The West Indies....

My dear fellow, you surprise me for one so learned. Are you joking?

Why do you refer to Webb as he?

Constance Webb was the white wife of CLR James.

Dem sold u once, dem dont want u .... ::rofl::

my dear fellow that is the webb that is involved there.  I had no idea.
lots of people write about  James,possibly with the same name.  I did not even know she wrote about her husabnd


she ended having an axe to grind did she?


I will look into this.  but James was a womanizer.  he loved to what were referred to as capitalist fleshpots.  he pounded the man but loved his fleshpots.  but the James I knew was not what I see described there


very embellished that is

very embellished ? and you are surprised ? . Most of the links that you posts are embellished

stop with your silliness Kwami.  Constance Webb was married to James for a couple of years if that.


and little she says about those years is backed up by anything much


here:[color=rgb(204, 102, 0)]Editorial Reviews
[/color][color=rgb(51, 51, 51)]From Publishers Weekly

[/color]


[color=rgb(51, 51, 51)]Now in her 80s, Webb reminisces on a life in which she nursed California migrant farm workers, posed for Dal¡ and organized for the Socialist Worker's Party. She financed these activities by working as an actress and model, mingling with people like Walter Winchell and James Baldwin.[/color]


[color=rgb(51, 51, 51)] But the author, who is white, is perhaps best known for her relationships with intellectual black activists and writers Richard Wright and C.L.R. James.[/color]

[color=rgb(51, 51, 51)] She befriended Wright in her 20s and, much later, became his biographer. [/color]

[color=rgb(51, 51, 51)]She began corresponding with James at 19, after hearing him speak about racial politics. While her interest was initially romantic, the two corresponded for nearly a decade before marrying briefly (and having a son together). [/color]

[color=rgb(51, 51, 51)]Clearly, Webb took risks, yet she describes how, as a young woman, she also conformed to norms. Indeed, she obeyed the teenage Socialist boys growing up in Fresno, Calif., who suggested she lose her virginity to her boyfriend because "neither you nor he will be able to concentrate on the most important aspect of your lives-the creation of a Leninist-Trotskyist Party-if either of you is sexually deprived." [/color]

[color=rgb(51, 51, 51)]Webb is a good storyteller, but better editing could have yielded a more powerful social history. She uses little primary source material and doesn't cite interviews with comrades or family members. [/color]

[color=rgb(51, 51, 51)]Webb's memoir ends in the late 1950s when, approaching 40, she questions and separates from the leftist political group she'd long identified with. She struggles with the separation, writing, "there is emotional safety in agreement with others and I was unused to thinking for myself except when dreaming." Readers are left to wonder what happens when Webb does start to think and act for herself. 

[/color]
[color=rgb(51, 51, 51)]Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.[/color]

Webb



www.clrjamesinstitute.org/cwebb.html

www.raceandhistory.com/historicalviews/clrjames.htm

Ladies Man Who Lost His Love

CLR James achieved fame as a philosopher, historian, novelist, literary and cultural critic, marxist, politician and lecturer. But to consider CLR James today, Valentine's Day, is to recall that the region?s most brilliant intellectual was also very much a ladies? man.

Fredric Warburg, James's publisher when he was in England in the Thirties, described him as one of the most delightful and easy-going personalities.

Noticeably good-looking, James was, Immensely amiable, he loved the fleshpots of capitalism, fine cooking, fine clothes, fine furniture and beautiful women, without a trace of the guilty remorse to be expected from a seasoned warrior of the class war.

Years later, when he had moved to the US, one of James's friends told him, "You are a man who exercises a considerable fascination over women and along with politics and what you represent there is also mixed up sexual desire and jealousy of which the women themselves are not aware."

And yet, despite possessing this powerful sexual magnetism, he didn?t know what to do with it. His first wife, Juanita, was a beautiful Trinidadian Chinese complained to him a year after they got married, "the only time you have any pleasure with me is when you are on top of me."

Some time around 1947, a decade and a half after Juanita lodged her complaint, his second beautiful wife Constance Webb demanded of James, "Look here, tell me what you want from me, what can I give to you."

He didn't know how to answer, wasn't even sure what she meant, he later recalled, "I did not want anything in particular from her, due to my ignorance and stupidity". But CLR James was neither ignorant nor stupid. His was clearly more a case of say so eh do so, for as early as 1944, when he was still courting Constance with a barriage of letters, James chided her: "You are obsessed with the idea that if nothing comes of it in the end I will feel cheated, disappointed. Which proves how little you know of love. For you it is something that you get. It isn't. It is something that you give and gladly, that you fight to give...Accept, it is much harder than to give. If after the past year you cannot accept from me, then that is ungenerous."

That was precisely how he didn't treat Constance, for he didn't know how to accept, how to let himself be loved. And yet, the strangest part of it was that, like many Trinidadian men, he never held any prejudice against women.

James's novel Minty Alley, written before he left Trinidad in 1930, sympathised profoundly with its female protagonists. And when, much later, he became a world-renown figure, his most important intellectual collaborators were women: Grace Lee Boggs and Raya Dunayevskaya.

That was in the late Forties, he was in Reno Nevada, a period when his love for Constance, who was in New York, burnt most brightly. Of course, ever self-conscious, he discovered all sorts of failings, including non-appreciation of her beauty:

"Sweetheart, how I have wronged you and hurt myself. Your youth and beauty, your charm and style, darling I revel in them. You are a work of art, to make me warm in my blood and delight in you aesthetically. Instead I fought you, fought your loveliness, all you had to give me as a woman. As if anything could be wrong in that. Now I have not only love and a burning glow inside of me for you but pride.?

By the time he had finished working on Notes on Dialectics with Boggs and Dunayevskaya, he felt at the peak of his intellectual powers and his passions.

"This is the man who loves you," he promised Constance. "I took up dialectic five years ago. I knew a lot of things before I was able to master it. I knew a lot of things about loving you. I am only just beginning to apply them. I can master that with the greatest rapidity, just give me a hand. I feel all sorts of new powers, freedoms, etc., surging in me. You release so many of my constrictions. What are you going to do? I am bursting all over with love for you."

In that decade of the Forties James wrote thousands of pages of love letters to Constance, a considerable physical achievement because his collapse in 1942 from a perforated stomach had left him with shaky hands.

But by 1952, things were coming apart, and James was desperately clutching at a retreating Constance.

"I see Constance often. We talk. For hours and hours at a time," he admitted to Freddie Paine. "You thought it would be easy to get her back. Freddie, that will be the most difficult thing in the world. But that is what I want."

The following year he was deported from the US and CLR James and Constance Webb were divorced.

www.bookdepository.com/Nobbie-Stories-fo...-James/9780803226081

Thanks a lot Bokey. you have led me to a place I like and one I did not know existed 


I had paid no attention at all to Constance Webb..not even after James spoke about Nobbie, their son in Beyond a Boundary..whom he had brought to Trinidad on a visit to his old family place in Tunapuna. 


now I know of an area of James life that means plenty.  it also means that what Constance said of the sexuality in his relationship with Reya Dunayeskaya for eg. may have some foundation though I doubt it.


that stuff was written long after the events and may have been sexed up to encourage sales.  James was his way with women but I dont know that it included male prejudice  egregious ways.


but I got more to dig out....

my focus on James had nothing to do with his personal life beyond what he said of it.


I have been focused on James politics and his writings.  I have not even gotten into biographies of him and I have several in my small library


Black Jacobins, Beyond a Boundary, Party Politics...., Mariners Renegades and Castaways are books of James I am often into.  and that is a huge quantity right there.


You Dont Play with Revolution is a book about James and westindian intellectuals in canada who had brought him there to work with them on the preparation of what was a westindian revolution.


the Vincentian Alfie Roberts was central to that project as well as Tim Hector.


the Johnson Forest Tendency also was much more  that is reported by wikipedia.  anyway Facing Reality, the result of years of their work is the foundation of my ideological outlook.  there is no more meed for a vanguard political party which I see as the counter-revolution in the revolution.


the Johnson- Forest tendency was absolutely right in that..they nailed i... and subsequent social experience right up to the Occupy movement in the USA proves the Tendency right out.  the Dumbing down of society is also proof that their theory of the obsolescence of the vanguard party and the educational function of basic social experience in modern society is right