in man. The artist, whoever he is, is quite sure because Apollo does not interfere; he just stands up with his right arm. That is certain. So they are fighting. 

Then you come to Michelangelo. When you look at Michelangelo, the man who is struck down, Paul—Christ has struck him down. The extended right arm. When you look at Saint Peter, you have the people and the horses on one side, you have this tremendous diagonal, and then you have another set of people coming along on the right-hand side. And then when—

It’s as if the whole world at a particular historical moment is gathered together in the painting.

Is gathered together, particularly in those two paintings by Michelangelo, and the whole world can be seen in in the Guernica and in the Olympia statues, because in addition to the Apollo at the beginning, there is another one, the other pediment where there is the king and his wife and the young man who wants his daughter,³² and at the end there are some people, ordinary people lying down and so forth. In other words the whole picture is there. 

Then you come to Guernica—that’s an absolute masterpiece beyond belief. Picasso gives you first of all a woman being burnt. That is the ordinary kind of thing that many painters will paint. But then comes difficulty; some light is there. People don’t realize: that is what has caused the modern world to be what it is. Some electric power of some kind. On this side is a figure that Picasso has been playing about for years, the bull—because he has placed beneath the bull the woman with the child, and the bull is there, has enormous power. The sexual instincts are very strong, that is clear. He is concerned, and the woman is there telling him, you are the only person who can save me. He doesn’t know that. But Picasso has said the whole world is finished. The only thing that can now come from it is the sexual power of the bull, its physical strength and the woman with the child. 

So that picture goes this way. I am sure that if you look at the Olympia statues and then you look at the two Michelangelo paintings and then you look at Guernica you get a picture of the historical development of the time. But you have to know the history. I have no doubt that the people for whom those statues and those pictures were made understood them. I have no doubt about that. I am sure that I could take Guernica to Trinidad tomorrow and there would be no misunderstanding. It is your artistic persons comparing him to Corot and comparing him to Michelangelo and to Goya—they get into trouble. But if you understand that the picture is done for the ordinary person, which the artist is himself—otherwise he wouldn’t see things so clearly—you can see them. 

I mean now what you’re doing is not accepting any distinction between a major historical moment of change or struggle and how that gets expressed through an individual artist in the painting. You’re dissolving these categories. You’re seeing them really in one continuum; I mean the historical practice.

I wouldn’t say it’s one continuum. But I say—

What makes the difference?

The point is that the great artist with the new vision and the extremely emphatic presentation only arises when the society is already going into it or is out of it. That produces him. Why don’t we have, in Britain, a Solzhenitsyn? It’s because in Britain there’s nothing at present to give a man of that kind. We haven’t had a great writer in Britain since D.H. Lawrence. For the whole of the twentieth century we haven’t had one because—well, politically, the Labour Party and—

And so you’re really seeing the artist in a Marxist sense, like a historical individual.

An artist is a historical individual, but—you are quite right—he is a historical individual. History is in him. But it’s an individual presentation. 

Yes, but that’s how you write about Melville. That’s how you write about Shakespeare. And that’s how you talk about Michelangelo. 

They are individuals.

And Picasso. But it’s also how you talk about Sobers.³³

About Sobers, yes, but—

Or Worrell or Walcott. 

But in regard to when they came forward and how they played, you know whom I learnt that from? I learn that from Learie Constantine, who used to tell me from 1928—I remember his phrase—they are no better than we. Constantine used to tell me, say, we are as good as they; that’s to say, as individual players, but somehow we are not able to—

Bring it together. 

Bring it together. 

Distill it.

And we used to argue. He says, we want a black man as captain. I said, Learie, you will never get me to agree with that, because the English play and the Australians play and they play well; they haven’t got black men as captains. What makes it in the Caribbean that a black man must be captain? I was foolish enough [not] to understand. What Learie meant was, we want somebody who will feel that everybody is on the level and—

And will gather up the society. 

Gather together and feel the responsibility and recognition that we now, as black people who have just come in, have to do something. That’s what Learie kept on—and he saw that when they came here. Goddard³⁴ was the captain; that’s very noticeable. But nevertheless he had so many black players, remarkable players, that he gave way to them. He wasn’t a good captain but he had this much, he could see how they could play and he would go along with them. 

[There is another gap in the transcript where it appears the film ran out and was restarted.]

Just a little bit more about Moby-Dick, yes? Because it’s a novel whose power most American critics will acknowledge. But I don’t know that they could be able to see that vision that you see in it really worked out, in terms of how the novel is structured: I mean, Ahab and the Whale and Ishmael as the intellectual, you say, attracted by the man of action. And the crew. How do you see that as a kind of microcosm of America?

Because that is in the book. I am very sorry—I am very militant and in fact I can be very aggressive about that. The things that I say about Moby-Dick are not my sentiments that I feel, and a man is entitled to write about his feelings about the game of cricket. Neville Cardus wrote a great deal about his personal responses in the game, and with very brilliant results. But nevertheless I insist in writing about cricket: I’m watching what they are doing. If I have a feeling about it, that is strictly subordinate to what is going on. 

In my analysis of Moby-Dick, I say, for example, when the Whale does come near the end, before Ahab chases it, the men on board the vessel which is going after it suddenly shout together, and I find those two or three pages are some of the finest pages in the book. Which means for me that Melville at that time—when the men see it and they take part, not only following Ahab—is inspired to write better or more forcibly than he has written at other times. And I say, if you want to criticize me you have to say that that passage has not got the significance which I give to it. But I say, there it is. That’s what I’m going by. It’s the vigor and violence, the strength of that passage that makes me feel that Melville is saying, well, here is what matters. Ahab doesn’t matter because Ahab gets killed. But these people, they go down. Before they go down, he lifts them up from being ordinary members of the crew and makes them one of the noblest passages of the book. 

You’ve written a lot from time to time and paid very careful attention to the West Indian writers, West Indian novelists, and the situation of the artist in the Caribbean. There is no Melville there—but I mean, are there people, are there works that you think begin to connect the whole historical situation like that? Among those writers? 

I believe that the West Indian writers began after the upheavals of 1937 to 1938. I have discussed this with Lamming.³⁵ That was the atmosphere in which they grew up. You have Lamming, Naipaul, and Wilson Harris.³⁶ I don’t believe there is any country today where people are writing in English that can produce three writers who can be said to be more significant than those. 

Lamming is very important, because Lamming got tired of writing in England about the Caribbean for an English audience, and for ten years he didn’t do anything. That’s an enormous number of years for a man in his prime. Finally he goes and he writes Natives of My Person, which analyzes not so much the slaves but the slavers. In other words, he has shifted, and the critics don’t know what to do with that. They expect from Lamming a good book about black people, but Lamming does not. That is the result of living abroad. 

The next book that Lamming will write, I believe, will be about the West Indians in the West Indies, written for the West Indian. I have talked to him. You know, he’s an extraordinary man, and more extraordinary still is Wilson Harris. Wilson Harris has got into his mind that there is something that is American, that is different from the organized settled life that the Europeans have lived, and even the Asiatics have lived—that in America there is something in the climate and in the structure which impresses itself and draws out characteristics from the Amerindians and the people who went there and the people who live there today. Half of it he says quite plainly: it is taking historical bits and using the historical imagination. He’s not afraid to do that, and he’s an astonishing writer. Besides which he’s a most delightful person. It’s a pleasure to meet him. But he writes these fantastic stories and he says plainly, “I have to make it up, but I’m going by what I see and the facts that remain,” and he will write a novel and short stories about Amerindians showing that they are not so different from those people who came and lived there, the Spaniards, and we in the Caribbean today. There is something continuous that runs. I think that is very fine. 

One more thing. I believe that Vidia—

Naipaul.

Naipaul, after writing that magnificent book, is feeling the strain. He’s writing about this, about that, he writes about Argentina, goes back to India, writing criticism and so on, feeling the strain of writing for an audience, a British audience, about the West Indian. He has felt the same thing that Lamming has felt, that he can’t go on doing that. And such criticism has been made of Vidia and his non-West Indian attitudes. I believe I have reason to say that if something genuinely West Indian began, Vidia would be there. He has pretty sharp criticisms not only of West Indian politicians but of all. His attitude to politics on the whole is as it is; the West Indians are treated that way because that’s what he thinks of all of them. He’s not going to break it. But if something genuinely came in the West Indies and we said, Vidia, come and help, I believe he would.

C.L.R., I want to put a question which comes right out of what you’ve just said. You’ve throughout your life developed and tried to make as clear as you could, often in magnificently simple ways, a view of life, vision of life. You often encounter people, writers, ordinary people, people in opposite political camps from you, who don’t agree with you. You never go principally to what divides you from them. You always find that which you can accommodate into your sense of historical development. You are the only Trotskyist who’s never really been a sectarian at all. Why is that? Where does that come from? 

But I have left the Trotskyist movement.

Yes. You understand what I mean. I mean somebody who was formed in a political milieu that is full of splits and tendencies and political struggle, you always go to what I would call the progressive side of human beings, and you therefore talk positively about the most extraordinary people you know. 

Now I tell you what I will say, and I think we are coming near to the end. I believe that the revolution in San Domingo was a total revolution. It cleared out what stood in the way completely. They weakened because there was no international assistance; they were by themselves. But after 150 years the same thing happened in Cuba. The revolution was complete; the whole system was thrown aside. I grew up in the Caribbean and I left there when I was thirty years of age. And I grew up in an atmosphere in which I knew everybody and everybody knew me. I played cricket in the savannah with everybody, you read my stories; I talked to Tom, Dick, and Harry. The white people—I was friendly with them. My great friend—the man who helped me, and really we worked together—was Mendes, who was white. So that living in that atmosphere—

A microcosm of the world.

A microcosm of society on the whole. We—not me alone—Fanon had it, Césaire had it, Padmore had it, and Garvey had it in a way, although he attributed it to the black people alone. But Garvey used to say, Lenin organizes the white proletariat, I organize the black people. I believe that we West Indians—you will find the same thing in the man who wrote Froudacity.³⁷ He had a vision that we live in a small society where all aspects of society and members know one another. I went to school with the black boys and the children of the colonial secretary and all that. You get a certain comprehensive view. 

And with the books you also get a comprehensive view, and when you come out, that is what we are. That accounts for the list of us who come from those miserable scraps of dirt and really have some sort of impact upon the intellectual life of the world. That’s what I have arrived at. Finally I believe that the West Indians in the next ten years will do some astonishing things, politically. They can’t help it. 

Based on what you’ve just said. Experience. 

Based on this—that we have Canada and Britain and the United States, intellectual developments all at our disposal, and yet we have the same drive that the underdeveloped peoples have. We are parts of two sides of the world, one. I think that will be enough for the time being. 

When we talked about your involvement with the Pan-African movement in England and we talked about important African figures who were present there, like Kenyatta and so on—you don’t meet Nkrumah in that period in England. You meet Nkrumah in the States. 

I meet Nkrumah in the States, but Nkrumah is to me one of the greatest of all the Africans. There are three Africans who matter: Nkrumah, who was able to organize the revolution, and after Nkrumah some forty African states followed in ten years. That’s what you have to look at. The second one is Nyerere, who is organizing an underdeveloped country on an entirely new basis. And the third is Wole Soyinka, who is one of the finest living writers, and a person whom I respect enormously in the literary world of today. Those three are Africans who can take their place with any kind of analysis of the people who matter in the present world. 

Nkrumah made the revolution. There were only five million people in the United States, but it was 100 million who followed in ten years.³⁸ In other words, he was the catalyst that sent this thing rushing through. I met him personally. I used to know him well. He was a very sophisticated person, could get on very well. I’m glad we got the opportunity to mention Nkrumah, who was a tremendous person; Nyerere, who is one of the finest living politicians, a man whose ideas are most profound; and Wole Soyinka, a fine writer and organizer of note. I’m glad we mentioned them because they now will play the role themselves that we used to do in the old days before the Africans had the opportunity to educate themselves as I had sixty years ago. 

Thanks very much. Happy birthday. 

Thank you very much.