Broken Health
(1961–1964)
They couldn’t tell Essie much when she arrived in Moscow. There had been a noisy party in Paul’s hotel room the night before; at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. students had still been asking for his autograph; he had retreated into an inner room. His translator, Irina, had found him in the bathroom, his wrists slashed with a razor blade. (Two years later Robeson told a doctor treating him in the GDR that in Moscow “people whose parents or whose relatives were in jail had approached him—‘Can’t you help me?’—this sort of thing had put him into conflict.”) Who had been at the party? When had Paul slashed his wrists? At what hour did Irina discover him? How close was Paul to death? All this remained unanswered (as much of it still is) when Paul, Jr., arrived in Moscow a few days later. Deeply suspicious, he sought a logical explanation from officials. Some of the guests, he was told, “were not Soviet people”—enough innuendo to feed his suspicions but not to clarify them. If there was anything mysterious, or possibly sinister, in the circumstances surrounding Robeson’s attempted suicide, those who had had recent contact with him provided scant elucidation. Harry Francis expressed surprise that Robeson had left London without a word to him. Ivor Montagu, who had by chance ended up on the same plane to Moscow with Robeson, recalled his surprise at the sudden agitation he had shown during the flight—earlier he had seemed “fine”—when a Good Samaritan sitting behind him (and a stranger to Robeson) had offered him his overcoat against the cold weather.1
A team of Soviet doctors headed by Dr. Snezhnevsky offered the diagnosis “depressive paranoic psychosis generated by an involutional form of arteriosclerosis,” and prescribed Largactyl and Nosinan, commonly used tranquilizers. According to Paul, Jr., the doctors told him that his father “had been so paranoid when first admitted that he thought they were spies and were going to kill him, and was yelling that Essie was a spy, too. For the first few days that Essie tried to visit him, Paul wouldn’t see her.” By the time, Paul, Jr., saw his father, Robeson was able to converse with clarity. But he chose, as was his style with matters of deepest import, to say nearly nothing. Paul, Jr., later ventured to ask him why he had done it; the guarded, mysterious answer he got—according to Paul, Jr.—was that “someone close to me had done irreparable damage to the U.S.S.R.”2
A rumor has persisted, alternately, that Robeson himself had become disillusioned with the Soviet Union. But those who knew him best stoutly deny that intepretation, and, indeed, scant evidence has surfaced to support it. Robeson’s disillusion, such as it was, was not with the U.S.S.R. per se but with the way the world worked, its refusal to adhere to a historical process that had seemed predetermined. His sense of blighted hopes, personal and historic, is readily documented, but was generalized—not reducible to any specific disappointment with Soviet policy or development. Robeson’s forlorn sense of loss was more encompassing, and one contributing factor may well have been “chemical”—a bipolar depressive disorder that fed on political events and largely expressed itself through them but was finally more than their sum. On the other hand, without the accumulated pressures of government harassment and worldly disappointments, any underlying depressive tendency might never have become manifest. Further, almost anyone subject to the kinds of pressures Robeson was—even without an organic “predisposition”—might have become susceptible to breakdown. It may well be that all Robeson himself knew about his deepening sense of malaise was what, accompanied by tears, he had once told his Chicago friend Sam Parks: his moorings had slipped—abroad he now felt himself a stranger in unfamiliar territory, at home he felt himself bypassed by a civil-rights movement he had done so much to forge.3
Paul, Jr., continued to search for clues to corroborate his own view that his father had been “neutralized” by malignant unknowns, possibly CIA agents, at the “wild party” preceding the suicide attempt. He used his connections within the CPUSA to gain access to someone on the Soviet Central Committee and to a representative from the Security Division; his frantic pursuit produced only circumstantial clues, but did dangerously increase his own level of anxiety. Twelve days after arriving in Moscow, he himself broke down. Terror-stricken, hallucinating, he heaved a huge chair through the plate-glass windows of his hotel room and nearly threw himself after it. Himself hospitalized, in his view a second victim of those responsible for his father’s collapse, he assigned the same cause to his own: chemical poisoning by the CIA.4
Within a few weeks both father and son were doing notably better—playing chess, taking long walks, following (Paul, Sr., reluctantly) the prescription of the Soviet doctors for regularized calisthenics (a prescription Sam Rosen, for one, thought lamentably inadequate). In consultation with Essie—who as always had responded to crisis by redoubling her energies and burying her doubts—they decided to give out minimal information. Even to intimates like his brother Ben, his sister Marian, Helen Rosen, Freda Diamond, and W. E. B. Du Bois, Essie sent the same message (embedded in lighthearted letters otherwise full of casual chitchat and breathless excitement over Yuri Gagarin’s recently completed mission into space): after years of overwork, compounded by “a slight heart attack,” Paul’s health had given way; he had fallen “flat on his face with exhaustion” and his doctors had bedded him down for a long rest; Paul, Jr., had been sent for as a precautionary measure, because of his father’s “heart attack.” As to Paul, Jr.’s own condition, no elaborate word was necessary, since no elaborate rumors had leaked out; not even his wife, Marilyn, was informed of the full extent of his collapse, and his uncle Ben and the others were merely told he had come down with “a stomach upset.” Essie delayed sending out most of her letters for over a month—until Big Paul was feeling well enough to append a few reassuring lines of his own (“Feeling much better. Soon back to normal”), thereby, it was hoped, giving further weight to the official version they had concocted. To those making business or professional inquiries, Essie merely replied that, because of overwork, Robeson’s doctors had insisted on a rest period of several months.5
And, indeed, within a month of the attempted suicide he was feeling much improved and the doctors were much encouraged. Both Pauls, with Essie in attendance, were transferred to the Barveekha Sanatorium for further rest, and by early May, Paul, Jr., was writing Marilyn that his father was “in a relaxed and even carefree mood,” their shared cottage luxurious, and the surrounding grounds lovely. Essie took advantage of the medical facilities to have a complete checkup of her own, and the doctors found no signs of any recurring cancer. By mid-May, Big Paul was occasionally trying out songs on a piano and was feeling well enough to receive the Chinese Ambassador to the U.S.S.R. for a brief visit. By the end of May, Essie felt able to fly to London to pick up needed clothes, supplies, and typewriter from the flat; when she returned to Barveekha ten days later, she found both men so improved that the doctors decided to push forward their discharge dates. Paul, Jr., flew home to the States on June 2, and the following week Essie and Paul, Sr., were allowed to return to London on the promise of a prolonged rest free from commitments.6
After arriving back at Connaught Square on June 10, Robeson began working for an hour or so a day with Larry Brown on their music (“The Voice sounds unimpaired,” Essie wrote Helen Rosen), and gave some renewed thought to a trip to Africa, bolstered by a personal letter from Kwame Nkrumah inviting him to assume the recently created chair of music and drama at Ghana’s University of Accra (he also got an invitation from Cheddi Jagan to come to British Guiana, in South America, as his personal guest). The good cheer lasted less than two weeks. Robeson’s mood took an abrupt turn downward, and Essie made a split-second decision to get him back into the hospital in Moscow. A worried Shirley Du Bois reported to Freda Diamond that mutual friends had seen Paul “being carried from the plane,” on landing in Moscow, “by two whitecoated male nurses, one on each side.” Essie again put the best face on it to correspondents: they had been “hasty” in returning so soon to London and for caution’s sake had now gone back to Moscow to ensure an absolutely “solid” convalescence. “Hearts are strange things,” she wrote Shirley Du Bois in one of the emblematic lines of her life, “and I respect them.” Hearing of Robeson’s setback, Dr. Du Bois wrote him a charming letter explaining that he had been in Rumania for a month getting (at age ninety-three) rejuvenation treatments from the famed Dr. Asian, but was getting “bored”; he asked Robeson to kiss the stones of Moscow and greet all his friends, announcing himself “fed up” with an “impossible” America and expressing the hope that he would soon see Robeson in Ghana (where Du Bois was shortly to take out citizenship). Essie at first admitted to Paul, Jr., and Marilyn that she was “seriously discouraged,” yet within two weeks was again sounding a positive note (“All is very well now, and on the way UP”). Bob and Clara Rockmore asked Essie, with considerable heat, to let them know “in plain English just what’s what,” promising not to divulge to anyone what they were told. She would not, continuing instead to send chatty, uninformative notes that reaffirmed her ability to keep a confidence—and to enjoy the secondary satisfaction of being in absolute control of an incapacitated Paul.7
The same tactics failed to work on Helen Rosen. Receiving a note from Essie on July 31 that the doctors were “VERY much pleased with [Paul’s] progress” and that they would be at the Barveekha Sanatorium for another month or so to consolidate his improvement, Helen and Sam decided to have a look for themselves. They were already in nearby Rumania to attend a medical conference. (Sam’s now renowned stapes surgery had brought him international attention, and Helen had trained in audiology in order to assist him in the operation; they were traveling widely to demonstrate the procedure.) In mid-August they arrived at Barveekha for a four-day stay. Helen was appalled at what she found. Paul was utterly lethargic and passive, as if drugged, and Essie’s singsong attempts to rouse him—“Let’s show Helen and Sam how nicely we do our exercises”—only added to the poignancy. “They gave one look at him and guessed,” Essie reported back to Paul, Jr., and Marilyn—that is, guessed “SOME of the story.” Essie encouraged the Rosens to believe that the breakdown had happened only after the second trip to the Moscow hospital, that it duplicated “the 1956 experience” (his first breakdown), that it was the byproduct of “nervous exhaustion and tired heart”—and said nothing at all about “the ideas” (as she cryptically referred to them to Paul, Jr.) he had expressed during his least lucid days. The Rosens resented not having been told the truth before, but after Essie assured them that Big Paul had been “adamant” about not letting anyone but himself tell his story, they said they “understood.” When they left, four days later, Essie wrote home that Paul was “so sad … I may have to bury him tomorrow.…”8
By the second week in September, after a three-month stay, Robeson was again improved, and the Barveekha doctors decided to risk letting him go back to London, urging that if all went well he should eventually return to his own country. “So hold onto your hats,” Essie wrote the Rosens just before boarding the plane for London. Her augury proved all too apt; Robeson had barely been in London forty-eight hours when he again relapsed, this time suffering his most serious episode yet. The usually unflappable Essie put in a panic call to Helen Rosen in New York: could she come at once to London? Helen dropped everything, took the next plane, and arrived in London the following morning. She found Paul huddled in a fetal position on the bed, tangled up in the bedsheets, “positively cowering” in fear. Essie, in consultation with Paul’s agent Harold Davison, made arrangements for Paul to enter the Priory, a private facility that had the reputation of being the best psychiatric hospital in England.9
The Priory sent out a five-passenger car and two orderlies, one of whom, a Mr. Williams, “beguiled and soothed” Paul into the back seat, with Essie and Helen on either side of him. They drove out from London toward the Priory in Roehampton, hoping he would stay calm during the half-hour trip. But when the car approached the Soviet Embassy and Paul (according to Helen) “thought we were driving in there,” he started muttering, “You don’t know what you’re doing, you don’t know what you’re doing”; then, as they drew opposite the Embassy, he frantically signaled them to “get down!!”—implying, Helen felt, “that great danger was at hand.” He pushed her down on the seat, leaning over her with his body as they drove past. “He was frightened,” Helen recalls, “cowering himself and trying to protect me.” She didn’t know which building they were passing until Essie told her it was the Soviet Embassy, without adding any other comment. To this day Helen remains “astonished” that Paul knew where he was, given the terrible shape he was in—“He just suddenly came to.”10
At the Priory he was put under the care of Dr. Brian Ackner, assisted by Dr. John Flood, both highly regarded specialists. Ackner, co-author of a classic paper on insulin coma, has been described by a contemporary specialist as “a first-line authority” on mental illness at the time. It was Ackner’s view that Robeson suffered from “one of those somewhat rare chronic depressions which fail to respond to any therapy or continue to relapse but which in the long run have a good prognosis.” He was supported in that view by Professor Curran of St. George’s Hospital, who was later called in for consultation, and by Dr. Flood, who chose the words “endogenous depression in a manic depressive personality” to describe Robeson’s underlying condition. Examining Robeson on the day of his admission, September 15, Ackner found him “in a depressed, agitated state with many ideas of persecution,” expressing “ideas of … unworthiness which, although they may have had some basis of reality in the past, were quite delusional in the degree to which they were held.” Ackner decided to begin a course of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)—brain seizures triggered by electric currents—immediately. In Western medicine in the early sixties, ECT was the preferred treatment for “major depressive” illness. Twenty-five years later, it remains a standard weapon in the medical arsenal, but the doubts of some experts about its possible culpability in memory impairment and even brain damage have made ECT more controversial than it once was; the development of alternate drug therapies since 1965 has further reduced it to the status of one among several possible—and hotly debated—treatment options.11
Essie did not tell Paul, Jr., home in New York, about the decision to give his father shock treatments. When he later learned about them, he was outraged, insisting that if he had known at the time he would have raced to Europe and brought his father home. Essie, accustomed to “sparing” her men, believed she had to shield Paul, Jr., from the news, given his own recent breakdown. Paul, Jr., believed she acted to deceive him, concerned only to prevent interference with her own willful plans. He believed, too, that there had been “foul play” at the Priory and that the “wrongly administered” ECT treatments had “damaged his father’s brain.” Once aroused, Paul, Jr.’s suspicions of his mother were never to quiet.12
Helen Rosen, who was on the scene, does not doubt that the decision to proceed with shock treatments seemed inescapable, given the lack of medical options at the time and Paul’s desperate condition. Even today, after the development of a much larger arsenal of drug therapies than existed in 1961, several specialists have suggested that, should a “Robeson” arrive at their offices with his presenting symptoms, he would still be a likely candidate for ECT. But it is also almost certain that today they would first attempt to treat his symptoms with medication, probably a course of lithium (which first came into use in some research centers in the late 1960s). If any criticism can be made of the way Ackner and his staff at the Priory treated Robeson, it would center on the speed—two days after his admission—with which they moved to ECT. Eventually, in the course of Robeson’s long stay at the Priory, he did get a full course of treatment with the few drugs then available, but “without much benefit” from any. To the criticism that this drug therapy should have preceded the ECT series, Ackner would probably have responded that Robeson’s suffering was too acute to await a delayed and problematic response to a limited arsenal of chemicals. Besides, Robeson did respond well enough to ECT—at least in the immediate aftermath of treatments—to reaffirm Ackner in his choice of therapy and in the cautious optimism he had felt from the beginning about Robeson’s long-term prognosis. The positive short-term effects of ECT treatments in bringing Robeson out of a “down” cycle encouraged his doctors to continue with them even though in the long term the treatments provided no cumulative benefits.13
Helen decided to stay on in London until the initial crisis had passed; in the end she stayed a month, living at the Connaught Square flat with Essie, joining her on the daily trek to the Priory. The difficult trip required a change of buses—not made easier by Essie’s insistence on carting out the meals she prepared at home for Paul after he felt well enough to start complaining about the Priory’s food. Of an evening, the two women were often exhausted, which precluded the probing exchange of intimacies neither wanted. Helen mostly read and Essie mostly kept up her voluminous correspondence. One evening Helen blued Essie’s hair for her and brushed and combed it into a chignon; Essie had long since given up taking fashionable care of herself, lapsing into dowdy overweight and practical Murray Space Shoes; after the hair styling she expressed delight at her improved appearance. The two women went to bed early almost every night, Helen in Paul’s bedroom. She found it almost impossible to sleep, because his bed was next to the elevator shaft and the noise was horrendous. She couldn’t understand how Paul could have abided such discomfort on a regular basis.14
Once again, explanations—or, rather, a formula for avoiding them—had to be made to friends. Most seem to have accepted Essie’s blandly reassuring words about “recurrent exhaustion … improving steadily … is now really recuperating … real progress … well on the way to recovery.…” But Clara and Bob Rockmore continued to protest Essie’s vague and (as they wrote her) “transparently not valid” descriptions. Essie placated them with a few additional details, yet basically held them at bay with abstractly rounded phrases like “Everything is going VERY well.” She wrote to Paul, Jr., that Rockmore “is furious because he does not know everything,” and barely concealed her satisfaction at turning the tables, at being able to write to the man who in her view had kept her under patronizing financial control for years, “You will know everything in due course.”15
She told Paul, Jr., in New York very little more. He did know the truth about the suicide attempt and the actual depth of his father’s depression, but, fearing that he would overreact, Essie kept him only partly informed about the course of his father’s treatment and progress. She filled her frequent bulletins to him and Marilyn with reassuring generalities, relaying details about the “up” cycles, avoiding news of the down side (“Progress, real progress, is being made,” she wrote three weeks after Paul had been hospitalized; “It was quite a business, to make an understatement”). Instead of lingering on negative or uncertain medical developments, she chatted on about how Shirley and W. E. B. Du Bois had visited the flat; how Helen had made a “great success” cooking breakfast for them all; how Larry Brown had “dropped by to pay his respects”; how Martin Luther King, Jr., at a reception in London that she attended, had had “very warm and sweet and respectful” things to say to her about Paul.16
In mid-October, Helen Rosen returned to New York; two weeks later Sam Rosen looked in on Paul. After talking with the Priory doctors, he came away feeling that they “were taking good care” of him. By November, Dr. Ackner decided to allow Robeson an occasional day visit back to the Connaught Square flat: “He watched rugby on TV,” Essie reported, “we had tea, he had a nap, then supper, then watched [on] TV the Gracie Fields show, which was a marvellous half hour and just the kind of thing he could do.” To Paul, Jr., and other family and friends, Essie continued to send these vague, generally upbeat reports, sometimes in the form of daily diary “entries.” But to Helen and Sam she sent a considerably more complicated set of truths about Paul’s condition. When he had a setback in early December, she reported to the Rosens that Dr. Flood says “it is a chronic depression”; when Paul rallied, she wrote, “IF he were a radio set, we could say he is now RECEIVING, but not yet SENDING.”17
In a separate letter to Helen, Essie confided—perhaps because Helen had been present when Paul got frightened riding past the Soviet Embassy—that he “is back on his round of thoughts, which worry him.” Harry Francis—the British trade-unionist who was the only person besides Essie allowed to visit Paul on a regular basis—“insists,” Essie wrote Helen, “that none of his thoughts have foundation, none whatever, and is going to try to persuade him so. H. says everyone is shocked that he should have such ideas, and just cannot understand why. Except that he is exhausted and ill.…”18
Essie never specified the contents of Paul’s “thoughts,” and Helen has never understood his fear while passing in front of the Soviet Embassy. According to Paul Robeson, Jr., “the ‘thoughts’ were of suicide.” But the fact that Harry Francis was made privy to them and passed them on to “shocked” others—who could only have been people as politically reliable as himself—also suggests that the “thoughts” may have related, too, to some subterranean fears Robeson had regarding the U.S.S.R., or possibly his own standing with the Soviets. There is no surrounding evidence for believing that those fears centered concretely either on dismay at the course of Soviet history or, oppositely, on concern that he himself, or someone close to him, might be thought to have done harm to the Soviet cause—or even some murky combination thereof of treachery and disillusion. In an interview ten years later, Harry Francis recalled that he had spent “many hours with Paul during the period that he was in the nursing home and we used to discuss all manner of subjects. The propaganda that was put around that he had become disillusioned with the Soviet Union was completely without foundation.… Our association was such that if he had had doubts, he could have expressed them to me. Paul was certainly convinced that the reports that we had all had about the Stalin regime were justified—as big a shock to him, of course, as they were to all of us who had gotten no idea of what was happening. But he did not accept it in any sense of disillusionment with socialism or the Soviet Union as such.” If the fantasies Robeson manifested when acutely ill did reflect some interior reality (in however distorted a form) that he otherwise repressed, the road map for understanding it is lost.19
Essie also conferred with the Rosens about the advisability of letting Paul, Jr., come over to London to see his father. Helen sent Essie some details about Paul, Jr.’s emotional state, which so upset Essie that she was sick in the bathroom. She successfully discouraged her son from making the trip to England, but she knew that would increase his resentment of her, and she warned Helen that he would also be angry at her and Sam for having spent time with his father when he could not. “Yours has been help,” she wrote the Rosens, “when help was desperately needed.”20
Early in February, Essie confided to the Rosens that Paul had become “VERY depressed” and had begun talking again of finding a “short, fast way OUT.” The doctors decided on a second series of eight ECT treatments (completed in mid-April) to add to the sixteen he had already had. “I have said nothing about treatment to anyone else, to NO ONE,” Essie wrote the Rosens. “You understand these things, but there’s no point in alarming or confusing the others—Bobby or Pauli, or anyone.” To the Rosens she gave a full account, repeating a conversation with Paul in which he insisted “it wasn’t worth it. Nobody could help, they tried their best, but he was sick to death of the struggle. If I was loyal, I would help [him die]. I agreed, but said first I must be sure there is no help. We must be sure we have tried everything. He agreed to that.…”21
The second series of ECT treatments did again produce momentary relief. Within ten days the improvement was so pronounced that Paul was asking for the newspapers, sleeping better, and once more eating the filet steaks Essie brought out on the bus. He told Essie he was glad to read in the paper that Jackie Robinson had been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. He himself wrote a note to the Rockmores to say he was “feeling much much better … might jump over that way soon … have turned the corner—am sure will be all right from here on in.” By early March he was feeling so much better that, when Essie told him she was going to see Ella Fitzgerald’s show with Coleman Hawkins at the Hammersmith Gaumont, he surprised her by saying he would like to go along. Harold Davison managed to come up with a second ticket at the last minute; the two seats were separated, but had a clear view of each other in case a problem developed. Along about her third song, Ella Fitzgerald came forward and quietly announced that she wanted to dedicate her next number to “her fellow-artist and a very great man, Paul Robeson, wherever he may be sitting.” There was a hush, and everyone strained to locate Paul in the audience, but thanks to the darkness of the house only his immediate neighbors recognized him (he surreptitiously gave them the autographs they asked for). With the aid of ushers, he was quickly removed from the auditorium at the end of the concert, before a crowd could gather around him. He then asked, to everyone’s renewed surprise, to go backstage to greet and thank Ella Fitzgerald. Ella, according to Essie, was “thrilled,” hugged and kissed him, said it was “a big day” in her life, and expressed joy that he seemed to be so much better. Davison got the Robesons into a car back to the Priory. Since he had had “no bad reactions” to the outing, they repeated it four days later with a trip to the Aldwych to see Peggy Ashcroft and John Gielgud in The Cherry Orchard. Paul again went backstage; Peggy cleared her dressing room of other visitors and they caught up on news, promising to do a poetry reading together the following year. Paul was especially touched when the stage-door man, an old acquaintance, told him “the whole of the theatre world would be glad to hear he was up and about and getting well.” He told Essie that, although he felt fine, he wanted to go back to the Priory—he didn’t want people to think he was again “available,” or everyone would start “having plans for him again.”22
The pattern of shuttling back and forth between the Connaught Square flat and the Priory was to go on for many, many months, with the time spent at the flat lengthening during periods of apparent improvement—and also varying with Robeson’s tolerance for being cooped up with Essie. Her unlimited presence was at times a contributing source of unease. Devoted to him she undoubtedly was, but it was devotion encased in control. To be dependent on Essie for his daily needs was a lifetime habit, but to be confined to her was a lifetime’s nightmare; the man with “a thousand pockets” had been slipped into a thin topcoat, and Essie held out the sleeves. For thirty years he had avoided being locked away with her, had strained against any arrangement that threatened to curtail his need for a rich variety of contacts. Now, in his sixties and desperately ill, he had to rely on her judgment about the advisability of a nap. He was lucky to have her—yet on another level this was his definition of defeat. Open antagonism between them, however, was on a back burner; sick and dependent as he was, being “cooped up” with Essie was no longer the worst imaginable fate. She was devoted to his comfort and did everything in her considerable power to prevent any demands from being made on his limited ability to cope, turning away callers and telephone calls, rejecting all requests on his time. But in fact the demand for his public services had become negligible, and Essie strictly limited the private traffic in friends to Harry Francis, occasionally Harold Davison, and rare, select visitors from overseas like the Rosens, the Du Boises, the Rockmores, or an old political chum like John Abt or Charles Howard.23
Larry Brown, who had known Paul for over thirty-five years, was allowed to drop by two or three times, but he was not in the best of shape himself, and Essie had grown impatient with what she felt was his lachrymose passivity. When the Home Office refused Larry a labor permit, he “talked about THE END, suicide, wept, and said he’d go to Paris.” But (as Essie wrote the Rosens), “I said a four-letter word in disgust, and it shook him. He said, well, what then? … I told him he had never written down most of his stuff, that he owed it to the RACE, what with all this Rock and Roll, and other corruptions out of which people were making fortunes, and still he kept putting off writing down the original, wonderful, historic stuff. He was definitely jolted … gave up the liquor … and bought some manuscript paper.” When it came time for him to return to the States, Larry wanted to see Paul for a last time. Essie hesitated, but finally decided that if he didn’t get to say goodbye he “would feel badly” and “wouldn’t know how to explain at home, etc.” So she arranged a half-hour visit, and Larry was “gratified.” He lived for nearly another decade back in the States, short of funds, reliant on friends, never able to commit most of his music to paper. If, on their last visit, Paul had been too unwell to summon up appropriate words of farewell, he had at least once, when introducing Larry to an audience back in 1949, done so publicly: “… he’s here tonight, and he’s with me all the time. And I can’t ever tell him—I try to tell him once in a while, never sort of face to face, but to audiences like you, who love him, that I know our lives have been close. He knows how I feel—that as long as I can sing a note, as long as we’re going along, we’re going to be there together.”24
Though the world left Paul alone, it had not entirely forgotten him. His sixty-fourth birthday, on April 9, 1962, brought greetings and letters both from old friends and from distant admirers. And from Kwame Nkrumah came a touching invitation to Ghana: “It is impossible not to flourish in this land of sunshine and friendliness and, as one of our truly dear friends, you will receive an abundance of both.” (“One of the greatest anxieties and frustrations Paul has,” Essie wrote Nkrumah, “is that he has not yet been to Africa.”) Helen called from New York, thrilled that his voice sounded “so deep and quiet,” and the East European, Chinese, and Cuban legations, as well as the Movement for Colonial Freedom, all sent their “warm fraternal greetings.”25
Perhaps encouraged by the loving response to his birthday, Paul began to take a more consistent interest in things, to read a little, and occasionally to discuss events (“When he is depressed,” Dr. Ackner wrote in a report, “he loses all interest in the question of Negro rights and segregation in the U.S.A., but when he becomes more cheerful he regains his interest”). He was able to approve the draft Essie drew up for him of a brief preface to a book on singing, and in his own hand he sent a few lines of greeting to Waldemar Hille, who had accompanied him for some of his West Coast concerts. More promising still, Robeson was able to go in person to the U.S. Embassy when the renewal of his passport once again threatened to become an issue.26
The FBI had continued to keep Robeson on its Key Figures and Top Functionaries list, though aware of his debilitated condition—indeed, its agents had been alerted that his “passing” would be “exploited” by the “international communist movement.” When the Robesons applied to have their passports renewed, what could have been a routine matter was prolonged to the point of harassment. Well aware that without a valid passport Robeson could not renew his residence permit in England (which was also due to expire shortly) and that a forced departure from England at this stage of his recovery could prove ruinous, the State Department had no scruples about jeopardizing his life. No evidence has come to light suggesting that agencies of the U.S. government were directly complicitous—as his son has long maintained was probable—in the breakdown of Robeson’s health, but once it did deteriorate, they proved perfectly willing to assist in its further decline.27
Essie took advantage of the presence of Clara and Bob Rockmore in London for help in bringing Paul by car to the U.S. Embassy so he could make application in person, as required, for the passport. Harry Francis and Harold Davison met them at the door to the Embassy, providing—as Essie reported to the Rosens—“a feeling of great security.” And all the clerks, with the exception of the consul, were British, and “most sympathetic and interested.” The American passport consul, Helen Bailey, turned out to be a Robeson fan and was “very considerate” (she reported to her superiors that “he appeared to be a very frail and subdued old man”). Essie had made a trial run to the Embassy the week before to make sure no unforeseen obstacles would develop, and the applications were quickly filed without a hitch. The preliminaries successfully navigated, everyone breathed a sigh of relief and went home to await the passports.28
They did not come. What arrived instead, six weeks after application had been made at the Embassy, was notification from Helen Bailey that the State Department had decided to invoke Section 6 of the Subversive Activities Control Act—which denied the right of any member of a Communist organization to apply for a passport. The Robesons were requested to submit sworn statements indicating whether they were or were not members of the CPUSA currently or at any time in the preceding twelve months. Furious, Essie dashed off to the Embassy in a cab. “Sheer harassment,” she angrily told a startled and embarrassed Helen Bailey: the State Department, the FBI, and everybody else knew perfectly well that they were not Party members. She herself immediately swore an affidavit to that effect: “I hereby state categorically and without reservation whatsoever that I am not now, and never have been, in all my life a member of any Communist Party in the United States, or in any other country. Never!”29
Paul was another matter. He had always refused to sign any “non-Communist” affidavit, viewing it as an intolerable abridgment of his constitutional rights. Ill though he was, he again refused to sign—“no matter what,” Essie reported; with the Party in disintegration at home, he felt “very strongly that he won’t let anybody down, especially now that they are under pressure.” What to do? Essie hit on a clever strategy. She wrote immediately to John Abt and Ben Davis, Jr., and enlisted their help in persuading him to sign. “Remembering his still very belligerent conscience and principles,” she wrote them, “he MAY be persuaded” on their say-so. She added for emphasis that “he is frantic with worry about it. He will begin all that persecution complex all over again, and with reason, which was distantly related to his illness. I hate to think of what will happen.…”30
John Abt (speaking for Ben Davis as well) came up with exactly what was needed. “We unanimously and emphatically recommend,” he at once wrote back, “that Paul sign the requested affidavit.” He spelled out the reasons. There could not possibly be any legal consequences for Paul; the affidavit only required him to swear that he had not been a CPUSA member for the past year and was not one currently; since he had been abroad for four years that was “a simple, self-evident, and unassailable truth.” (By implication, Abt was suggesting the oath might have been assailable if interpreted to cover a previous period—because, as in the past, someone could always be found to swear, for financial or political considerations, that Robeson, or anyone else, had been a Party member earlier). As for the moral and political implications of signing the “non-Communist” oath, Abt provided a soothing if not entirely persuasive rationale. Paul, he argued, had done his share: his “long, heroic and successful fight for a passport” had made travel possible “for hundreds of people.” But the Supreme Court decision ordering the CPUSA to register, and the authorization under the McCarran Act to deny passports to CP members, had pushed the legal battle to a different level: it had now become a struggle by admitted CP members to prove their constitutional right to a passport nonetheless, a struggle already commenced by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Herbert Aptheker. “Paul’s strong right arm is still needed for a host of battles, but the second round of the passport fight is not one of them.” Abt ignored the point—one Robeson himself had always stressed—that to sign a “non-Communist” affidavit was automatically to compromise constitutionally guaranteed rights. But, reassured by Abt that “if we had any reservations … we would not hesitate to say so,” Paul finally agreed to sign. He and Essie were issued new passports forthwith.31
Despite the resolution of the passport problem, Robeson’s spirits began to sink again. He talked of his own condition as “hopeless”; given the repetitive ups and downs, he “didn’t see how he could ever recover, [and] just expected to wither away.” The return of the Rosens in late summer temporarily improved his mood. Accompanied by their daughter Judy, her husband, Al Ruben, and their two young children—all of whom adored “Beep” (their private nickname for him, based on the initials for Big Paul, B.P.)—the Rosens stayed in London for several days and interspersed a number of short visits with Beep. Helen managed to spend some time alone with him; she reported to the others that he had been “very communicative” and had smiled often. His terrible bouts of sleeplessness eased somewhat: for several nights in a row he was able to forgo a second dose of Seconal when he awoke after a few hours. Essie began to hope against hope—and for public consumption to predict yet again—that “we are nearing the end of this nightmare, and in a month, or two at the most, he will be really well again.…”32
A few additional people were allowed to come for brief visits. Philip Lebon (Harold Davison’s doctor, and the man who had put Essie in touch with the Priory) got his first look at Paul in many months, and Essie reported excitedly that he had succeeded in engaging Paul in animated talk about music, even leading him to sing a few excerpts to illustrate a point: “It was rather thrilling to see him first really interested and enjoying himself, then participating, then contributing.” Essie’s friend Peggy Middleton went to the Connaught Square flat for tea while Paul was there. “He seemed better than he had been for two years,” she wrote Cedric Belfrage. “He had never since the collapse been able to talk about world situations and people or in fact to talk to me for more than 5 minutes. This time we gossiped for almost an hour and I felt happy about it and he seemed gay and made jokes.… Essie felt the breakthrough had been made.…”33
Four days later he was back in the Priory, heading down into another low. On top of that setback came the shocking news of Bob Rockmore’s sudden death from a heart attack. Essie could not decide how to tell Paul, and the doctors suggested she wait. It wasn’t until a month later, in mid-March 1963, when he was once again on an up cycle, that she felt able to risk it. Hearing the news, he “just put his head down, put his hand over his eyes, and went RIGHT DOWN,” Essie reported to Clara. He just sat there, sad and apathetic until—at least as Essie told it—she said “very firmly: No, YOU, dont just sit there, DO SOMETHING. Write NOW to Clara, and send your love and sympathy. Hold her hand by mail. Bobby would like that.… And I gave him a pad and pen, and addressed and stamped an envelope for him, then went back to my knitting. After another hour, he picked up the pen and said: What shall I write? I said write what is in your heart and in your mind, period. So he did. And I sealed and mailed it on the way home.… After he wrote the letter he immediately felt better, because he had done something constructive. On Sunday he was fine, but sad. But he didn’t DESCEND, if you know what I mean.” Paul’s note to Clara that day was simplicity itself: “Do so wish I were with you to talk and talk and talk. It seems I could write pages and pages about what dear Bobby meant to me.…” Two months later, writing to her again, Paul struck a more inclusive, elegiac note: “Seems such a strange world already.… I’ll do the best I can.…”34
In the hope of accelerating his progress, Essie decided to orchestrate plans for his approaching sixty-fifth birthday in order to ensure an enthusiastic response. She mailed out a form letter (“Dear Dear Friends”) soliciting greetings (“I would like him to receive an avalanche of Birthday Cards”) and even outlining the sentiments she wanted expressed: “… wish him health and happiness, say you are so glad to hear that he is recovering and thank him for his example and courage and integrity during a very tough period.… Knowledge that he is remembered and understood … will be a major contribution to his permanent recovery, which seems to be in the very near future.” Paul would have been horrified at the letter, having all his life avoided any crass bid for attention. But crassness did produce the desired avalanche.35
On the day of his sixty-fifth birthday, April 9, 1963, Essie was able to take a small mountain of congratulatory messages and presents out to the Priory. But Paul’s reaction was not at all what she had anticipated. The more he read the letters, the more agitated he became, until finally, pushing them aside, he angrily got up and started shouting about the demands being made on him. People were beginning to expect too much from him again—writing that they hoped he would return to Australia, sing again in Prague, speak here there and everywhere—didn’t they understand he would never sing again, never return again, never see any of them again? Essie tried to quiet him: “People didn’t want him to do a damn thing at the moment, except to get well,” she insisted. You don’t understand, he shot back, “I’ll never be well.… I’ll just sit in a corner … until maybe something can happen to me like happened to Bobby [Rockmore], and that will be fine. Or maybe some sympathetic understanding doctor will give me something.” “He was so angry,” she reported to Helen Rosen. Essie told Dr. Ackner what had happened. “Not to worry,” Ackner purportedly told her, “it’s all a part of the picture.… He cant go too far back now, just setbacks temporarily.”36
The birthday hurdle over—if not quite cleared—Essie promptly turned to the next task: replying to spreading reports that Paul had become disillusioned with the U.S.S.R. In its fullest form, the rumor had appeared in January 1963 as a two-part article purported to have been written by Robeson himself in a fly-by-night sheet called The National Insider. The style of the articles wasn’t remotely close to Robeson’s own, and the content was almost comically foreign to his actual history (“… at times I have been a Socialist and a Fascist.… [My father’s sermons] were really powerful, but none of them appealed to the intellect. Most of the congregation didn’t really have any intellect to begin with”). Yet, as farfetched as the articles were, and as disreputable as the publication in which they appeared was, the section in which Robeson purportedly rejected Soviet-style Communism (though not the dream of a classless society) was reprinted in Le Figaro and then picked up elsewhere. It therefore required rebuttal.37
Essie drafted a reply and sent it off for comment and correction to Paul, Jr., Ben Davis, D. N. Pritt, Lloyd Brown, Harry Francis (and through him John Gollan, head of the CP in Great Britain), Carlton Goodlett of the peace movement, and Alexander Soldatov, the Soviet Ambassador to Britain. She made revisions according to their suggestions—particularly Pritt’s—and got off a strong statement, under her own name, denouncing the articles as “pure fabrication” and declaring that “None of us has seen any indication that ‘he has changed his political views’ in any way, as has been alleged in the articles. On the contrary, there has been no interruption in his warm friendship and close contact with our Soviet and Socialist friends.” (In a letter to Cedric Belfrage, Peggy Middleton provided a private gloss on that view: “… so far as I know Paul has never repudiated the SU, but I can well believe he said something angry and incoherent that got misconstrued. Essie says that he does.”) The Associated Negro Press issued a release based on Essie’s statement, and for the moment the matter died, neither the original allegations nor the denial receiving widespread circulation. (Several months later, Essie released a further statement in Paul’s name calling talk of his recantation “completely absurd”; Time announced that “The phrasing sounded suspiciously Eslandic.”)38
By then, Essie had become fierce about press intrusions. She “still treats the whole thing [the illness] as confidential,” Peggy Middleton wrote Cedric Belfrage in bemusement. And Essie herself wrote Mikhail Kotov in the U.S.S.R. that the press had become a “serious worry” to her. She was not merely being her usual overprotective self, for at one point in late 1962 reporters had actually come out to the Priory to try to get a statement from Paul about Castro; the authorities at the institution had effectively blocked access, and Paul himself had had no idea a press hunt for him had been on. But now, in mid-1963, with more than two years having passed since his collapse in Moscow, the newspapers (according to Essie) had decided to renew their efforts “to smoke Paul out, interview him, and see exactly what was what.” Their only real interest, she felt, was in whether he had changed his political views, and she “determined NOT to permit” a question that “would so infuriate him, and offend him … I dare not risk his cursing them out.” In the summer of 1963, however, a confrontation with the press appeared imminent when Essie decided to make a shift in Paul’s medical treatment.39
Peggy Middleton—according to her account—had been protesting for some time against Paul’s ECT treatments at “a rich man’s hideout where,” she felt, “the emphasis was on the social situation and not on general health.” Her constant needling, in combination with the growing length of Paul’s stay at the Priory and the uncertainty of his progress, lay the groundwork for doubt that an unexpected arrival further activated. Claire (“Micki”) Hurwitt, wife of the New York surgeon Elliott Hurwitt and herself trained in psychiatric nursing, had known Paul a little from Progressive Party days, and when she arrived with her two small children in England, she dropped off an introductory note from Helen Rosen at the Connaught Square flat. Essie invited Micki up for tea and took an immediate liking to her (as did Micki to Essie), finding her combination of left-wing and medical credentials irresistible. When Essie told her about the course of Paul’s treatment at the Priory, Micki expressed surprise at the large number of shock treatments—by then a documented fifty-four—confessing an instinctual distrust of ECT. Essie suggested she come out to the Priory and have a look at Paul directly.40
Micki did not like what she saw. As soon as she walked into Paul’s room, she was overwhelmed by the smell of paraldehyde, a “knockout” drug she associated with only the most desperate and uncontrollable psychiatric cases. A nurse at one point beckoned Micki aside and showed her Paul’s medication chart; Micki was horrified at the number and high dosage of drugs he was getting every day—“enough to kill a horse,” she told Essie. “Get him out of there,” she said. Her husband arrived from New York several weeks later and agreed with her estimate. Peggy Middleton had recently spent a day at the famed Buch Clinic in East Berlin and had been particularly impressed with Dr. Alfred Katzenstein, an American-trained clinical psychologist who had served with the U.S. Army during World War II and had experience dealing with survivors of the concentration camps. Essie flew over to Berlin to have a look around, was impressed with what she saw, and made preliminary arrangements for a September 1 consultation for Paul, if he was willing.41
Initially he was not. Then he said he would go, but only if he could go at once. Franz and Diana Loesser, who several years before had initiated the Robeson passport campaign in Manchester and now lived in the GDR, were enlisted to make quick arrangements. A flight on Polish Airways was booked for its regular nonstop Sunday flight to East Berlin on August 25. Somehow the British press got wind of the plans, and several reporters congregated outside the Connaught Square flat and rang Essie’s phone at all hours of the day and night. Peggy Middleton advised a statement to the papers, but Essie felt “there was always the chance that he would refuse to go at the last minute” and feared most of all that if Paul himself was accosted, he might break down. Determined to avoid the press, she hit on an elaborate set of ruses worthy of Agatha Christie.42
Late Saturday night, Peggy Middleton, Diana Loesser, and other friends collected eleven pieces of baggage from the Robeson flat and deposited them at Paddington Station. Sunday morning, the Telegraph hit the stands with an article reporting that Robeson, who had “broken with Moscow,” was about to be spirited behind the Iron Curtain to keep him silent, and that his wife was denying all access to him in the interim. “Paul is no longer a public figure,” the Telegraph quoted her as saying over the phone, “He is not in the public domain.” The article set the press to salivating, and a horde of reporters now moved into Connaught Square. Essie was ready for them.43
While Harry Francis got Paul out of the Priory—on the floor of a car under the noses of reporters waiting at both entrances—Essie concocted a scheme for getting herself out of Connaught Square. She enlisted Micki Hurwitt and another friend, Nick Price; Nick collected Micki in his car and parked it near the Robesons’ flat. Micki got out, casually strolled past the reporters, rang the Robesons’ doorbell, and was admitted, Essie having been watching from the window. Essie gave her the key to the flat, a piece of hand luggage, and her big traveling purse; with Essie’s two overcoats draped over her arm, Micki went back out into the street, trying to appear elegantly calm. When she’d gotten a block away, one of the reporters ran after her and asked if she was Mrs. Robeson; Micki gave him “a withering stare” and he backed off.44
On returning to the car, she gave Nick Price the apartment key, and he in turn went up to the flat, casually letting himself in as if he lived in the building. Essie gave him the rest of the hand luggage, draped Paul’s overcoats over his arm, and arranged to meet him and Micki at the Lancaster Gate underground stop. Nick got back to the car without incident, but when Essie prepared to leave the flat herself, she discovered she’d sent off all her money in the handbag with Micki. But her luck held. Though it was a Sunday in the summer, she found one neighbor at home and borrowed ten shillings. Taking a deep breath, she then stepped out of the building, a plastic cover over her hair, a pile of letters in her mouth for posting at the corner (Punch later had a good time with the letters, recommending them to its readers as the latest word in ingenious disguise). No one recognized her; a heavy rain and her lack of luggage helped. She made it safely to the Marble Arch underground and within minutes met Nick and Micki at Lancaster Gate. Nick had already picked up the heavy baggage from Paddington.45
They made it to the Priory in twenty minutes. If they had been daring, Paul had been lionhearted. After being removed from the Priory, he had remained in the hands of Harry Francis and the “British left” (Hurwitt’s phrase) in a car parked in the nearby woods, awaiting the rendezvous with Essie. He had not been in the best of shape recently, but somehow held together—“He had all kinds of guts,” was Hurwitt’s laconic summary. After speeding to the airport, they found the director of the Polish airways waiting for them, apprehensive at the lateness of the hour. Having cleverly directed the press to the VIP lounge, he quickly led the Robesons and Hurwitt through the regular gate onto the first-class section of the plane. The three other passengers in the compartment paid them no attention. Within minutes the plane took off, and they settled back with a sigh of relief. Essie, laughing, handed Paul the Telegraph article about his pending “abduction.”46
At that moment, a pleasant-looking young man got up from his seat, came over to the Robesons, smiled, and handed Paul his card. Paul smiled back, read the card, scowled, and handed it to Essie. Printed on the card was “John Osman, Foreign Correspondent for the London Daily Telegraph.” (Reuters News Agency, they later learned, had planted a reporter in tourist class as well.) Essie jumped up and insisted Osman return to his own seat, eventually forcefully accompanying him, expressing her indignation that the British press would harass a sick man (“The thing I resented most,” she later wrote Marie Seton, “was that it was so American at its worst, and this I did not expect from the British. Well, we live and learn”). To make sure Osman would stay in his seat, Essie parked herself next to him and talked him right into Berlin.47
To her surprise, he “seemed nice” and had been to Africa, so, as Berlin came into view, she agreed to let him ask Paul two and only two brief questions: What did he think of the Sunday Telegraph story, and what did he think of the recent March on Washington? Paul had been monosyllabic up to that point, but he somehow, remarkably, summoned up the energy to answer, and did so eloquently. He said the Telegraph article was vicious and, worse, wishful thinking—not having been able to establish that he had changed his political views, and disappointed that he was voluntarily returning to a socialist country, the press had decided to make a mystery of it. As for the March on Washington, Robeson called it “a turning point,” said he was proud of the black strength and unity it showed—and sent his congratulations. Osman tried to continue the interview, but Essie cut him off. In his article in the Telegraph the next day, Osman described Essie as “a formidable ‘protector’” who had threatened him with judo at one point. He accurately printed Paul’s replies to his two questions and described him as looking “haggard and worn. His features were thin and his stooping gait bore little resemblance to his public image.”48
The doctors at the Buch Clinic thought so, too. Dr. Katzenstein found him “completely without initiative,” his depressive moods “very low,” his ups “not high enough to be called manic”—the reverse of his breakdown in 1956. The doctors immediately took him off all sedation (though adding Librium subsequently) and expressed considerable doubt—even anger—about the “high” amounts of barbiturates and ECT that had been given him. “I don’t think anyone would have argued with ten or twelve ECT treatments,” Dr. Katzenstein said more than twenty years later, but fifty-four such treatments was not only “very unusual” but “a very doubtful procedure unless immediately followed by psychotherapy.” He believed fifty-four shocks could theoretically produce “considerable changes within the brain”; though in fact he found no such evidence, he felt that at the least they had shaken Robeson’s confidence—“just the process of being grabbed and hit, you lose the sense of being in control of your own life.” Katzenstein freely acknowledges, however, that “here in the GDR we generally consider British psychiatry to be superior to ours.” Indeed, the literature on ECT since the early sixties does not as a whole support Katzenstein’s views. For quick alleviation of acute depressive symptoms (as in Robeson’s case), ECT remains the preferred initial treatment. But disagreement does still exist about whether improvement from ECT is temporary and can or should be built upon with additional courses, and also about the extent to which psychotherapy can prove a useful adjunct for those who are severely disoriented. A successful outcome in the treatment of mental illness seems centrally to depend on careful adjustments tailored to the individual needs of the patient at hand. Such adjustments require intuitive skills of the highest order. Which is to say, one part of medical care, perhaps the greatest part, is an art. Robeson was not fortunate enough to have been treated by artists.49
After a comprehensive set of tests, the Buch clinicians found a heart “insufficiency”—not unusual, they said, in a man of sixty-five—a slightly enlarged liver (possibly a toxic reaction to drugs), and “a secondary colitis with incipient ulceration,” perhaps also drug-related. Additionally (and peripherally), the GDR doctors diagnosed Paget’s disease, a condition—of unknown etiology and no psychiatric import—involving an abnormal amount of bone deformation and known to be fairly commonplace. Katzenstein did not feel he could rule out some underlying organic cause for Robeson’s condition—since little was (or is now, for that matter) known about the chemistry of the brain—but felt that ultimately the extraordinary pressures he had been under for a decade were themselves sufficient to explain his collapse. Castor oil with every meal quickly put Robeson’s digestive system in good order. And getting off sedatives not only made him immediately more alert and talkative but also improved his ability to sleep (as is now well known, a prolonged use of sleeping medication can produce a reverse effect). Passing through East Berlin two weeks after the Robesons’ arrival, Elliott Hurwitt was impressed with Paul’s improvement (as was Sam Rosen a few days later, though he was not impressed with Dr. Katzenstein himself). Hurwitt wrote Essie soon after that he felt sure “Paul is in what is, for him, the best possible medical environment that could be found.” Coming to the Buch Clinic has “turned out to be a very fine move,” Essie reported home. To Helen Rosen she wrote that Paul “now enters into discussion. He stammers, and is slow on the up-take, but on the beam, right on the beam.”50
But she did not report that Dr. Katzenstein had suggested that “what is left of Paul’s health” would have to be quietly conserved. Nor did Essie tell anyone—including Paul—that she had been given bad news about her own health. Explaining why she was flat on her back in the hospital, she wrote home airily about “a bad flu,” “an infected gall bladder,” and “general exhaustion from the long siege.” But in fact the diagnosis was a good deal worse. Although the London and Moscow doctors had continued to give her a clean bill after her periodic checkups, the Buch doctors found evidence of recurring cancer and in fact told her it was terminal. Determined to live out her life at full tilt, Essie went off to collect a “peace” medal she had earlier been awarded; the ceremony had been delayed until she could appear in person.51
Paul was not told about Essie’s condition, or about his own prognosis; he was encouraged to believe they were both on the road to full recovery. And certainly he seemed greatly improved, able to participate in more socializing within a period of a few weeks than had previously been possible over many months. It was protected socializing—a few friends, like Stephen Fritchman, Joris Ivens (the filmmaker), Earl Dickerson (the black executive and activist), Henry Winston (the CPUSA leader), Vladimir Pozner (of L’Humanité), and Helen and Scott Nearing, would drop by for carefully limited visits. Sometimes Dr. Katzenstein would take Robeson to feed the ducks in the park, or on supervised outings with himself and his wife to the park, the zoo, to shop, or to drop in briefly at the Soviet-German House of Culture. Diana and Franz Loesser visited Robeson at Buch several times, and had him out to their house twice for tea; Diana noted with delight the gradual improvement—when he first arrived in the GDR “he looked very strange and ill, burnt out,” but within a few months he “was talking to people and you got the feeling he could cope, though a very sick person.” A few expeditions were more elaborate still. Paul took an accompanied trip downtown to be measured for a new overcoat, and on one notable occasion not only took tea at the Soviet Ambassador’s residence but stayed for an extended chat about grandchildren, the “Negro Revolution,” and the hockey match between Russia and Canada. Essie described the visit (with her usual optimistic overelaboration) as fluent and light-hearted.52
The Robesons had Thanksgiving dinner with Kay and Aubrey Pankey and their other guest, Ollie Harrington, the black American cartoonist, now living in Berlin. Pankey had left his singing career in the States in search of wider opportunities and had found them in Eastern Europe, regularly performing in concert and settling in the GDR. The Pankeys hadn’t seen Robeson in a dozen years, and Kay Pankey recalls her shock on opening the door: “I saw a tall, gaunt, thin man; he was all eyes. My heart just went out.” Ollie Harrington, who had also been living in Europe for a decade, was equally stunned at the sight of Robeson: “I’d never seen such a change in a man.” But Harrington, a warm and witty storyteller, decided to try to break through to Paul—“Intuitively I knew he was there, somewhere,” so “I started telling anecdotes we used in our ‘special times’ back in Harlem, tales about ‘the stupidity of Charley’ alternating with ‘the ridiculous reaction of the Brothers.’” Robeson slowly responded: his eyes gradually came alive, and he even laughed out loud a few times. “I haven’t seen Paul throw back his head and laugh so heartily for a very long time,” Essie later wrote the Pankeys in thanks. “It was like a visit home in the old days, with none of the bad past.” To Harrington, the evening showed that Paul “was there; he was not a brain-damaged individual; communication could be established—but on his terms.” On his way out of the door, having already lapsed back into melancholy, Paul impulsively grabbed Ollie’s hand. “Thank you, thank you,” he said over and over.53
Yet Paul’s ability to go out more exacerbated his unease in one sense: the very fact that he could see improvement and enjoy himself unleashed deep fears of incompetence; the accelerated activity itself fed his anxiety about being once more asked to “perform.” Dropping in one day with Dr. Katzenstein to visit the Soviet-German House of Culture, he roamed around comfortably and had coffee in the restaurant, and was even able to tolerate a few people staring at him as if to say, “Is that Paul Robeson?” But then an official did recognize him, gathered others around and persuaded Paul to sign the visitors’ book. He seemed to take it all in stride, but the next day, according to Essie, “he was in a bit of a tizzy,” and she finally found out why: he was worried about whether he had written something “really adequate” in the visitors’ book. When he told Essie and Dr. Katzenstein what he had written, they assured him that it was fine and that, besides, nobody expected instant wisdom on such an occasion. Paul seemed only partly comforted.54
Essie, who was still keeping the outside world at bay, had withheld from Paul for months the sad news that his beloved brother Ben had died of cancer of the esophagus in July. She finally told him in November, after Paul had written his brother a little note. She left no record of how he took the news of the loss of someone who had been such a loving anchor to him. Probably it was without much outward reaction, for, as Essie had once written to Helen Rosen, “… nobody knows what is in … Paul’s mind.” However, in mid-November he headed into another down cycle, and Essie reported to the family that he told her he “just cannot make it any more.… I am too tired. I haven’t got the energy. Maybe the voice is still there, but I haven’t the energy, and it takes energy and nerves. And I just haven’t got them anymore.” He had felt “exhausted,” he told her, as far back as 1956, following prostate surgery, and had never really mended. He had been able to make a “supreme effort” now and then—California in 1957, Carnegie Hall in 1958, Othello in 1959, Australia in 1960—but only with “great fear and worry.” (During the run of Othello, he now confessed to her for the first time, “every performance was an ordeal”: he always expected to forget his lines and once did.) He dreaded any prospect of yet another “come-back,” yet at the same time he worried over the fact that he had never managed to get to Africa or China and still felt he “should make some kind of contribution and gesture of respect” to them. He told Katzenstein he had “failed” his own people, had been “unable to bring forth the victory,” “could not help them any more.” Essie conveyed his fearful questions back home to the family: “Will people understand? Will they think he has changed, as the Western Press insists? What can he say? What can he do???? And last and most important, he feels he should be home participating in the Negro struggle. But how??? He isn’t up to personal appearances.…”55
Essie tried to ease Paul’s mind, joined in the effort by the Buch clinicians, and seconded by friends back home like Helen Rosen. Together they urged him to retire, in body and conscience; he had done his share, and more; it was better to end on a dignified note; now was the time for a younger generation of black leaders to shoulder responsibility; perhaps after he had recovered his health he might again consider an active role, but for the time being he should set his mind at ease by formally announcing that the public phase of his life was completed, by medical command. Paul said he agreed—and went on worrying. He could not shake a lifetime of trying to live up to those perfectionist demands his father had placed on him in childhood, and which he had long since internalized as his own, to live up to the dictum that he should always do better and more. He could never quite believe that he had done enough to allow him to retire with honor from the field. Particularly, he could not shake the wish to rejoin in a significant way a black-rights movement he had done so much to inaugurate, could not give up the hope that the new generation of black activists would make some request for his services that he would be able to fulfill, that together they might establish some continuity of purpose, some mutual acknowledgment of interconnection between the generations.56
Paul seemed unable to leave it alone, continuing to fret about whether he had a future, and if so whether he wanted one. Essie (at least as she reported to the family) told him he had to make the decision, had to tell her what he wanted to do, where he wanted to go. She drew up a list for him of the possible places they could live and the pros and cons of living there. On the morning of December 7, 1963, he told her he had made a decision. He wanted to go home—home to the States, to Jumel Terrace, to his grandchildren, to his people. Essie had several more go-rounds with him, but he held to his decision: “This is what he seems to want,” she reported to the family, “so we are going to have to go, as the British say.” She added, “I have a VERY good feeling about it myself.… I know your welcome, and your concern will warm his heart, and relax him very much. He knows you wont expect him to DO anything, just BE. That’s what everybody here wants, and hopes, but HE doesn’t leave it at that. He feels he should be doing something, saying something.” Dr. Katzenstein felt Paul’s decision to go back to the States was the right one. He was pleased that his effort to “treat the whole person” had led to some improvement, that Paul had gained weight and appeared more animated in manner; yet Katzenstein felt “there was no way of knowing if he stayed longer whether he would improve more.” He hoped Robeson “would find a peaceful home.”57
On December 17 Paul and Essie flew nonstop to London to collect some of their things from the Connaught Square flat and to take their leave of friends. On December 22 they boarded a BOAC jet for Idlewild Airport, New York.
Robeson was going home, as he had wanted to for years.