Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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