Mike Marqusee obituary

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/15/mike-marqusee

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The writer and political activist Mike Marqusee, who has died of cancer aged 61, enjoyed an intellect as dazzling as it was unique. A true polymath, he made the most of a boundless curiosity and a powerful memory to educate himself, and others, about a kaleidoscope of topics: Renaissance art, cricket and empire, British labour politics, Indian history and culture, Zionism, the music of Andalucía and Tamil Nadu, the poetry and art of William Blake, the American civil rights movement, the films of John Ford, the songs of Bob Dylan. The list could go on and on.

He sometimes speculated that such eclecticism resulted in his work being undervalued by specialists. If that was true, those in error failed to see how his range of interests often enabled one sphere of knowledge to provide an exhilaratingly original insight into another. Further, beneath the panoply lay a set of core values: a commitment to socialism, a belief in the transformative nature of art, a rigorous internationalism and a prioritising of intellectual and personal honesty heedless of cost. A joyful, hedonistic appreciation that life’s pleasures were there for the sampling was also a vital part of Mike.

He was born in New York, the son of John and Janet Marqusee, who were involved in property development, publishing and radical politics. Seeking to escape the pressures exerted on a precocious anti-war leader at his high school in Scarsdale, an conservative and affluent suburb of New York, Mike left the US for Britain in 1971. He read English literature at Sussex University before moving to north London, where he was to settle for the rest of his life.

Mike started out as a youth leader, based at Highbury Roundhouse, driving minibuses full of inner-city children on field trips around Britain. He later said that he learned more about politics from his work on the youth schemes there than in any of his subsequent activism.

Though a lifelong Marxist, Mike eschewed membership of the competing revolutionary tendencies that attracted many young radicals of the period. Indeed, in later years, he endured a bitter falling out with Socialist Workers party sectarians in the Stop the War Coalition, of which he was a founding member. He joined the Labour party around 1980, supporting the leadership of Haringey council in its fight against cuts and resisting Neil Kinnock’s attacks on the left that would pave the way for the emergence of New Labour, a development that saw Mike eventually leave the party. He chronicled Labour’s rightwing drift in a book co-authored with Richard Heffernan, Defeat from the Jaws of Victory (1992). He also became involved in the radical publication Labour Briefing, going on to become its editor. It was through his engagement with the Labour party that he met his partner, the housing rights barrister Liz Davies, who survives him. Together they formed an alliance that was as formidable in the political arena as it was supportive at home.

Mike had already written one book, his only published novel, Slow Turn (1988), which featured the game of cricket, a sport he had come to love while watching county matches in Sussex as a student. He turned his focus to the overlap between the game and nationalism, drawing openly on the legacy of CLR James to produce a rivetingly original analysis. Anyone But England (1994) went on to be shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award and laid the foundation for Mike’s regular cricket commentary in publications such as Wisden and The Hindu.

Two years later, he published another book on the game, War Minus the Shooting, that dealt with events surrounding the 1996 World Cricket Cup in South Asia. He co-founded Hit Racism for Six and could often be found practising his own swing in the nets at Finsbury Park, providing ample evidence that, in his case, the pen was mightier than the bat.

Mike now transferred his attention to another sport. Redemption Song (1999) was a paean to Muhammad Ali, setting the world heavyweight’s sporting achievements in the context of the political battles in the US. Moving seamlessly from descriptions of Ali’s bouts in the ring to the music of Sam Cooke, from the machinations of the Nation of Islam to the burgeoning of the anti-war movement, it was a fine example of Mike’s ability to weave together strands from different disciplines into a rich new cloth.

The distinction, so often snobbish, between high and popular culture held little appeal for Mike. He had a deep familiarity with Quattrocento art and I was lucky enough to be among a small group of friends that he introduced to the sublimity of Giovanni Bellini’s paintings on a trip to Venice. His mother was both a painter and a successful art dealer and Mike’s ability to scrutinise the formal qualities of a painting was probably acquired from her. But he was equally at home analysing the wider meanings of the plots of John Ford westerns or the character development in TV series such as Rome or The Wire. A large TV, a comfortable sofa and a strong joint was always a combination that made Mike happy.

His taste in music was equally catholic. Mike was a big fan of the driving rock of Springsteen and Steve Earle while, at the same time, his engagement with Indian culture resulted in several trips with Liz to the Carnatic music festival in Chennai. A subsequent enthusiasm for Cante jondo music saw expeditions to the flamenco bars of southern Spain and an immersion in the poetry of Lorca.

Mike wrote poems himself and published two collections, and it was the ear of a poet that he employed in his next book, Wicked Messenger (2003), an analysis of the lyrics of Bob Dylan. At the end of his life he was working on a book that examined the relationship between Thomas Paine and yet another poet, William Blake.

Mike’s penultimate book was perhaps his most daring and controversial. A firm atheist, he delighted in describing himself as a “deracinated Jew”. In If I Am Not For Myself (2008), he melded together, in characteristic fashion, his own family history, political theory and close reading of canonical religious texts, separating out Jewishness from its co-option by the state of Israel.

In 2007 Mike was diagnosed with the bone marrow cancer multiple myeloma. Though it took him a couple of years, he predictably reverted to type, responding to his illness by writing about it. His last book, The Price of Experience, a collection of pieces about his disease (several of them for this paper), ranges over withering contempt for the mercenary activity of the big drug companies, an appreciation of the fastidious care provided to him by the NHS and its selfless staff and quiet sensitivity concerning how we talk to each other about illness.

In his introduction to the book, which, like a number of his titles, I had the privilege of publishing, he wrote: “Writing itself was a precious continuity with ‘life before cancer’. While so many of my other capacities had been taken away from me, I could still write.” Now he no longer can. However, through his books and journalism, we will still be able to remember his voice, with its glorious combination of profusion and singularity.

• Michael John Marqusee, writer, born 27 January 1953; died 13 January 2015