Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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