CHAPTER 8

Othello

(1930–1931)

In the three months between his return to London and the beginning of rehearsals for Othello in April 1930, Robeson made two strenuous concert tours—one in the British Isles, the other in Central Europe—acted in a feature-length film in Switzerland, and performed The Emperor Jones in Berlin. All three ventures brought continuing acclaim, but only the film extended his range.

The majority of the critics continued to give him splendid reviews, but the sameness in his concert program of spirituals began to create some dissatisfaction. Robeson experimented with several devices for breaking up the format. In Paris he tried singing the spirituals to a full orchestral accompaniment (Pierre Monteux conducting), but it was generally thought—and Robeson agreed—that the effect was artificial, the simplicity of the Sorrow Songs injured, and their impact diluted in so elaborate a context. He also tried sharing the platform with another soloist: at different times the violinist Wolfi and the pianists Vitya Vronsky, Ania Dorfman, and Solomon performed with him. All were received well, but for some critics the problem of “monotony” in Robeson’s own program remained bothersome; they were alternately impatient with the “intrinsic” repetitions of the spirituals themselves or disappointed in Robeson’s own refusal to branch out beyond them.1

The Manchester Guardian’s critic, representing the one set of complaints, praised Robeson for his “ease and grace” but felt “the music itself is not inexhaustible in its appeal.… There is a family likeness about these melodies which reminds us that a small musical vocabulary and a strophic or folk-song style of composition are bound before long to tire the ear.…” The Glasgow Herald critic, representing the other set of complaints, suggested that Robeson “owed it to himself to embrace the wider field of serious bass music.” The demand that he “try something else” grew loud enough for his defenders to answer publicly. The Daily Express suggested, “We might as well rail at … John Galsworthy because he writes plays but refuses to write revues or musical comedies.… Mr. Robeson would not sing Negro songs so well if he had not concentrated all his heart and brain on them. Specialization … is the secret of achievement in art, as in other things.”2

At just the time some critics were growing tired of the spirituals, Robeson was finding new depth in them. His highly successful second tour of Central Europe, where he devoted his concert program entirely to the spirituals, helped further to convince him of their universal qualities: “Slav peasant music has a great deal in common with ours; and in the countries which have for centuries suffered under an alien yoke, I found a more instinctive response, in spite of the bar of language, than in countries like England, who have forgotten what it is like to be conquered.” Essie, who went with him to Central Europe, recorded in her diary his enthusiastic reception in Prague, Brno, Vienna, Dresden—everywhere but Bucharest; she thought the Rumanians “a surly lot” (by then Essie was understandably out of sorts, troubled again by a recurrence of phlebitis in her leg and angry after a long, bitter-cold train ride, when they could get a sleeper only for Paul, and she and Larry had had to sit up all night).³

Robeson’s “fascinating discoveries” about the spirituals during his two 1930 tours deepened his commitment to them still more. A Polish musician “proved” to him that “the melodies of Central Africa have also influenced European music” and “traced its descent through the Moors and the Spaniards until it reached Poland.” Robeson’s interest in Africa—soon to burgeon—had just begun to emerge, and he dismissed the recently advanced theory that the Afro-American folk song derived from the Scottish folk song—or, indeed, that it derived from anywhere other than Central Africa. He was delighted, in Paris, when talking with Prince Touvalou of Dahomey, to learn that in that land “whole families devote their lives entirely to song.” Becoming convinced that “we are on the eve of great discoveries with regard to Negro culture,” Robeson was heartened by reports from Germany that “magnificent sculptures” found in the heart of Africa heralded the recovery of “a great civilization.” He told one reporter that he hoped to go to Africa “whenever I can get a ‘break,’” to study the cultural background for himself; and he told another (who described him as having “the enthusiasm of the true student”), “It is one of my ambitions to make a talkie which will interpret fully the spirit of the Negro race.”⁴

At the completion of his two concert tours in March 1930, the Robesons, apparently as a diversion, agreed to spend a week in Switzerland acting in an experimental silent film called Borderline. However offhand the Robesons’ involvement, the film went on to become something of a classic in experimental cinema, continuing to the present day to have admirers. The so-called Pool Group produced the film: Bryher (Winifred Ellerman), her bisexual husband Kenneth Macpherson, and her lover (and Macpherson’s), the poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle). The Pool Group had previously made three short films. Borderline was to be the only feature it would complete before disbanding.5

In the film, Robeson plays the part of Pete, a black man living quietly in a shabby Swiss “borderline” town until the arrival of his sweetheart, Adah (played by Essie), ignites a tangled crosscurrent with a white couple (played by Gavin Arthur and H. D., billed under the pseudonym Helga Doom), disrupting the town and leading, ultimately, to Pete’s unhappy departure—a “plot summary” barely detectable when viewing the film and not much elucidated by the elaborate brochure H. D. prepared to accompany it. Macpherson—the film’s scenarist, cameraman, and director—concentrated not on narrative coherence but on cosmic psychological metaphors (greatly influenced by the speculations of Hanns Sachs, Bryher’s analyst) and on “advanced” experimental cinematic techniques employing complex montage (greatly influenced by the theories of Sergei Eisenstein).⁶

Macpherson meticulously planned camera angles and movement in advance of the Robesons’ arrival, hoping to make maximum use of their limited stay by completing enough “one-take” footage to permit later splicing. He spent far less time on the scenario. One did exist (cinematic historians have speculated to the contrary), but only in rough form; Macpherson talked over an early draft with Essie and promised to incorporate her suggestions, yet, when she asked to see the finished version prior to their arrival in Switzerland, Macpherson sent word that he “did not think it advisable to send the scenario as it is not like stage acting—not sustained.” He promised to “discuss all the shots with you according as they are taken on arrival.” When Essie expressed hesitation about her ability to act, he reassured her: “It is not like the stage, where you simply have to go through with your part without a stop, but a series of, so to speak, snapshots, with waits in between—so that, as I say, the camera is in the end the real actor. Anyhow, I’m quite sure you have a very considerable talent.”⁷

The Robesons arrived in Territet on March 20, 1930, and left on March 30—filming completed and a fair amount of sightseeing gotten in on the side. Judging from the casual entries in Essie’s diary, the whole experience was in the nature of a lark for them, time out from the hectic pace of touring. They had “great fun,” in part because they liked everyone connected with the filming; when they were shooting the interiors, Essie wrote in her diary, “Kenneth and H. D. used to make us so shriek with laughter with their naive ideas of Negroes that Paul and I often completely ruined our make-up with tears of laughter, had to make up all over again. We never once felt we were colored with them.”8

They danced the tango between takes, and enjoyed the beauty of the countryside, though not the hike up the mountains outside Montreux to get exterior shots—“Paul and I were frightened out of our wits,” Essie wrote, although she was mollified by a picnic lunch. In the village of Lutry, they were followed by crowds everywhere they went, Robeson attracting children “as honey does bees.” The townspeople filled the streets and hung out of their windows to catch sight of “Monsieur le Nègre.” The café did unprecedented business. The fire brigade, alarmed at the new electric installation in the studio (the town hall) for lighting, held a special practice session. The Tribune de Lausanne arrived for an interview. Except for an electrician, no one was paid (the total cost of making the film was two thousand dollars), yet, in Bryher’s words, “extras had to be dispersed rather than sought, everybody wanted to be in it and every twenty minutes all the lights went out because the tram went by.”⁹

When they saw the first three days’ work on the screen, Essie reported to the Van Vechtens that they were “surprised to see how well we both filmed.” Paul “of course” looked “marvelous”—his “face is so big and mobile and expressive.” But Macpherson assured Essie that she, too, was “very good”—and, indeed, two months later, after they had had a look at the first reel of the film, Bryher wrote Essie, “You really are stealing the picture. One knew that Mr. Robeson would be good—every time I see the film it is your acting and your sense of movement that amazes me. Even more than his—if this is not treason.”¹⁰

The Robesons never expected wide distribution for the film. Essie categorized it as “one of those very advanced expressionistic things in the Russian-German manner, so it will probably be shown by Film Societies, etc.” She described it in a letter home to A’Lelia Walker as “futuristic”—“We made it up in the Swiss Alps” and “enjoyed every moment of it, though it was hard work.” “It’s a dreadful highbrow,” she confided to the Van Vechtens, “but beautifully done, I think.” G. W. Pabst, one of the heroes of the Pool Group—Bryher described his Die Freudlose Gasse (Joyless Street), starring Greta Garbo, as “the one film that we felt expressed our generation”—was given a private showing of the film and declared himself “very enthusiastic”; he offered the use of his own people “to stick the negative and make the exhibition positives”—and also expressed a desire to make a “talkie” with Paul. If the film “is to be ‘popular’ in the obvious sense, I don’t know,” H. D. wrote Essie. “It is without question a work of art and that satisfies us.”¹¹

It had to. The film was not a popular success, and the critics, on the whole, did not think it art. As Essie had predicted, it was booked by cine-clubs and film societies in Europe, and in October 1930 had a showing at the Academy Cinema in London. The British critics were particularly harsh. The reviewer on the Evening Standard dismissed the film as “self-conscious estheticism,” and the critic in Bioscope called it “a wholly unintelligible scramble of celluloidan eccentricity,” although adding that it “stimulates one’s natural desire to see and hear Paul Robeson in a first-rate British ‘talkie’ made for the public.” That was still a few years off.12

The nine days of shooting completed, the Robesons went straight from Territet to Berlin, where Paul had agreed to do two performances of The Emperor Jones under Jimmy Light’s direction. Light was abroad for a year on a Guggenheim Fellowship, and at his persuading, Essie had “wangled and rearranged and quarreled” in order to piece together the needed three days in Paul’s schedule. The terms helped: the Deutsches Kuenstler Theater offered Light and Robeson together 50 percent of the gross receipts. Robeson trusted Light as a director and also liked him as a person, and the experience turned out to be a good one. Hooper Trask, the former actor and correspondent for The New York Times and Variety, was originally scheduled to play Smithers opposite Robeson, but in the end Light himself assumed the role. (Reviewing the production in the Times, Trask confined himself to praising Light’s work as a director; Essie described his acting as “not bad.”) Audience and critics alike received Robeson warmly, the play much less so. The Berlin critics had earlier seen the great German actor Oscar Homolka in the role, but preferred Robeson; they had unanimous praise for his “childlike originality and naturalness”—he succeeded, as one put it, in “showing the soul of his people to the audience,” which no white actor, Homolka included, possibly could. One reviewer congratulated Robeson for having done his best to help a “weak poet” like O’Neill, whose “flat, sociological” play (in the words of another) had little to reveal to “culturally conscious Europeans.” Though O’Neill had his defenders, Robeson, not O’Neill, emerged as the star attraction.¹³

The Robesons were “crazy” about Berlin. “It is a marvelous city,” Essie wrote home, and recounted the special pleasure they took in hearing, at the Berlin zoo roof garden, Sam Wooding’s Negro Band—“I can’t tell you how the good old home rhythm sounded to us.” There’s no evidence that either Paul or Essie saw anything disagreeable or threatening in the political climate during their stay in Berlin. Yet the year 1930 marked a turning point in German history, with massive Nazi rallies throughout the country, with Bruening, a Catholic conservative, succeeding to the chancellorship in March, and with the Nazis emerging in the September election as the nation’s second-largest party. All of this went unremarked by Robeson—in much the way he had made no public comment on such recent events as the general strike in Britain in 1926, the phenomenon of women under thirty voting for the first time in that country’s 1929 general election, and, in the United States, the Wall Street crash in October 1929. Even after Bruening had been elected in Germany, Robeson told reporters—he was, of course, thinking of the artistic experimentation of Weimar—that his “one great desire” was to return to Germany to study and perform: “Germany is the gateway now of all of Europe,” and “on the Continent the colour bar does not exist.” As further regards fascism, a reporter from the Jamaican paper The Daily Gleaner quoted Robeson as late as 1932 as saying, “If the real great man of the Negro race will be born, he will spring from North America. The Negro Gandhi or Mussolini cannot be begotten but in the land of ancient oppression and revolutionary emancipation.”14

But it would be a mistake to imply that Robeson was unconscious of or indifferent to political developments. He had long since developed a deep interest in Jewish culture. As early as 1927, to give but one example, he had performed a concert in New York’s Town Hall to aid the Women’s Committee of the American ORT (the organization devoted to teaching trades to young Jewish people in Eastern Europe seeking to emigrate to Palestine); and he had frequently expressed the view that enslaved blacks had derived inspiration from the Old Testament account of the struggle of the ancient Hebrews. As regards labor unrest in Britain, moreover, Robeson at least once spontaneously offered a gesture of support for the plight of Welsh miners doubly beset by wage cuts and meager unemployment relief, which a Labour government seemed unwilling to ameliorate. To be sure, his political consciousness in 1930 was not yet developed to nearly the extent it would later be, but it was already greater than his near-total silence on public events would suggest. He was inactive (as was his style while awaiting some clear purpose), not unaware, continuing to hold in 1930 to his long-standing view that he could best work against injustice by advancing his own reputation as an artist. But that stance was shifting. Within a few years, Robeson would no longer be content with the view that the enhancement of his artistic stature would somehow produce a generalized improvement for others; he would move instead toward direct participation in organized political efforts to assail oppressive conditions.¹⁵

The Robesons returned to London in early April, and Paul went directly into rehearsals for Othello. He had hesitated about signing on for the production—“Am still afraid of Othello but we can talk it over,” he had written Maurice Browne when first approached. Browne later commented, “For eighteen months I wrestled with him,” and “my persistence broke down his objections.” He overcame Paul’s qualms with promises of a first-rate director and a first-rate Iago. He got neither. Browne cast himself as Iago and gave the directing plum to his wife, Nellie Van Volkenburg. Both choices were self-indulgent. Browne had aspirations to act (“I had always itched to play Iago,” he later confessed) without being an actor, and Nellie had had scant directing experience since her days with Chicago’s Little Theatre, and none in Shakespeare. Robeson did get a first-rate Desdemona in the twenty-two-year-old newcomer Peggy Ashcroft. He had seen her in Matheson Lang’s production Jew Süss, her first major success, and because his contract with Maurice Browne gave him the right to decide who would play Desdemona, asked Ashcroft to audition. She was terrified: “I can’t sing in tune,” she remembered years later, “and I had to perform the Willow Song in front of Paul Robeson.” Nonetheless, he liked what he heard and she was offered the role. Ashcroft was thrilled at the opportunity; “for us young people in England at the time,” she later recalled, Robeson “was a great figure, and we all had his records, and one realized that it was a tremendous honor to be doing this.” The supporting cast was also well chosen: Sybil Thorndike as Emilia, the little-known Ralph Richardson as Roderigo, and Max Montesole, an experienced graduate of Frank Benson’s famed Shakespeare company, as Cassio. They would prove “supportive” in several needed senses.16

At the start, Essie enthusiastically wrote Nellie Van Volkenburg, “I have a feeling that we are going to have a magnificent time with Othello,” It proved to be anything but. Robeson realized from the first that his director and his Iago were hopeless, likely to prove actual impediments to his own performance. After the first week of rehearsal, Essie, who had a sharp eye and a short fuse for incompetence, wrote indignantly in her diary, “Nellie doesn’t know what it is all about. Talks of ‘tapestry,’ of the scene, the ‘flow,’ and ‘austere beauty,’ a lot of parlor junk, which means nothing and helps not at all.… She can’t even get actors from one side of the stage to the other. Poor Paul is lost.”¹⁷

Van Volkenburg and Browne were fascinated with the “psychological dimensions” of the play and urged on Paul the theory (both were gay) that Iago’s motivation was best explained as the result of his having fallen in love with Othello. When Paul asked for specific direction, he got instead patronization, the more galling for coming from an officious amateur. Nellie had a penchant for standing in the back of the stalls and yelling instructions through a megaphone; one day, while rehearsing the Cyprus scene, Paul paused and asked her a question. “Mr. Robeson,” she shouted through the megaphone, “there are other people on the stage besides yourself!” Peggy Ashcroft, horrified at this gratuitous humiliation of Robeson, decided that Nellie was “a racist.”¹⁸

Ashcroft found her entire experience in Othello “an education in racism,” something about which she had previously been ignorant. “Paul would tell us stories which I could hardly believe.… He talked a lot to us, and particularly Rupert [Rupert Hart-Davis, her husband], about his problems in the States,” though “he didn’t talk politics”—his concern then was with the plight of his people, not with any particular political program for ameliorating it. When queried about “the racial aspect” of the production, Ashcroft was widely quoted in the press as saying, “Ever so many people have asked me whether I mind being kissed in some of the scenes by a coloured man, and it seems to me so silly. Of course I do not mind! It is just necessary to the play. For myself I look on it as a privilege to act with a great artist like Paul Robeson.” In fact they were a bit skittish during rehearsals. The press bombardment about “how the public will take to seeing a Negro make love to a white woman” made Robeson somewhat “infirm of purpose”; as he told a reporter fifteen years later, “For the first two weeks in every scene I played with Desdemona that girl couldn’t get near to me, I was backin’ away from her all the time. I was like a plantation hand in the parlor, that clumsy.”19

Robeson was sympathetic to Ashcroft’s plight under Nellie’s direction. While rehearsing the scene where Othello denounces Desdemona as a whore, Nellie insisted Robeson keep slapping Ashcroft to “encourage” her to fall at a particular angle—one that Ashcroft felt “was physically impossible to do in one movement.… I think she was a sadist”—bringing her instead to the verge of tears. Without a word, Robeson got up and left the theater. He sent a message to Maurice Browne that he could no longer continue under Nellie’s direction, and requested a replacement. When Browne threatened a breach-of-contract suit, Robeson—with the Equity suspension still fresh in his mind—returned to rehearsals.²⁰

But thereafter, clear that (in Ashcroft’s words) “there was no help, indeed only hindrances, from our director,” Robeson, Ashcroft, and Max Montesole—with Sybil Thorndike joining them whenever she could—took to rehearsing together evenings in one another’s homes. Montesole, with his considerable experience in playing Shakespeare, provided crucial support; according to Ashcroft, he “was the saving of the production—as far as it could be saved.” Jimmy Light also pitched in by coaching Robeson privately. “I think Paul would have given up long ago,” Essie wrote in her diary, “if it hadn’t been for Jim and Max. They have both been working like blazes over him.”²¹

But if the cast members did all they could to help one another, Nellie retained final say over staging, lights, and sets—and made a considerable botch of each. Her staging was at once fussy and remote, long on detail (much of it anachronistic, like the introduction of a quasi-Venetian skirt dance) but short on immediacy (in resorting to a series of ascending platforms, she managed to put much of the stage action at the farthest possible remove from the audience). She cut significant passages from the text in favor of highlighting extratextual diversions like dance, incidental music (including a sailor’s ditty as Othello lands on Cyprus), and conspicuous set changes. (“It would not have surprised me,” one critic later wrote, “if Mr. Paul Robeson had ‘obliged’ with a negro spiritual too”—unaware that Robeson and Maurice Browne had had a “terrific row” during rehearsals when Browne tried to insist that Robeson arrive at Cyprus singing.) Nellie staged the final scene of the play with the bed tucked away in a corner, creating a remote, frigid mood when precisely the opposite effect was called for. Then, in addition, she allowed set designer James Pryde, a well-known painter (with no experience in scenic design), to include an enormously high four-poster bed, which caused such a racket being hoisted into position behind the curtain as Ashcroft and Sybil Thorndike were playing the preceding Willow Scene that Thorndike—the one cast member to whom Nellie deferred—told the stagehands in no uncertain terms that they could not move the bed until after she had begun her long speech: “I can shout my way over it, but Desdemona can’t!”22

As for the lighting, Nellie kept it dim to the point of inscrutability. The subdued effects were necessary, she explained in her program notes, in order to maintain the integrity of Pryde’s scenic “paintings,” but as James Agate acidly pointed out in the Sunday Times, “The first object of lighting in the theatre is not to flatter a scene-painter but to give us enough light to see the actors by.” The actors even had trouble seeing one another, yet when one of them complained to Nellie she snapped, “Switch on the exit lights over the doors”—her sole concession. (Later, with the director no longer on hand after the opening, Ralph Richardson kept a flashlight up his sleeve to light his way across the stage.) To complete her miscalculations, Nellie pasted a disfiguring beard and goatee on Robeson and until the final scene dressed him in unsuitably long Elizabethan garments (including tights, puffed sleeves, and doublets), instead of Moorish robes, which would have naturally enhanced the dignity of his performance.²³

By opening night, Paul (according to Essie) was “wild with nerves.” Her own hair “went gray in a patch” during the final ten days of rehearsal, and she clutched Hugh Walpole’s hand throughout the opening-night performance as select members of the gala audience—Baroness Ravensdale, Garland Anderson (the black author of the hit play Appearances), Lady Diana Cooper, Anna May Wong—came up during intervals to offer moral support and to compliment her on her white satin gown. Paul, by his own account, “started off with my performance pitched a bit higher than I wanted it to be,” but by curtain he was recalled twenty times. The critics, however, responded more tepidly than the audience. Browne and Van Volkenburg got a general drubbing—the production “has little to recommend it”; “Maurice Browne cast himself for Iago, and ruined the play.” “They caught the hell they so well deserved,” Essie wrote in her diary.²⁴

Sybil Thorndike came off well, and Ashcroft got a splendid set of notices, but Robeson’s own reviews ran the gamut. The virtues of his performance were sharply contested. At one extreme, he was hailed as “great,” “magnificent,” “remarkable”; at the other decried as “prosaic” and “disappointing.” A number of critics agreed that he had played the role in too genteel a fashion, as if “afraid of losing himself”; Othello became “a thoughtful, kindly man, civilised and cultured,” rather than “the sort of great soldier to whom the senators of Venice would entrust their defense.” (“Robeson endows Othello with an inferiority complex which is incongruous,” wrote Time and Tide.) Putting a direct racial gloss on the same complaint, one reviewer ascribed Robeson’s caution and geniality not merely to his own personal modesty but to his fear that any “assumption of arrogance might be mistaken for the insolent assumptions of the less educated of his race.” Another critic, in The Lady, suggested that his “lethargy” was an attribute intrinsic to blacks, and used that as “confirmation” for the view that the hot-blooded Othello had been conceived by Shakespeare not as an Ethiopian but as a passionate Arabic Moor. (“There is not a much closer racial affinity between the Negro and the Arab than between the Arab and the white man, and a far closer cultural affinity between the last two.”) In regard to that view, Robeson’s own interpretation of the play in 1930 was less pronouncedly racial than it would be by the time of the Broadway production in 1943. Whereas he later argued forcefully that debate over whether Shakespeare intended Othello to be a Negro or a Moor was a nonquestion—by “Moor” Shakespeare meant “Negro”—in 1930 Robeson told a newspaper interviewer, “There are, of course, two distinct schools on the subject, and it is possible to produce a convincing argument for either side. It is possible to prove from the text that Othello was a Negro, but the same argument applies to a Moor. If, of course, Shakespeare intended definitely to write of a Moor, then I am not the man for the part. This, however, I consider doubtful. Anyway, the Moor is chiefly of negro extraction.”25

Robeson shared the critics’ discontent with his technical abilities, yet attempting the role, he told one newspaper reporter, had nonetheless been liberating: “… Othello has taken away from me all kinds of fears, all sense of limitation, and all racial prejudice. Othello has opened to me new and wider fields; in a word, Othello has made me free.” Even after the opening, he continued to work with Jimmy Light, steadily improving his performance. “He is much better now than he was at the opening,” Essie reported ten days later. “He has been working steadily at his part, and some changes have been made in his costumes, so that he is 100 percent better.” The Van Vechtens came over the following month, saw for themselves, and agreed with Essie’s estimate. “He is magnificent, unbelievable,” Van Vechten wrote Alfred Knopf, and to James Weldon Johnson he reported, “Paul is simply amazing.… He completely bowled me over with surprise. I did not expect such a finished and emotional performance.… They stood on chairs and cheered him the night we were there.” Du Bois wrote from New York to ask for some pictures for the NAACP’s The Crisis and to say “how thrilled we are” with his success.26

Box-office business was brisk at first, and after Maurice Browne bowed out as Iago (by his own account, he “fled like a frightened rabbit” after the critics drubbed him, turning the role over to his understudy), there was added reason to hope for an extended run. But public interest failed to build, and, given the high production costs—Robeson was paid a reported record salary of three hundred pounds a week—the show closed after six weeks, and then briefly toured the provinces while negotiations proceeded for a transfer to the States. Jed Harris, the American producer who had recently revived Uncle Vanya with success, came to dinner at the Robesons’, and it was widely announced in the press that he would bring Othello to New York the following season with Lillian Gish as Desdemona, Osgood Perkins (who had been hailed in The Front Page) as Iago, and Robert Edmond Jones as set designer. It was also rumored that Gish was negotiating to do a film version with Robeson. There were additional soundings from the Theatre Guild and from producers Gilbert Miller and Sydney Ross.²⁷

None of this came to fruition. Robeson was under contract for another American concert tour, to run from January to April 1931, which undercut Jed Harris’s preferred dates. Apprehension over the likely reception in the States of a black man kissing a white woman also proved dampening. “I wouldn’t care to play those scenes in some parts of the United States,” Robeson himself told a New York Times reporter: “The audience would get rough; in fact, might become very dangerous.” One Southern paper editorialized in response, “He knows what would happen and so do the rest of us. That is one form of amusement that we will not stand for now or ever. This negro has potentialities for great harm to his race.”²⁸

But according to Essie, who carried on the negotiations, it was Maurice Browne who ultimately destroyed the attempt to carry Othello to the States. Nobody wanted his production, and he tried to prevent Robeson from appearing in a restaged version by claiming that he alone had the right to “sell” him. He did manage to prevent Peggy Ashcroft from accepting an offer from John Gielgud to appear at the Old Vic, “lending” her out instead—to her anguish—for a Somerset Maugham play. Essie was furious at Browne’s manipulations. “He’s a rascal indeed. I am surprised he could not play ‘Iago’ better. He’s a real villain.”²⁹

Paul, too, seems to have blamed Browne far more than Van Volkenburg for the tensions and inadequacies of the production. Once opening night was safely behind him, Paul wrote Nellie a gracious and self-effacing letter thanking her “for the real help you have given me. Under different circumstances you & I would certainly have worked together with much more sympathy. I do feel most of it was my fault, but somewhere in the middle of things Maurice & I suddenly became antagonistic & I’m afraid deep down always will be.…” By the time the play closed, in July, Browne (so Essie wrote the Van Vechtens) became “openly nasty,” and at the final performance, as Ashcroft remembers it, he gave a curtain speech to the audience in which he “thanked everybody, except Paul and myself.”30

Career matters soon took a back seat to personal ones. In the middle of the six-week run of Othello, the baby fell ill. Paul, Jr. (nicknamed Pauli), at age two and a half came down with a painful and prolonged series of maladies—a bowel fissure, tonsillitis, stomach cramping—that led to a brief hospitalization and a month-long recuperation. Essie thought Paul was insufficiently attentive to the boy during his illness. “The only times you are the least bit interested in him,” she wrote him in a summary accusation the following year, “are the rare occasions when you deem it suitable or befitting the artist to mention such prosaic things as children and parenthood; then I suppose you do think of him with pride and with a vague gratification that he is as grand as he is.”³¹

On his side, Paul felt renewed anger when Essie’s book about him—Paul Robeson, Negro—appeared, as timed, the day after the opening of Othello. Van Vechten was in London when it was published, and reported to Alfred Knopf (who had turned the book down in the United States) that it is “flopping here”—the book “is so bad.” It did flop in terms of sales, but the reviews were genial. In general, the book was received as an artless, attractive panegyric to Paul, sprinkled with just enough seemingly candid revelation to make him believably human—for example, Paul’s supposed admission that “I have no fatherly instincts about him [Pauli] at all.” But if Essie and most of the critics believed her words “humanized” Paul, he did not. He did not appreciate, to put it mildly, being described as “disloyal” to his friends, lazy “with a capital L,” and “not in the least sensitive” to racial slurs—agreeing with the one critic who thought the book on that issue had been too bland, had excessively downplayed the “bitter” aspects of trying to make his way as “one of an oppressed race.”³²

Nor was Paul amused at the heroically understanding tone Essie adopted for herself in the book when discussing the subject of sex. She had included a partly fictionalized (and artificially “frank”) conversation about infidelity between herself, Paul, and a female friend of theirs—with Essie “forthrightly” pursuing the subject despite Paul’s alleged hesitancy and discomfort. The conversation purportedly began with his remark that Essie overdid the “little tin god” version of his character—“she’d never believe I was unfaithful to her, even if the evidence was strong against me”; to which Essie purportedly responded, “We might as well finish this argument, now that we’ve begun it,” and went on to say, “Would it shock you to learn that I might have suspected as much? Of course, I’m not admitting anything, even now.… But if I suspected you, I remembered at the same time that in the eight years of our marriage I have been desperately ill three times, with long, tedious convalescences following each illness; that only now am I achieving sound good health and in a position, physically, to be a constant wife to you [this last phrase was taken out of the published version at the last minute by Essie]; I remembered that we have been separated for long intervals by your work. ‘Well, darling,’” the book has her saying, while “looking at him tenderly, ‘if I ever thought there were lapses, I thought of the possible reasons for them, and dismissed them as not lapses at all.… No matter what you may have done in these eight years, there has been no change whatever in your love for me—except perhaps that it has increased. I know that you are faithful to me in the all-important spirit of things; that I am the one woman in your life, in your thoughts, in your love.’” Paul is said to have received this speech with “eyes full of tears, and full of immense relief,” and, on recovering himself, to have remarked with admiration, “What can you do with a woman like that?”33

Life did not imitate art. Three months after the book’s publication, Essie found a love letter from Peggy Ashcroft to Paul—and was instantly furious. She had adored Peggy—“so simple and appealing”—but in her anger, that “lovely girl” now became (in the privacy of her diary) “the little Jew bitch—not even married a year, and after somebody else’s husband.” Fifty years later, Peggy Ashcroft believed that “what happened between Paul and myself” had been “possibly inevitable”; indeed, it may possibly, in the pertinent, inciting words of Othello himself, have had to do with Shakespeare: “She loved me for the dangers I had passed, and I loved her that she did pity them.” For Ashcroft, it was “a lesson to me in the power of drama to encourage a portrayed emotion to become a fantasy of one’s own. How could one not fall in love in such a situation with such a man?” Paul had encouraged Peggy by telling her that, although he relied on Essie, he also felt suffocated by her, “that he had to have expression outside” the marriage, and that he already had had such “expression” before.³⁴

Essie had previously sent Pauli and Ma Goode to Territet, Switzerland, where she and Paul had filmed Borderline. Now she joined them and, once settled there, wrote to Paul (who had embarked on a ten-week tour of the provinces, unsuccessfully trying out a new one-man show consisting of the first act of Emperor Jones interspersed with lieder and spirituals). Her letter has not survived, but in the diary entry coinciding with it she accused him of being everything from a dissembling husband to a rotten parent to a dishonest artist. As she had intimated in her book, she had known about some of his “peccadilloes” over the years but not, apparently, their extent. “I am surely a jackass if ever there was one,” she wrote in her diary. “Fancy believing his lies right up to the last. He was a smooth one, though. He must have been lying to me for five years, steadily. Well, I’ll never let another man know what goes on in my mind and heart.… Paul is not any different from any other Nigger man, except that he has a beautiful voice. His personality is built on lies.…”³⁵

Paul responded to her furious indictment with measured calm. In one of the few long letters he ever wrote, he began by matter-of-factly discussing his financial straits, reviewed work-in-progress on their London flat, and then turned to the Ashcroft episode:

I am very sorry, of course, you read that letter. You will do those things. You evidently don’t believe your creed—that what you don’t know doesn’t hurt you. It makes things rather hopeless. It must be quite evident that I’m likely to go on thusly for a long while here and there—perhaps not. I’m certain I don’t know, but the past augurs the future.

I have tried to explain to you that no mail addressed to me—telegraphed, cabled or otherwise—is so important it must be opened. You knew I was coming in Sunday, and you could have held it until then. In fact, if it was Saturday eve, you couldn’t have reached me, as I was leaving early Sunday. It’s my fault for having mail reach me there, but you were not living there as yet, and I felt that for the time being it was my apt. It makes matters rather difficult, as I must have a certain amount of privacy in my life—and my mail must be inviolate (certainly even this stupid society of today feels that, as tampering with mail is a rather serious offence even legally). So, I see nothing but to leave you the apartment and go to an hotel. I’ll keep my front room and come in to see you. I most probably will be at the Adelphi—and you can have the girl live at the house; either that, or we can rent it out and you remain in Switzerland. I could come over for a couple of weeks before going to America.

In our present condition it appears it would be better also for you to remain in England or Switzerland then. (When I go to America.) We’ll need every penny, and I’ll be so busy with my work, I’ll not be able to see much of you—you might feel happier there [in Switzerland] with the boy.

The work on this music must be done, and I can see my way clear if I can concentrate.

As for that letter—I’m sure you haven’t destroyed it, and I must not only request but demand that you send it to me. Please send it all, as I shall have it verified. Just how it helps you to do these things, Essie, my dear, I do not know. But I must have the letter. What I feel about this and that I am sure I don’t know. I am in a period of transition—where I shall finally finish is of little consequence to me. I would like to get on with my work. To do that I think I need to be alone and to be as far as possible absolutely free. I thought in spite of past misunderstandings it might be possible tho we happened to be in the same apt. But if these things can continually happen, it’s quite impossible and will only be bad for you and me. I’d suggest you remain with the mountains and lakes, and I’ll come there when I can feel so disposed.

There’s no need of beginning something (the apt. scheme) we know will not work out as we wished.

I’m sure that deep down I love you very much in the way that we could love each other. It could not be wholly complete because we are too different in temperament.

But however it is, we haven’t helped each other very much. I feel spiritually starved. You became almost a physical wreck. Something’s wrong—maybe my fault, maybe yours—most likely both our faults. There’s no need rushing ahead and repeating the same mistakes.…

I feel that the next few weeks with my rushing from place to place and in the atmosphere of boredom will bring us little as to completer understanding.

I’d love to come to Switzerland for a short while when I am thru and see you, the boy and mother [Ma Goode] before going away. We’d be much more likely to understand each other better there. If you must come to see about the flat and business, all right. If you feel you want the flat—all right. You determine that. But the financial strain must be considered. Love to the boy. Do tell me about him and how he’s going along. Of course I’m interested. Write me always as you feel. I often feel extremely close to you and want to see you and talk to you and perhaps weep on your bosom. Let’s hope all will come out right. Love, Paul.36

Paul’s letter made Essie angrier still. She characterized it in her diary as “cold, mean, vindictive.” In her view, he wanted her to stay in Switzerland not to save money, as he claimed, but “so he can carry on with Peggy.… It would be inconvenient having me in London.… It doesn’t matter to him that all my clothes are in the flat, all my books, all my work. That I haven’t even a coat here for this cold weather. I came here to stay ten days, and only brought clothes for ten days! Yet, if I return to London, he will swear I came to spy on him.” She was furious at the suggestion that she had opened the letter to snoop and insisted that “the last thing under the sun” she expected to find was a love letter—especially since he had spoken “very sweetly” to her over the phone from Edinburgh. “Well,” she wrote in her diary, “none of it matters. I feel now that he is just one more Negro musician, pursuing white meat. I suppose it’s a curse on the race. No wonder white people don’t want to let black men into their society. I believe that he would have had a hard time getting in if he hadn’t had me to point to, and people felt, ‘Oh, he has a wife of his own, and is happy, so I guess he isn’t after our women.’… He is secret, mean, low. He excuses himself with high sounding words that merely mask a disgusting commonness. We will begin from here.”37

The affair with Ashcroft was brief; they parted without bitterness, and their feelings of friendship continued (in the late thirties, Paul—with Essie—visited her backstage at the theater). The domestic crisis precipitated by Essie’s discovery of Ashcroft’s letter was soon eclipsed by another threat to her marital security. Paul had become deeply involved with a woman named Yolande Jackson, a sometime actress whom Essie had known about for at least a year. Paul had even talked to Ashcroft about Yolande, but he did not tell her that their affair was concurrent. Few traces of Yolande Jackson’s relationship with Robeson have survived—not the occasion of their first meeting, or details about the early progress of the affair, or any substantial information about her subsequent life. Alberta Hunter has described her as “a wonderful person” (no specifics added), and Rebecca West said she was “vaguely shady—something of a slut” (no specifics added). According to Rupert Hart-Davis, Peggy Ashcroft’s husband and a friend of the Jackson family, Yolande was “a large, attractive, flamboyant woman, always with a new enthusiasm and I daresay a new lover,” who had been a drama student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art but had never pursued a theatrical career with any notable consistency or success. Her father, William Jackson, was a barrister who practiced in India and became head of the bar in Calcutta, where he was known as Tiger Jackson. By the time Rupert Hart-Davis came to know the Jackson family, in the late twenties, they had returned to England and lived in a “small villa on the outskirts of Worthing on the Sussex coast … waited on by gigantic Indians in turbans and native dress.”³⁸

However long Paul had been seeing Yolande Jackson, their love affair now took a significant turn. He developed a consuming passion for her, and ever after described her to close friends as “the great love” of his life, “a free spirit, a bright, loving, wonderful woman.” Some time in September, he told Essie about his deep feelings for Yolande, and they may have discussed divorce. Faced with that news, following hard on the revelation of his affair with Ashcroft, Essie had a nervous collapse. As she wrote Carlo and Fania three months later, “I have been terribly ill with nerves, but am gradually getting back to my old self. I really did have a bad time. I had a nervous breakdown that went into paralysis, and lost the use of the whole left side of my face. I was a sight. Well, it’s alright again, and I have got the use of the nerves back, and I don’t look distorted anymore. It was a close squeak—we thot [sic] I would be permanently paralyzed.” During those two months, from October to December 1, 1930, she and Paul managed to reach a temporary modus vivendi: she stayed in their flat in London while he remained on tour in the provinces, Yolande sometimes joining him. On weekends he came into London, dividing his time between Yolande and Essie—Yolande getting “most of the time,” Essie wrote in her diary. She claimed that Yolande “telephoned, telegraphed, and ran him to earth.… I know, because Paul told me so himself.”39

By December, comparative calm had been restored. Paul spent the early part of the month in the flat with Essie and (according to her) they “had a marvelous time”—theatergoing, dining with the actress Jean Forbes-Robertson (the star of Barrie’s Peter Pan), supping with Noel Coward (whom they had met earlier in New York). Essie felt that she and Paul had become “better friends than we have ever been, much, much closer.” Paul went off to stay with Yolande from December 7 to 19, then joined Essie in Switzerland for Christmas with Ma Goode and Pauli. Essie explained the rapprochement to the Van Vechtens in the vocabulary of an understanding mother chastising her errant boy and in a tone that hovered precariously close to strained nobility: “He’s fallen in love with another girl—honest—besides the one he was in love with when you were here—and his life is rather complicated just now.… He doesn’t quite know where he is himself, so naturally I don’t know where I am with him … bless him. He’s a dear, and I think he’s very nice. At first, naturally I was very upset about it all, because with my characteristic dumbness and one-way mind, it never occurred to me that he could possibly be straying. But now that I know he has not only strayed, but gone on a hike, I’ve turned my mind over and given it an airing—and I feel much better. I certainly hope he gets what he wants, because he has been very sweet to me. If he wants some one else, I shant mind too much. Of course, I’ll mind some, but I refuse to be tiresome. Be nice to Paul [he was on his way to the States for a tour]. And Fania, dear, sew on a button for him if he needs it.”⁴⁰

Paul and Essie talked outright about divorce just before he left for the States, and momentarily Essie agreed—but soon changed her mind, using renewed anger over Yolande’s behavior as an excuse for backing off. Arriving in Paris to see Paul off for the Mauretania boat train to New York, Essie became increasingly annoyed at the phone calls from Yolande, still in London, to Paul. Finally Essie flew into a rage. “She knew we were together and that I was saying goodbye to him forever, but still she pursued.… I made up my mind that she will never marry him as long as I live, and am able to prevent it. I changed my mind completely, and decided once and for all, if she can’t act like a decent sport, and at least treat me with the courtesy that I gave her.… God damn it, I’ll not get a divorce at all. I’ll be damned if I will. She is not a decent person—simply a nymphomaniac, tracking down another man, as she has tried to track down many, and she may have mine—I can’t prevent that, but I’ll not divorce him—so there.” Her resolve was strengthened for the moment by a chance meeting at the Gare Saint-Lazare with Foster Sanford, Paul’s football coach from his Rutgers days and a man he deeply respected. Seeing Sanford “reminded” Essie that if she and Paul were ever divorced, “Sanford and all the men like him would hate [Paul] forever, and that many healthy, friendly doors would be closed to him. Sanford was a symbol, and he helped me to finally make up my mind. I’ll sit tight and not move an inch.”41

She felt confirmed in an opinion she had written into an early draft of Paul Robeson, Negro: “A Negro who marries a white woman is promptly ostracized by the majority of his race and the wife is ignored socially. Notable examples of this feeling are Frederick Douglass, that idol of the Negro race, who fell from his pedestal when he married a white woman, and Jack Johnson, the black heavyweight champion of the world and popular hero of both races, who completely lost his popularity when he married a white woman.” Clearly this was what Essie wanted to believe—but an idea is not necessarily proved wrong merely because it satisfies a wish. Foster Sanford thought she was right. Soon after their chance meeting in Paris, he himself had a private talk with Paul in New York and (according to Sanford’s son) “read him the riot act” about a divorce, warning him that abandoning his wife would offend people of both races, and that doing so in order to marry a white woman would surely cost him the affection of his own people. Bricktop, the famed chanteuse-cabaret owner, apparently spoke to Paul in the same vein.⁴²

Essie stayed on in Paris for a few days after Paul left for the States, feeling lonely but determined not to brood. She looked up some old friends, got her hair waved, and set out to see the town, touring the shops and the theaters. On New Year’s Day 1931, she had word from Pauli’s governess in Switzerland that both he and Ma Goode had fallen ill. Essie spent the next month taking them for medical consultations with physicians in Vienna, where Ma Goode was found to be suffering from an acute abscess of the kidney and Pauli from distorted vertebrae near the base of the spine. He was given artificial sun treatments and massage, and Ma Goode was given injections. Both improved rapidly, and Essie next decided to take herself in hand. “Still a little frightened over the paralysis business,” she consulted a Viennese “nerve specialist,” who told her the paralysis had been “due entirely to shock” and gave her “a good reconstructing nerve prescription” and a regimen of ten hours’ sleep a night. As she, too, began to improve, she queried the Van Vechtens, in her continuing capacity as Paul’s business manager, on how his concert tour in the States was going, whether “he actually sang the German and Russian songs, and how they went. I do so hope he had another great success. Bless him. He’s a good scout.”⁴³

The tour, in fact, had not started out well. Carlo and Fania reported to Essie that during the inaugural Carnegie Hall concert the spirituals had gone splendidly but the lieder Paul had added to his program were not well received. Larry Brown, who was accompanying Paul, confidentially cabled Essie that “nothing was going according to plan.” “What has happened to the tour?” Essie wrote back. “Is he lying down on it? Or is it really the [economic] depression? I feel the fault must be in him. Even in the worst possible depression here in England, he still drew crowds.… Is he fed up, is he bored, is he angry? Has he lost interest in his work? Or is he just lying down as he so often has?”44

As Robeson moved across the country—and the tour carried him all the way to San Francisco—he became additionally agitated because of press misrepresentation. The newspapers reported that he had decided to include European songs only because black audiences had demanded them, that the younger “and more intelligent” blacks tended to dismiss the spirituals “as something beneath their new pride in their race,” and that, although Robeson himself felt black artists “ought not do anything except their own folk-lore,” he had tacked “art songs” on to his repertory to appease the protestors. Robeson complained about this misrepresentation during an interview for the Kansas City Call with Roy Wilkins (who was shortly to move to New York to become an officer in the NAACP). Black artists, Robeson told Wilkins, “ought to do as many things as they can do well. Very few singers, perhaps none, can sing German lieder like Roland Hayes. It would be foolish for me or anyone else to say that Roland should not sing German lieder. But I do contend that Negroes should not run off and leave severely alone their own peculiar gifts which none but they can do perfectly.” It bothered him, he told Wilkins, “that very little of what I actually say gets into the papers—and I mean great dailies as well as the Negro weeklies.” He also told Wilkins that he had decided to live in Europe, where one didn’t need friends “to act as ‘bumpers’ against prejudice.”⁴⁵

Meanwhile, in London, according to the rather studied accounts in Essie’s diary, she was seeing quite a bit of Noel Coward. She spent the evening of her birthday with him at her flat (his birthday was the following day), and he had become a confidant in her troubles with Paul. Essie may have wanted Paul to think that Coward’s “marvelous” attentiveness was a sign of something more than friendship. In a letter to her in January, Paul wrote:

I had a talk with NC. We talked frankly as he said he knew all the facts. I left my position very clear—that I am very anxious to marry, etc. He thought that rather inadvisable from career angles—but appears to understand. I couldn’t gauge him very well. He was non-committal, and rightly so. After all, his business with you is your concern, not mine. He was very nice. I had lunch with him at the Ritz. We had a long chat, he is delightful.…⁴⁶

In that same letter, written about a month into the three-and-a-half-month tour, Paul reported that it “has been rather trying.… What I really need is about 3 months out to do nothing but learn new songs.” He was feeling “rather sad and lonely,” in part because “I don’t like the American scene so much” and in part because “everyone was rumoring over [our] separation. One or two people asked me directly. I denied any such thing. Thought it best for you to handle same as you think best.” Essie had already cautioned the Van Vechtens to “let Paul open the conversation about all this. He might be offended if he thot [sic] I had told you, first. I know he will tell you, so all you have to do is sit and wait.” But Paul did not, as Essie had expected, confide in the Van Vechtens. When they let her know that he had “said nothing whatever about the situation,” simply indicating that she had stayed behind because of health and would be joining him later, Essie chose to interpret that as meaning “definitely I think, that he does not want a divorce, and hopes that I do not,” and that “he evidently means” to ask her to come over—“So, it all sounds lovely.”47

Essie did come to New York in March, but the news immediately leaked out to the press that she was staying not with Paul at the Hotel Wentworth but with her old friend Hattie Boiling at the Dunbar apartments. The New York News and Harlem Home Journal in a three-inch headline announced, “ROBESONS SEPARATE,” and in the story inside quoted “friends” of the couple to the effect that “a beautiful English woman enamored of Robeson followed him here” and “the battle is now raging … between the two women for Robeson’s affection.” Essie put the issue more casually in her diary, describing her month-long stay in New York as a round of parties and adventures. She went with Minnie Sumner to see Noel Coward in his hit play Private Lives, “stopped traffic” at the NAACP annual ball at the Savoy by arriving with Coward as her escort (“Noel danced with me often. He was conspicuously attentive … to the confounding of all those present”), went to Washington for two days, where she picked up again with her old beau Grant Lucas (“At last we have had our talk—after ten years—and I find I haven’t changed a bit toward him, nor he toward me.… He is terribly attractive, and I think he likes me all over again”). She also took a side trip to Columbia, South Carolina, to gather material for a new book she was planning about her family and her early life (“Talking about southern hospitality … I’ve never seen anything like it”). She and Paul did spend his birthday together, going to the theater with the Van Vechtens and spending the night at the Wentworth. But that one evening aside, they scarcely saw each other.⁴⁸

When Essie sailed on the Leviathan for England on April 15, her old friend Corinne Wright and Grant Lucas saw her off. At the last minute, Paul, too, came along. “The representatives of the Negro press,” Essie wrote Grace and James Weldon Johnson, “looked positively disappointed when they saw Paul arrive with me at the pier, and they solemnly watched him see me off properly. We had to laugh. They insist upon separating us, bless em, but we have other plans!” Yet, a few months later, when drawing up another general indictment of his behavior, Essie rebuked Paul for having appeared at the sailing. “Grant and Corinne were too well bred to show their surprise, but you can imagine how Grant felt.” Grant stayed to say a last few words, and after the ship pulled away Essie memorialized his “sweet face” in her diary: “He has done a great deal for me in this last week, has helped me find myself in many, many ways. I shall always be grateful to him for that.” From shipboard she wrote the Van Vechtens that she was “still thrilled over the heavenly time I had in America. I can’t remember ever having had such a perfect time in my whole life! Honest.” She was now convinced that “everything is going to come out beautifully for me”; she still had “no idea what Paul will do, but no matter what he does, we are fast friends, and understand each other better than ever before.” Besides, she felt rid at last of “a lot of silly young ideas I used to be boarded up with,” and “surprised at the great variety of ways in which I can have a good time. I am having a really good time for the first time in my life. And if I’m happy and he’s happy, things are bound to come out right in the end. I’m not at all impatient, because I’m amusing myself.”49

There matters stood for the next six months. Paul returned to London soon after Essie and immediately went into rehearsal for a revival of O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, under Jimmy Light’s direction, and with Robert Rockmore (an American lawyer whose wife, Bess, had been a Provincetowner) as producer. It was to be a short-lived venture. “The rehearsals nearly killed me,” Robeson later told a reporter. “I am supposed to be a strong man. Yet I couldn’t stand up to the strain on my physical strength. When I came to the first-night I had no physical reserve left.” Essie went to the dress rehearsal and “was a little worried about Paul’s voice. He is using much too much voice, and if he keeps on like this, he will strain it.”⁵⁰

Yet the opening went off marvelously—for Robeson, not O’Neill. With only two dissents, the critics hailed his portrayal of the shipboard stoker Yank as “splendidly vital,” asserting that he had “never been more effective.” In a fine display of traditional English homoeroticism, the Graphic’s critic devoted a fifth of his review to waxing eloquent over Robeson’s physique: “That Mr. Robeson should be stripped to the waist is my first demand of any play in which he appears. Perhaps one of the disappointments of his Othello was its encumbrance with the traditional dress-gown.” Most of the reviewers dismissed the play as “sentimental,” “grotesque,” and already outmoded in its once-fashionable “expressionism.” A number of the critics, while exonerating Robeson personally, considered it a mistake to have cast a black in a role originally written for a white. “It upsets the balance or alters the whole direction of the piece,” wrote the reviewer in the Star. “One cannot help thinking that here is something which has to do with racial consciousness and the oppression of the negro.” Essie agreed that Paul had been “magnificent” on opening night but was angered at the presence of Yolande Jackson, who had sat in the front row of the stalls “with a French count—no-account looking. I never saw such nerve in my life,” Essie huffed in her diary.51

After five performances, the play abruptly closed. “Laryngitis” was the umbrella explanation given out to the press, but Paul’s symptoms were in fact more extensive than that. Essie wrote the Van Vechtens that the strain of “a packed concert tour followed immediately by an intense rehearsal period” had exhausted him; he “began yelling, and after opening on Monday night, had to [be] put to bed in a nursing home on the following Friday, suffering from strain, nerves, laryngitis and no voice at all. The doctor kept him in bed a week, treated him with inhalations, etc. and ordered complete rest.” This bout of “nerves” conceivably marked the onset—the first symptomatic evidence—of the depressive disorder that twenty-five years later would overtake him.⁵²

When reporters asked Robeson about his future plans after the closing of Hairy Ape, he alternately replied (or was variously misquoted) that he would not act again for several years, that he hoped to start a repertory theater in London, that he wanted to go to Africa, to return to Germany, to retire for a while to the provinces to learn Russian. He did begin learning Russian in earnest, taking up formal study of it with the composer Alexandre Gambs, and telling the press that he was finding it “extremely easy to learn the language” and that Russian music suited his voice—perhaps, he thought, because “there is a kinship between the russians and the negroes. They were both serfs, and in the music there is the same note of melancholy touched with mysticism.”⁵³

Essie scorned his “indecision” about implementing plans and announced that she was applying for a Guggenheim to visit Africa on her own. She lectured him that the “inglorious” ending of The Hairy Ape resulted from his typical inability “to make up your mind about things—about your work, about your life.… You hadn’t the guts to say no in the first place—or having said yes, you wouldn’t face it and buckle to it and do the thing properly. No—you hem and haw and postpone the evil day, and if something turns up to decide or help or hinder you, you remain quiescent. You only really work or fight if you are pushed back into a tight corner. It’s the same about your life. You want Yolande, you don’t want me.… But do you do anything about it? No. You want us both. Or rather you don’t want me, but you don’t want to give me up. It’s ridiculous and childish.”⁵⁴

Essie, as usual, was judging the surface—seeing it lucidly but not penetrating beneath. She was always able to describe behavior accurately but then gauged its meaning narrowly, tending to assume that things are what they appear. Judging people by what they did, she equated that with who they were—it was a major difference between her temperament and Paul’s. He was indeed “taking his time,” willing to let the appearance of vacillation—a real enough aspect of his behavior, but misconstrued as a summation of it—serve as a useful disguise. To protect himself from Essie’s overly zealous scrutiny, her relentless demand to be “up and doing,” he found it convenient to cultivate the appearance of irresolution—it kept her, and most of the world, from invading his complex privacy, even though it opened him to charges of being a dawdler. He might have smiled, rather than felt annoyance, at Essie’s description of him to Larry Brown as “a very strange person.”55

Paul moved into bachelor quarters in London, leaving Essie the elaborate flat they had recently taken on Buckingham Street, and, accompanied by Ethel A. Gardner (Larry Brown was in the States), did considerable concert work locally. Essie had to postpone her trip to Africa after suddenly hemorrhaging in June, and she went off to spend the summer in Kitzbühel, Austria, with Ma Goode and Pauli. But she took ill again in August and had to be rushed to a sanatorium for what seems to have been an abortion—or a curettage following an abortion she may have had before leaving London. She and Paul had continued infrequently to sleep together, but she might have gotten pregnant by Grant Lucas while in the States, and she had also been seeing fairly regularly—and possibly having a sexual relationship with—a man named Michael Harrison. In any case, when she went to Austria she went armed with a letter from Paul addressed to a Dr. Lowinger in Vienna in which he refers to Essie’s “present pregnancy,” expresses concern for her health after the dangerous delivery she’d had with Pauli, and requests Lowinger, if he agrees that it “would be unwise for her to complete the term,” to “arrest the pregnancy at once, or as soon as you feel it would be advisable.”⁵⁶

Paul wrote her in late August saying he was “really very tired and very unhappy and am very anxious to see the boy and more anxious about your health,” sending her money and urging her to see Dr. Lowinger. “If we decided to go ahead with things sometime,” he remarked about her pregnancy, “we must be very careful and give every possible chance from the first. Which, I am afraid, during the Period of Possibility will have to exclude foreigners (Verstehen sie).”—perhaps a reference to Michael Harrison—“One can be just so liberal in such important matters.” He assured her again that he was “really very devoted”—“love you very much in fact—much more than I ever did and miss you beyond words.” Essie wrote the Van Vechtens, once more sounding the patronizing maternal note, “Big Paul isn’t very well, and not very happy, bless him. I think he has growing pains. But he is a dear, and we are great friends. When he has quite decided in his own mind what he wants to do, we can come to some sort of decision ourselves, and some plan.” Meanwhile, she wrote, she felt “a little guilty being so happy, and so busy.” She does seem genuinely to have enjoyed being with Pauli in Kitzbuehl, and enthusiastically recorded her son’s doings and sayings—he was “so brown,” she wrote to Grace Johnson, “with so much red in his cheeks, and perfect teeth, and carries himself like a king.” In September she took herself to Vienna for another “procedure”—its exact nature unspecified, even in her diary (suggesting, once again, that it was not entirely designed as a private document).57

Essie returned to London in early October. By then Paul had resolved to marry Yolande. While in New York he had seen Freda Diamond—who over the years had become a confidante and an anchor to him—and discussed his feelings for Yolande; she had advised him to go ahead with the marriage if he had his heart set on it. He now wrote Freda to say, “I trust I am going to great happiness, and I miss you dreadfully.” That juxtaposition of sentiments was entirely typical: in his emotional life Robeson would not conform to traditional expectations that love (and sex) must be single-minded devotions, that only one person at a time must be the focus of desire. As he further elaborated to Freda: “… we must never lose the lovely feeling between us, only strengthen it.… Remember that this feeling between us must go on as it always has and will deepen and deepen significantly. You shall never hear things about me—I shall tell you, and nothing can in any way disturb us. I shall tell you … because of that in me which is yours.” Paul again told Essie that he wanted to be free, and they again discussed divorce. This time Essie finally agreed—“we are both quite happy and pleased over the prospect of our freedom,” she wrote in her diary—and they proceeded to see a lawyer. Cordiality reigned. While Paul and Larry rehearsed in the Buckingham Street flat, Essie got together some dinner. Paul scrubbed her back in the tub while she got ready to go out with Michael Harrison, he confiding the hope that Peggy Ashcroft (so at least Essie recorded in her diary) would “stop telling the world she was in love” with him or “it would cause all sorts of upheavals and scandals,” she laughing and saying, “It was all due to his devastating charm with the ladies.” He left their tub-side tête-à-tête to take Yolande to the theater for her birthday.⁵⁸

A week after that enlightened exercise in togetherness, Paul canceled his Albert Hall concert because of the flu, took to bed in his hotel, and wouldn’t let Essie visit. “Paul is behaving very, very strangely,” she wrote in her diary, and complained to the Van Vechtens, “It does seem too bad that he won’t be reasonable. But I am not allowed to tell him not to go to parties just before a big concert, as I used to, so he just goes and does these things, and gets into trouble.” She decided Paul was “certainly degenerating!,” having fallen prey once more to irresolution. “He can’t seem to make up his mind what to do about his work, about his life, about me, and Yolande, nor anything. He really will have to settle down and get busy, if he wants to hold his place. Poor fellow,” she wrote in her diary. “I’m sorry for him.”⁵⁹

Essie decided to sketch out a lengthy letter to him. In the no-nonsense manner on which she prided herself (and in which she thought Paul woefully, perhaps morally, deficient), she laid out options, imposed conditions, drew up systematic conclusions. “My dear P,” she began. “I don’t seem to be able to talk to you any more. We don’t seem to speak the same language. So I thought I’d better write.” She was now entirely prepared, she continued, to give him a divorce, should he want one. “I shall be infinitely better off divorced from you, than married to you.… As your wife, I have rarely had the supposed pleasure and comfort of your company—except at very irregular meals and at odd hours late at night; and of course on those social occasions when you found it convenient or necessary.… All I really lose when I divorce you, is a job; and divorces being what they are—I lose the job but keep the salary, with a raise.”60

She then reiterated her charge that he was a deficient father, uninterested in his own son, and defended herself from his long-standing complaint about her extravagance. “You deplore the number of menages you must keep up,” but seem unwilling to forgo separate quarters and conveniently to forget that “the reason we sent Mama and Pauli abroad was because you didn’t want your child so much in evidence before your two ladies and before your public. A child is an encumbrance when one is playing the great lover.” She then broadly hinted that “Andy” (Joseph Andrews), a Jamaican whom Robeson employed as a valet-secretary but who was really more of a friend, primarily served to abet his adventures. “I must say I feel a little bit embarrassed for you,” Essie wrote, “when you identify him as your secretary. Andy can’t write a dignified intelligent letter, he can’t answer the telephone with dignity and intelligence, and he is inefficient, unpunctual and unreliable. How can he be a secretary, then? When you tell people he is, they think … it must be some special arrangement.”⁶¹

As for Yolande, Essie had “thought a great deal about this racial mixing business” and concluded that, “when a white woman takes a Negro man as a lover, she usually lowers him and herself too; white people and Negroes feel rather that she has a bull or a stallion or mule in her stable, her stable being her bed of course, and view the affair very much as if she had run away with the butler or the chauffeur; she is rarely—almost never—a first-class woman, and neither white nor black people think the Negro has won a prize.” In her own behalf, Essie objected to the way he had publicly flaunted his affair with Yolande, and his “lack of taste in emphasizing” the gifts Yolande had given him of a cigarette case, a locket, and a seal ring. She compared him in this regard to Leslie Hutchinson, the popular black musician, who took “pride in displaying presents from white women.”⁶²

“I daresay,” she continued, “you will feel I am a stickler for dignity. Well, in a way I am. For instance, there’s the matter of Yolande hanging over the railing conspicuously from the stage box at the premiere of Othello; and sitting in the center of the front row of the stalls at the Hairy Ape. In your magnificent selfishness, I suppose it never occurred to you that I might be embarrassed? And that her trying to be conspicuous was in the worst possible taste? … Funnily enough, since your audiences are always mostly white, she who wants to be conspicuous is just another white woman, and no one knows the news; when you marry her she will still be just another white woman.… You say in your large way, that English women don’t know the first thing about how to make love. You are very funny, honey. And you say they haven’t suffered! All your intimate information seems to have come from middle class Anglo-Indians—and you know what the English think of them! … If you had ever seriously tried to make love to me, I’m sure I don’t know what might have happened. But we needn’t worry about that—you never did. You made a pass or two at it—took me to a theater and were very pleased with such evidence of your devotion. I was too—which makes it even funnier. [I] seriously doubt if you were ever in love with me. You liked me, were companionable, and I was thoughtful and considerate of you—so you like me. I doubt now if I was ever in love with you—I admired you tremendously, and I was certainly interested in you.”63

But the past, she concluded the letter, “is behind us. The question is, what should we do with the future? I know what I want to do, and shall do with mine. There is no indecision about me, as you know. But about you—you have a great natural gift, and a magnificent body, neither of which you have done anything to preserve and improve.… You also have a terrific charm—but have rather overworked that. You have a fine mind. You have, as I said in 1921, the immediate possibility of becoming the greatest artist in the world—if you want to; and it wouldn’t take much work, either—you have so much to start with.” Driving home her point, she reiterated her view that if he was ever to realize his potential, he would have to decide what he wanted to do and stick to it. “If you continue to drift along as you are doing now, refusing to face things out, you will degenerate into merely a popular celebrity. Which seems poor stuff when one thinks of being a really great artist, the thrill of having done something perfectly.… You can jeer all you like, but I remember vividly your elation when you had given a really fine concert.” “Well,” she closed, “it does seem that I fall naturally into place in the role of lecturer, doesn’t it? All I can say in my defense is that I have decided what to try to make of my own life, and as we part, I should be very happy to know that you have decided upon something for yourself. I do so hate waste. And you will be a wicked waste if you don’t step on it.”⁶⁴

On the evening of November 28, Paul dropped by the flat to leave a Russian dictionary (Essie had also taken up the study), found she had gone out, and saw the pencil draft of her letter to him. Apparently it moved him, and he returned the next morning to have a talk with her. As she described it in her diary, it turned out to be “a red-letter day for me, perhaps one of the most important days in my whole life.… We got closer and more friendly than we have been. He says he wants to see me often, and urgently, and that we have something between us which no one else will ever be able to duplicate. He thinks he wants to marry Yolande, but he isn’t sure, but he is sure he wants us always to remain close and friendly.… We had a lovely time, slept together, and enjoyed it enormously. I’m so glad things are pleasant and friendly. Most important of all, he has found his feet, so far as his work is concerned, and is through with slacking and sliding and muddling through. Thank God for that!” She sent a high-spirited version of their new arrangements to the Van Vechtens: “He doesn’t live here of course, but has reached the regular and often calling stage, which is much more inconvenient. He is a dear, tho, I must say, even tho he is so funny and serious and absurd at times. I think no matter what happens to him, and I’m sure a great deal will happen to him, he’ll always be a very nice person.”65

That same week Essie, on a dare, consulted Madame Maude, a psychic. She liked what she heard. Her marriage, Madame told her, was not a “real” one, but her next one would be—“to a man who has to do with the control of many men … in a large building—perhaps in government,” and she predicted vast changes in Essie’s life within the next few months, changes that would come about as a result of her own “creative work.” Essie decided at once to finish up the film scenario she’d been working on, converting it into a novel called Black Progress, and to complete her modern-day parody play based on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a “comedy with music” about the tour of a black jazz band in Europe. She was still more excited about her prospects after Nell St. John Ervine, a clairvoyante, gave her pretty much the same reading Madame Maude had. “She said she saw me parting with a tall, dark man, turning away for good.…” When, two days after that, a third psychic, Mrs. Mohamed Ali, whom Larry Brown set high store by, read her cards and told her yet again that she would divorce Paul, would remarry happily, and would “meet great success” through her work, Essie was elated at the thrice-repeated fortune.⁶⁶

Just before Christmas, Ma Goode and Pauli arrived in London for a visit from Kitzbühel. In a hired Daimler, Paul and Essie went to Victoria Station to meet them, and Paul leapt from the car when the train arrived and hoisted Pauli to his shoulder—they “seemed very happy together,” Essie wrote in her diary. On Christmas Day they had a family dinner, and after it Paul took Pauli to the Palladium to see Peter Pan with Jean Forbes-Robertson. On December 29 he again spent most of the day with the boy, then left in the evening to go out with Yolande. The following day Paul sailed alone on the Olympic for another tour of the States. He stopped at the flat early in the morning to say goodbye to Essie and Pauli, while Yolande waited downstairs in her car to drive him to the ship in Southampton.