Minty Alley

"He had, at sixteen, after much cogitation, but without preliminary, put his arm around a girl's waist and been soundly slapped. Since then he had never repeated the experiment, and often experienced difficulty in looking young women fully in the face."

Minty Alley, the only published novel of C.L.R. James, the Trinidadian Marxist, illustrates James's writing talent. Telling the story of Haynes, a sheltered middle-class young man, class, race, gender relations, and the rowdy characters in a boarding house on Minty Alley breathe life into a past Trinidad. James's great sense of humor shines throughout the text, as Haynes finally becomes a man as a "master of the house" and his relationship with the "fair sex" improves. Although very proper and English in prose as well as the dialogue for Haynes, the use of Trinidadian vernacular, one instance of patois, and the novel's colorful, determined, and newsworthy lower-class characters reveal early on how James always identified with the masses and "national" Trinidadian culture of the yard. 

The suffering of women, in particular, at the hands of the playboy, Benoit, reveal another side to James one does not find in The Black Jacobins or his other work, for example. One could rant ceaselessly without end on the complex gender dynamics of this short work, a project I may return to in the future. Moreover, Philomen, the abused Indian servant of the landlady, Mrs. Rouse, provides another example of racial and class stratification in the divided colony, a dynamic Naipaul and Selvon explore from different perspectives. Yet, here in a novel written in the 1920s, one senses where Naipaul's Trinidad fiction is coming from in describing the "Indian countryside" and the "Creole" or "Black" city. 

For those eager to read James's admirable attempt at the novel form highly recommended. Early Anglophone West Indian literature provides includes similar work to Minty Alley, which paved the way for explosion of literary production in the subsequent generation. Besides, reading Minty Alley demonstrates an early ancestor of Naipaul's Miguel Street and its comic sensibilities. One wishes James had completed that second novel, alas, but Minty Alley actually shows, from a literary angle, how James, himself not too different from Haynes in class background, came to identify with the popular classes and escape the sheltered world of petit bourgeois life.