His luck did not improve with his next film venture, Big Fella, which followed almost immediately and involved essentially the same team that had put together Song of Freedom: J. Elder Wills as director and Elizabeth Welch as costar. Welch, in retrospect, remains puzzled as to why Robeson agreed to do the film: her guess is that he accepted the poor script—based on Claude McKay’s Banjo—out of a sense of obligation to Hammer-British Lion Productions for having given him the opportunity to do Song of Freedom. Possibly, too, he wanted to have a crack at a lighter role; he had told a reporter two years before that he wanted to try his hand at a comic part—as long as it was not some shuffling stereotype. It may also be that Essie applied a bit of leverage: she was eager to play the role of the café proprietress, which the producers offered her (they also cast Larry Brown in a secondary part), and she hugely enjoyed being in the film. “I spoke some French & wore false hair à la Pompadour!” she wrote a friend. “Larry was magnificent. Paul was very pleased with my work, and so was the Director.”55
Big Fella tells the story of Banjo, a dockside worker and an itinerant balladeer (justification for having Robeson burst yet again into song), who locates a lost boy, sees him unwillingly returned to his home, is called in by the boy’s family to help rear him, but ends up preferring the easygoing life of the docks. The scriptwriters did, under pressure from Robeson, make it clear that Banjo was “a steady, trustworthy sort of fellow,” who worked for a living and did not participate in the “roguery” of the dockside life. They also voluntarily agreed to change the film’s title from Banjo to Big Fella to avoid leading “the audience to expect a sort of ‘Uncle Sambo’ of the cotton plantations.” Robeson was thus enabled to make a racial statement about an ordinary but admirable black man, functioning well in a contemporary, European setting. But, that virtue aside, the picture had little to recommend it.56
Between the completion of Big Fella and the immediate onset of yet another film project, Jericho, Robeson managed a month’s trip to the U.S.S.R. He gave a four-city (Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Odessa) concert tour, and he and Essie helped settle Ma Goode and Pauli in for a nearly two-year stay. The concerts were well received—Essie described the audiences as “marvellous … wildly appreciative. I have never heard Paul & Larry better.” The English language Moscow Daily News hailed his December 16 concert in the Large Hall of the Conservatory as “brilliant”—precisely because Robeson “is a ‘mass singer’, simple, natural and human.” His friend Eisenstein, reviewing the concert in Workers’ Moscow, congratulated Robeson on the “pure Russian” of his “hello” and “thank you” to the audience, regretted that no translations were provided for the English-language songs, and commented on how Robeson’s “every gesture conveyed irony toward his formal dress, to which he had been condemned by world concert conventions.” Pauli entered a Soviet Model School, with Stalin’s daughter and Molotov’s son among his schoolmates, and he took at once to the kindliness of his Russian teachers and to (in Essie’s report home) “the complete lack of colour consciousness among the students.” On New Year’s Eve the family gathered together in Moscow—Ma Goode, Pauli, Paul, Essie, Essie’s brothers, John and Frank, Larry Brown, and William Patterson. They had “a high old time”; three days later Essie felt “still full of vodka, caviar, champagne and Russian cigarette smoke.”57
In contrast to the economically depressed West, Essie sent back a glowing report of a U.S.S.R. with “thousands of well stocked shops.… Everyone well fed & warmly dressed. Books everywhere, outrageously cheap & everyone reads.” Six months earlier, referring to his prior trip to the Soviet Union, Robeson had told Ben Davis, Jr. (the black American Communist who was to become a Robeson intimate), that everywhere he went he had found “plenty of food,” that he had made a point of visiting workers’ homes and “they all live in healthful surroundings”—would that “the Negroes in Harlem and the South had such places to stay in.” Apparently the Robesons had still heard nothing, or chose not to credit the few rumors that might have come their way, about Stalin’s forced collectivization of agriculture, a policy that produced widespread famine, cost millions of lives (hitting the “national minority” population in Kazakhstan especially hard), and in the case of the Ukraine was deliberately designed by Stalin to crush the notion of an autonomous culture.58
In mid-January the Robesons left Pauli and Ma Goode “happily settled” in the Hotel National, and returned to London. Essie and Paul had only a four-day layover there before they had to leave for Egypt to film exteriors for Jericho. The shooting lasted a month. They stayed just outside Cairo and wandered its streets between takes, struck at the extreme contrasts in wealth and poverty, at European chic side by side with ancient tradition. “Cairo is a wonderful place,” Robeson told an interviewer; “it is such a queer mix.” In a letter to the Van Vechtens, Essie expressed fascination “that the Egyptians are pure coloured folks, science notwithstanding”—“we can find a double in Harlem for everyone we’ve seen here. It’s great fun to see an enormously rich country like this, where the coloured folks are the bosses!” She reported, too, that “Paul is in fine form—bigger, sweeter, dearer than ever, interested in his work, interested in me, interested in Pauli, and all is very very well.”59
Along with liking Cairo, Robeson enjoyed working on the film itself. “It’s the best part I have ever had for a picture,” he told one reporter. To another he revealed that he had “become very interested in Egyptian films” and expected to make one soon with Om Kalsoun, the noted Egyptian singer, as his female lead. The Jericho experience also confirmed Robeson in his fondness for cinema as a vehicle for his voice. He felt he could use it in a “perfectly natural” way while filmmaking, without having to strain for volume and projection, as he sometimes had to onstage or in concert; “I can sing best when I’m natural. I don’t like posing or raising my voice or strutting about.”60
One of his costars in the film, Henry Wilcoxon, became friendly with the Robesons and often shared meals with them. He found Essie “very sharp … the kind of person you don’t push around,” but he thought Paul an immensely appealing human being, at once modest and charismatic, having “a natural stage presence,” and conducting himself on the set like “a pro.” Robeson talked to Wilcoxon in a low-keyed way about the rising threat of fascism in Spain and gave him a book to read on socialism, offhandedly suggesting he have a look at it.61
The location shots for Jericho were made fifteen miles out in the desert at a studio site across the road from the Pyramids. One day Robeson, Wilcoxon, and Wallace Ford, another of the film’s stars, inspected the Great Pyramid of Giza. With the help of a dragoman, they worked their way into the King’s chamber at the geometric center of the pyramid, their path lit every hundred feet or so by a low-watt bulb. Inside the chamber they discovered “the most incredible echo” and Wilcoxon got the idea that Robeson should try singing. The first note “almost crumbled the place,” as Wilcoxon remembers, and when Paul followed with a triad, “back came the most gigantic organ chord you have ever heard in your life. This was Paul Robeson plus!” Then, “without any cue from anybody Paul started to sing ‘Oh Isis und Osiris’ from The Magic Flute.… When he finished and the last reverberation had gone away … I was crying, the dragoman was crying, Wally Ford, bless his heart, who was usually doing nothing but laugh, he was crying, and Paul was crying.… There were tears going down our faces. And we almost daren’t breathe to break the spell of the thing.” Hardly saying a word, the three men drove back to Cairo.62
The good feeling carried over into the filming. Jericho, in the opinion of some, is one of Robeson’s better pictures (which is not, to be sure, among the higher compliments one can pay to his career). The picture’s story line, certainly, is the least conventional of his films. Jericho Jackson (Robeson) is a medical student drafted to serve in the army, who rescues some fellow soldiers from a torpedoed troop ship, then flees an unjust court martial to wander across North Africa until he marries the daughter of a Tuareg chi
eftain (played by the real-life Princess Kouka, discovered in the Sudan—and then cosmeticized), becomes leader of the tribe, and, after avoiding recapture by the white authorities, lives out his life as a benefactor of his people. Robeson, as always, was called upon in the film to break periodically into incongruous song and to behave with unswerving heroism, but in comparison with most of his other movie roles, the part of Jericho Jackson did enable him to move several steps away from the standard stereotype of servile childishness (even if it kept him firmly rooted in an alternate caricature of simplistic nobility). The press—perhaps still hankering after the servile stereotype—was lukewarm. In London the critics were polite. In New York (where the film played under the title Dark Sands) the response ranged more widely but not more enthusiastically: Bosley Crowther in the Times suggested that “out of respect to Paul Robeson and his magnificent baritone voice the less said about Dark Sands the better.” The film was not a commercial success.63
On returning to London from Cairo in the early spring of 1937, Robeson lent his support to various political causes. In April, he appeared in concert at the Victoria Palace to aid homeless women and children in Spain. In May, he contributed fifteen hundred dollars to forward the work of the International Committee on African Affairs (a new organization in New York headed by Max Yergan, who had recently housed Essie and Pauli on their visit to South Africa). Also in May, Paul and Essie returned to the Soviet Union for another visit.64
They stayed in Russia for most of the summer, the first long holiday they had ever taken. They found Pauli and Ma Goode “very well” (except that Pauli had developed an intestinal problem calling for a special nonfat diet, which necessitated finding them a flat with kitchen facilities for preparing his special meals). Pauli had been promoted with honors; “He adores the children,” Essie wrote the Van Vechtens, and Mama “loves Russia.” The National Theater of Uzbekistan was currently in Moscow and Paul and Essie took Pauli to the Uzbek folk-dance-and-song matinee; he was “thrilled to death” and “nearly danced in his seat.”65
For Paul himself, it was the Uzbek Opera that provided the special thrill. The two performances he and Essie saw were (in Essie’s words) “vivid and vital, and a striking cross between Chinese, Arab and African—the whole with a definite and instantly recognizable African rhythm.…” Paul saw in the Uzbek Opera the fruit and confirmation of the success of Soviet policy toward its national minorities. As he put it, the Uzbeks, “a rather dark Mongolian people of Southern Asia who had enjoyed a brief period of glory under the famous Khans” and had then become “an oppressed and subject people,” were, under socialism, being encouraged to preserve their cultural identity even while being welcomed on equal terms into the fellowship of Russian citizenry. He rejoiced to find leaders of the Soviet state in attendance at the opening-night performance; they were lending the weight of their presence, as he saw it, to the recent promulgation of Article 123 of the Soviet Constitution, which had declared as “irrevocable law” the equality of all citizens of the U.S.S.R., “irrespective of their nationality or race, in all fields of economic, state, cultural, social, and political life.”66
To Robeson, Article 123 was “an expression of democracy, broader in scope and loftier in principle than ever before expressed.” It stood in sharp contrast to the official policies and unofficial practices that characterized the rest of the contemporary world, where doctrines of “the inferiority of my people are propagated even in the highest schools of learning.” The Uzbeks, unlike blacks in America, were not being counseled “to suffer endless misery silently, comforted by the knowledge that by ‘divine decree’ they are the ‘hewers of wood and the drawers of water.’” They were not being told that their language and culture were “either dead or too primitive to develop” and had to give way before the “superior” utility of alien forms. In its treatment of the Uzbeks and other national minorities, the Soviet Union, Robeson believed, had uniquely placed itself in opposition to cultural tyranny and racial oppression—an achievement, to him, that “shines with special brilliance.”
It stood in particular contrast, he felt, to what was currently happening in Spain. In that sundered country, beset by civil war, Franco’s fascist forces of reaction were mobilizing to destroy the Republican government and to keep the Spanish people, “poor, landless and disfranchised,” from claiming the right to control their own destiny. Robeson saw the mounting conflict as crucial in “the world-wide fight of the forces of democracy against reaction,” and he called upon people of color everywhere to participate in the Spanish struggle “against the new slavery”—“it is to their eternal glory that Negroes from America, Africa and the West Indies are to be found fighting in Spain today on the side of the republican forces, for democracy and against those forces of reaction which seek to land us back to a new age of darkness.”
To demonstrate his own commitment to the Republican cause, Robeson interrupted his holiday at the Soviet health resort of Kislovodsk to fly back to London for a mass rally in aid of the Basque refugee children at the Albert Hall on June 24, 1937. He had originally intended to broadcast his remarks from Moscow, but as soon as he learned that the Albert Hall management might not allow the broadcast to be heard (with a simultaneous threat from Germany that it would jam the relay), he rushed back to London to appear personally. The group of sponsors included W. H. Auden, E. M. Forster, Sean O’Casey, H. G. Wells, and Virginia Woolf, and the meeting was a huge success, as judged by the overflow crowd and by the number of contributions that poured onto the platform table. Robeson not only sang but also spoke, and the newspapers described his speech as the most striking of the evening. His words were impassioned:
Like every true artist, I have longed to see my talent contributing in an unmistakably clear manner to the cause of humanity. I feel that tonight I am doing so.… Every artist, every scientist, every writer must decide now where he stands. He has no alternative. There is no standing above the conflict on Olympian heights. There are no impartial observers.… The battle front is everywhere. There is no sheltered rear. The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative. The history of this era is characterized by the degradation of my people. Despoiled of their lands, their culture destroyed, they are in every country save one [the USSR], denied equal protection of the law, and deprived of their rightful place in the respect of their fellows. Not through blind faith or coercion, but conscious of my course, I take my place with you. I stand with you in unalterable support of the government of Spain, duly and regularly chosen by its lawful sons and daughters.… May your meeting … rally every black man to the side of Republican Spain.… The liberation of Spain from the oppression of fascist reactionaries is not a private matter of the Spaniards, but the common cause of all advanced and progressive humanity.67
Returning from his Russian holiday in August, Robeson broadened his political activity. He spoke out in opposition to Japanese aggression against China and appeared at benefits for the Daily Worker and the Friends of the Soviet Union. In the fall of 1937, he told the British press that he could not “portray the life nor express the living interests, hopes and aspirations of the struggling people from whence I come” in “commercial films and in the ‘decadent’” West End theater and would instead do his next performance at Unity, the “workers’ theater.” He elaborated further to an interviewer from the Daily Worker:
This is not a bolt out of the blue.… Films eventually brought the whole thing to a head.… I thought I could do something for the Negro race in the films; show the truth about them and about other people too. I used to do my part and go away feeling satisfied. Thought everything was O.K. Well, it wasn’t. Things were twisted and changed—distorted.… That made me think things out. It made me more conscious politically.… Joining Unity Theatre means identifying myself with the working-class. And it gives me the chance to act in plays that say something I want to say about things that must be emphasized.
Stafford Cripps, the leading socialist politician, sent Robeson “my most sincere congratulations upon the action that you have taken. It is a splendid gesture of solidarity with the workers and I know how deeply it will be appreciated throughout the country.” Just as Cripps’s letter marked the beginning of a friendship, Robeson’s increasing public advocacy marked his full emergence as a political spokesman.68
The escalating civil war in Spain now became Robeson’s primary concern. In the month of December alone, he made four appearances in behalf of the Republic. He participated in the Third Spanish Concert at the Scala Theater; made a broadcast appeal for the Loyalists (receiving over four hundred letters in response); sang at a concert sponsored by the Left Book Club (which had been founded in 1936 by Victor Gollancz, John Strachey, and Harold Laski and quickly burgeoned into a real political force) in support of the International Brigadists fighting on the Republican side in Spain; and appeared on the stage of a huge rally in the Albert Hall to raise funds for victims of the war (it met on the same night that government troops, by the glare of searchlights, attacked Franco’s forces at Teruel). The Albert Hall rally was an emotional high point. Clement Attlee, leader of the Opposition, spoke out forcefully against the betrayal of Spain by the so-called democracies of the West, whose governments, he argued, were in fact devoted to protecting class interests. Ellen Wilkinson, the member of Parliament who had recently been in Spain with Attlee and had shared in the attacks made on him in Parliament for his “partisan” trip, made a moving appeal for funds and succeeded in raising three thousand pounds. And Herbert Morrison further aroused the crowd by urging the Labour Party in Britain to work against the “treacherous and vacillating” Chamberlain government then in power. But it was Robeson’s appearance, according to newspaper accounts, that created a furor of enthusiasm. He galvanized the rally when he sang “Strike the cold shackles from my leg”; and when he altered the lyrics in “Ol’ Man River” from “I’m tired of livin’ and scared of dyin’” to “I must keep fightin’ until I’m dyin’,” the hall went wild.69
Paul Robeson Page 32
