Book 14 - C L R James, Beyond a Boundary

The weeks in this blog have stretched longer and longer until I will be lucky to do a book a month. I half expected this to happen as things get in the way. This time it was being away in Scotland, visiting distilleries and mostly reading about whisky and birds, none of that reading will feature here. Instead my follow-on book from the cricket humour of Peter Tinniswood, is something that is not only referred to as one of the best cricket books but also has a claim to be one of the best books on sport ever written. This is because it is about more than a game. It is part memoir, part portraits of cricketers who were significant personalities, part social history and the evolution of attitudes to race, and part aesthetic theory.

C L R James could write this because not only was he a social theorist, historian and essayist, with a role in the public life of the West Indies, he was also someone who had been obsessed by cricket from a young age and played the game to a very high standard. High enough to be offered a place in a Lancashire League team (and know he didn’t have the personality to bear that responsibility) But he was also marked out at an early age as an intellectual. One of the shocking revelations (shocking in the sense that it made me sit up and blink, not that it was terrible)  was that his favourite book from the age of eight was Vanity Fair and that he reread it so many times he could challenge people to read out a random passage and he would complete it. But alongside this he stored and filed clippings about cricket happening in England, devoured and organised the stats, and learnt about great figures from the past, as well as being outside playing thee game. From early ages are habits formed!

This book is so rich I am going to blog about it in two parts. in the second I will talk about some of his observations about cricket and cricketers but in this I will talk about a tiny little detail, almost an aside, that resonated with me because of the election Ed Miliband has just lost.

it was in a section where James was describing how many of his his values were actually formed on the cricket pitch and how as a black, scholarship boy in a colonial school he imbibed the attitudes of Thomas Arnold and the Nineteenth Century public school ethos.

“But as soon as we stepped on to the cricket or football field, all was changed. We were a motley crew. The children of some white officials and white business men, middle class blacks and mulattos, Chinese boys, some of whose parents still spoke broken English,  Indian boys, some of whose parents could speak no English at all, and some poor black boys who had one exhibitions or whose parents had has starved or toiled on plots of agricultural land and were spending their hard-earned money  on giving their their eldest son an education. Yet we rapidly learnt to obey the umpire’s decision without question, however irrational it was. We learnt to play with the team, which meant subordinating your personal inclinations, and even interests, to the good of the whole. We kept a stiff upper lip in that we did not complain about ill fortune. We did not denounce failures, but  ‘Well tried’ or Hard luck’ came easily to our lips. We were generous to  our opponents and congratulated them on victories, even when we knew they did not deserve it… We did not obey every rule. But the majority of boys did. the best and most respected boys were precisely the ones who always kept them.”

The idea of playing by the rules, of not being bumptious in victory or churlish in defeat, of being honest and straightforward, seep into the bones if taught early and consistently enough. (I recognise them, they were also part of my education even if I only went to a grammar school. They are still deep within me). For James they are at his moral core.

“One afternoon in 1956, being at that time deep in this book, I sat in a hall in Manchester, listening to Mr. Aneurin Bevan. Mr Bevan had been under much criticism for not playing with the team and had answered his critics. He devoted them  and bought his audience to a pitch of high receptivity and continuous laughter by turning inside out and timing holes in such concepts as ‘playing with the team’, ‘keeping a stiff upper lip’, ‘playing with a straight bat’ and the rest of them. I to had had my fun with them on the public platform often enough but by 1956 I was involved in a more respectful re-examination and I believe I was the solitary person among the those many hundreds who was not going the whole way with Mr Bevan. perhaps there was one other.  When Mr Bevan had enough of it he tossed the ball lightly to his fellow speaker, Mr Michael Foot. ‘Michael is an old public schoolboy and knows more about these things than I.’ Mr Foot smiled, but if I’m not mistaken the smile was cryptic.
I smiled too but not whole heartedly. In the midst of the fireworks Mr Bevan had dropped a single sentence that had tolled like a bell. ‘I did not join the Labour Party, I was bought up in it.’ And I had been brought up in the public school code."

It was the reference to Michael Foot that caught me.I remembered the early 1980s and him doing his best to hold the Labour party together - a party riven by deep personal and ideological differences. He was the only person respected enough by both wings to have any chance of doing such a thing but he could not win and in the end was badly defeated in the 83 election. He was of course traduced and maligned in the press at the time.  But all I could see was an honourable man trying to do his best for the team, in other words trying to uphold his public school code (that code by the way doesn’t stop you being marxist, anarchist, libertarian, high tory, liberal, christian fundamentalist, or anything else. It is just a code about how you conduct yourself with your beliefs). Politics is known as being a dirty trade with a relativistic relationship to the truth but there there are still many good people trying to do the right thing. Michael Foot always struck me as being one of those, as does Ed Miliband. They both lost, of course, so I don’t know what that says about the use of the old code of values. Perhaps that times ohave changed (or more likely) they were always more honoured in the breach.

Miliband didn’t go to a public school though. His opponent David Cameron did and either standards have slipped and the ethos is no longer taught or Cameron is more Flashman than Tom Brown.  There was a small but indicative example of him 'not playing the game' in the use of the Liam Byrne note . When labour lost the 2010 election Liam Byrne as the outgoing Chief Secretary to the Treasury left a jokey note for his successor ‘Dear Chief Secretary, I’m afraid there is no money. Kind regards – and good luck! Liam’. it was a little private joke within a Westminster tradition (in 1964 Reginald Maudling left a similar note ’Good luck, old cock ... Sorry to leave it in such a mess’). Making it public trampled on tthe convention and was bad form. Definitely not ‘playing the game’, yet David Cameron waived the piece of paper around on the campaign trail, piously proclaiming that it was no joke.

To me it not only felt like the breaking of a confidence (it was definitely meant to be a private communication) but it was also used dishonest because it was repeatedly misquoted.  ‘I’m afraid there is no money left.’ was the phrase used in speeches. That ‘left’ might seem like a small, unimportant, detail but it actually changes the meaning. It it implies that there was a pot that has all been spent (i.e. implying profligacy), instead of there being no money because of the state of the economy after a banking collapse.

You can say this is a small incident that means nothing in itself. Politics is a form of warfare where anything is acceptable if it helps you win. But to me it’s the small details that reveal character.

This is one of the times of ‘Beyond a Boundary’ where James will, for example, dwell lovingly on a single stroke. More of that though when I talk about the cricket.



First published
1963

Link with last book
Cricket

Book 3 - Robert H Thouless, Straight and Crooked Thinking

During the Scottish Independence referendum the Scots Nats became very irritated with the reporting of the BBC’s political correspondent Nick Robinson. They thought he was biased in favour of the No vote and that his reports were slanted. One event they complained about was a report of press conference when questions were raised about RBS moving its HQ and some business leaders warning of bad economic consequences in the event of independence.

The BBC Editorial Complaints Unit has recently adjudicated on this complaint and concluded that although the impression the report gave was inaccurate there were no grounds for believing the inaccuracy was intentional.

Here are two videos (admittedly put up by partisan sources so you have to be aware that the full news bulletin is not shown, only the contentious bit ). Nevertheless you can compare the report with the actual question and answer







We cannot not tell if the news bulletin in the first clip was more balanced in totality (as this is only a short excerpt) but you can this part was misleading when you compare it to the full answer in the second clip. Firstly Robinson decided, after the event, that the key question was one of trust,  and made it look as if he put a simple question which was ignored. The “He didn’t answer but he did attack the reporting” line at the end suggest Alex Salmond ducked it by attacking the messenger (always a desparate tactic). However  it was not like that. Nick Robinson didn’t ask one question but two, the first of which was answered at some length. That is the way things usually go: you ask your most important question first and it gets answered, subsequent questions can get lost, especially if they seem a little snide. The second question certainly had a bit of an edge and reminded me of when Sir Robin Day asked the the then Minister of Defence, Sir John Nott "why we should believe you, a here today, gone tomorrow politician", and John Nott stormed out of the studio. In comparison Alex Salmond was quite calm. The problem for Nick Robinson was that it was a press conference and not an interview so he couldn't follow up about the economic warnings.

Alex Salmond didn’t really address the second question (he brushed it aside saying  old news) so Nick Robinson’s report is not an outright lie but you do not have to lie to be misleading. All you have to do is impose a narrative and edit a report to fit.  It is one of the most common traits of modern media and is one of a main cause of distortions in our understanding. A commentator thus has the power to shape information and be dishonest without being literally dishonest.

However it is the BBC's  finding that although it was misleading it was done unintentional  that piqued my interest. How can it be unintentional when the whole act of writing and editing is a conscious activity? One has to recall what happened, select the wheat from the chaff and then compress it for a bulletin. At every stage you must be thinking what you are doing. But they didn’t mean he was doing his job in a trance, they meant that there was no evidence of a malicious motive or wilful propagandising. If that was the case (and it probably was) it means Nick Robinson was making no effort to step outside his habitual thought patterns and was actually working on semi-automatic pilot. He therefore didn’t notice what he was doing was a distortion. My guess is that he felt rebuffed by the way he was treated and that emotion guided his hand.

This is a small but interesting example of how we need to look carefully at what we are told and how we have to make judgements. It brought me back to a book that has been on my shelves since the mid 70s: “Straight and Crooked Thinking”, which I can thoroughly recommend. In the words of the author:

The intention of the book is primarily practical. Its main purpose is not to stimulate intellectual curiosity but to increase awareness of the process of crooked thinking and crooked communication and to provide safeguards against these. It would not have succeeded in its object if it merely led its readers to study books about logic. The test of its success is rather whether it makes it less easy for one of its readers to be persuaded by a salesman …and less easy for a politician to influence his way of voting by such irrational means as the use of emotional language or confident affirmation.  More importantly I hope it will make it less easy for the reader to hate the enemy … with that blind lack of understanding that comes from various forms of crooked thinking about him.

It was first published in 1930 but seems more relevant now than ever. Look at the current state of political/social debate, where an emotional storm can be generated in 140 characters, all politicians are well trained in the art of evading of questions whilst making sure they they repeat their pre-prepared ‘talking points’, newspapers bend all news stories to illustrate their world view,  broadcasters see interviews as a form of hostile interrogation, and an unthinking cynicism exists that distrusts anything a politician says because “they are all the same and only in it for themselves”. Public discourse is pretty sticky at the moment and expanding media and outlets for opinion causes more confusion. A guide to help you pick your way through a thicket of words is timely even if it was written over 80 years ago.Not only does it act as a refresher in the ways one should examine the way people promote their cause and carry their argument, it you guard against failings in your own thought processes. After all we all have our own prejudices and bad habits.

It is timely because the principles of logic, debate, and the sifting of evidence are fundamental and unchanging, as are the tricks that can be played. However my copy has a slightly dated feel. It was revised in 1974 and uses examples from contemporary issues for of that time for illustration (as well as examples from earlier editions). Even more interesting though is the style and the way a modern book with the same aim would be more punchy with a more broken up layout to emphasise points. here the prose is measured and clear but it is that of an academic born in 1894. I actually like his style and enjoy the calmness but there again but my age may play a part in that.

When I started to write this I didn’t know whether the book would still be in print but I am really pleased to find a new edition is available, updated by Robert Thouless’ grandson. It would be interesting to see how the prose changes with the generations and what new examples are used, especially as the background of the younger Thouless is ecology and animal behaviour rather than psychology.

P.S. I'm glad the new edition has a new cover. My one looks like it was knocked up, in a hury, when the art director was away.

Date of first publication
1930, revised edition 1974

Randomness Factor:

Reminded of the book whilst reading the news