James began politically passive, absorbed in English literary culture

Evidence

James, however, though he was aware of these events, kept his distance. “In politics I took little interest.” He had finished school in 1918 and was content to tend his two passions, his two disciplines: cricket and literature. … I had a circle of friends (most of them white) with whom I exchanged ideas, books, records and manuscripts. We published local magazines and gave lectures or wrote articles on Wordsworth, the English Drama, and Poetry as a Criticism of Life. We lived according to the tenets of Matthew Arnold, spreading sweetness and light and the best that has been thought and said in the world… . Never losing sight of my plan to go abroad and write, I studied and practiced assiduously the art of fiction. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1194