Berlin, Moscow, Films
(1934–1937)
Because there was no through train to Moscow, the Robesons and Marie Seton had to lay over in Berlin for the whole day of December 21. It proved to be a nightmare. Berlin was not the city Robeson remembered from almost five years before, when he had played Emperor Jones there and marveled at its vivacity and freedom from color discrimination. The Nazis were now in full charge, and he felt the change immediately. On the walk from Friedrichstrasse Station to the hotel, his dark skin drew instant attention—surreptitious glances from passers-by, contemptuous stares from storm troopers. On arriving at the hotel, he turned silent, lying on the bed and staring at the ceiling. Essie put in a call to a Jewish friend they had known in 1930, a “highly-cultivated” man they had liked. He came by the hotel, furtive and frightened, and told them of the horrors of the mounting persecution. He looked like “a living corpse, skeleton head, haggard eyes,” Essie wrote in her diary; he was “terrified.” After the man left, Paul, upset and angry, decided they should stick close to the hotel until time for the train departure.1
When they made their way to the station that evening, Paul and Marie went to find the train while Essie went to look after the luggage. An older woman stared in angry disbelief at the sight of a black man and a white woman together, then took her complaint to three uniformed men standing on the platform. When they looked over in Paul’s direction, he “could read the hatred in their eyes”; it reminded him of a lynch mob. He had been conditioned all his life to maintain a calm exterior, but he also remembered what his brother Reeve used to tell him: “If you have to go, take one with you.” “I took a step forward,” Paul told a reporter many years later, and “they could read something in my eyes.” For whatever reasons of their own, the men moved off. When Essie joined them a few minutes later, there was still (as she wrote in her diary), “a terrible feeling of wolves waiting to spring,” but they managed to board the train without further incident. “For a long time after the train moved out of Berlin,” Marie Seton later wrote, “Paul sat hunched in the corner of the compartment staring out into the darkness.”2
A very different reception awaited them in the Soviet Union. At the frontier, the customs house walls were covered with the slogan “Workers of the World Unite!” (in several languages) and with huge murals of scenes from farm and factory. The customs inspectors, enchanted with Paul’s fluent Russian, let Essie through with all her trunks and bags. (“Paul’s Russian is even more practical than he had hoped,” Essie wrote the Van Vechtens, “and everyone is astounded and delighted when he speaks. I do what I can with my German, and get pretty far with it.”) On the train that night they contentedly drank wineglasses full of vodka before dinner, watched a heavy moon rise over the steppes, and listened to “some lovely gypsy music” on the radio. Next morning, at the Moscow railroad station, an entire delegation greeted them—Sergei Eisenstein and his cameraman, Edward Tisse; the head of the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS); the Soviet playwright Alexander Afinogenov (whose Fear had recently been a sensation) and his mulatto American wife, Genia; and several black Americans living in the U.S.S.R., including Essie’s two brothers, John and Frank Goode. The Goodes, sympathetic to the Soviet experiment, had decided to try living in a socialist land and thus far were enthusiastic over the experiment. John had gotten work as a bus driver at the Foreign Workers’ Club garage, and Frank, more recently arrived, had—as a towering, powerfully built man—the prospect of being billed as a “Black Samson” in a wrestling troupe tour of circuses and carnivals. He “is already acclimated,” Essie wrote her mother, but she didn’t like the looks of John—“cold, and worn, and old.” During their stay, Essie loaded him up with warm underwear and a heavy leather coat, paid rent for six months on a room he could have to himself, and left him enough foreign money to buy scarce eggs, meat, and vegetables till spring (while they were still there, John turned “from gray to pink,” Essie contentedly reported to Ma Goode).3
Following their initial reception at the railroad station, the Robesons were taken to their suite in the National Hotel near Red Square. They found a “magnificent” set of rooms, four huge windows overlooking the square, parquet floors, fine, heavy furniture, a marble bath, a white bear rug—and a grand piano. Interviewers and reporters poured in as soon as the Robesons arrived. “I’ve come to the USSR on a holiday,” he told them, to visit the theaters (“the most interesting in the world”), hear the opera, see the country. His chief interest, he said, would be to “study the Soviet national minority policy as it operates among the peoples of Central Asia.” (As he told the London Observer in the spring of 1935, “I’m not interested in any European culture, not even the culture of Moscow—but I am interested in the culture of Uzbekistan.”) Eisenstein stayed for lunch that first day, and he and Paul quickly discovered that they liked each other immensely.4
The next two weeks were a whirlwind of activity and of rising enthusiasm, Robeson for the Russians, the Russians for Robeson. Nights at the theater and opera, long talks with Eisenstein, gala banquets, private screenings, trips to hospitals, children’s centers, factories—events tumbled one after another, a heady mix of new, confirming experiences, all in the context of a warm embrace (“The people have gone mad over him,” Essie wrote home). Christmas Eve was spent at the home of Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, and his English wife, Ivy. The Robesons drove out to the Litvinovs’ with Eisenstein, Marie Seton, and the conductor Albert Coates along the Leningrad Highway, the air bitterly cold, the roads full of ice, the car skidding from side to side. On arriving, they found a broad white-columned house set in the midst of a stunning pine forest, a feast complete with chocolate ice cream—and two Red Army generals for dinner companions. The redoubtable and cultivated General Tukhachevsky (executed in 1937 for “plotting” against Stalin) sat next to Essie, and the two chatted along amiably in German.5
After dinner there was exuberant dancing; the Foreign Minister cut up with something that resembled an Irish jig, and Eisenstein demonstrated—to general hilarity—the dance steps he thought he had learned at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. After exhaustion set in and the guests had been refortified with a monumental Russian tea, Paul, simply and gently, said he wanted to sing some of his people’s songs. When he finished, Litvinov put his hand on Robeson’s arm and told him how glad they were he had come to the Soviet Union, that they understood the plight of blacks in the United States and “were one” with them. Litvinov, Essie wrote Ma Goode, was “grand” (though she thought Ivy “extremely ordinary and disappointing”—“Don’t repeat this, for heaven’s sake”). She also described to her mother, offhandedly, how at one point during the day she had “cried with the cold.” Marie Seton remembers the tears, but accounts for them differently:
Paul got such intense warmth and affection from everybody.… She didn’t get the same enthusiastic love and affection. And it’s the only time I ever, ever saw her break down and cry.… I think Sergei [Eisenstein] and I were the only two people who actually saw her.… She defended herself by saying it was the cold.6
Back in Moscow that evening, the Robesons went to spend an hour with William Patterson, whom they had known from the early twenties, when he had been married to Essie’s closest friend, Minnie Sumner. In the interval Pat had become a committed Communist, and was deeply involved in political work, most recently with the International Labor Defense organization that was spearheading protest against the imprisonment of the Scottsboro boys (the nine black youths accused in the South of raping two white women). Worn down by his efforts, and suffering from tuberculosis, Pat had come to Moscow for treatment and lay seriously ill. The Robesons found him in bed in a dingy, sparsely furnished room—but talking “as enthusiastically as ever.” Essie and Pat had never liked each other, and four days later Robeson went back to see him alone. Pat later told Marie that on the second visit he encouraged Paul to return home and participate actively in the black struggle, but that Paul, though fully agreeing with the importance of the struggle, simply could not see himself living in the States.7
On New Year’s Eve, the great filmmaker Pudovkin collected the Robesons for a private showing of End of St. Petersburg and Storm over Asia. That was followed by a midnight celebration with Eisenstein at Dom Kino, the House of the Cinema Workers, where the revelries got boisterous and the dancing frenzied—Essie, uneasy at the “brutal kicking and knocking about,” decided that the Russians “are a rough people.” That impression was confirmed the following day. Stopping off briefly during their New Year’s Day rounds at John Goode’s garage, Paul sang and got a raucous welcome—but Essie was a little put off by the “vicious shoving” and the “sickening smell of cabbage” everywhere. Still, Essie was on the whole impressed with what she saw in the Soviet Union—with the improved status of women, the quality of care in the hospitals, the diet and preventive injections given the children in nurseries, and the psychology of childrearing Alexander Luria expounded on during the private tour he gave her (and the visiting left-wing American Muriel Draper) of his Twin Nursery Kindergarten (Luria also told them there was “no room” for psychoanalysis in the Soviet Union—“everyone was too busy”).8
Paul was more impressed still, above all with what he found out about “the minority question.” Far into one night, he and Eisenstein discussed the so-called primitives of Central Asia—the Yakuts, Nentses, Kirghiz, Tadzhiks. Eisenstein said he disliked the unfair implications of inferiority which the term “primitive” conveyed—which was why, he explained, the Soviets had preferred to use the phrase “national minorities.” On another day, Eisenstein came by with Alexander Luria, who told Robeson that one of his best students was a Yakut, a man who performed “magic rites” alone in his room, yet had “no difficulty whatever” with scientific and conceptual ideas. On a visit to the Technical and Theater School of the National Minorities, the Robesons were intrigued at the mix of faces and colors, at the excellence of the work produced, and at the declared purpose of the training—to send graduates back to their own peoples to form theater groups. Nearly thirty years later, Robeson himself referred, in a speech, to coming in contact during his 1934 trip with “a people called the Samoyeds.… They had come from the northern country, from the so-called Eskimo peoples. ‘Samoyed’ in Russian means ‘self-eater.’ ‘Self-eater,’ that was their own name in 1917, which certainly presumed that they were a backward people.… In 1934 I found out, in the Soviet Union, that there was no such thing on earth as a backward people.”9
He also found strong sympathy for his own “national minority.” At dinner with the theater director Alexander Tairov, Robeson was impressed at how widely the talk ranged over African art, music, and culture. And when he went to see a Children’s Theater production, the play turned out to be about how life in an African village was disrupted by greedy white hunters. At intermission, a little boy rushed up to Robeson, hugged him around the knees, and begged him to stay in the Soviet Union—“You will be happy here with us.” Not surprisingly, Essie wrote the Van Vechtens that “We both love it here, and are profoundly interested in what they are doing.”10
The Robesons talked with some of the “minorities” themselves. They spent a lively evening with Jack and Si-lan Chen, whose father, Eugene Chen, had been the first Foreign Minister of the Chinese Republic under Sun Yat-sen, and whose combined ancestry of Trinidad black, Chinese, and English struck Robeson as an ideal blend of cultures. The beautiful Si-lan, a dancer married to Eisenstein’s American student Jay Leyda, did not at first take to Robeson: he went “rambling off on an endless comparison of Chinese and African sculpture,” seemed unsure of “the genuineness of his Soviet welcome,” and “determined to be cautious with all new acquaintances.” Si-lan was herself fierce in her devotion to the Revolution. Her art, she said, was designed to be “nationalist [Chinese] in form, and socialist in content”—a precise expression of Paul’s emerging wish to combine the integrity of ethnic cultural forms with a humane cosmopolitan vision, and after their first encounter, Si-lan found him “much more relaxed and normal.”11
Robeson also talked at length with American blacks resident in the Soviet Union. VOKS threw a banquet for the Robesons to which most of the black community in Moscow came; Robert Robinson (an Afro-American toolmaker who had come to the U.S.S.R. in 1930 in search of a job—but not out of any ideological sympathy) remembers the reception as excelling “by far” any such occasion he had attended—formal attire, “exquisite” food, elaborate entertainment. On another evening, the black community itself fêted the Robesons. Essie thought the expatriate Afro-Americans had chosen to marry “very third rate” Russian women; Robert Robinson, in turn, thought Essie more than a little vain and arrogant. According to Essie’s diary, all the black Americans expressed deep contentment with life in the Soviet Union, a society, they told the Robesons, that was entirely free of racial prejudice. Robeson became convinced that the Soviets had solved the minorities question—“in the only way it can be solved, by granting self-determination to all nations within its boundaries.”12
Robeson realized “how much my shy, sensitive Pauli would enjoy” the “sincere friendliness” of the Soviet citizenry toward people of color, and he and Essie began to consider the idea of resettling Pauli for a few years in Russia. He had occasionally stayed with his parents in the Buckingham Street flat in London, but essentially he had continued to live with and be raised by Ma Goode. Currently the two were living in New York, where Pauli, just past his seventh birthday, had finally found some children of his own age to play with. Essie was content with that arrangement for the time being, but she didn’t want Pauli to “get like those other niggers in New York,” and she warned Ma Goode not to take him “to any nigger beach” and “to keep him up to scratch”—“The more careless his surroundings are, the more sloppy the children, the more important it is to keep his manners perfect, and charming.…” For his part, Paul had paid scant attention to his son’s upbringing (“I have no fatherly instincts about him at all,” Essie quoted Paul as saying; “I’m busy with my work and he has people to look after him”), interfering only when he felt Essie and Ma Goode were too incessantly drumming “manners” into the boy—“The poor little fellow has enough to learn, anyway, without being taught a lot of unimportant stuff.” But Paul did want his son “to go to America at regular intervals, so he will know his own people.… I want him to have roots. I want him to know Negroes.… I don’t want him to be prejudiced. I want him to know and feel that he is a Negro.” Yet for now, having had the idea of placing Pauli in a Soviet school for a few years, Paul actively investigated the possibility. He decided that, if a spring concert tour in the U.S.S.R. worked out, they (in Essie’s words) would “go thoroughly into the question of living conditions here” and, if those passed muster, would bring Pauli and Ma Goode over for two years. They felt Pauli would adjust easily, since he was already fluent in German, a language widely spoken in the Soviet Union.13
During his two weeks in Russia, Robeson saw more of Sergei Eisenstein than anyone else. The two men were together on nearly a daily basis. Eisenstein arranged introductions, accompanied the Robesons on visits, took them on a tour of the film institute (GIK) where he taught, and introduced Paul to a packed audience of artists at a special party for him at the Dom Kino. Essie reported home that Eisenstein was “marvelous company”—“He is young, and great fun, with brains and a sense of humor.” Eisenstein also screened his own films, General Line and Potemkin, for them—Robeson later told a reporter that he thought General Line “easily the finest film I’ve seen”—and many a time the two men talked far into the night about the possibility of working together on a picture. Eisenstein had been trying for a long while to make a film about the Haitian revolution, and he had tentatively entitled it “Black Majesty” (earlier he had offered it to Paramount but was swiftly turned down). At the moment, Shumyatsky was considering the proposal, and if it went through, Eisenstein hoped to cast Robeson as Christophe (or possibly Dessalines) and the Yiddish actor and director Solomon Mikhoels as Toussaint. Eisenstein hoped to use Robeson in several other projects as well—over the next two or three years, they would consider doing a film together based on a Pearl Buck novel, a stage production of the American working-class play Stevedore, and, after civil war broke out in Spain, a film on that conflict. All these projects would have to wait for official approval from the Soviet authorities.14
Toward the end of his stay, Robeson sat down beside Eisenstein and talked quietly about the gratitude he felt for the warmth of his welcome. He had hesitated to come, he said, had not really been convinced that the Soviet Union would be any different for him from any other place. But he was leaving filled with enthusiasm for what he had seen and heard—and deeply moved at his personal reception, at “the warm interest, the … expression of sincere comradeship toward me, as a black man, as a member of one of the most oppressed of human groups.” In the Soviet Union he had felt “like a human being for the first time since I grew up. Here I am not a Negro but a human being. Before I came I could hardly believe that such a thing could be.… Here, for the first time in my life, I walk in full human dignity.”15
Still, Robeson was not yet ready entirely to commit himself to a socialist—or, indeed, any other—political vision. Soon after he returned to London, he told a reporter that his interest in the Soviet Union “was, and is, completely non-political,” perhaps deliberately exaggerating his lack of interest in public so that in private he might be better able to mull over options. Three years later, after he had become fully engaged politically, Essie wrote William Patterson that “Paul, in his quiet easy way, has apparently been fundamentally interested for a long time, but has been taking it easy,” delaying overt public commitment until his instincts and his understanding could become consonant. Robeson’s deeply disturbing exposure to fascism in Berlin had been immediately followed by his strongly affirmative exposure to communism in the Soviet Union. (Stalin’s forced collectivization programs were already well advanced, and famine was already raging in the Ukraine—but of all this Robeson saw and heard nothing.) Emotionally linked in his experience, they would thereafter be centrally connected in his psyche. Nazi fascism and Soviet communism became opposite, symbolic representations of evil and good, shorthand explanations ever after for opposing forces in the universe. The Soviets, understandably, helped along the courtship; Ivan Maisky, the Soviet Ambassador in London, henceforth regularly invited the Robesons to Embassy events, including lunch with George Bernard Shaw.16
“Paul is extraordinarily happy these days,” Essie wrote her mother in February 1935, a month after their return, “and it seems permanent.” Fania Marinoff lunched with them at the fashionable Ivy and reported to Carlo that “they both looked marvelous and Essie seems very happy,” though “Paul was full of himself as usual.” Part of his new agenda was to earn enough money in the next eighteen months to free himself from financial worry, allowing more time for political activity. The plan was straightforward: a two-month concert tour of the English provinces, then tryout openings in small theaters for two new plays with politically promising themes: Basalik, about an African chief who resists white encroachment, and Stevedore, a play of racial and trade-union conflict that had already successfully debuted in New York. If the two plays went well, Robeson planned to tour them in repertory theaters for six months in the provinces. Having “made a fortune,” he would then take a year off and go to Africa and back to the U.S.S.R. Not everyone, however, was prepared to believe in Robeson’s conversion to a more politically conscious role. When Nancy Cunard heard that he had agreed to appear in Stevedore, she wrote Arthur Schomburg, “The news that Robeson wants to act in it is encouraging. But there, between you and I, my dear Arthur, with R. it is more uncertain. It is a strange ‘case,’ in fact. He has given his talent for the German victims of Hitler; he has never, as far as I know, done a thing for his race, anyway in England. So, we shall see.”17
The concert tour went according to plan. In February and March, Robeson sang seventeen times in the English provinces, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. He drew large crowds everywhere, despite the economic depression and even though he essentially sang his old program, making few additions to his repertory from that body of world folk music to which he had recently felt drawn. Perhaps he recognized that his ability to hold a popular audience hinged to some extent on the familiarity of his offerings. In any case, the warm welcome reassured him that his recent political outspokenness had not cost him his audience. After two standing-room-only concerts in Belfast and Dublin, Essie wrote her mother, “Everybody tells him he mustn’t say this, and he mustn’t say that, or the public will be angry with him and desert him. Well, see how they desert him.”18
The critics, recognizing that he had become a popular idol in Britain, tended to applaud the charm of his personality, his modesty, deep feeling, simplicity, and sincerity of manner—rather than to belabor technical points of musicianship. Where they did, the advice offered was contradictory. Some of the critics continued to express the hope that Robeson would expand his repertory; others chided him for the songs he had already added, finding them unsuited to his “Negro” voice. Robeson paid the press scant attention. The distorted newspaper accounts of his trip to Russia had taught him to discount the accuracy of their coverage. “They have twisted what I say about the Soviet Union around so badly that now I give them written statements,” he told a reporter from Soviet Russia Today.19
The three-performance tryout of Basalik (step two of Robeson’s agenda) faltered at the Arts Theatre Club. The play’s strong ideological appeal to Robeson was not buttressed by much artistry. Basalik, chief of an African country bordering on a British protectorate, carries off the British governor’s wife as a hostage—treating her subsequent sexual advances with royal disdain—in a successful effort to extract a promise that his people will be left in peace. The formula of the Noble Savage dictated that Robeson, as Basalik, would do little more than stand around in regal silhouette, making majestic, monosyllabic noises. The critics handled him sympathetically, commiserating with his inability to find a vehicle suitable to both his gifts and his political integrity, but they gave no encouragement to any notion of extending the play’s run beyond three performances.20
The following month, May 1935, Robeson appeared in the play Stevedore, directed by André Van Gyseghem (who had directed the London production of All God’s Chillun in 1933). Stevedore had had a considerable success the year before in New York at the Theatre Union (a group which had come together to stage plays with working-class content and at inexpensive box-office prices): Brooks Atkinson had hailed it in the Times as “a swift and exciting drama of a race riot seasoned with class propaganda.” In London the play was performed mostly with nonprofessional actors; Mrs. Marcus Garvey and George Padmore (the influential West Indian Marxist) helped recruit black cast members from various social strata, ranging from medical students to African seamen recently departed from their tribal villages. Robeson’s old friend John Payne supervised the singing in the play, and Larry Brown appeared in the supporting role of Sam Oxley. The script exemplified Robeson’s hope of fostering socially useful art. It tells the story of Lonnie Thompson, a black worker falsely accused of raping a white woman, who eludes a lynch mob, rallies his fellow blacks, wins the support of a group of white union members, and routs the rampaging mob—though Thompson himself is shot dead. Frankly propagandistic, the play combined the theme of the oppression of American blacks with a message of hope: the ability of a confederation of like-minded workers of every race and creed to unite against injustice.21
The play’s good intentions were embedded in a melodramatic structure that lent it a certain vigor, but at the cost of complexity. As James Agate complained in the Sunday Times, the play “presents an ungraded picture of the virtuous savage and his vile oppressor,” useless as a contribution toward solving a social problem because “its simplistic stereotypes did not match up with real life.” Some of the other critics were more impressed with the play than Agate was, but almost all (including Agate) applauded Robeson’s performance. Given the handicaps of an obvious script and an overcharged production, the consensus was that his “extraordinarily vivid and arresting personality” had been shown to advantage. Nancy Cunard, who had been skeptical of Robeson’s intentions, not only liked the play (“extremely valuable in the racial-social question—it is straight from the shoulder”) but also wrote in The Crisis that Robeson “is much more real than in such other parts as ‘Othello’ (which does not suit him).”22
Because the play did not draw enough of an audience to extend its run, Robeson’s plans for doing both Basalik and Stevedore in repertory for six months in the provinces had to be canceled. He continued, though, to get a variety of attractive offers. Soon after Stevedore closed, the German director G. W. Pabst offered Robeson the leading role of Mephisto in a film adaptation of Gounod’s Faust. “This picture will be in no sense a Hollywood picture,” Pabst wrote him, but, rather, “an attempt to make [an] artistic product of the highest kind.” To that end, he had asked George Antheil to arrange the score and Fritz Reiner, director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, to conduct it. Antheil, who knew Robeson, also wrote to urge him to accept the role (“I am sure that it will be a great production”). But he decided to pass on the offer, shying away from European opera, which he felt ill-suited to his voice and unsympathetic to his temperament. Pabst let him know that he thought he’d made a mistake—“I am sure we could have done a marvelous thing together.” The previous year Robeson had turned down an opera closer to his vocal and personal needs—Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Gershwin had offered Robeson the part of Porgy and told him he was “bearing in mind Paul’s voice in writing it.” But, despite additional pleading from DuBose Heyward, who was doing the libretto, Robeson decided against the role.23
He also declined an offer of quite another sort that came to him from a group of students at Edinburgh University. They wanted to nominate him for the Lord Rectorship, an honorary position decided upon by student election and involving no obligation other than a speech at investiture. It was, one of the students wrote him, “a gesture toward yourself and toward your race which for its national and international importance, ought to be encouraged.” Robeson declined with “grateful thanks,” saying that he expected to be spending a great deal of time abroad during the next three years, “some of it in Africa and some in Asia.”24
He did accept two other offers: to portray Toussaint L’Ouverture in a stage play by the radical Trinidadian C. L. R. James, then residing in London, and to re-create his role of Joe (for a forty-thousand-dollar salary) in the film version of Show Boat. Having been unable to combine socially significant work with commercial success, he temporarily split them apart: the Toussaint play would satisfy his political needs, Show Boat his financial ones. (He had hoped that by now Sergei Eisenstein would have succeeded in pushing through their proposal to do a film on Haiti together, but Eisenstein’s letters contained no encouragement.) Show Boat was first up. At the end of September 1935, the Robesons left for Hollywood.25
They stopped on the way in Pittsfield, Massachusetts to see Pauli. He had remained under the tutelage of his grandmother, to whom the Robesons sent eighty pounds a month. Ma Goode’s own theories on childraising included the peculiar notion that touching or cuddling a child was tantamount to spoiling him. Essie attempted at least indirect supervision through long letters—of instruction to her mother and of exhortation to Pauli (Paul occasionally appended for his son a brief “Hello Fellow!” note, and at one point wrote him, “… I love you very, very much and I’m making a New Year’s resolution that I’ll see a great deal of my boy the next year and all years thereafter”). Essie commented to her mother at length about everything from Pauli’s schooling to his wet bathing suits. She wanted Pauli brought up, she wrote, in the same way she had been:
to feel perfectly at home and at ease, in any company … to consider myself a pretty swell human being, and to look for human beings everywhere, in any walk of life … to open up my mind and to think with it … to do impossible things … to be as good as I could … never … to think I am being looked down upon. I unconsciously feel I’m top dog. That’s the reason I am at home in any society. I want Paul to have that. It saves a lot of hurt feelings, imaginary slights, etc.26
To Pauli, Essie tried to convey egalitarian values she wasn’t always able to live up to in her own life, cautioning him against snobbism in any form, and encouraging an effort at self-assertion she herself had never needed. She did not want him deferring to any authority, including that of parent or teacher, or ever obeying without question (“if and when he comes under my control,” she wrote her mother, “[I] will teach him to question everything and everybody”; she wanted him “to speak up for his rights”). She especially did not want Pauli internalizing any disparagements thrown at him as a black child. Hearing that a classmate had called him a “nigger,” Essie wrote him a long letter about the importance of being proud of his color:
We, too, were called “nigger” when we were young. But we didn’t mind very much.… I honestly think that white people call us all niggers, because they are jealous of us. They only call us nigger, when we do something better than they do, or when they are angry.… All white people, or nearly all white people, have no colour at all. They are just white. Some of them have rosy cheeks, but that is all.… We think the colour is beautiful, and much more interesting than just plain uninteresting white.
Hearing that Pauli had called another boy a “sissy,” Essie chastised him for indulging in equally unjust name-calling: “There are a lot of very nice children who are not well and strong, and who cannot play games. It may not be their fault at all. I don’t want you to hate them, and fight them. That is horrid.… I’d much rather you didn’t hate anybody. Hating people makes you nasty, yourself. Don’t hate him, don’t fight him. If you don’t like him, just leave him alone.” Along with the detailed comments on his behavior, she reassured Pauli that “It is a great sadness to us that we cannot have you with us to live,” promising that “some day, soon, I hope we will all settle down together.”27
The Robesons also stopped for a brief time in New York—to take in some theater, to see the Van Vechtens and other friends, and to confer with Oscar Hammerstein II about the Show Boat film. Then they headed out to the coast, stopping off in Chicago so that Essie could interview Joe Louis (who had recently defeated Max Baer) for a collection of “Negro portraits” she hoped to do as a book. “I found him charming, and very very simple and natural,” she wrote back to the Van Vechtens. “He only goes clam when you take him out of his field. He’s as sweet as he can be, and crazy about the RACE.” What with Joe Louis’s victory and the arrival of Robeson in Hollywood, Van Vechten predicted to Alfred Knopf that “there is going to be a great deal of talk again about Negroes this winter,” citing Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia and the premiere of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess as two additional reasons. By November the Robesons, along with Larry Brown, were settled in a “grand flat” in Pasadena, each of them in his or her own bedroom “so we can all live happily and comfortably, without getting under each other’s heels,” lemon trees in the backyard, orange trees outside the kitchen window, and enormous poinsettias lining the walk from the street to the house. “Its all rather picture post cardy,” Essie wrote Hattie Boiling, “and you’re never quite sure its real, but its lovely.”28
The filming proved a happy experience; the relationships were good all around (possibly excepting Allan Jones—“If you saw the Four Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera,” Essie wrote home, “you have seen our Ravenel, who is Allan Jones”). Robeson especially liked Helen Morgan, who played Julie, and was delighted with James Whale’s direction. He felt he learned a great deal from Whale about how to work in front of a camera and how to use his vocal strengths to maximum advantage. He was in marvelous voice and spirits throughout the filming; when he finished singing “Ol’ Man River” through the second time, the members of the orchestra applauded, and members of the technical crews frequently crowded the set to watch him (“We are proudest of the enthusiasm and interest of the property men and the electricians,” Essie wrote. “If you can interest them, you’re good”).29
The shoot was condensed into a two-month period so Robeson could get back to London in time for rehearsals of C. L. R. James’s play about Toussaint. Given Show Boat’s cast of three thousand and the lavish production settings, that meant hectic scheduling; Whale shot nearly two hundred thousand feet of film in little more than six weeks. Essie had no trouble keeping busy on her own, spending much of her time wandering around the film sets and reporting back impressions to her friends (Carole Lombard—who was shooting Spinster Dinner with Preston Foster—is “a gorgeous bitch … and as unrestrained as the air”). Newly trained in anthropology, Essie regaled Hattie Boiling with the strange customs of the natives: “The former studio manager of Universal City made it a rule that the employees who punched a time clock had to get off the sidewalk when stars, or people who ‘Got screen credit’ came along. They were just like the niggers of the place.”30
When the shooting was over, James Whale wrote Robeson to say, “Your ‘Joe’ is really magnificent,” and to express the hope that “I will have the pleasure of directing you in a starring vehicle soon.” The likely vehicle for a time seemed to be the C. L. R. James play, Black Majesty (it had the same title as Eisenstein’s proposed film). Whale, as well as Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, became excited about the script after Robeson showed it to them, and they immediately bought the film rights. “What we all three want to do,” Whale wrote Robeson, “is to get you going in ‘BLACK MAJESTY,’” and Hammerstein thought the film “must be done on a very broad scale or not at all.” The picture would cost less to make in England, and Hammerstein (perhaps momentarily forgetting Sanders of the River) felt “such an unusual undertaking will have a better chance with Korda who is a man of taste and courage, untrammeled by the superstitions and the conventional convictions of Hollywood producers.” Besides, Hammerstein wrote Robeson, “Popular as you are here, you are even more popular in England.” But three months later, Hammerstein’s interest had waned, and he wrote Essie that “it would be better to keep BLACK MAJESTY in abeyance.” The postponement became permanent.31
While the film languished, Robeson tried out the stage version. Arriving back in London late in January 1936, he went directly into rehearsals for the James play. (For the unknowing, the Sunday Times identified Toussaint as “the subject of one of Wordsworth’s sonnets.”) Sponsored by the Stage Society, the play was given on several Sunday evenings in March 1936. The critics thought Robeson made the most of his material but didn’t think much of the material, denigrating it as a “careful prose record” while elevating his performance above it. “By the rules that apply to others,” The Times wrote, his acting “is clumsy, but his appearance and voice entitle him to rules of his own.” The critic on the Evening Standard lamented that “Japhet in search of a father was not a more forlorn figure than Mr. Paul Robeson in search of a play.”32
Still, it was an experience Robeson valued, not least for the opportunity it gave him to broaden his friendship with C. L. R. James. The two men had been acquainted before the production, but they got to know each other much better during it and remained in contact over the years. James recalls that Robeson’s power onstage was primarily due not to his acting skills per se but to the immensity of his personality: “He was a man not only of great gentleness but of great command.… The moment he came onto the stage, the whole damn thing changed. It’s not a question of acting.… The physique and the voice, the spirit behind him—you could see it when he was on stage.… But he wasn’t a John Gielgud. No. And I say that not with any desire to discredit him but to place him historically.”33
James had the impression that Robeson was a man of deep “reserve” and was “detached” from any interest in the glamour or material rewards of a theatrical career—though not, in James’s opinion, because it had as yet been superseded by any profound political commitment. James—who was himself a committed Trotskyist—never felt that Robeson became political “in the sense that Richard Wright did”—that is, “a revolutionary political person, whose whole life was spent, wherever possible, in striking blows at capitalist society.” James felt that Robeson came to be “on the side of the revolution; he was on the side of black people; he was on the side of all who were seeking emancipation. But that wasn’t his whole life.” Where Richard Wright, in James’s opinion, “would have stopped doing anything to strike a serious political blow,” Robeson “was not that type.” He was, rather, “a distinguished person giving himself to revolutionary views”—which was why George Padmore, “a hundred-percent Marxist,” always felt “a certain reserve” toward Robeson, even while he “admired and thought very much of him.”34
Because Robeson kept his own counsel until he had taken whatever amount of time he needed to digest a given issue, his behavior could be characterized from the outside according to the viewer’s own script. At exactly the time when James was doubting Robeson’s temperamental ability to commit himself to Marxism, Emma Goldman—who as an anarchist had as early as 1922 expressed her disillusionment with the Soviet system as a betrayal of the Revolution—was expressing concern that he might have already overcommitted himself. In response to a letter from Essie describing how happy her brothers were in Russia, Emma replied that the Soviets might have done away with “the barbarity of racial differences,” but much else in their system was deplorable. She had heard “the claims of the Communists that Paul has become a full fledged Communist,” but whether the reports were true or not, and she hoped not, “I love and admire Paul’s genius so much that [the claims] … could have no effect on me.… Politics and politicians come and go, they rarely leave a ripple on the surface of the human struggle. But creative genius goes on for ever. Besides, I never believe what the Communist press writes about anybody.” Emma’s long-standing commitment to anarchism and Paul’s growing attachment to socialism did not get in the way of their cherishing their relationship. According to Freda Diamond, Paul told her that Emma once picketed a political event in which he was participating; he walked off the platform, took Emma’s sign out of her hand, gave her a hug, handed her back the sign, and then returned to the platform.35
Robeson, meanwhile, continued to educate himself. Essie reported to the Van Vechtens that Paul had become so excited over Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s 1935 book, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (a work full of glowing predictions and devoid of criticism), that he read bits aloud to her, “marked it all up with pencil marginings,” and “turned down pages everywhere.” He also read most of the leading Africanists of the day—Westerman, Oldham, Willoughby, de Groot, Soothill, Levy-Bruhl, and Hornbustel—and he wrote Melville Herskovits, the pioneering anthropological authority on Africa, with whom he had briefly roomed in the early twenties when both were graduate students at Columbia, asking for additional reading suggestions; Herskovits sent a long bibliography and a large envelope full of reprints. Robeson joined Jomo Kenyatta, Z. K. Matthews, and other guests at gatherings at the West African Students Union, receiving “prolonged applause” when he spoke, at one such event, about the need for Africans to “wake up and do something for themselves.” He asked Langston Hughes for some of his “left poems” for possible conversion to songs, and Hughes sent him three about lynching and four about the Revolution (“Breaking the bonds of the darker races, Breaking the chains that have held for years …”). When Mei Lan-fang, the famous male interpreter of female roles for the Peking Opera, arrived in London, Robeson sought him out to discuss Chinese culture. When Charles Spurgeon Johnson, the Fisk University sociologist who had been one of the guiding spirits of the Harlem Renaissance, came to London (he had written ahead to ask Paul about hotel accommodations, wanting, for the sake of his wife, to avoid “embarrassment”), he and Robeson had a long talk about the prospects of “race war.”36
Robeson also sought out Norman Leys, a white doctor and a committed socialist who had lived in various parts of East Africa from 1902 to 1918, written the influential book Kenya, and spent a lifetime pleading the African cause in Britain. Leys recognized the cultural richness of the African past but felt that colonialism had already destroyed its most vital aspects and that traditional African institutions had not, in any case, reflected an intrinsically different set of human needs and aspirations. He saw African tribalism as a source of weakness, a hereditary form of division that had facilitated European exploitation, and he believed Africa should modernize along Western lines. He and Robeson disagreed on many matters, yet respected each other’s opinions. Leys thought Robeson judged “aesthetically rather than morally or rationally”—admitting he was “a Westerner” even while claiming that “all American Negroes have kept much of their inherited African culture.” In his view, Robeson wished to keep alive “a specifically African philosophy and way of life” where it existed and revive it where it did not, even while recognizing that he “is a heretic, for his own people want to be 100% Americans and deny their possession of racial characteristics” that he asserts they still have—and although, further, he recognized that “Negrophobes are delighted with the doctrine of a special racial character” (which didn’t in itself disprove its existence). Leys was putting his finger on real ambivalences within Robeson’s evolving views. Even in his own notebooks for 1936, Robeson continually veered back and forth, now emphasizing that the Afro-American was “essentially decadent” and would be “happy if tomorrow he could disappear as a group into the American conglomerate mass,” now emphasizing instead that, “emotionally, the modern American Negro would find himself quite at home in Africa,” insisting that “the bond is one not only of race but more important of culture—of attitudes to life, a way of living.”37
Robeson attempted to resolve his own ambivalence by thinking of the assimilationist black as “deluded” in insisting upon his “European heritage to the exclusion of his African one”—in ignoring the “fact” that “in every black man flows the rhythm of Africa; it has taken different forms in America, in the Caribbean, in South America, but the base of all these expressions is Africa.” The assimilationist was also deluded, Robeson believed, in thinking that the way out of bondage lay in “deliverance by some act of a God who has been curiously deaf for many centuries; for certainly if prayer and song and supplication could effect a release, the Negro in America would long ago have been free.” Robeson offered as his “humble opinion that we can get nowhere until we are proud of being black—and by the same token demand respect of other people of the world. For no one respects a man who does not respect himself.”38
When talking to Leys, Robeson spoke repeatedly of his belief in some unique essence that blacks carried with them from their African past. Finding his ideas “vague and confused,” Leys pressed Robeson as to whether he thought this “essence” was inherently racial or traditionally cultural in origin. He could not extract an answer that satisfied him. (Perhaps because Robeson did not wish to give it. In his private jottings at just this time, he wrote: “I base nothing on distinctions of race. They are too vague. But color distinctions cannot be avoided. Neither can cultural differences.”) If African “differentness” was inherently racial, Leys was prepared to agree with Robeson that some tangible basis existed for asserting the future possibility of unifying all Africans under one cultural banner. But Leys found “no evidence extant so far to prove the existence of special racial mentalities.” If, on the other hand, Robeson believed the African was different because of his special tribal heritage, Leys was prepared to argue that the past had no automatic claims on our loyalty: “If there is such a thing as a body of African tradition, I see no reason to think it deserves a higher place in African life than the O.T. [Old Testament] or the Sagas or the Vedas.” He deplored the destruction by foreigners of Kikuyu or Zulu social life, but not when the abandonment of old values resulted from exposure to new ideas: “No-one of us has the right,” Leys argued, “to keep others away from the fruit of that tree” from which they had themselves imbibed, with the usual mixed results of bringing death in one hand and abundant new life in the other—“they have the same right to face the danger as we have.”39
As against Robeson’s wish to preserve and foster the African “essence,” Leys protested that such “deliberate exaltation of a group is bad” in the same way nineteenth-century nationalism was bad: it sanctioned and glorified “exclusiveness.” It did so, moreover, on the assumption that the exposure of Africans to Western ways would inescapably result in a diminishment for Africans. But Western scientific thought—the great bugaboo—was not, in Leys’s view, inherently evil, and could only be portrayed as such when science was misconstrued as mere information rather than a process of discovery; the study of scientific “truth itself cannot be other than a wholesome discipline.” Just as Leys claimed his own “right to the full human heritage,” so he claimed it for Africans:
… if an African finds his personal ideal best fulfilled outside African life he ought to be free to leave it.… World citizenship means in practice maximizing both liberty and variety inside every human group, whether it be family or any larger one not excluding nation and race. Liberty must obviously diminish or destroy characteristics peculiar to the group.
To Robeson such views represented the familiar Western tendency to assign primary value to the needs of the individual rather than the community. He agreed with the ideal of enabling Africans “to become world citizens”; but he continued to hope Africans would employ their opportunities selectively, choosing—as the Chinese had—to incorporate only those aspects of the “newness” that would better help them sustain their traditional emphasis on the needs and values of the collectivity. Robeson wanted to protect an invaluable heritage, Leys to create a still “better” synthesis.40
Through interviews and co-authored articles, Robeson further clarified and expanded his views. He did not doubt, he wrote, that Western science “worked miracles” and through its accumulated knowledge allowed growing power over “the external world.” But that kind of material power had come to be considered the only source of “good,” the “measure of all things.” In his view, the ultimate questions lay not in the realm of knowledge “but of ethics”—which is what Leys had meant in calling his approach “aesthetic” and “unrealistic.” Robeson felt the African heritage, with its concern for the inner life and for community values, had much to recommend it. He could not accept “wealth and luxury as the ultimate goal of human activity”—or the apparent equanimity of a man like H. G. Wells in suggesting (in The Work, Wealth, and Happiness of Mankind) that spiritual needs, the “mystery” of ultimate truths, were outside the bounds of everyday life. Robeson realized that many of his own people admired him, ironically, precisely to the extent that he had become successful on Western terms and had accumulated Western-prized luxuries. “They think I must be happy and proud,” but “deep down inside me I am African, and for me the African life has a much deeper significance.”41
On the other hand, Robeson did not want to be construed as advocating a narrow nationalistic view that equated artificial geographical boundaries with the parameters for maximum human happiness. “I am not a Nationalist,” he asserted; “this belief, I know, has taken firm root in India, and the Near East, and is perhaps spreading. As for the people in that part of the world it may be a natural transition. I, however, am more profoundly impressed by likenesses in cultural forms which seem to transcend the boundaries of Nationality. Whatever be the Social and Economic content of the culture—Archaic, Clan and Tribal organization, Feudalism, Capitalism, or Socialism—this cultural Form seems to persist, and to be of vital importance to the people concerned. I realize that I am one of the very few who persists in suggesting that the African cultural form is in many respects similar to the old Archaic Chinese (Pre-Confucius, Pre-Lao-tse).… This comparison may seem much clearer if you will contrast this old Chinese form with an African form of a high level, namely, that of the Yoruba (Benin), Ashanti, Zulu or Boganda.… So, I am in no way exclusively ‘nationalist’ in pursuing my line of inquiry, and I am as interested in the problems which confront the Chinese people, as well as in those which concern, for example, Abyssinia. To me, the time seems long past when people can afford to think exclusively in terms of national units. The field of activity is far wider.”42
As he became increasingly attracted to the socialist vision, Robeson moved somewhat away from his preoccupation with preserving African culture and toward an international perspective—from urging the primary need of asserting black values to emphasizing the overriding importance of human values. As he wrote in his notebook, he felt “certain that all races, all Peoples are not nearly as different one from the other as textbooks would have it.… Most differences [are] only superficial. History of Mankind proves this. No pure race. No pure culture. No people has lived by itself.” In the voluminous private notes he jotted down during 1936, he complained that “even in as advanced and friendly a country as Russia,” stereotypes of “savage” Africa remained, yet at the same time he was coming to believe that the concern of American Negroes “should be to make America socialist.” Moving somewhat in the direction of Norman Leys, he now began to champion the view that, “if the world is to prosper,” it must be “broadened to transcend national boundaries,” toward the “possible synthesis of, and on the other hand, constant interplay between related cultural forms.” Africa’s geographical location, he felt, “appears to have symbolic significance. She stands between East and West, and in the future must take from both.”43
C. L. R. James has emphasized two additional corollaries to Robeson’s developing world-view. Though blacks had “special qualities” as a result of their special experience, they were “able to participate fully and completely in the distinctively Western arts of Western Civilization”—a black man might bring unique attributes to the role of Othello, but that did not disqualify him from performing Macbeth or Lear. Similarly, blacks might see the world from a somewhat different perspective from whites, but that did not make it impossible “for whites to understand blacks, or blacks to understand whites.” The “human stem”—as Robeson had written in 1934 and would continue to emphasize for the rest of his life—“was one.” Lopped off and set in separate soil, the branches of the tree would die; fastened to a common trunk and nourished equally, all would thrive.44
At the same time that Robeson was trying to formulate a theoretical position, he was trying on a practical level to incorporate his new values into his work as an actor. Early in 1936 he agreed to record a prologue and theme song for Joseph Best’s Africa Looks Up (released as My Song Goes Forth), a documentary film about South Africa, and to make two movies with African themes, Song of Freedom and King Solomon’s Mines. He could only hope—and did his best to ensure, through contract guarantees—that these new cinema projects would better fulfill his social ideals than the earlier ones had. He worked hard on revising the prologue to Best’s documentary and in the final draft has himself as narrator say, “Every foot of Africa is now parceled out among the white races. Why has this happened? What has prompted them to go there? If you listen to men like Mussolini, they will tell you it is to civilize—a divine task, entrusted to the enlightened peoples to carry the torch of light and learning, and to benefit the African people.… Africa was opened up by the white man for the benefit of himself—to obtain the wealth it contained.” The mainstream reviewers gave My Song Goes Forth a middling reception; the London Daily Worker thought it too bland to serve a militant liberationist purpose.45
Even as he signed for his two new films, Song of Freedom and King Solomon’s Mines, his most recent one, Show Boat, was released. Robeson had tried to get “final-cut” approval but had been turned down (as Carl Laemmle, Jr., cabled Universal Studios, “Impossible let him okay takes. Garbo doesn’t have this privilege nor anyone else”). The picture as shown rearranged and diminished the original dimension of his role—described in the ad campaign as the “lazy, easy-going husband” of the showboat’s cook (played by Hattie McDaniel). In the States most reviewers hailed the film as (in the words of the Trib’s critic) “opulent, spectacular and generally enchanting.” But the British notices were generally tepid and in some cases sardonic: James Agate in The Tatler suggested that enough money had been spent on the picture “to build and support a National Theatre,” with artistic results on the level of “oleographs on a cottage wall.… It has been said that we shall see nothing like it again for a hundred years. I sincerely hope not.” Segments of the black press, moreover, continued to berate Robeson for portraying (in the words of the California News) yet another “shiftless moron,” and Marcus Garvey’s monthly magazine, The Black Man, denounced him for using “his genius to appear in pictures and plays that tend to dishonour, mimic, discredit and abuse the cultural attainments of the Black Race.” (In a lighter vein, the dancer Bill Robinson wrote Essie, “Tell Paul that we saw Show Boat twice; just to hear him sing and to get the new way of shelling peas.”) To add to Robeson’s discomfort, friends whose opinion he valued highly told him they thought little of Show Boat. Emma Goldman (commenting on the 1935 revival, not the film) wrote to say she thought him “magnificent,” but didn’t care for the theme. Eisenstein, commenting on the film, conveyed his continuing belief that Robeson was “a marvel,” but added that
only in two or three shots is his face, figure and personality treated in the way it ought to: there is so much to be made out of him! Picture pretty poor, considering all possibilities in it. Illustrating “Ol’ Man River”—not the best taste: would prefer realistic treatment of Paul singing—song and singing being so marvellous by themselves.46
Robeson had reason to hope his new screen venture, Song of Freedom, would appease his critics—and his own conscience. Based on Claude Williams and Dorothy Holloway’s The Kingdom of the Zinga, the film began shooting in the spring of 1936. It tells the story of John Zinga (played by Robeson), a London dockworker whose glorious bass voice is accidentally discovered, launching him into international success as a concert singer. In one of those remarkable coincidences on which film plots turn, Zinga learns that the mysterious carved disc he has always worn around his neck reveals him to be the legendary King of Casanga. Abandoning his concert career to return to his people, he is met with scorn and abuse from them until he bursts into sacred song, thus persuading them of his royal heritage. The film ends with Zinga’s resuming a part-time concert career in order to raise needed revenue for his people. Though inane as narrative, the film held strong appeal for Robeson. In its dockside scenes especially, it showed blacks coping within the context of ordinary life—a welcome switch from the previous stereotypes of shuffling idiot, faithful retainer, happy-go-lucky hedonist, or menacing con man. Zinga himself is portrayed in the film as a natural aristocrat, a man of charm and intelligence (as is his wife, played by Elizabeth Welch). Song of Freedom, Robeson told a reporter, “gives me a real part for the first time,” and he continued to refer to it in later life as one of only two films he made (the other was Proud Valley) in which he felt he could take any pride.47
Elizabeth Welch remembers talking politics with him on the set—or, rather, declining to. Coming from a varied racial and ethnic background, she considered herself nonpolitical, and when Robeson talked to her about “doing something to help her people,” she responded that “all people are my people.” He let it go at that, unwilling to crowd her with polemics. Far from remembering him as insistently political, she retains the image of an affectionate, good-humored man, “modest about his acting,” satisfied with his life, content with Song of Freedom. Even the black press, this time around, agreed he should be satisfied: the Pittsburgh Courier welcomed Song of Freedom as the “finest story of colored folks yet brought to the screen … a story of triumph.” Langston Hughes wrote Essie, “Harlem liked ‘Song of Freedom.’”48
Nineteen thirty-six was to prove the busiest year in Robeson’s film career. He had only a few months’ interval between the completion of Song of Freedom and the commencement of work on King Solomon’s Mines for Gaumont British. The interval was so brief that he decided not to accompany Essie and Pauli on their long-hoped-for trip to Africa that same summer, especially since “both the British and South African authorities opposed his going.” According to Essie, he was also concerned about protecting his voice: “He has to have the best conditions only—the best hotels and the best traveling facilities in trains.” Instead, Paul went on a short vacation alone to the Soviet Union, intending to improve his Russian, and Ma Goode traveled separately to Moscow to check on living conditions for herself and Pauli, with the possibility in mind of his attending school there.49
Another marital crisis may additionally have contributed to Paul and Essie’s heading off in separate directions. According to Marie Seton, tension between them became so great in 1935 that Marie advised Paul to make a clean break, saying outright that Essie “was poison to him.” Political differences may have played a central role in creating the tension: Essie was trying to serve as a brake on Paul’s accelerating commitment. As regards South Africa in particular, an (aborted) effort was made in 1935 to involve Robeson in the affairs of the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU), which Essie did her best to resist. The effort involved a circle of interested whites that included Norman Leys, the Yorkshire novelist Winifred Holtby, her friend Vera Brittain (author of Testament of Youth), William Ballinger (the Scottish trade unionist who went to South Africa to help organize the ICU), his wife, Margaret Hodgson (who became a white representative for blacks in Parliament), and Ethelreda Lewis, later well known as the editor-writer of the Trader Horn books. When Ballinger told the press that Robeson had become more “politically minded” and was giving thought to a trip to South Africa to find out about conditions there, Essie reacted angrily, writing Winifred Holtby that her husband “was an artist and not a politician.” Holtby reported to Margaret Hodgson that “Robeson is not indifferent.… I feel that Mrs. Robeson is our real antagonist.” Vera Brittain put the matter more pointedly—“Pretty sure the annoyance, & indeed the whole attitude, is Mrs. Robeson’s, not Paul”—and described Essie as “an aggressive little woman really, determined to fight for Paul’s material interests & angry when he is led away from his purely artistic—& commercially profitable career.” Summing up to Norman Leys, Holtby described Essie as “a bit too slick & American for my taste.”50
Essie kept Paul closely posted on the details of her African adventure. She and Pauli were gone three months, stopping at Madeira on their way down the West Coast to Cape Town (where Essie barely managed to gain entry) then working their way upcountry into Swaziland, Basutoland, Uganda, and the Belgian Congo. They went armed with letters of introduction stressing that Essie would be engaging in anthropological field work, thus easing the problem of visas and travel restrictions, which might otherwise have curtailed her freedom of movement. She was further aided by African friends who met her and Pauli at many stops, passed them through a network of loving hands, and provided them with experiences not ordinarily available to foreigners.51
Along with attending a political convention at Bloemfontein and seeing the “frightful conditions” of the mines in Johannesburg and the slums in Cape Town, Essie at one point in the trip met and was housed by Max Yergan. Articulate and personable, Yergan was a 1914 graduate of Shaw University in North Carolina; he had been in Africa under the auspices of the International Committee of the YMCA for seventeen years and had made a brilliant career working with the Bantu of South Africa to improve educational facilities (he was awarded the NAACP’s prestigious Spingarn Medal in 1933). Yergan would shortly return to the United States, would become an intimate of the Robesons, and would figure conspicuously in their lives.
Wherever they went, everyone seemed to have heard about “Robeson,” and when the ship landed at Cape Town the newspaper reporters crowded around to insist (as Essie wrote Paul) “you were assuming leadership—world leadership of Negroes, and were now beginning to do something constructive about it. What measures were you taking to lead your people? Was I here to start your campaign? And so on.” Essie tried to be cautious and diplomatic in her answers. “I said you were young and healthy and entirely normal and not particularly spiritual, and that you were naturally interested in the Negro everywhere. We are Negroes ourselves and as Negroes, are interested in our people, and in conditions which affect our people.” The white paper, Cape Town Argus, translated that into “My husband has never been interested in politics.… He holds no fanciful ideas about Africa for the Africans.… He is not yet 40 and has no romantic ideas about devoting his time and energies to his people.” The African trip, Essie wrote after she had returned,
was one of those grand dreams come true. It is certainly the most interesting thing I have done, and I will always be grateful for the opportunity. Its quite a different world and I think every Negro who can, should go and look & listen and learn. We have a grand heritage from Africa, as a race, and it is shameful that we are not interested in it, and almost wholly ignorant of it.52
Paul and Ma Goode returned from their respective trips to the U.S.S.R. equally full of praise for the life they had found there. Paul had stayed for a few days with friends on film location at a collective farm and had had an “idyllic” time, “astonished” at how well informed the village children were about “the American Negro problem”—and how free of racial prejudice. That had been precisely Ma Goode’s impression, and Paul now made the final decision that she and Pauli would go to live there at the end of the year. Peggy and Eugene Dennis (a leading figure in the Communist Party, U.S.A.), who had left their older son, Tim, in school in Moscow and then been denied permission to take him out, warned the Robesons to leave Pauli with maximum publicity. They did exactly that: Paul announced widely to the press that they had decided to educate their son in the Soviet Union so that he would not have to undergo the discrimination his father had faced growing up in the United States.53
On his return from the Soviet Union, Paul went to work immediately on King Solomon’s Mines. It was one of those no-expenses-spared productions—twenty-seven thousand natives in “authentic” animal skins! grass huts! erupting volcanoes!!—and replete with a corresponding number of stereotypes and anachronisms. Based on Rider Haggard’s novel, the film tells the story of Umbopa (Robeson), servant to the white man, who ultimately reveals his true identity as an African chief, regains his throne, saves the lives of his treasure-seeking white friends (Cedric Hardwicke, Roland Young), and sings his way into the inspirational sunset. Robeson sang beautifully, but the music was composed and placed with fatuous disregard for authenticity, succeeding only in confirming the cinema’s inability fully to use the range of his gifts and to respect his dignity. The black New York Amsterdam News expressed its gratitude that the film “at least doesn’t reek with the imperialistic theory of British superiority” (most viewers today find that reek palpable), but the black Pittsburgh Courier was wholly negative: Robeson “is made to sing childish lyrics to dreary tunes in the most unlikely circumstances.”54
His luck did not improve with his next film venture, Big Fella, which followed almost immediately and involved essentially the same team that had put together Song of Freedom: J. Elder Wills as director and Elizabeth Welch as costar. Welch, in retrospect, remains puzzled as to why Robeson agreed to do the film: her guess is that he accepted the poor script—based on Claude McKay’s Banjo—out of a sense of obligation to Hammer-British Lion Productions for having given him the opportunity to do Song of Freedom. Possibly, too, he wanted to have a crack at a lighter role; he had told a reporter two years before that he wanted to try his hand at a comic part—as long as it was not some shuffling stereotype. It may also be that Essie applied a bit of leverage: she was eager to play the role of the café proprietress, which the producers offered her (they also cast Larry Brown in a secondary part), and she hugely enjoyed being in the film. “I spoke some French & wore false hair à la Pompadour!” she wrote a friend. “Larry was magnificent. Paul was very pleased with my work, and so was the Director.”55
Big Fella tells the story of Banjo, a dockside worker and an itinerant balladeer (justification for having Robeson burst yet again into song), who locates a lost boy, sees him unwillingly returned to his home, is called in by the boy’s family to help rear him, but ends up preferring the easygoing life of the docks. The scriptwriters did, under pressure from Robeson, make it clear that Banjo was “a steady, trustworthy sort of fellow,” who worked for a living and did not participate in the “roguery” of the dockside life. They also voluntarily agreed to change the film’s title from Banjo to Big Fella to avoid leading “the audience to expect a sort of ‘Uncle Sambo’ of the cotton plantations.” Robeson was thus enabled to make a racial statement about an ordinary but admirable black man, functioning well in a contemporary, European setting. But, that virtue aside, the picture had little to recommend it.56
Between the completion of Big Fella and the immediate onset of yet another film project, Jericho, Robeson managed a month’s trip to the U.S.S.R. He gave a four-city (Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Odessa) concert tour, and he and Essie helped settle Ma Goode and Pauli in for a nearly two-year stay. The concerts were well received—Essie described the audiences as “marvellous … wildly appreciative. I have never heard Paul & Larry better.” The English language Moscow Daily News hailed his December 16 concert in the Large Hall of the Conservatory as “brilliant”—precisely because Robeson “is a ‘mass singer’, simple, natural and human.” His friend Eisenstein, reviewing the concert in Workers’ Moscow, congratulated Robeson on the “pure Russian” of his “hello” and “thank you” to the audience, regretted that no translations were provided for the English-language songs, and commented on how Robeson’s “every gesture conveyed irony toward his formal dress, to which he had been condemned by world concert conventions.” Pauli entered a Soviet Model School, with Stalin’s daughter and Molotov’s son among his schoolmates, and he took at once to the kindliness of his Russian teachers and to (in Essie’s report home) “the complete lack of colour consciousness among the students.” On New Year’s Eve the family gathered together in Moscow—Ma Goode, Pauli, Paul, Essie, Essie’s brothers, John and Frank, Larry Brown, and William Patterson. They had “a high old time”; three days later Essie felt “still full of vodka, caviar, champagne and Russian cigarette smoke.”57
In contrast to the economically depressed West, Essie sent back a glowing report of a U.S.S.R. with “thousands of well stocked shops.… Everyone well fed & warmly dressed. Books everywhere, outrageously cheap & everyone reads.” Six months earlier, referring to his prior trip to the Soviet Union, Robeson had told Ben Davis, Jr. (the black American Communist who was to become a Robeson intimate), that everywhere he went he had found “plenty of food,” that he had made a point of visiting workers’ homes and “they all live in healthful surroundings”—would that “the Negroes in Harlem and the South had such places to stay in.” Apparently the Robesons had still heard nothing, or chose not to credit the few rumors that might have come their way, about Stalin’s forced collectivization of agriculture, a policy that produced widespread famine, cost millions of lives (hitting the “national minority” population in Kazakhstan especially hard), and in the case of the Ukraine was deliberately designed by Stalin to crush the notion of an autonomous culture.58
In mid-January the Robesons left Pauli and Ma Goode “happily settled” in the Hotel National, and returned to London. Essie and Paul had only a four-day layover there before they had to leave for Egypt to film exteriors for Jericho. The shooting lasted a month. They stayed just outside Cairo and wandered its streets between takes, struck at the extreme contrasts in wealth and poverty, at European chic side by side with ancient tradition. “Cairo is a wonderful place,” Robeson told an interviewer; “it is such a queer mix.” In a letter to the Van Vechtens, Essie expressed fascination “that the Egyptians are pure coloured folks, science notwithstanding”—“we can find a double in Harlem for everyone we’ve seen here. It’s great fun to see an enormously rich country like this, where the coloured folks are the bosses!” She reported, too, that “Paul is in fine form—bigger, sweeter, dearer than ever, interested in his work, interested in me, interested in Pauli, and all is very very well.”59
Along with liking Cairo, Robeson enjoyed working on the film itself. “It’s the best part I have ever had for a picture,” he told one reporter. To another he revealed that he had “become very interested in Egyptian films” and expected to make one soon with Om Kalsoun, the noted Egyptian singer, as his female lead. The Jericho experience also confirmed Robeson in his fondness for cinema as a vehicle for his voice. He felt he could use it in a “perfectly natural” way while filmmaking, without having to strain for volume and projection, as he sometimes had to onstage or in concert; “I can sing best when I’m natural. I don’t like posing or raising my voice or strutting about.”60
One of his costars in the film, Henry Wilcoxon, became friendly with the Robesons and often shared meals with them. He found Essie “very sharp … the kind of person you don’t push around,” but he thought Paul an immensely appealing human being, at once modest and charismatic, having “a natural stage presence,” and conducting himself on the set like “a pro.” Robeson talked to Wilcoxon in a low-keyed way about the rising threat of fascism in Spain and gave him a book to read on socialism, offhandedly suggesting he have a look at it.61
The location shots for Jericho were made fifteen miles out in the desert at a studio site across the road from the Pyramids. One day Robeson, Wilcoxon, and Wallace Ford, another of the film’s stars, inspected the Great Pyramid of Giza. With the help of a dragoman, they worked their way into the King’s chamber at the geometric center of the pyramid, their path lit every hundred feet or so by a low-watt bulb. Inside the chamber they discovered “the most incredible echo” and Wilcoxon got the idea that Robeson should try singing. The first note “almost crumbled the place,” as Wilcoxon remembers, and when Paul followed with a triad, “back came the most gigantic organ chord you have ever heard in your life. This was Paul Robeson plus!” Then, “without any cue from anybody Paul started to sing ‘Oh Isis und Osiris’ from The Magic Flute.… When he finished and the last reverberation had gone away … I was crying, the dragoman was crying, Wally Ford, bless his heart, who was usually doing nothing but laugh, he was crying, and Paul was crying.… There were tears going down our faces. And we almost daren’t breathe to break the spell of the thing.” Hardly saying a word, the three men drove back to Cairo.62
The good feeling carried over into the filming. Jericho, in the opinion of some, is one of Robeson’s better pictures (which is not, to be sure, among the higher compliments one can pay to his career). The picture’s story line, certainly, is the least conventional of his films. Jericho Jackson (Robeson) is a medical student drafted to serve in the army, who rescues some fellow soldiers from a torpedoed troop ship, then flees an unjust court martial to wander across North Africa until he marries the daughter of a Tuareg chieftain (played by the real-life Princess Kouka, discovered in the Sudan—and then cosmeticized), becomes leader of the tribe, and, after avoiding recapture by the white authorities, lives out his life as a benefactor of his people. Robeson, as always, was called upon in the film to break periodically into incongruous song and to behave with unswerving heroism, but in comparison with most of his other movie roles, the part of Jericho Jackson did enable him to move several steps away from the standard stereotype of servile childishness (even if it kept him firmly rooted in an alternate caricature of simplistic nobility). The press—perhaps still hankering after the servile stereotype—was lukewarm. In London the critics were polite. In New York (where the film played under the title Dark Sands) the response ranged more widely but not more enthusiastically: Bosley Crowther in the Times suggested that “out of respect to Paul Robeson and his magnificent baritone voice the less said about Dark Sands the better.” The film was not a commercial success.63
On returning to London from Cairo in the early spring of 1937, Robeson lent his support to various political causes. In April, he appeared in concert at the Victoria Palace to aid homeless women and children in Spain. In May, he contributed fifteen hundred dollars to forward the work of the International Committee on African Affairs (a new organization in New York headed by Max Yergan, who had recently housed Essie and Pauli on their visit to South Africa). Also in May, Paul and Essie returned to the Soviet Union for another visit.64
They stayed in Russia for most of the summer, the first long holiday they had ever taken. They found Pauli and Ma Goode “very well” (except that Pauli had developed an intestinal problem calling for a special nonfat diet, which necessitated finding them a flat with kitchen facilities for preparing his special meals). Pauli had been promoted with honors; “He adores the children,” Essie wrote the Van Vechtens, and Mama “loves Russia.” The National Theater of Uzbekistan was currently in Moscow and Paul and Essie took Pauli to the Uzbek folk-dance-and-song matinee; he was “thrilled to death” and “nearly danced in his seat.”65
For Paul himself, it was the Uzbek Opera that provided the special thrill. The two performances he and Essie saw were (in Essie’s words) “vivid and vital, and a striking cross between Chinese, Arab and African—the whole with a definite and instantly recognizable African rhythm.…” Paul saw in the Uzbek Opera the fruit and confirmation of the success of Soviet policy toward its national minorities. As he put it, the Uzbeks, “a rather dark Mongolian people of Southern Asia who had enjoyed a brief period of glory under the famous Khans” and had then become “an oppressed and subject people,” were, under socialism, being encouraged to preserve their cultural identity even while being welcomed on equal terms into the fellowship of Russian citizenry. He rejoiced to find leaders of the Soviet state in attendance at the opening-night performance; they were lending the weight of their presence, as he saw it, to the recent promulgation of Article 123 of the Soviet Constitution, which had declared as “irrevocable law” the equality of all citizens of the U.S.S.R., “irrespective of their nationality or race, in all fields of economic, state, cultural, social, and political life.”66
To Robeson, Article 123 was “an expression of democracy, broader in scope and loftier in principle than ever before expressed.” It stood in sharp contrast to the official policies and unofficial practices that characterized the rest of the contemporary world, where doctrines of “the inferiority of my people are propagated even in the highest schools of learning.” The Uzbeks, unlike blacks in America, were not being counseled “to suffer endless misery silently, comforted by the knowledge that by ‘divine decree’ they are the ‘hewers of wood and the drawers of water.’” They were not being told that their language and culture were “either dead or too primitive to develop” and had to give way before the “superior” utility of alien forms. In its treatment of the Uzbeks and other national minorities, the Soviet Union, Robeson believed, had uniquely placed itself in opposition to cultural tyranny and racial oppression—an achievement, to him, that “shines with special brilliance.”
It stood in particular contrast, he felt, to what was currently happening in Spain. In that sundered country, beset by civil war, Franco’s fascist forces of reaction were mobilizing to destroy the Republican government and to keep the Spanish people, “poor, landless and disfranchised,” from claiming the right to control their own destiny. Robeson saw the mounting conflict as crucial in “the world-wide fight of the forces of democracy against reaction,” and he called upon people of color everywhere to participate in the Spanish struggle “against the new slavery”—“it is to their eternal glory that Negroes from America, Africa and the West Indies are to be found fighting in Spain today on the side of the republican forces, for democracy and against those forces of reaction which seek to land us back to a new age of darkness.”
To demonstrate his own commitment to the Republican cause, Robeson interrupted his holiday at the Soviet health resort of Kislovodsk to fly back to London for a mass rally in aid of the Basque refugee children at the Albert Hall on June 24, 1937. He had originally intended to broadcast his remarks from Moscow, but as soon as he learned that the Albert Hall management might not allow the broadcast to be heard (with a simultaneous threat from Germany that it would jam the relay), he rushed back to London to appear personally. The group of sponsors included W. H. Auden, E. M. Forster, Sean O’Casey, H. G. Wells, and Virginia Woolf, and the meeting was a huge success, as judged by the overflow crowd and by the number of contributions that poured onto the platform table. Robeson not only sang but also spoke, and the newspapers described his speech as the most striking of the evening. His words were impassioned:
Like every true artist, I have longed to see my talent contributing in an unmistakably clear manner to the cause of humanity. I feel that tonight I am doing so.… Every artist, every scientist, every writer must decide now where he stands. He has no alternative. There is no standing above the conflict on Olympian heights. There are no impartial observers.… The battle front is everywhere. There is no sheltered rear. The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative. The history of this era is characterized by the degradation of my people. Despoiled of their lands, their culture destroyed, they are in every country save one [the USSR], denied equal protection of the law, and deprived of their rightful place in the respect of their fellows. Not through blind faith or coercion, but conscious of my course, I take my place with you. I stand with you in unalterable support of the government of Spain, duly and regularly chosen by its lawful sons and daughters.… May your meeting … rally every black man to the side of Republican Spain.… The liberation of Spain from the oppression of fascist reactionaries is not a private matter of the Spaniards, but the common cause of all advanced and progressive humanity.67
Returning from his Russian holiday in August, Robeson broadened his political activity. He spoke out in opposition to Japanese aggression against China and appeared at benefits for the Daily Worker and the Friends of the Soviet Union. In the fall of 1937, he told the British press that he could not “portray the life nor express the living interests, hopes and aspirations of the struggling people from whence I come” in “commercial films and in the ‘decadent’” West End theater and would instead do his next performance at Unity, the “workers’ theater.” He elaborated further to an interviewer from the Daily Worker:
This is not a bolt out of the blue.… Films eventually brought the whole thing to a head.… I thought I could do something for the Negro race in the films; show the truth about them and about other people too. I used to do my part and go away feeling satisfied. Thought everything was O.K. Well, it wasn’t. Things were twisted and changed—distorted.… That made me think things out. It made me more conscious politically.… Joining Unity Theatre means identifying myself with the working-class. And it gives me the chance to act in plays that say something I want to say about things that must be emphasized.
Stafford Cripps, the leading socialist politician, sent Robeson “my most sincere congratulations upon the action that you have taken. It is a splendid gesture of solidarity with the workers and I know how deeply it will be appreciated throughout the country.” Just as Cripps’s letter marked the beginning of a friendship, Robeson’s increasing public advocacy marked his full emergence as a political spokesman.68
The escalating civil war in Spain now became Robeson’s primary concern. In the month of December alone, he made four appearances in behalf of the Republic. He participated in the Third Spanish Concert at the Scala Theater; made a broadcast appeal for the Loyalists (receiving over four hundred letters in response); sang at a concert sponsored by the Left Book Club (which had been founded in 1936 by Victor Gollancz, John Strachey, and Harold Laski and quickly burgeoned into a real political force) in support of the International Brigadists fighting on the Republican side in Spain; and appeared on the stage of a huge rally in the Albert Hall to raise funds for victims of the war (it met on the same night that government troops, by the glare of searchlights, attacked Franco’s forces at Teruel). The Albert Hall rally was an emotional high point. Clement Attlee, leader of the Opposition, spoke out forcefully against the betrayal of Spain by the so-called democracies of the West, whose governments, he argued, were in fact devoted to protecting class interests. Ellen Wilkinson, the member of Parliament who had recently been in Spain with Attlee and had shared in the attacks made on him in Parliament for his “partisan” trip, made a moving appeal for funds and succeeded in raising three thousand pounds. And Herbert Morrison further aroused the crowd by urging the Labour Party in Britain to work against the “treacherous and vacillating” Chamberlain government then in power. But it was Robeson’s appearance, according to newspaper accounts, that created a furor of enthusiasm. He galvanized the rally when he sang “Strike the cold shackles from my leg”; and when he altered the lyrics in “Ol’ Man River” from “I’m tired of livin’ and scared of dyin’” to “I must keep fightin’ until I’m dyin’,” the hall went wild.69