THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Carter's Bank Shot Stephen L. Carter is a well-known Yale law professor, African-American moderate, and author of such books as The Culture of Disbelief. He's also written a...
...He's also written a new mystery/thriller called The Emperor of Ocean Park (Knopf, 657, $26.95...
...What's got the book world worked up is that Carter got so much money for this first effort...
...True, as an intellectual, he dutifully wrote about Sergei Eisenstein and Charlie Chaplin as representatives of "the new art forms of the century...
...He loved American movies, to which his Moby-Dick verdict apparently did not apply...
...It does seem a little extravagant, but if it sells, he'll get as much for the next one...
...The only real mystery in this mystery tale, Gates concluded, is why Knopf paid Carter a $4.2 million advance...
...Having lived in America since 1938, long overstaying his visa, James was deported...
...By then, of course, he had long given up his Trotskyite creed, although not his Marxism...
...David Gates in Newsweek howled that the book "is hung about with kick-me signs that betray the amateur...
...After literature, James's real passion was cricket, a game that for him was as much allegory as sport...
...An anti-colonialist Trotskyite cricketer who preferred Britain to his native Trinidad, James (who died in 1989 at the age of 88) was a multi-faceted West Indian personality: historian, philosopher, black liberationist, novelist, literary critic, political activist, Anglophile, Bardolater, and much-married womanizer...
...But that's all about par for mystery/thrillers—try running a little highbrow criticism over a Tom Clancy or a Robert Ludlum novel, for example...
...As a cricket correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, James once compared cricket to the ancient Greeks' Olympics...
...This is where we get down to the problem...
...James: A Life by Farrukh Dhondy (Panthe-lj on, 304 pp., $24...
...But in his heart he wasn't for Eisenstein at all...
...He opposed black nationalism, black separatism, and, above all, Stalinism—predicting in 1983 that the Polish revolt begun in Gdansk "would end in Leningrad and Moscow...
...Still, I found the story of Cyril Lionel Robert James fascinating...
...Why James became a Trotskyite revolutionary remains something of a mystery, even to his biographer...
...According to Dhondy, James "fell for the drama of Gone with the Wind...
...James was everything a would-be leader of workers and sharecroppers should not have been...
...It could stand being cut in half, the plot could use serious doctoring, and its prose could take some touch-up work...
...James replied—rather cynically— "I would recommend you go see it in the morning and picket in the afternoon...
...But James's Trot-skyite past (he broke away in the early 1950s) got him into trouble during the McCarthy era, when World Revolution, a book he wrote in his Trotskyite interlude, was defined as subversive...
...The Emperor of Ocean Park isn't what anyone would call a great book...
...Arnold Beichman...
...The New York Times's Michiko Kakutani declared Carter's "thrilleresque narrative convolutions" are "so cliched and bogus that they verge perilously close to parody...
...Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, members of his audience objected, saying the film was racist and glorified the Ku Klux Klan...
...He was for Clark Gable...
...As the Trinidadian poet Derek Walcott put it, James loved cricket "not because it is a sport but because he has found in it all the decencies required for a culture...
...When James advised a London assembly of black activists in the 1980s to see an art-house revival of D.W...
...During a six-month stay on Ellis Island in 1953, he wrote a long essay on Herman Melville called "Mariners, Renegades and Castaways...
...In Moby-Dick James found, writes Dhondy, "the great allegory for America itself, for the reign of capitalism in its final stage of totalitarian obsession...
...Carter is used to receiving flattering praise, and it's got to be a shock for him to read the first reviews now coming in...
...Books in Brief C.L.R...
...Unless you were a Trotskyite or are - interested in the sport of cricket, this confusing and amateurishly produced biography of a Trinida-dian intellectual may not be to your taste...
Vol. 7 • June 2002 • No. 39
