Special Delivery: The Letters of C.L.R. James to Constance Webb, 1939-1948

C. L. R. James; Constance Webb; Anna Grimshaw

ISBN 10: 1557866279 / ISBN 13: 9781557866271

Published by Blackwell Pub, 1995

About this Item

DJ in archival cover. Stated first published 1996.

Seller Inventory # 004877

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Special Delivery: The Letters of C.L.R. James to Constance Webb, 1939-1948
• Publisher: Blackwell Pub
• Publication Date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1557866279
• ISBN 13: 9781557866271
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine

About this title

Synopsis

C. L. R. James's correspondence with Constance Webb, the young American woman who eventually became his wife, began in 1939 and lasted a decade. Passionate, poetic, and wonderfully readable, the letters chart an extraordinary friendship and gripping period in the life of C. L. R. James as a revolutionary activist in America.
Beginning with James's first letters to Webb (written whilst visiting Trotsky in Coyoacan, Mexico) and ending with his letters from 'exile' in Nevada, the correspondence is simultaneously an intimate record of a romantic relationship and a profound meditation on politics, art, and American civilization. Whether debating with Richard Wright in New York, lecturing in Los Angeles, or singing arias aboard ship in the Gulf of Mexico, James is always a superb traveling companion: quick to draw historical and political lessons from everyday life, and always able to illuminate experience through art.
Something powerful was unlocked by James's experience of America. And at the centre of this experience was his attempt to bridge the gap of race, age, and gender between himself and Constance Webb. Already celebrated while unpublished, these letters form one of the major resources on James's life and thought during his American period. But they also tell a story as intellectually stimulating as it is affecting.

Review

C.L.R. James, is an extraordinary 20th century figure. An author, historian, reporter on the sport of cricket, Africanist, Marxist, black intellectual, and friend of many of the leading left radicals of the day. His history of the Haitian slave revolution, The Black Jacobins, is a masterpiece of humanity and empathy. James spent 15 years living in the United States from 1938, and there he fell in love with an 18-year-old Southern white girl, Constance Webb. It was an amazing ill-match; she really was not too interested. So he wrote her passionate love letters, collected here in Special Delivery. When the two did eventually marry, divorce quickly followed, as might have been predicted; still, these erudite letters, from one of the most intelligent and cultured men of his generation, remain an amazing testament to love, and the folly of it.