C. L. R. James in Nevada

Fig. 1.

Pyramid Lake Ranch, Reno, Nevada, where C. L. R. James stayed from August to November 1948 while seeking divorce. Undated postcard.

When Reno, Nevada, was the divorce capital of the United States, it drew the famous and infamous.¹ But certainly C. L. R. James must count as one of its most singular visitors. Playwright, historian, literary critic, journalist, revolutionary Marxist and pan-Africanist, Cyril Lionel Robert James (1901–89) was one of the most remarkable intellectuals of the twentieth century. Born and educated in Trinidad, he lived throughout the 'Black Atlantic', having spent significant periods of time in Britain, the United States, and Ghana, in addition to returning to Trinidad in 1958 to participate in the independence movement.

James came to Reno in August 1948 to divorce his first wife Juanita, a Trinidadian from whom he had been estranged since 1932 when he emigrated to England. He needed the divorce so that he could marry Constance Webb, a white woman slightly more than half his age. She was an aspiring actress, model, writer, committed Trotskyist, and a close friend of the African-American writer Richard Wright. James had actually

Fig. 2.

C. L. R. James. Photograph from Constance Webb, Not Without Love: Memoirs, Hanover, New Hampshire, 2003.

obtained a Mexican mail-order divorce from his first wife and had married Webb in 1946. But the divorce was not recognized as valid, and he sought it once again, leaving a pregnant Webb back in New York as he travelled out West.

James's stay in Nevada proved to be an important moment in his life. Not only was it a period of intensive intellectual activity, but it was also a time of reflection and soul searching: he sought to bring together the intellectual, political, and emotional threads of his life into a new synthesis. Others interested in James – for instance, Bill Schwarz – have recognized the importance of his stay in Nevada to his overall development, but have not explored in any detail the Nevada context.² Perhaps since I have lived in Nevada for fifteen years and have written on the intellectual history of Marxist thought, I am in a good position to make James's stay there more concrete.³ As I have sought to flesh out the story of James in Nevada, I have viewed it as being germane to black intellectual history, the history of American radicalism, and the development of postcolonial thought. It also signifies an important dimension of Nevada itself, where 'passing through' sometimes seems as important as 'settling down'.

When C. L. R. James first travelled to the United States in 1938 he was already a prominent intellectual in the British Trotskyist movement. Invited to the US by the Socialist Workers' Party (SWP), he embarked on a coast-to-coast lecture tour, speaking alternately on 'The Twilight of the British Empire' and 'Socialism and the Negro'. Just after arriving he gave a lecture to the New York intellectuals who wrote for the Partisan Review. In Chicago he debated Bertrand Russell on pacifism, arguing that socialist revolution was the only genuine alternative to world war. In spring 1939 he met with Leon Trotsky in Mexico to discuss what was then known as the 'Negro question'. When James left for the United States, he imagined that he would return to Britain for the beginning of the cricket season. Instead he stayed in the US despite an expired passport. For more than a decade James lived a shadowy existence, writing under assumed names (notably J. R. Johnson) and living in continual fear of discovery and deportation. He was finally forced to return to England in 1953.

During this lengthy American stay, James (in intensive collaboration with, most notably, Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee) helped found the 'Johnson-Forest tendency', a minuscule but original Marxist group that broke with orthodox Trotskyism. Briefly, the Johnson-Forest group stood for three principal ideas. First, it argued that the Soviet Union, rather than being a degenerate workers' state – the mainstream...