CHAPTER 23

Return to Europe

(1958–1960)

Two hundred friends and fans gathered behind police barricades at the London airport. The exultant group included Cedric Belfrage; Tom Driberg, chairman of the Labour Party National Executive; the agent Harold Davison; the eighty-one-year-old Labour peer, Viscount Stansgate; Dr. Cheddi Jagan, Minister of Trade in British Guiana; the deported American Communist leader Claudia Jones; Glen Byam Shaw; London County Councillor Peggy Middleton; and Harry Francis, assistant secretary of the musicians’ union (who would become a good friend). When Robeson’s plane touched down at 11:00 a.m. on July 11, they burst into “Hip, hip, hooray” and “For he’s a jolly good fellow.” Crowding around the Robesons after they cleared customs, the well-wishers, some of them weeping, pressed in with bouquets and hugs.1

Reporters from all the major British papers, and many foreign ones, were waiting, too. Robeson paused only for brief remarks—and a few spontaneous bursts of song—and then in the afternoon held a full-scale press conference at the Empress Club in the West End. The hostile Lord Beaverbrook, who had never forgiven Robeson for his anti-British remarks during World War II, boycotted the event, but the turnout was nonetheless full. A reporter from the News Chronicle called the press conference “the most remarkable I have ever attended,” describing Robeson as “full of gaiety and excitement about his future.” Yet not all the reporters were charmed. Twice asked whether he was a Communist, Robeson twice refused to reply—the second time Essie chimed in to say, “It is not a friendly question”—and referred the press to his statement in Here I Stand, insisting that he had come to England as an artist. “He behaved like a royal personage,” an angry reporter wrote in the Daily Sketch. “I pointed out I hadn’t time to read his book. ‘Then you’ll have to wait,’ he announced autocratically.” Tom Driberg, disgusted at the “ignorant questions,” turned away to keep his temper. (When asked the same question under less trying circumstances a few months later, Robeson responded, “My politics are to free my people.”) Generally, though, the press coverage was sympathetic and extensive; nearly every paper splashed the story of Robeson’s arrival, with pictures, over the front page. Back in America, news of his welcome was either ignored or distorted (“Robeson, in Britain, Balks at Red Query,” headlined the New York Herald Tribune).2

The British public received Robeson with an uninflected enthusiasm. James Aronson was in London at the time and described for the National Guardian how the welcome translated into heartwarming daily gestures: “A charwoman greets him on an early morning walk; people on their way to work rush up to shake his hand; a cab driver refuses with indignation to accept payment.…” Robeson was “euphoric,” Aronson recalls, “at the reception he was getting, seeing old friends, realizing that he hadn’t lost his power and, just the simple joy of living in a society where he was respected, loved, and where he could be as free as he wanted to be, without qualms.” You had to be there, Aronson added, to understand the full symbolic weight of the reception—“to understand how Europe feels about Robeson … how through him they express their love of good culture and contempt for the philistinism of American policy.”³

Overnight Robeson became a “hot” show-business property once again. Within twenty-four hours of his arrival, Harold Davison had arranged three half-hour TV appearances at a thousand pounds each, had begun putting together a British tour for the fall, and was helping him sift through concert offers from around the globe. Robeson signed with Glen Byam Shaw to open the hundredth-anniversary season at Stratford in Othello, took tea at the House of Lords with Lord Stansgate and his son, Anthony Wedgwood Benn, lunched at the House of Commons with Manchester MP Will Griffiths and Aneurin Bevan and his wife, Jennie Lee, and dined with Philip Noel Baker and Peggy Ashcroft. Over the following few weeks, he held a book-autographing party for Here I Stand at Selfridges and was guest of honor at a variety of celebrations at embassies and private homes—including, notably, an affair at the Café Royal hosted by Indian journalists and a dinner given by the Nigerian Minister of Internal Affairs.⁴

The exhilarating—and exhausting—round was topped off by several formal concerts. The first, on July 26, marked Robeson’s initial appearance on television: “Paul Robeson Sings”—a half-hour program for ATV. He was so nervous prior to the filming that arrangements were made to clear the studio during his performance (“I’ve never seen such a quiet neat perfect job done,” Essie wrote Lloyd Brown), and as a result Paul was relaxed and in excellent voice. Bruno Raikin, who accompanied him, felt that in general Robeson was “not the same man any more,” but that the TV broadcast stood out as an exception—“He sang beautifully,” and toward the end spontaneously discussed with the TV audience, without any prior preparation and with enormous charm, his pentatonic-music theories. “We find with relief,” wrote the London Times, “that he is one of those whom age shows no signs of withering.… He still talks to us quietly and good-naturedly, and breaks into a smile that is the quintessence of friendliness; he still sings with a huge delight in his songs.” “Paul is very heartened,” Essie wrote Freda Diamond, “and I realize he has a whole new career open to him.” Paul added a note at the end of the letter: “Just a little too much excitement. In spite of all this miss the home fires.”5

Larry Brown arrived from America by ship in time to accompany Robeson in a formal concert at the Albert Hall two weeks later. Robeson could do no wrong with the sold-out audience. Several of the critics rejoiced that his “magnificent” voice remained intact, but others complained about his narrow range and said that his use of a microphone had made it impossible to assess the real condition of his voice. Through the medium of Tom Driberg’s sympathetic column in Reynolds News, Robeson explained that he had used a mike for many years, usually concealed in the footlights, and that had he not he wouldn’t be singing well at age sixty. The young American sensation Harry Belafonte was making his English debut on the same night as Robeson’s concert, performing three miles away at the Gaumont State Theatre, and the tabloids tried to turn a coincidence into a competition: the young contender bidding for Robeson’s crown. Robeson put a stop to that particular nonsense: he showed up for one of Belafonte’s performances at the Gaumont, warmly applauded him, and later chatted amiably backstage. When a reporter commented to Belafonte that his singing was more lighthearted than Robeson’s, Belafonte responded, “It is because Robeson made his protest bitterly that we can be more light-hearted now.”⁶

On August 15, after a month’s stay in London, Paul and Essie flew to Moscow. If his British reception had been cordial, his Russian one was tumultuous. At Vnukovo Airport, a jostling, eager crowd gave them a rapturous welcome, sweeping Paul away from Essie, burying him in bunches of gladioli, preventing Soviet Minister of Culture Mikhailov and the official delegation of artists and dignitaries from making any formal presentation. When the Robesons finally reached the Metropole Hotel, another crowd awaited them in the street, yelling “Droog” (“Friend”) and “Preevyet, Pol Robeson” (“Welcome, Paul Robeson”), applauding wildly, pressing forward still more bouquets. The pushing and shoving at one point proved too much for him—he “was actually in a state,” Essie reported to the family, and needed a police escort to reach his car.⁷

On the evening of August 16, Soviet television broadcast a live twenty-minute conversation with Robeson, preceded by a narrated film about him. On camera, he described his life in the United States since his last visit to the U.S.S.R. and expressed his joy at being back. The U.S. Embassy in Moscow reported to the State Department that his remarks had been distorted in translation by the television commentator, giving as an example the transposition of Robeson’s saying, “We still have trouble in America, but things have become a lot better,” into “Life in America is very hard.” The Embassy characterized the television program as “Soviet exploitation of an obviously politically illiterate (but very charming, warm, and sympathetic) Robeson for its own propaganda purposes.…”8

That same “exploitation,” according to the Embassy, continued the following day at Robeson’s public concert—his first in the U.S.S.R. in nine years—in the Lenin Sports Stadium, with eighteen thousand people filling it to capacity. The event was televised, and Robeson was shown as “visibly affected” by his reception, weeping openly, and, immediately after being introduced, bursting into the Russian patriotic song “Shiroka Strana Moya Rodnaya” (“My Broad Native Land”), singing twice the refrain, “I know no other land where people breathe so free,” opening his arms wide to the audience in a bear-hug embrace. Next came all the old favorites—“Ol’ Man River,” “Joe Hill,” “John Brown’s Body”—followed by folk songs from many lands and a little speech in which he thanked the Russian people for the strength they had given him and his family to persevere, promising that “the fight for freedom goes on” (“He did not specify what freedom or whose,” the Washington Post acidly wrote—almost alone among the American press in reporting to the States on Robeson’s Soviet reception).⁹

The morning of August 19 was spent (according to Essie’s summary account) “with the Negroes in Moscow, who came in a body to the hotel to greet and welcome Paul.” That afternoon they left by jet for Uzbekistan, in Soviet Central Asia, to attend the opening of the International Festival of Films of African and Asian Peoples. “We were literally laden with flowers,” Essie wrote of their welcome, “staggering happily under their bulk.… When our motorcycle escort stopped momentarily so that the way could be cleared, people peered into the car and the shout went up … ‘Pol Robeson is here!’ And crowds seemed to materialize out of nowhere to shout ‘Preevyet!’ Welcome.”¹⁰

But it was not all cheers and flowers. The heat in Tashkent was brutal, with clouds of flies everywhere. Vasily Katanian, a film director, came out with a crew to make a documentary on Robeson and found him “prostrate from heat and exhaustion … glumly silent,” pouring sweat. Katanian accompanied the Robesons the following day to visit a famous local collective farm outside the city headed by Khamrakul Tursunkulov. The roadway out was primitive, and (according to Katanian) they arrived two and a half hours late, “absolutely beat from bouncing over the potholes through the dust and heat,” while their hosts, dressed in full welcoming regalia, melted in the sun. Tursunkulov, who was deaf, kept forgetting Robeson’s name. Raising his glass to propose a toast to “our best friend, that dear man whom we have known so long and loved so well,” Tursunkulov was forced to pause, lean down to Katanian, and ask, “What’s his name?” Pleased with having finally managed to navigate the first attempt, Tursunkulov later proposed another toast—only to forget Robeson’s name a second time. After they returned to Tashkent, the Robesons had to sit in a stuffy film-festival hall watching “unbearable two-reel Indonesian films that were dubbed in Uzbek.” Regaining his spirits somewhat in the cool of the evening, Robeson enjoyed an official supper and even did “a strangely quiet, simple, dignified Asian jitterbug” with one of the dancers. The next day he was down with a fever and had to go to bed.11

His cold did not improve, but the schedule was relentless (“This is a rat race,” Essie wrote home, “a marvelous one, mind you, but very very hectic”). After arriving by jet at Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, the Robesons decided to continue straight to Sochi to get some rest, but the Georgian Minister of Culture came out to the Tbilisi airfield to insist they stop over in the capital for two days, as originally planned, saying, “There can be no discussion that you just fly past us.” Robeson “sleepily, but decisively” refused, and Essie flashed her bright smile while saying no (“You know me when I put my big foot down, especially wearing my Murray Space shoes”). At Sochi, exhausted, Robeson did little for three days except sleep and let himself be filmed in various positions of relaxation. Then, on August 26, still accompanied by Katanian’s camera crew, they boarded a steamship to Yalta for a leisurely cruise along the Black Sea coast.¹²

At Yalta, Robeson revived. The government rest house, Orianda, with its elegant cuisine, luxurious suites, and an elevator down to the sea, became home for two weeks. He made a few side trips, including a visit to Chekhov’s house (where, according to Katanian, “Paul looked with disinterest at all of the memorabilia,” but which Paul later diplomatically told the Moscow News he had found “awe-inspiring and heart-warming”). He and Essie spent a little time with the British journalist Paul Delmer, and with Sally and Rockwell Kent, who were passing through (Sally Kent thought him decidedly out of sorts—he “couldn’t sit still or stop talking,” full of uncharacteristic boasting about his own achievements). The Yalta doctors ordered more rest, so the Robesons mostly sat about while the film crew memorialized them. Katanian had to fend off the constant interference of Raisa Timofeyevna, wife of Mikhailov, the Soviet Minister of Culture. She objected to the suggestion that Ilya Ehrenburg write the film script (“No, he lisps”) and tried to persuade Katanian to film Robeson in a variety of artificial settings (discussing sports with athletes, discussing production schedules with workers, etc.).¹³

Katanian held his ground against Timofeyevna, but one day nearly had his comeuppance. On the spur of the moment the Robesons were asked to come to the nearby Khrushchev lodge, where the Premier, his family, and assorted officials were vacationing. They joined a lively and informal group to watch a volleyball game in progress (at one point Khrushchev called out to a Cabinet minister who had missed several plays, “We will support the minister, but he should play better!”). When the Pravda correspondent began shooting the scene with his camera, a distraught Katanian realized belatedly that his camera equipment was sitting back in the hotel at Yalta (“I might as well lie down and die”). Mikhailov and Raisa Timofeyevna were aghast: “What do you mean we won’t have Nikita Sergeyevich in our picture?” The situation was saved a few days later when Khrushchev invited the Robesons to dinner and the camera crew was allowed to tag along. Paul and Essie were driven for half an hour to a hunting lodge in the hills above Yalta, where they were greeted by the Khrushchevs, the Voroshilovs, the Mikoyans, Tupolev (the airplane designer), and others, and then proceeded in a line of cars up to a further retreat another twenty minutes into the hills. There they met the rest of the company—the current “leaders of the German, Italian, Rumanian, Bulgarian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian governments and their wives, and in some cases, their children” (as Essie described the gathering in a letter home)—and went out on a shooting party (“Kadar won the shooting, bringing down every single bird. He is quiet, a very nice friendly gentle man”). At dinner, toasts were made all around—Paul’s was so moving, Essie reported, that it produced tears—and then the Robesons were returned by car to Orianda.14

After leaving Yalta on September 12, they spent two final days in Moscow, making appearances and seeing Essie’s brother Frank Goode, who had remained in the Soviet Union. Then they returned to London to prepare for a three-month concert tour of Britain, with Larry Brown accompanying and Bruno Raikin as soloist. As in the past, Robeson could do no wrong in the British provinces. But this time, at age sixty, the tour took its toll. After every concert, as Raikin remembers it, Robeson would swear he was going to give up singing. “I’m a nervous wreck,” he told Raikin, who decided not only that Robeson’s voice had deteriorated—to be expected in a performer of his age—but also that “he wasn’t as happy a person, as fulfilled a person, as he had been in 1949.”¹⁵

Robeson refrained from making political comments during the tour, though he continued to sprinkle his concerts with talk—this time almost exclusively talk about the universality of folk music. The chief exception came at the start of the tour, when he told reporters that he felt so much at home in London, and so pleased to be among people anxious to hear him, that he planned to make the city his headquarters, traveling back and forth to the United States as the occasion warranted. He stressed that this did not mean he was “deserting the country of my birth,” yet The New York Times, picking up the remark, headlined a story, “Robeson to Quit U.S. for London”—and other American papers followed suit. Essie tried to smooth the waters, fearful that black America, especially, would take umbrage. “Paul says a man may live and work in many countries,” she wrote Carl Murphy, president of the Afro-American newspaper chain and Robeson’s chief supporter in the black press, “but a man’s HOME is where his family is, where his people are, and where his roots are. All these, for Paul, are in the United States. Period.” Murphy wrote back to reassure her that “None of us took seriously press reports that he had or would make his permanent home in England.”16

On October 11 Robeson took part in a historic service at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Church officials departed from custom and authorized a collection for a South African defense fund and then broke further with tradition by inviting Robeson to give a half-hour recital during Evensong—the first time either a secular artist or a black would sing in the cathedral. Four thousand people, including many nonwhites, crammed into an Evensong service that ordinarily drew four to five hundred. Standing where John Wycliff had been tried for heresy and Bishop Tyndale’s New Testament had been publicly burned, Robeson read the First Lesson, “… and let there be war no more.” After the sermon, he returned twice to the lectern to sing spirituals, with Larry Brown accompanying. Peggy Middleton, who sat with Essie in the first row, afterward wrote that “there were tears on many faces” at the poignancy of the occasion and the compassion and nobility of Robeson’s presentation. The London papers widely reported the event as a historic one.¹⁷

When Paul went back on tour, Essie returned to the United States for two weeks to cover the UN General Assembly sessions and to consider renting out the Jumel Terrace house (but in fact she did not). In December she flew to Accra to attend the All African People’s Conference, about which she did a syndicated series of articles for the Associated Negro Press. Back in London, she and Paul attended a party for Krishna Menon, had tea with Nan Pandit at the Indian Embassy, and dined with Marie Seton to celebrate the publication of her book about Paul. In between, they collected clothes and packed for a trip to Prague, Moscow, and India scheduled to begin on December 23.¹⁸

When word got out that Robeson was planning to visit India, Val Washington, a black member of the Republican national committee, got on the phone to Acting Secretary of State Christian Herter. He relayed to Herter the concern voiced by P. Chakravarty (a UN delegate from India and also permanent secretary of the Congress Party) that the Indian Communists were planning to lay “great stress” on Robeson’s trip and to acclaim him “as the greatest and most important negro leader in the United States.” Chakravarty had further told Val Washington that Robeson would “do great damage among the darker Indians if [he] gets away with the kind of propaganda he wants, allowing the already powerful Communist Party in India to attract still more converts.” Chakravarty “wondered,” Val Washington reported to Herter, “if there were not steps we could take to counteract the impact of Robeson’s visit.” Herter replied that he “would look into the matter immediately.”19

Picking up on the concern, U.S. Ambassador to India Ellsworth Bunker let it be known that Robeson’s visit, like the celebration of his sixtieth birthday which had preceded it, would not be viewed kindly in the United States. The U.S. Information Agency sent out material on Robeson “for discreet but widespread placement with Indian newspapermen,” emphasizing that “he was not being persecuted as a champion of the Negro.” Bunker reported to Secretary of State Dulles that he had told American officials in India to boycott any political function in which Robeson was involved but advised that “a few official Americans be permitted to attend Robeson concerts”—“to walk out unobtrusively,” however, should Robeson indulge in any “tirade against U.S. and American democracy.” Dulles telegraphed back, “Assume walkout would be extreme last resort since publicity gain for Robeson resulting from publicized walkout would be considerable and possibly detrimental U.S. interests.” One heavily censored CIA dispatch contained suggestions on how to prevent Robeson’s forthcoming visit from being used as an occasion for attempting to desegregate a local swimming pool.²⁰

Ultimately, and for other reasons entirely, Robeson’s trip to India did not come off. On the day the Robesons were due to leave London, Essie, packing up Paul’s suitcases, went to get his passport—and discovered it was lost. She spent hours searching the flat without finding it, and became “panic-stricken”—a rare state for the unflappable Essie. She decided to wake Paul. He took the news calmly, called Harold Davison to see if he had forgotten to return the passport (he hadn’t) after taking it to secure a work permit. Paul then helped Essie search the flat again, without success. By then it was time to leave for Prague, where Paul was booked for television and radio performances on Christmas Eve. They telephoned Prague for advice and were told to forget the passport and to try to make it through. British Immigration officials at the London airport cooperated, letting them board the plane after hearing their tale of woe.²¹

Then, an hour into the flight, fog descended, closing the Prague airport and forcing the plane to land in Zurich. Swiss Immigration agreed to let the Robesons spend the night, but by the next morning the fog had thickened and all airports in Czechoslovakia were shut down. Getting on one of the few planes leaving for London, they landed—after a hair-raising trip—at Southend, outside London. Immigration officials recognized Paul and gave him an emergency entrance permit. The next day Essie took the flat apart room by room, drawer by drawer, file by file—and finally found the precious passport. She sat down in the middle of the floor and cried. On December 29 the weather cleared and the Robesons—too late for his engagements in Prague—took off by jet, along with Du Bois and his wife, Shirley Graham, for Moscow. Du Bois, aged ninety, had also gotten his passport back and had begun to travel extensively. When he had arrived in England (where he and Shirley had stayed for a time with the Robesons) in August 1958, the Daily Worker had reported that Du Bois viewed “his own persecution with a calm detachment. But as he speaks of Paul Robeson his face becomes angry. ‘What they have done to Paul has been the most cruel thing I have ever seen,’ he said.”22

New Year’s Eve in Moscow was a formal affair, with engraved invitations to dinner at eleven in the Kremlin. In the tapestry-hung reception room, Khrushchev and other Presidium members greeted the guests, who were then ushered into the marble Georgian Hall, where long tables had been spread for a feast. Robeson spotted Du Bois and Shirley, who were habitually early and already seated. Both men stood up, and as they made their way toward each other, weaving through the crowded tables, people stopped talking to watch them. When they embraced in the middle of the banquet hall, the entire crowd, including Khrushchev, stood and applauded; after a moment of stunned surprise, as if noticing for the first time where they were, Robeson and Du Bois broke into laughter. At exactly five minutes before midnight, Khrushchev proposed a toast, the lights dimmed, and suddenly—as Shirley Du Bois described it—“all around us snow seemed to be falling, the Christmas tree of many colors gleamed, and then far up in the Kremlin tower we heard the solemn, slow striking of the clock.… When the last stroke died away, the orchestra played, all the lights blazed and an array of butlers bearing large, silver trays began plying us with food. Ulanova danced, the Oistrakhs, father and son, played, and when the performing artists appeared together on stage for the finale, two of the opera stars unexpectedly went out into the audience to where Robeson was sitting and led him back up to the stage. The orchestra struck up ‘Fatherland’ and Robeson’s voice ‘boomed out as he led the chorus.’”²³

A few days later Robeson came down with yet another cold. This time there was an added complication: unexplained bouts of dizziness. Simultaneously, Essie began to have uterine bleeding and went in for a curettage. It revealed “an irregular arrangement of cells” that the doctors diagnosed as a “precancerous condition of the mouth of the uterus.” They recommended that she enter the Kremlin Hospital for treatment, but before doing so she persuaded them to let her return to the hotel to collect her things and to help Paul pack for his scheduled trip to India on January 12. She found him not only feeling a lot worse, but also having failed to call a doctor as he had promised. “I was waiting for you to get home,” he told her—“Can you imagine?!” an indignantly pleased Essie wrote Marie Seton. Essie promptly got a physician to look him over. A consultant was then called in, and the doctors told Paul he had to be hospitalized immediately.²⁴

He refused. He was scheduled to perform in concert that same day, and in the evening was due to leave for New Delhi; he wanted, characteristically, to honor his commitments. (“Paul has the duty idea in a very bad form,” wrote a disapproving Essie; “he has a very great dread of disappointing people, and once he promises anything, he will do it or drop dead.”) The next day he felt still worse, becoming “frightfully dizzy” whenever he tried to get up. He confessed for the first time to Essie that he had often been dizzy before and had had spots before his eyes at concerts. He also confessed that he had been feeling under “continuing strain,” concerned that he might not be able “to do all the things he finds himself agreeing to do”; the worry “has got him down.” Fearing a stroke, Essie suggested it was “the perfect time for us to step off the merry-go-round, and collect ourselves and re-organize our lives, especially our health.”²⁵

Another consultant was called in and also insisted that Paul go to the hospital. “Scared,” he “listened meekly” and finally consented. And so, on the morning of January 12, 1959—the day they had intended to leave for India—Paul and Essie were both admitted to the Kremlin Hospital, he into a private room on the fourth floor, she into similar accommodations on the second. When it was announced that Paul would not be performing his scheduled concert that day in Moscow, rumors flew that he had somehow been injured. A crowd gathered at the Metropole Hotel, where the Robesons had been staying, anxiously inquiring about his health, asking what might be done to help, dispersing only after officials reassured them that Robeson was in good hands. Paul cried when told of the crowd’s distress and concern.²⁶

He was given a battery of tests. Initially there was some worry about a possible heart condition, but finally his low blood-pressure readings and continuing dizziness were ascribed to an “acute state of exhaustion.” The doctors insisted on a total rest for a minimum of ten days, probably longer, which precluded the trip to India. Paul turned “mulish,” Essie reported home, but the doctors, seconded by Essie, finally managed to persuade him that the changes in climate and water, “not to say anything about the enormous strain of another National Welcome,” would affect his health for the worse. On January 14 Essie herself began therapy, having radium inserted into the mouth of her uterus, requiring that she lie still for twenty-four hours after each treatment. For the first two days of hospitalization, she had gone up in the elevator to visit Paul; now, when she was prostrate, he came down and watched television with her (including the sessions of the Twenty-first Party Congress). On the days she was allowed up, Essie worked away at her typewriter—eventually turning out no fewer than ten articles during her hospital stay.²⁷

Next came the problem of what to do about Othello, scheduled to begin rehearsing at Stratford in mid-February. Robeson had had reservations about playing the role from the beginning, apprehensive that after so long an absence from the stage he would fail to measure up to what was being widely billed as a “historic” event and the “jewel in the crown of his career.” As bouts of dizziness continued in the hospital, Essie reminded him that Othello demanded “sudden, vigorous brave moves and strides” and insisted it was “madness” for him to undertake the part. Paul finally agreed to cancel, and Essie so notified Glen Byam Shaw, who at first tried to recast the role but then cabled Robeson begging him to reconsider (“I implore you Paul to help me or [the] Stratford season will be ruined”). He promised to adjust rehearsal and performance schedules in such a way as to minimize all strain on him.28

By then Paul was feeling considerably better, and getting restless. On February 5 he left the hospital for a month’s stay at Barveekha Sanatorium, the plush rest home for government officials and distinguished foreign visitors, while Essie stayed behind for continuing radium treatments followed by a gamma-ray series as an additional precaution. At Barveekha, ice skating and a careful diet further increased Paul’s zest (though failing actually to reduce his weight). Mulling over Shaw’s offer, he began to view it as an opportunity to get back into harness on terms that would minimize risk to his reputation. He would be able to concentrate—with due advance warning to colleagues and the press—on the vocal aspects of the role, the aspects he felt most comfortable with, and to minimize the physical movement, with which he did not. With the burden now “on other shoulders, not his,” as Essie explained it, the essential responsibility would be “with them, and they will be very grateful if he just appears.” Paul wired Glen Byam Shaw his acceptance. Shaw was ecstatic; he even promised that special light costumes would be designed so that Paul would not “have to carry a lot of weight.” Paul now looked forward to the engagement, “not with dread, as before, but with anticipation and interest.”²⁹

On March 9 Robeson left Barveekha for London. “I think everything will be fine,” Essie wrote Sam and Helen Rosen, “if he just doesn’t beat his brains out with the extra curricular activities.” Always eager to spare him whether he wished it or not, Essie put off telling him until the last minute that she would have to stay behind in the Kremlin Hospital; the doctors were pleased with the results of the radium and gamma treatments, but wanted her to complete the series before joining Paul in Stratford later in the month. Met at the London airport by reporters—who noted his weight loss and thought he looked older than his years—Robeson took the occasion to say that he thought his performance as Othello would now have to be a “muted” one, and to thank the able team of Soviet doctors who had looked after him and the many well-wishers who had sent encouraging messages. He added good-humoredly that “many people seemed to be more worried” about the effect of the illness “on my voice than about me,” and apparently “wouldn’t have minded if I had to crawl back from Moscow on crutches, just as long as I can still sing.” Essie, writing privately to Paul, Jr., struck a less wry and more overtly angry note: “I mean to begin to preserve the Robesons first, and then do what I can for everybody else. If that’s not political maturity, then write me down as an INFANT, period. Everybody else nearly got us killed once, and I say NEVER NO MORE. Which does not mean I am signing off, but it does mean I’m cautious, as from now.… People!!! I’m thoroughly disgusted. Not even an ‘if you are well enough,’ or ‘if you are not tired,’ merely please, please, please, you owe it to the cause, etc. And there are about ten causes. Sheer disgusting exploitation.”30

With the April 7 opening less than a month away, Robeson went straight to Stratford to begin rehearsals. He was accompanied by Joseph (“Andy”) Andrews, who since the early days in England had served him both as valet and friend. At Stratford, Robeson moved into a suite of spare rooms in a large converted farmhouse in Shottery, on the outskirts of town. It was owned by Mrs. Whitfield, described by her son-in-law Andrew Faulds (an actor who later became a Labour Party member from Stratford) as “a very old-fashioned sort of English lady, conservative with a small ‘c’ and totally unaware politically.” Unexpectedly—to her family—she became “devoted to Paul,” enamored of his “extraordinary courtesy and good manners”; she developed immense “respect for this man, and she had had no knowledge of him, either as an artist or a politician.” When Robeson was not rehearsing, he lived as a member of the Whitfield clan, wandering into Mrs. Whitfield’s sitting room for a chat, relaxing in the garden with Faulds and his wife and the two other Whitfield daughters, Mary and Thisbe. When Faulds talked politics with Robeson, he got the sense of, “well, ‘melancholy’ is the only word, of disappointment, of profound disappointment in how things had happened in the world … an immense awareness of the intractable bloody problems of the world at large.” But “the overall feel of Paul in Stratford was of personal happiness.” Among other things, he had a brief affair during these months, which he remembered with great tenderness. Robeson was, in several ways, enjoying a restoration.³¹

The twenty-seven-year-old director, Tony Richardson, had won instant fame for his vivid, brisk staging of John Osborne’s path-breaking play, Look Back in Anger. In turning his hand to Othello, Richardson cast in a contemporary spirit, choosing Osborne’s wife, Mary Ure, to play Desdemona, and the American actor Sam Wanamaker for Iago, but he interpreted the text conservatively. Ignoring the revisionist and iconoclastic views of the critic F. R. Leavis that Othello is the story of a self-dramatizing narcissist, Richardson settled instead for the traditional view of Othello as the Noble Moor brought down by the machinations of an alien world. This romantic Moor—steadfast, dignified, honorable, put-upon, loving—is almost certainly the only kind of Othello Robeson had any interest in playing, or could play. And it was in the mainstream tradition of recent Stratford Othellos—of Godfrey Tearle in 1948, Anthony Quayle in 1954, and also the portrayals of Richard Burton and John Neville in alternating performances of Othello and Iago at the Old Vic in 1956. Not until 1964, at the National Theatre of Great Britain, would Laurence Olivier attempt a “Leavis” Othello—and triumph.

Since Robeson was the kind of actor who majestically played an aspect of himself and could not (like an Olivier) inhabit a variety of characters foreign to his being, Tony Richardson was obliged to tailor his conception of Othello to his lead player. The logical path—if the goal was consistency—would have been to opt for a production style consonant with Robeson’s own. Instead, Richardson mounted a production basically at odds with his star’s gravity and reserve, filling the stage with flashy special effects that called maximum attention to his own lively powers of invention—rock-and-roll drumbeats, Great Danes dashing across the footlights, a deathbed scene enacted on an elevated platform. Moreover, he allowed Sam Wanamaker to play Iago with the Midwestern twang and strut of a slick confidence man, and Mary Ure to portray Desdemona as if she were acting in an Arnold Wesker kitchen-sink drama. (The supporting cast included a remarkable number of future stars: Albert Finney as Cassio, Roy Dotrice as the second Montano officer, Zoe Caldwell as Bianca, and—lost in a crowd of anonymous Venetian Citizens—Diana Rigg and Vanessa Redgrave.) All this made for moments of immense vivacity—but at the expense of emotional coherence, and with the additional danger of making Robeson, with his sonorous tones and serious demeanor, look like an anachronism.

The critics, an old-fashioned lot on the whole, voted for tradition, praising Robeson and decrying the gimmicky production that had threatened to swamp him. A few—including the prestigious Times and Manchester Guardian reviewers—lumped production and star together, dismissing the entire evening as a tricky failure; several others expressed concern that the subtleties of the verse continued—as in his 1930 performance of the role—to elude Robeson, declamation too often displacing feeling. But the critical majority succumbed to the authority of his stage presence, and congratulated him for having risen above the circumstances of the production. W. A. Darlington, dean of the London critics, ranked Robeson’s Othello among the best he had ever seen, the News Chronicle hailed it as “superb,” and even Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express, which for years had conducted a political vendetta against him, praised his “strong and stately” portrayal (though suggesting it was a triumph of “presence not acting”).32

Robeson was more than pleased; he was grateful. Given the obstacles of an uncongenial production, a recent illness, and the many years that had elapsed since his last appearance in a play, he felt lucky to have extracted some power from the role. It was doubtless with real relief that he told a reporter from the London Daily Mirror, “I am overwhelmed by the reception I have been given.” He was gratified, too, at the public response. The play immediately sold out its seven-month run, and long lines formed nightly in the hope of last-minute tickets. On opening night itself, the audience gave him an ecstatic fifteen curtain calls (Sam Wanamaker pushed Robeson forward and led the cast in applauding him). Essie, who arrived in Stratford at the end of March in good time for the opening, wrote Freda Diamond that it had been a “terrific personal triumph.” Helen Rosen, who had also arrived for the opening (the Rosens and Robesons had intended to rendezvous in India in January), found him undismayed by the few negatives: “He had never claimed that he was a great actor,” she recalls, and had always tended to agree with critics who pointed to his incomplete technical mastery. Peggy Ashcroft, too, was on Robeson’s side. Disappointed with what she saw in 1959, she put the blame in equal parts on “a production that did not suit his particular genius,” on a “technique that had not developed,” and on the fact that he was “surrounded by actors of a more modern style.”33

Once the hectic first few weeks were over, Robeson settled into a more relaxed stride. His schedule called for four, then three, then two performances a week for the rest of the play’s seven-month run, leaving him considerable free time for interim engagements. Requests came thick and fast, and at almost every performance friends and admirers crowded backstage to offer good wishes. Essie alternated with Andy in deciding who got through the net; among those who made it were Du Bois and Shirley Graham, Bob and Clara Rockmore, the lawyer Milton Friedman, Oginga Odinga of Kenya, Peter Abrahams of South Africa, Joshua Nkomo of Rhodesia, Reverend and Mrs. Stephen Fritchman (the left-wing minister who had hosted two of Robeson’s 1957 concerts in California). In late May, Sam Rosen arrived from the United States to join Helen for a few days; in July, Paul, Jr., and Marilyn brought their two children over. Robeson lived in the village several days a week, but Essie increasingly stayed in London, at their Connaught Square apartment. She was having trouble getting her strength back and needed rest; besides, she and Paul were not getting along well—the FBI even picked up a rumor that the couple would soon formally separate.³⁴

Between performances of the play, he pursued an active schedule, though “he tires greatly” (Essie wrote the Soviet filmmaker Katanian) and occasionally had to cancel an engagement because of exhaustion. Only two weeks after opening night, he joined Peggy Ashcroft, along with various foreign diplomats and the company of actors, in a procession through the town of Stratford to commemorate Shakespeare’s birthday. Ashcroft remembers that twenty or thirty young people suddenly broke from the curb on the pavement to join Robeson in the procession—“following him as if he were the Pied Piper.” She thought that “in the year of the Sharpeville Massacre” in South Africa, they saw in Robeson, even though he “was no longer a household name, the symbol of black and oppressed people with whom they were in sympathy.… It was very moving.” But on the train ride together back to London, Ashcroft found him “withdrawn and sad.” Possibly the reaction of the young reminded him of the civil-rights struggle going on back home, which was proceeding without him and which he yearned to join.35

That same month, Robeson joined another old friend, the deported American Communist Claudia Jones, at the West Indian Caribbean Festival in London, and subsequently spoke in support of the West Indian Gazette, which she had helped to found (and even promised he was “going to do something for her paper).” With the weight of the Othello opening behind him, Robeson began to make other political appearances and pronouncements. In April he took part in the African Freedom Day concert sponsored by the Movement for Colonial Freedom. He told the rally, “The struggle is not one of individual people; it is a collective struggle,” and credited the Soviet Union—emphasizing his point “with a clenched fist,” according to the report from the U.S. Embassy to the Secretary of State—with being a positive force in the fight for African freedom. Only the Daily Worker on the left and Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express on the right covered Robeson’s Africa Day appearance, each reporting in predictable style: the Express blasted him for abusing British hospitality by spending his day off taking part “in a rally whose object was to denounce the British Empire.”³⁶

The Express was hardly mollified when, that same week, Robeson sang to a huge disarmament rally in Trafalgar Square—and followed that in June with yet another appearance at a tumultuous ban-the-H-bomb gathering. That same month he made a forty-eight-hour trip to Prague to attend the Congress of Socialist Culture, and in early August joined Paul, Jr., and Marilyn at the World Youth Festival in Vienna. The U.S. Embassy in London notified the State Department of Robeson’s Continental travels, and American legal attachés abroad alerted J. Edgar Hoover. U.S. press representatives were also present when he strode to the platform at the Youth Festival in Vienna on August 3 to be greeted by a roar of applause, a deluge of flowers, and, at the close, some “anti-Communist” catcalls from members of the American delegation, which were relayed back home on CBS television and reported in The New York Times.³⁷

In his speech in Vienna, Robeson reflected on the disappointment many American blacks felt at the rising tide of white resistance to desegregation in the South, and on the fact that “eighteen million of us do not have full freedom.” But The New York Times chose to relegate that portion of his speech to a parenthetical clause and to focus instead on what it called his “general attack on his country’s foreign policy,” headlining its article “Robeson Sees Rise of Fascism in U.S.” The Times further reported that when delegates critical of his stand tried to question his views, they were “shouted down or ruled out of order by the Communists, who control the program.” It was not the sort of publicity likely to make Robeson seem (as he very much wished) a desirable comrade-in-arms to the black leaders of the civil-rights struggle; whether or not the Times was deliberately attempting to keep the “radical” Robeson distanced from the movement, it made a decided contribution to that end.38

Returning from the festival, Robeson used the few hours during a plane change in Budapest to give a speech and an interview to the Hungarian Telegraph Office. The gesture created a delicate situation, and on two counts: Robeson had publicly supported Soviet intervention during the Hungarian uprising of 1956; plus, his American passport was clearly stamped “Not Valid for Travel in Hungary.” By making himself visible in Budapest, he risked offending the people of one nation and the authorities of his own. He minimized the first danger by confining his remarks while in Budapest to generalities. Never once mentioning the U.S.S.R. by name, he instead spoke glowingly of his belief in Socialist Man and his personal feelings of affection for the Hungarian people. The second danger was not so successfully navigated. In defying the ban on travel to Hungary, Robeson had given the State Department an opportunity to invalidate his newly won passport—especially since he had alluded to an intention to go to China soon, also a forbidden travel area.³⁹

Frances G. Knight, head of the Passport Division, sent an airgram to American posts in Budapest and elsewhere requesting additional information on what Robeson had said and what his prospective travel plans might be. The State Department directed the U.S. Embassy in London to contact Robeson for direct verification of whether he had visited Hungary and if so what he had said there. After the Embassy had sent him two registered letters, and after he had had a chance to confer with Bob Rockmore in the States and D. N. Pritt (who had been counsel to Jomo Kenyatta) in England, Robeson confirmed that it had indeed been his “privilege and deep pleasure” to find himself in Budapest on a regular stopover made by the Dutch KLM plane on which he had been traveling. He pointed out, by way of mitigation, that American athletes had recently competed in Hungary “in a very friendly atmosphere” and that American businessmen and artists had been in the country as well. Since Robeson had technically been in transit only, and since he had been “getting less and less publicity” of late, Frances Knight argued it should be kept that way, and the State Department decided to delay passport action against him until his intentions with regard to a trip to China were made clear. The State Department was about to play out yet another war of nerves.⁴⁰

The British continued to treat Robeson as a beloved celebrity, not a potential subversive. The BBC decided to feature him in a series of ten Sunday-night radio broadcasts and also to offer on the Home Service “The Paul Robeson Story,” featuring Ronald Adam, Marie Burke, and Dame Sybil Thorndike (“The radio series is going like a house-a-fire,” Essie wrote Helen Rosen, “and the fan mail is fabulous”). On television, Robeson was first paired with Yehudi Menuhin for a conversation about music that The New Statesman, not given to overpraise, found so stimulating that it absolved television for the “hours of muck” that made up its ordinary fare (a gratifying dividend for Robeson was Menuhin’s apparent expression of interest in his musical theories). A second television program, with the British jazzman Johnny Dankworth sharing the billing, was not nearly so well received: “too many mutual compliments, too much nebulous waffle,” was the opinion of Variety. That one misfire aside, Robeson’s radio and television appearances produced so much favorable comment and such a deluge of fan letters that the BBC decided to schedule yet another series, for 1960. Essie periodically expressed concern that Paul might not be getting enough rest, but, after nearly a decade of enforced silence, he seemed willing to run the risk. Although white America rarely reported on Robeson, the Pittsburgh Courier headlined to black America, “Paul Robeson Great Success in Britain.”41

On October 13, 1959, Essie wrote Claude Barnett of the Associated Negro Press, asking for accreditation as a roving reporter so she could cover Khrushchev’s planned visit to Africa in January. “Have had quite a struggle with my health,” she wrote Barnett, “but am finally beginning to get back my energy.” Barnett immediately sent her a press card, but soon after, she came down with “terrific and blinding pain”—and Essie was not a complainer. She wrote the truth to Sam and Helen Rosen, whose discretion and intelligence she had come to trust (though, given Paul’s involvement with Helen, a certain distanced politeness remained the rule). To the Rosens she confessed that she had “pain everywhere,” but begged them to “keep mum, please, please,” since “Paul has no idea how very bad things are with me.… He already has his own affairs to cope with, and there is nothing he could do, anyway.” Essie feared that her cancer had recurred, and the Rosens recommended that she see J. B. Blaikely, a leading gynecologist who had headed a team of British doctors cooperating with Soviet physicians on radiation treatment. Blaikely put her in the hospital for exploratory surgery. He found no sign of a recurrence and assured Essie that the doctors in Moscow had “done a wonderful job.” Her pain, he decided, was from an ulcer on the front wall of the rectum, a common aftereffect of radiation therapy, and advised her that if she maintained a bland diet it would heal itself within six to nine months.⁴²

Paul took Essie home from the hospital on November 14, and she arranged for her friend Peggy Middleton to come in twice a week and help with her letters. Essie reported to Freda Diamond, “Paul is so relieved and happy that it isn’t cancer, that he is quite thoughtful and useful.” To the Rosens she sent a less glowing version of domestic life: “I give him full run of the living room and his bedroom, while I have my bedroom and the dining room. It works out very well.” On November 26 Paul made his last appearance as Othello and was called back for ten curtain calls. He had not missed a single performance in seven months, but the grind had been far more difficult than he publicly acknowledged. “It’s been wonderful but a constant hazard,” he wrote Helen Rosen near the end of the run, “the going has been tough—and I’ve resorted to all means of self hypnosis between performances—languages—music—sleep—investigation of the ways of various nationalities—travel.… Have done fairly well in some regions.” Yet at one point, he confessed, he had become so lonesome for her that he had “debated flying over (really) in between engagements.” When his old theatrical friend Flora Robson came to see his performance, he confided to her that he was having great difficulty remembering the lines and had to have a prompter on hand all the time. With the show now finally closed, he decided on a complete rest before beginning a three-month British concert tour with Larry Brown in mid-February.43

In January 1960 Paul and Essie went for a three-week stay in Moscow to complete their rest cure and to have medical checkups. The Moscow doctors put Essie in the hospital to evaluate her continuing pain and to give her a blood transfusion. After a week of exhausting procedures, they told her the location of the ulcerated area, high on the wall of the rectum, made it difficult to treat, but assured her they could help; she settled in for a period of outpatient therapy that would continue long after Paul had returned to London. His health was found to be “very fine.” Essie reported home that “he is in excellent shape, considerably overweight, and a little tired. No exhaustion as before and they are all very pleased with him.…” She also reported that he was “very happy.” He made radio and television appearances, spoke and sang at a mass meeting in his honor at Ball Bearing Plant No. 1, attended the Chekhov hundredth-anniversary celebration, met with the Izvestia staff, participated in sessions of the World Peace Committee, and in between took out a week to rest at the Barveekha Sanatorium. He is “having a ball,” Essie wrote, though “nobody likes his [Othello] beard and mustache, which he still wears and still likes—says it makes him look Abyssinian!” The U.S. Embassy in Moscow also reported on his activities: his “television appearance and press statements were notably uniform in including laudatory mention of the Soviet troop reduction announcement, in mesh with the current Soviet propaganda exploitation of this item.”⁴⁴

Paul returned to London on February 7, while Essie remained for additional treatments. John Pittman, a black American Communist who had come with his family to live as a correspondent in the Soviet Union, had an apartment a few doors down from Essie, and the writer Albert Kahn was also nearby. “So between her American and Russian friends,” Paul wrote Helen Rosen, “she’ll be all right.” He, however, was far less resourceful than Essie about ordinary daily matters and within a few weeks of returning to London was writing to Helen, “The apartment is rather lonely these days. No one to get breakfast and no peanut brittle.” The new British tour, beginning on February 21 and lasting until May 15, took up the slack.45

He had avoided giving concerts in the Soviet Union because the sound arrangements were rarely adequate, but in England most of his concerts were booked in acoustically sophisticated cinemas. Nor did he have to worry about the provincial reception. In a thirty-two-city tour that led up to Manchester, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen and back down through Hull, Liverpool, and Birmingham, he was greeted with nearly unanimous praise, though the actual turnout proved disappointing (he grossed about eighty-five hundred pounds). Bob Rockmore, who had been expecting substantial sums from Paul’s overseas earnings to pay off his commitments at home and to provide a nest egg for later years, began to complain again about “the expenditure of too much money by everybody concerned,” and was hardly appeased when Paul cabled him to give the proceeds of his share ($1,650) from the sale of some property to his brother Ben.⁴⁶

In talking with reporters during his tour stopovers, Robeson struck something of a valedictory note: having succeeded at Stratford, he said, “I can now relax, feel that my artistic life has been fulfilled and hope to continue at a good level without any startling plans.” Though he pretty much avoided discussing politics with the press, he didn’t hesitate to attend the thirtieth anniversary of the London Daily Worker or to celebrate May Day with the Scottish miners, telling the assembled crowd, “You will need all the strength you have got to see that you who create the wealth of the country have a chance to enjoy it.” But even in Glasgow, with people calling out warmly on the streets, “Paul, stay with us!,” he continued to show signs of erratic mood swings. One man who had known him before couldn’t get over “how much he’d aged and how tense he was,” once losing his temper with his well-regarded accompanist Harry Carmichael—a lapse in courtesy unthinkable for Robeson at any previous point in his life.⁴⁷

On his return to London, Robeson spent most of the next month making a second series of radio broadcasts for the BBC to release the following year, and then, on June 18, went to East Berlin for two days to participate in the third annual press festival sponsored by Neues Deutschland, official organ of the Communist Party. It was a considerable gesture, with the GDR unrecognized in the West and thought to be near collapse (soon after, the Berlin Wall went up). In appreciation, the East Germans built Robeson a special bed big enough for his huge size, and assigned him both a private doctor and a bodyguard (he was a small man, but he reassured Robeson, “Never mind, Paul, I can just cover your heart”). Robeson appeared as the featured artist during the ceremonies officially opening the festival and held a press conference at which he said that in the autumn he hoped to make an extended visit to the East European socialist countries; he also said he planned to return to the United States. Indeed, his homesickness had been growing. During the run of Othello, Andrew Faulds had sensed “a keen desire on his part to get back to America,” to “get back with the folks”—though his wish to be part of the burgeoning civil-rights struggle he had helped to inaugurate alternated with the realization that the NAACP and even Martin Luther King, Jr., would be reluctant to share a platform with him.48

Otto Nathan saw him in London and reported to Robeson’s lawyer Leonard Boudin that he “is not very happy, he does not look well.” Paul himself confessed as much to Helen Rosen. While still on tour he had written her, “… desolate without you—crying for you—Got de Blues and too damn mean to cry—No! I’m almost weepin—Tell Odessa [the Rosens’ housekeeper] to come over here and get me and bring me back.… That’s the ‘blues’ or ‘secular’ side of my personality talking.…” Five days later he wrote her that everything was going “fine” but that it “all gets a little desolate now and then—no matter how wonderful things are in general.” Then he uncharacteristically spelled out his new priority of needs: “… I never thought that friends would one day out-weigh the seemingly all-powerful social and political drives.… All the slogans in the world can’t replace even hours of concern and tenderness—let alone years and years. Funny how that complete ‘inner security’ springs up when surrounded and ‘encircled’ as in Katonah … somehow loses some of its power when surrounded without question by the respect and deep affection of thousands and thousands. Strange but true.”⁴⁹

Two months later he was still writing Helen frequently and still sounding the same desolate themes: “I’m so lonely. Doesn’t seem to improve at all … Suppose you’ll head to the country [Katonah]. Boy! What a few weeks there would do! What you say!” “If only those ‘blokes’ could improve the atmosphere,” he wrote her yet another time, “a trip [home] might be possible.” American artists like Nat King Cole, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Diahann Carroll were “jumping back and forth” from the States to England—“Why can’t I do the opposite? … makes one really homesick.” (While making a speech during these same months in which he referred to “my country,” Robeson blurted out, “… any time my folks say they need me, if it’s tomorrow morning, I’ll get back there don’t worry, bet your life I will.”) Helen was startled to get Paul’s letters: both their frequency and their content were highly atypical. It made her wonder what special pressures might be working within him. At just this time, ironically, the FBI was reporting that Robeson “has taken up permanent overseas residence,” and the Washington Post headlined a rare U.S. report on him, “Robeson Tours as ‘Exile’” (self-exiled, the article went on to claim).50

As much as Robeson yearned for home, the signals he got from the States were mixed. Old friends like Earl Robinson wrote that “the climate really does seem more favorable than negative for peace and progress.” Daily headlines described the spread of sit-ins and the birth of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), marking a more militant phase in the black struggle and generating, in the growing circle of liberal, labor, religious, and campus support, a more sympathetic Northern white response to it. By 1960, too, a dozen African nations had gained independence, led by Ghana’s successful revolution in 1957. Yet the newspaper accounts also made clear that the actual pace of progress in the white South remained slow and uncertain. Six years after the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision, only 6 percent of Southern schools were integrated, and the rate of compliance in ending disenfranchisement was still so glacial that fewer than one in four blacks of voting age in the South could register.⁵¹

When the Democrats named John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to head their 1960 presidential ticket, some saw it as harbinger of vigorous federal commitment to civil-rights legislation, but Essie and Paul were not among them. The ticket “is really American,” Essie sarcastically wrote Freda Diamond. “Millions, Irish Catholic Boston background, and the South. What a combination. I will be deeply interested to see if Negroes will vote for THAT combination. If they do, shame on them. I also will be interested to see what The Left will do in this dilemma: they simply cannot vote for Kennedy-Johnson, equally they simply cannot vote for Mr. War Tricky Dicky [Nixon], so perhaps, if they have any principle at all, they will just NOT vote. I wouldn’t pollute my vote by casting for either of that stink.” Just before Kennedy narrowly won the election, Robeson was asked at a press conference in East Berlin whether he thought the Democratic nominee represented “the other America.” “Maybe you’d better define what you mean by the other America,” Robeson replied. “The other America for me is Jefferson, Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Kennedy is just about as dangerous as anybody else. He does not represent the Democratic Party’s great traditions, but is, like Nixon, a firm supporter of NATO and he wants more bases, not fewer.”⁵²

Essie, unlike Paul, felt no particular pull to return to the United States. After four months of treatment in Moscow, she arrived back in London in May, but her recovery continued to be erratic—“just when I think I’ve turned a corner for the better,” there is “blood, pain, etc.” She tried to live from day to day and characteristically pushed herself to maximum activity with minimal self-pity. She had hoped to attend the African Women’s Conference in Ghana, but had to forgo the trip. Paul, on the other hand, was again feeling energetic, and accepted a new batch of invitations to attend functions on the Continent. But before embarking on yet another round of what Essie called his “rat race” of commitments, he decided to take off some weight. He had gone up to 282 pounds, and Essie alternately described him as a “walking mountain” and an “over-stuffed divan.” Taking an injection of gonadotropine every morning to “break up the entrenched fat,” and sticking to a diet of five hundred calories a day, he lost forty pounds in forty days. He “looks and feels like a million dollars,” Essie reported.53

In his trim new appearance, his mood swing once more heading upward, Robeson set off for Paris early in September to participate in a festival for the fortieth anniversary of the Communist paper L’Humanité in the working-class suburb of La Courneuve. The huge throng that turned out for the festival gave him a thunderous greeting, and privately he was entertained by L’Humanité editors Etienne Fajon, René Andrieu, and André Carrel, who brought him together both with French Communist officials and with visiting Soviet artists. From Paris he went to Budapest (the State Department had recently made travel to Hungary legal for American citizens) and then, after a two-week break back in London, returned to East Berlin for a four-day visit. Feeling much improved by then, Essie accompanied him to the GDR for what proved a series of stately ceremonials.⁵⁴

At Humboldt University’s 150th anniversary celebration, Robeson was awarded an honorary Doctor of Philosophy degree. After the ceremonies, standing on a balcony overlooking the massed crowd on Unter den Linden, Robeson sang “John Brown’s Body” and “Ol’ Man River”; the stiff German professors surrounding him on the balcony, as a gesture to their honored guest, broke uneasily into their own very special accompaniment version of “John Brown’s Body.” Aware that the evangelist Billy Graham was conducting meetings across the border dividing East and West Berlin, Robeson commented, “Why doesn’t he go down to Alabama instead and preach about brotherhood?” Later in the day the Robesons were individually awarded prizes by the East German peace movement. That evening the honors were completed at a gala that called for “full medals.” Surveying his assorted awards, Robeson asked Franz and Diana Loesser with dismay which one he was supposed to wear. “I’m afraid all of them,” Franz said. Robeson grimaced and said he would wear only one—picking out a handmade medal given him by the students of Humboldt. At the Central Youth Club that same night a performance of folk songs and dances was put on in his honor in a hall jammed to capacity with five thousand people and graced by the presence of Walter Ulbricht and Otto Grotewohl, leading members of the government. Robeson spontaneously joined a group of African students from Leipzig in a dance, then later spoke and sang to the crowd. It was, he told them, “one of the most moving days of my sixty-two-year-old life.” As the climax of the evening, Helene Weigl, the widow of Bertolt Brecht, presented Robeson with a silk cloth bearing a reproduction of Picasso’s peace dove—symbol of the Berliner Ensemble—and Chairman Ulbricht pinned on him the Order of the Star of International Friendship; Robeson was the first person given the award.55

“In a socialist country,” Robeson told a reporter on his return to London, “I give my services free. In a capitalist country I charge as much as I can.” He put that principle to work in deciding whether or not to take up a lucrative offer to tour New Zealand and Australia for ten weeks. He didn’t want to go; he was tempted to visit Ghana instead, and was also homesick for the States. Offered more than a hundred thousand dollars for twenty concerts in Australia and New Zealand, with additional sums to be added for television appearances, Robeson reluctantly decided to accept. For two or three months’ work, Essie wrote to Freda Diamond, they could “clean up some fast money, and then he can retire, and do only what he wants to do, when he wants to. Which means television, radio, and occasionally a concert. And some writing.” (Paul still hoped to do a book about his musical theories.) With Essie and Larry Brown, Robeson arrived in Australia on October 13.⁵⁶

The tour did bring in the expected income and generated some incidental pleasures as well, but, far from being a piece of cake, it proved a grueling ordeal. In Robeson’s opening press conferences in Sydney and Brisbane, several hostile reporters prodded him with sharp-edged questions, and Robeson rose angrily to the bait. Had the Hungarian uprising been justified? Robeson pointed his finger at the questioner and told him the uprising had been inspired by “fascists”—encouraged by Voice of America broadcasts to Hungary—and was not a revolt of the people. Had not the condition of blacks in the United States greatly improved of late? It had somewhat improved, Robeson shot back, primarily because blacks had become militant in demanding their rights and because the U.S.S.R. had supported the black struggle. Was he bitter about the way the U.S. government had treated him? Bitter? Robeson echoed, and then launched into what one newspaper later described as an “emotional outburst” and another as a “nauseating” political “tirade.” “If someone did something bad to me I wouldn’t be bitter—I’d just knock him down and put my foot into his face” (crashing his foot down on the floor to illustrate his point). He then went on—at least, so the press reported—to say that the Russians would “hammer out the brains” of any country, including America, who took arms against them, and to declare that, in the event of such a conflict, he would side with Russia. Paul “is angrier than ever,” Essie reported ruefully to Freda Diamond, “and it makes me shudder, because he is so often angry at the wrong people, and so often unnecessarily angry.”⁵⁷

Paul’s anger reflected not the momentary logic of events but storedup griefs, a nature unraveling. Behind the reporters’ hostile questions—which had been thrown at him now for two decades—he heard the smug, unspoken subtext: “Come on, Robeson, confess, confess that your hopes have run aground, confess that human beings stink, confess that the rest of us have always been right, that we’re perfectly entitled to go on leading the narrow, hardened, opportunistic lives you silly idealists once so righteously scorned.” He told Nancy Wills, an Australian woman he had first met in London in the forties, that he was afraid to walk the streets in Australia—“He didn’t believe that the people here loved him.” When Essie, in front of Wills, mentioned the possibility of stopping off in the Philippines on their way back to London, Paul flew into a rage, declaring that U.S. agents would kill him if he ever set foot in the Philippines—“It was frightening,” as Wills remembers the scene, “to see and hear anyone so distraught, so angry.”58

Australia had not fully emerged from its own McCarthy-like deepfreeze, and the current Menzies government was, at the very moment of Robeson’s arrival, debating an anti-civil-libertarian Crimes Act Amendment. Having set him up with a string of loaded political questions, the Australian press proceeded to lambaste him for being too political. The Herald and Sun chain of newspapers headlined their stories of Robeson’s initial press conference, “Would Back Russia in a War,” and “Robeson Bitterly Critical of U.S.” while the Telegraph weighed in with “I Wish He Was Still Bosambo.” D. D. O’Connor, the sponsoring agent for Robeson’s tour, wrote Essie that the headlines “aroused a certain amount of resentment, particularly in official circles and of course in the wealthy and rather snobbish section of concert patrons.” Since tickets for the tour were scaled rather high, O’Connor expressed concern for its commercial success, a concern heightened when the director of adult education in Hobart promptly canceled Robeson’s scheduled appearance in that city (“My Board is reluctant to be identified with Mr. Robeson’s public statements, and cannot co-operate with you as previously arranged”).⁵⁹

Things simmered down once the tour itself began. The next three weeks were spent in New Zealand, and there the press was altogether more civil than in Australia. At a typical concert appearance Robeson (continuing his recent practice) would eschew a formal program and present instead an informal combination of talk and song. One reporter vividly caught his platform manner:

Robeson treated the normal procedures … with something like kindly indifference, putting on thick-rimmed glasses to read the words of a song from a copy of the printed program, and commenting on many of his songs in the light of his own view of social justice (“If they call that politics, I plead guilty”). With a small lectern beside him, to hold notes and reminders, there were times when he stripped his glasses off at the end of a song and challenged his audience with the optical and vocal intensity of a preacher delivering a spiritual ultimatum.… This cosmic belch of a voice still has the power to astonish by sheer, carpeted magnificence.

Not only did the music critics hail Robeson’s artistry, but the news reporters skirted political questions (according to one reporter, Robeson’s New Zealand agent phoned in advance to request that political topics be avoided). When his plane set down at Whenaupai Airport in Auckland, he was given a traditional Maori welcome, and he later visited the Maori Community Centre. “The Maoris are a wonderful people—beautiful copper colored,” Robeson wrote Clara Rockmore. They “have accepted us as of them and [are] very proud of our success.… Am over the dumps (the bad spots)—and riding high.” Despite his agent’s worry, and although local Catholic schools were instructed not to support Robeson’s concerts because he was a “Communist,” they in fact sold out.60

Still, the fireworks, if dampened, continued to smolder. The New Zealand Woman’s Weekly reported that Robeson at times seemed “edgy” when speaking to the press—“A quick answer, an impatience at any sidetracking.…” It also quoted him as saying he had no further musical ambitions and was now only ambitious “as a scholar”; he wanted “to be so fluent in one other language—any one—that I can find myself dreaming in that language, so that I am not forced, as I am now, to do all my thinking and talking in the tongue of my oppressor. That sounds bitter, I guess.” Robeson sometimes talked politics to the reporters even when they did not goad him into doing so. In Auckland he told the press he was “here to sing” and was “through with missions for the moment”—and then proceeded to criticize the United States for supporting Franco and Chiang Kai-shek. He declared himself still “a rigid Marxist,” expressed concern about mistreatment of the Maoris and the suppression of their culture, and even volunteered sardonic disappointment that blacks back home seemed wholly wedded to a prayerful, nonviolent struggle: “They say to me: ‘Paul, you’re black like we are but you don’t pray so much. You’re more likely to break a few heads. So you stay overseas where you are.’” The reporter from the conservative New Zealand Herald concluded, “He is a man who quite openly wears a chip on his shoulder.” Robeson further alienated conservative New Zealand opinion by singing to the waterside workers in Wellington, who were out on strike, and accepting membership in their union. Essie gave a few interviews in her own right and saw her function as being “especially gracious and pleasant, though always forthright, to try and counteract some of the anger.” But by the end of the tour, Essie was fed up with trying to pacify Paul and the press simultaneously. She let out her feelings to the Rosens: “Your Boy is full of bile and tension, and remains ANGRY at the drop of a hat. I’m very tired of coping with it. I’ve developed enough patience to last me the rest of my life, so there is no need to develop any more. You can have him. He’s tired out, but keeps on doing everything on the horizon, and so hereafter, I just don’t want to look at it. I’d rather not see it. Then I won’t need to protest, and try and save him, and try and fob off pests. He resents everything I do, no matter what. So, I’m up to here. Period.”61

The U.S. Consul in Auckland was pleased to report back to the State Department that “no civil reception or other formal type of welcome was tendered to Robeson during his stay.” Peace groups took up the social slack. In both New Zealand and Australia, the Robesons were welcomed in every city by delegations drawn from the trade unions, the Communist Party, Soviet and Chinese friendship societies, peace committees, and the Union of Australian Women. In Sydney, the Soviet Ambassador came down from Canberra to attend a peace reception in the Robesons’ honor, and the Tass representative in Australia solicited an article from Paul (written by Essie) about their impressions of the country. In that article, and frequently elsewhere as well, Robeson spoke out against New Zealand’s discrimination against the Maoris and Australia’s more overt brutality to its own native population, the aborigines. There were about seventy-five thousand aborigines in a total Australian population of ten million, driven off their land into a desert interior scarce in food and water and nearly devoid of the game they had traditionally hunted and lived on. Without the vote or representation, the aborigines roamed the Outback, a desperately abused people, Australia’s “niggers.”⁶²

The more Robeson learned about the condition of the aborigines as his tour progressed through the country, the more his indignation grew. Through Faith Bandler, an aboriginal activist, the Robesons saw a private showing of a fifteen-minute film made in the late 1950s on the plight of the aborigines in the Warburton Ranges. As she remembers it, “The tears started to stream down his face”; but when the film showed thirsty children waiting for water, his sorrow turned to anger. Flinging to the floor the black cap he had taken to wearing on his head for warmth, he swore aloud that he would return to Australia and help bring attention to the appalling conditions in which the aborigines lived. He repeated that promise a few days later to the press, and again at a large peace reception for him at Paddington Hall in Sydney. “There’s no such thing as a ‘backward’ human being,” he told the crowd. “There is only a society which says they are backward.” He cited the case of his own family: his cousins in North Carolina who worked the cotton and tobacco fields were also called “backward”; that meant they hadn’t been allowed to attend school. “The indigenous people of Australia,” he roared, “ARE my brothers and sisters.”⁶³

Arriving at the Perth airport in Western Australia toward the end of his tour, Robeson was met by Lloyd L. Davies, a lawyer and longtime aboriginal activist. Davies remembers that a throng of well-wishers was on hand at the airport to welcome Robeson but when he spotted a group of local aborigines shyly hanging back, he instantly headed for them, moving through the crowd “like a fullback.” When he reached them, “he literally gathered the nearest half dozen in his great arms,” and when he moved toward his waiting transport, the aborigines moved with him. Davies heard one of the little girls say, almost in wonder, “Mum, he likes us.” In his speech to the West Australian Peace Council, Robeson referred to his “darker brothers and sisters” whom he had seen at the airport—“they’re good stockmen, they tell me, know how to handle those horses and sheep; they ain’t too dumb for that. Not too dumb to labor for nothing.” Robeson went on to say, “I wish I could be sweet all the time.… Sometimes what you read in the paper sounds a little rough. You’re right, it was rough. That’s right. I said it.” In Davies’s view, Robeson’s gestures and words during his visit to Australia “gave a tremendous boost to the Aboriginal cause.”64

The Robesons returned to London in early December 1960, their bank balance improved, their pockets stuffed with excellent artistic notices and mixed political ones—and thoroughly exhausted from the effort. “Had a really wonderful—moving tour,” Robeson wrote Clara Rockmore right after they returned, “surely need no more ‘Proof’ of anything”; the tour “fulfilled its mission in a most complete way. The audience took me up at my own valuation and responded nobly.” Still, he felt “just tired out—Bored—to put it truthfully.” From one angle, he was “just not too interested in what comes up—will do what does as well as I can—but in a ‘normal world’—I’d just quit—retire in general—and do just enough to keep going well above water.” But “there is little excuse not to function without seeming very difficult and shirking,” and so he would try to be “philosophic.” Of one thing, though, he felt certain: “that’s the last tour, as such. I’ll sing at benefits as far as concerts are concerned—and professionally will do what I have to do.” Additional plaudits meant nothing to him; to be “perfectly honest,” he wrote Clara, they had become entirely overshadowed by “the absolute vacuum (emptiness) in my personal life.” He felt “terribly, terribly lonely.…” It was “almost unbearable.” “We are just beginning to feel the strain,” Essie wrote in innocent imitation of Paul’s freighted lines, “so we are taking time out for a couple of months, just to sit here with NOTHING to do!!” Essie, who was “feeling much better generally,” went to work on a new book about blacks and American politics, while Paul continued desultory work for a book on folk music and held occasional sessions with Larry Brown to prepare recital material for future concerts.⁶⁵

No one saw more of Robeson in these months than Harry Francis, the left-wing assistant secretary of the musicians’ union, who had become a friend and an intermediary. Francis told Paul, Jr., twenty years later that his father had returned from the Australian trip so depressed that he took to lying on the bed in a darkened room with the curtains drawn. Francis dropped in frequently, and also brought over Harry Pollitt’s (the leader of the British Communist Party) bodyguard, who played pinochle with Robeson by the hour. During one of Harry Francis’s visits, the phone rang and he answered it. Fidel Castro—so Francis tells it—was on the other end, calling from Havana, asking to talk with Paul Robeson. As the FBI was well aware, Robeson had been giving thought to a trip to Cuba (and to China and Africa as well); indeed, his uncertainty about whether to undertake another strenuous journey had contributed to his debilitating anxiety. He told Francis to explain to Castro that he couldn’t come to the phone at the moment. Only a few weeks later, anti-Castro forces, mobilized by the government of the United States, made their landing at the Bay of Pigs.66

In early January, Essie and Paul gradually started to get around socially again, spending evenings at the Soviet and East European embassies, attending the Oistrakh (father and son) concert at the Albert Hall as guests of the Soviet Ambassador, and having a private hour-long visit with Kwame Nkrumah, the President of Ghana, who was in London for a Commonwealth prime-ministers’ conference (Essie did a series of articles on the conference for the Associated Negro Press). In addition, Paul put in an appearance on the television program “This Is Your Life” to honor his old acting partner Flora Robson (“… myself in Person very dignified,” he wrote self-mockingly to Clara Rockmore; thanking him for appearing on the show, Flora Robson wrote, “It was you who taught me to be kind”). He closely followed political events, watching in alarm as President-elect Kennedy tried to justify American involvement in Laos, reacting with fury to Lumumba’s assassination in the Congo, protesting vigorously against the continued imprisonment of his old friend Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya (“Let him be free, NOW, AT ONCE,” Paul wrote, “to take his rightful and dearly-won place; to give his courage, knowledge and perception to his too long-suffering folk”).⁶⁷

Deciding on plans for the future entailed additional strain. Essie was against traveling to regions restricted for U.S. citizens for fear Paul would lose his passport and they would be forced to leave England, where she preferred to live. Attractive offers arrived in abundance but had to be sifted through with one eye aimed at conserving energy and the other at fulfilling political obligations that might, ideally, combine with plausible career opportunities. Paul toyed with the idea of accepting an invitation to return to Australia in Othello, and he waited to see if Herbert Marshall, his colleague from Unity Theatre days, would be able to bring off a Russian film on the life of Ira Aldridge (for which Robeson would do the narration, not play the lead)—but he immediately turned down a proposal from the British producer Oscar Lewenstein that he appear as Archibald in Jean Genet’s The Blacks; returning the script, Essie wrote Lewenstein, “I’m sorry neither Paul nor I like it at all.”⁶⁸

Within a few months of having returned to London from Australia, the Robesons had consolidated their plans for the rest of the year. Paul would go alone to Moscow for a visit in late March; in April he would attend the Scottish Miners’ Gala in Edinburgh; late May and part of June would be given over to the Prague Music Festival, with a return in between to participate in the Welsh Miners’ Gala in Cardiff; part of July would be spent in East Berlin; August was reserved for a much-delayed trip to Ghana; and then, in the fall, there would be return visits to Rumania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the U.S.S.R. It was a full schedule but, given its emphasis on visits rather than concerts, seemed not overly exhausting. In a letter to Clara Rockmore, of uncommon length and explicitness, Paul explained that he had changed “a great deal,” had had a chance “to find out ‘who’ was ‘who’—to see some of the way things work”:

In those years, [late fifties] I came very close to many of the Negro People—not “generally” only—but felt their warmth & generosity. I’m talking of the simple folk on the [West] Coast—etc.—not the “big shots.”

He also recalled with affection “great sections of the American Jewish community who not only were close in many phases of the Peace struggle, etc. but also … were very warm & human.” Still, at this point he felt “completely desolate.” Summarizing his current mood, he explained to Clara why, despite his homesickness, he had no immediate plans to come home:

I’m convinced that if I should return to America—I’d never get out again—within any time that was pertinent. Even that would be thinkable—in the light of the way I felt—but I’m also convinced they’ll not rest until they’ve gone much further. In one way I would welcome the struggle, if my closest allies could understand my point of view.

For I’ll get off the plane calling the Pentagon, etc. the bastards they are—the upholders of Fascism & Nazism the world over—and dangerous to all of human-kind. If that’s Treason—let’s have it out.

But I’m not prepared to come back to “retire” from the scene & keep my mouth shut, etc.

If there’s any crowd I can’t take its those guys who gave me such a bad time over all those years—and my very pride would never let them get hold of me again.

For I’m one Negro, who means to take some one or I hope “some over” with me of the “enemy” if I must go.

Sounds a little “cloak & dagger”—but really—the “double talk” about the Negro question in America—and the way its “swallowed” by Negroes themselves—is just too awful to behold.

So feeling that way where can one go—I still play with Canada [but he feared, as he had written Clara earlier, that HUAC “might try to reach into Canada” after him]—they might refuse me entry or demand I do concerts under a regular Impresario.… The West Indies seems to be out. They’re making a deal with the “Big Boys” in Washington & wouldn’t trust them.

Maybe Cuba will be in the picture once the relations are again normalized—I shall certainly get there at some time—normal relations or not.

But Canada seems the best bet.…

Am planning to work at television, recordings etc—but with no heart in it. But I’ll work—because the money is there—and I’m sure I’ll need it.

Sure all will go well because I’ve really turned into a “Pro” and if it must be done—it must be done.… Will come up into the “World” again & start swinging—

In two follow-up letters he reassured Clara that he was feeling “much better” and cautioned her not to take his earlier, “very discouraging epistle too literally”; he even felt more optimistic politically: “Kennedy seems to be at least realistic and some of the people around him are decent. Let’s hope.”69

Clara took Paul’s reassurances in stride, but Helen Rosen did not. She, too, received an uncharacteristically lengthy letter from Paul, ten days after the one he had written to Clara:

I’ve been feeling very “down” but feel much better now and see some daylight.… From television (we get Kennedy’s television interviews etc.) things seem to have taken not a bad turn. No one can be too optimistic but someone’s got to face reality.… The Negro group seems to be moving way ahead according to their own light. Revels sent me a marvellous tape of a Negro gathering or conference of … middle-class Negroes on the Coast.

The conference treated … questions precisely from that point of view. “We are middle class trying to integrate—and all must aid us—as for these ‘Peasants’ from the South—They embarrass us—but we must get them to understand that this is our not their day.”

As Revels said on the tape—nothing could be franker.

As a matter of fact—this seems to me most “American” at this juncture.… It’s not easy to see this firm basic turn in Negro life—which is clearest to me.

They see themselves as Ambassadors to Africa etc.—and helping America win “cold war”—& minds of men etc. And there seems no way to really function in the Negro Community without real “Red-Baiting”—even now. If not “baiting” a deep refusal to be caught anywhere in the deep “left.”

Weaver (Housing) case is typical [Robert C. Weaver; under Kennedy, he became the first black to head a major federal agency, Housing and Home Finance].

And of course this is so more or less for the whole country. Castro & Cuba seem to have “cut across” some areas—But again that’s across the Borders.

This makes difficult the “coming over for a time” which might be possible in a truly “artistic” setting or at least if one would or could “pipe down” for a while.

Quite frankly—the day is long gone for any quiet “double-talk” or reticence, I feel—so being as realistic as possible—I see hanging in for a while here but eventually looking Eastward near & far. We’ll see.

If the tension subsides as well it might—then there’s a different story. Hope so.

As far as our conversation [Helen had been in London briefly in early February to recuperate from an illness she contracted while in Africa], you have a right, certainly to see things as you always do—very realistically—But there are others who will for better or for worse pursue their lifelong direction—especially at this historic moment of Real Triumph over much of the World whatever the domestic Picture.

And the whole history of America—certainly testifies to the need of that advanced group—whatever the difficulties involved.

It remains a source of deep wonder to me that these folk are there—in every corner of the world—and in much worse conditions than the U. States. But there they are—and when a Cuba suddenly?? erupts—the Patience & Labor seem well worth the effort.

However one individual or the other views these things—modern history has evolved this ideology and that group to actualize the theory. And pretty well they’re doing as I said before.70

Paul’s political comments, though in spots even more enigmatic than usual, didn’t seem any cause for alarm to Helen (much as she regretted his seeming change of mind about coming home, as she had long advised and as he had seemed on the verge of doing). But the comments he made, both in the long letter and in shorter follow-up notes, on his emotional state did arouse her active concern. “Terribly lonely,” he wrote, “but just doing the best I can. Have altogether failed to find friends over here. Guess I’m to blame—but also a little ‘set’ in ‘ways’ I guess.” Soon after that downcast note, he wrote twice in one day to reassure her (as he had Clara) that he was “feeling fine” again; since he rarely wrote at all, this heightened rather than diminished Helen’s concern, especially since he added: “I can’t wait to see Sam again. He’s so sweet about me—and so disturbed when I’m raging and ranting. Both he and you are right—It means some ‘inner’ disturbance—But know that I ‘dig’ into it without ‘mercy’—and come up at last with the ‘needed’ adjustment.” He closed a note of February 24 with words that sounded suspiciously manic, however tender: “‘Thank you Lord.’ Thank you! … Thank you Lord! for such a lovely family [the Rosens] and you thank them too for taking me in.… I do love you—adore you—cherish you—”71

Relying on her own well-honed instincts, Helen concluded that Paul was in emotional trouble. She first told her fears to Sam, and then the two of them contacted Paul, Jr., and also Ed Barsky, the left-wing doctor whose medical partner, Morris Perlmutter, had treated both Essie and Paul. The four of them huddled. Helen explained her strong conviction that Paul was having serious difficulty and should come home, and it was decided she should go over to London and check on his state of mind firsthand. She did, a few weeks later, and seeing him convinced her more than ever that in fact he did desperately want to return to the States but did not feel well enough. She did everything she could to persuade him to follow his inclinations. Essie, however, was adamantly opposed to a return and, realizing the purpose of Helen’s mission, did her considerable best to keep them apart. They managed, toward the end of Helen’s visit, to spend an afternoon alone together in the apartment of Andy (Robeson’s valet and friend). The next day Helen arrived at the Connaught Street flat by prearrangement for lunch, only to be told that Paul had left by plane for Moscow. Essie was “jubilant” and Helen “stunned”—to this day, she says, she “doesn’t understand what happened,” doesn’t know whether Paul, on sudden impulse, took off for his planned trip to Moscow earlier than he had originally intended, whether Essie played any role in encouraging that impulse (and, if so, how—by getting some of his Moscow friends, like Boris Polevoi or Mikhail Kotov of the Soviet Peace Committee to call? by promising a return to the States after the Moscow trip?).⁷²

On Paul’s arrival in Moscow, the Soviet press reported him busy and happy (“The telephone rang constantly.… Robeson smiled and clapped his hands in astonishment. He wanted to be everywhere”). The editorial staff of Izvestia consulted with him; he dined at the Grand Hotel; he conferred about radio and TV appearances; Georgi Zhukov, chairman of the State Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, welcomed him on a visit to the Patrice Lumumba Friendship University, and Zavadsky of the Mossovet Theater invited him to play Othello. On the night of March 23 Paul and Essie talked by phone. They chatted about plans and friends: Essie reported that Peggy Ashcroft was asking if he would be available for a poetry reading with her; Paul reported that Galya and Boris Lifanov’s baby had been ill. Essie wrote him the next day to say how pleased she was that he “sounded so happy on the telephone, it must be good news all round.”73

On March 27 Essie had another call from Moscow. Paul had slashed his wrists.