Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  The Robesons’ alarm over the world situation made them anxious about leaving Pauli, now age ten, in school in the Soviet Union. It had become difficult to reach Moscow except through German-controlled territory (even the Scandinavian air route stopped at Hamburg), and with Spanish and Russian stamps on their passports guaranteeing German hostility to them, the Robesons finally decided to send for Pauli and Ma Goode. They did so reluctantly, knowing how happy the pair had been in Moscow; indeed, Pauli agreed to return only because (as Essie wrote the Van Vechtens) “we PROMISED to spend a lot of time with him, and after all, he hadn’t seen his parents enough.” Ma Goode went to the States for a prolonged visit, and Pauli was able to live with his parents on a daily basis for the first time since their summer vacation together in 1937. He was also happy when they immediately enrolled him in the Soviet School in London, maintained for the children of U.S.S.R. officials, an arrangement that allowed him to continue his studies without interruption (and to continue to be shielded from some of the rawer daily manifestations of racism—“Russian children don’t look at you as if they hated you,” Pauli told a newspaper reporter).18

  Robeson stepped up the pace of his political appearances in London. He sang at a variety of rallies—the International Peace Campaign at the Royal Opera House, a Save China assembly at Covent Garden (with speakers including Edouard Herriot and Madame Sun Yat-sen), the Basque Children’s Committee, and the British Youth Peace Assembly. He also contacted experts on Spanish music, with the aim of learning more about the cante jondo style, and was involved in preliminary discussions for setting up a foundation called International Theatres of the People. And for a brief time it looked as if he and Sergei Eisenstein might finally get together on a film project: Eisenstein wrote from Moscow in April 1938 to say that “all my troubles are over. New people are running the film business”; he was completing “one of the most important pictures to be made this year” (Alexander Nevsky), was “thinking in the direction of the brotherhood of nations and races,” and suggested that if Robeson had “some fine ideas in that direction to be made together,” he should let him know immediately. But although Eisenstein was to receive the Order of Lenin on February 1, 1939, and was soon to be made artistic head of Mosfilm, his projects would again run into roadblocks, and he and Robeson would never make the film they had long hoped to.19

  Once again Robeson was warned that his political activities might hurt his artistic career, this time by Harold Holt, his London agent, who admonished him to curtail his outspokenness or face the likelihood of losing concert bookings. “It is my duty, as your representative,” Holt wrote, “to point out that your value as an artist is bound to be very adversely affected.… You are doing yourself a great deal of harm.” Robeson ignored Holt’s warning and—for the time being—suffered no loss in public popularity. His first concert in more than two years at the Albert Hall was packed, and the applause greeting his entrance was so prolonged that, before the concert could proceed, Larry Brown had to play a piano introduction through twice, and Robeson had to give a little speech thanking the audience for its welcome. In the same month (June 1938) that Holt admonished Robeson about his political appearances, he was—perhaps in a gesture of deliberate defiance—particularly active, singing the Soviet anthem at a huge rally organized by the Emergency Youth Peace Campaign, and appearing at two other public meetings.20

  Instead of retreating from his political commitments, Robeson was establishing their primacy. He explained to the press that “something inside has turned”; long-standing discontent over the stage and film roles he had played had finally crystallized into a coherent vision of how he wanted to employ his talents in the future. He would never again, he said, do a part like that in Sanders of the River—a film he now saw as “a piece of flag-waving … a total loss.” Even the movie version of The Emperor Jones he now regarded as “a failure”: the changed order of the scenes had destroyed the play’s psychological integrity, and its director, Dudley Murphy, had misused him in the title role—rushing him through whole sequences lest his “mood” change, on the “fool notion that negroes had moods and could only play” when they were in the proper one. For the future, Robeson vowed to appear only “in stories that had some bearing on the problems” ordinary people faced in their daily lives (and at a box-office price they could afford). He no longer believed, he told another reporter, in the once-prevalent notion—held by most of the major figures in the Harlem Renaissance—that a “talented tenth” of the black people could or should, through their own demonstrated achievements, lead the black masses out of bondage. In line with his new convictions, Robeson chose for his next stage appearance the Unity Theatre production of Plant in the Sun. 21

  Political theater in Britain, as well as in the United States, had taken on new life in the early thirties. A group of British actors, encouraged by André Van Gyseghem and Herbert Marshall (who was then studying filmmaking with Eisenstein), had performed at the First International Workers’ Olympiad in Moscow in 1933. On returning home, they formed the Rebel Players and, after a striking success in 1935 with Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty, had reconstituted themselves as the Unity Theatre, renovating a large hall that had once been a derelict mission, in Goldington Crescent. In a wave of enthusiasm, they declared themselves “a people’s theatre, built to serve as a means of dramatising their life and struggles, and as an aid in making them conscious of their strength and of the need for United action.”22

  Plant in the Sun was the third play performed in the new Unity building. Written by a young American, Ben Bengal, it was directed by Herbert Marshall, who had gotten to know Robeson during his 1934 visit to the Soviet Union. The two men had talked over Robeson’s difficulty in finding politically astute material that would not be mutilated during production by commercial managers, and Marshall had suggested he read the script for Plant in the Sun. Robeson was immediately attracted to its forceful advocacy of trade-unionist principles, its story line about the irresistible success that follows when white and black workers combine their forces in a sit-down strike. He also liked the idea of playing a lead role that had originally been written for an Irishman. He found additionally appealing the Unity Theatre’s policy of having everyone in the cast—which included a full complement of real-life carpenters and clerks—appear anonymously. Robeson decided to accept the role.23

  Word spread rapidly of Robeson’s pending appearance in the play, and the limited, month-long run immediately sold out, fashionable West Enders vying with Unity’s usual working-class audience for seats. Time and Tide noted that Robeson, “who can fill any great hall in London on his own,” had not only given his services free to Unity, but was also prepared to make a personal plea to Parliament for support of a theater that “should put on plays of working-class life.”24

  Rehearsals had to take place on weekends and on evenings, because most of the amateur cast held daytime jobs. Neither the evenings nor the amateurs fazed Robeson. Enthusiastic, he would arrive early for rehearsals, and would sit outside in front of the theater chatting with Vernon Beste, Unity’s chairman. (Robeson told Beste he didn’t like doing concert tours—they made him feel too lonely—and recalled the deep kinship he had experienced talking with mill workers on the Isle of Man; in general, he seemed to Beste “greatly worried by the worsening political situation.”) Rehearsals were run along the lines of a pep rally. The actors discussed the social significance of the play, watched documentary films about “stay-in” strikes in France, made a special study of the dialect of the East Side of New York (where the play’s candy factory was set), visited two British confectionery factories, and even heard a formal lecture on “spontaneous struggles and their expression in strikes.” Robeson’s rapport with the amateur cast was complete. The actor Alfie Bass, who had been connected with Unity from the beginning and worked with Robeson on Plant, measured him against the other “stars” he’d known and decided, “Nobody I’ve ever met for intelligence, humanity and so on would
ever come up to this man—and I tell you I’m not easily fooled, I look with contempt on people that are supposed to be ‘big’ people.”25

  Robeson, for his part, was delighted to be working in a setting and on a script that suited his political vision. Before the Unity experience, he told a reporter, he had felt himself “drying up … acting in plays and films that cut against the very people and ideas that I wanted to help. For me it was a question of finding somewhere to work that would tie me up with the things I believe in, or stopping altogether. It was as strong as that.” Robeson’s satisfaction with Plant in the Sun found considerable echo among the critics. They were generally respectful of the “compact little study” and widely admiring of the “dignity and gentle strength” of Robeson’s own performance. “It was a melodrama of course,” the Manchester Guardian commented, “but with reality in it.”26

  Even during the run of Plant, Robeson managed to fit in a few political appearances—notably at a large rally for Loyalist Spain held at the Granada Cinema, and at a meeting to protest conditions in Jamaica (“I have appeared on many platforms for various causes. Tonight I am appealing for, as it were, my flesh and blood”). It was also in 1938 that Robeson made the acquaintance of another leader of another oppressed people—Jawaharlal Nehru, the foremost figure in the Indian National Congress. Nehru came to London in June, directly from a five-day tour of Spain with Krishna Menon, the dominant force in the India League and the man who had earlier enlisted Robeson’s support in behalf of Indian independence. Robeson gladly accepted the League’s invitation to appear at a public meeting welcoming Nehru to London, and in turn Nehru and Krishna Menon were taken to see Robeson’s performance in Plant in the Sun.27

  The rally to welcome Nehru drew a large crowd to Kingsway Hall on June 27, 1938. The Dean of Canterbury, Stafford Cripps, Harold Laski, Ellen Wilkinson, R. Palme Dutt (the Communist Party’s expert on colonial affairs), and Robeson were among those who spoke to the gathering. Dutt gave the chief address, emphasizing that “the Indian problem” could not be solved within the framework of British imperialism and hailing Nehru’s success in raising the membership of the Indian National Congress within two years from half a million to over three million. Robeson’s welcoming remarks stressed the indivisibility of the struggle for freedom, and called for an “even greater measure” of unified action by “democratic and progressive forces” to combat the “common onslaught by reactionary forces” in Abyssinia, Spain, China, Austria, and the West Indies. He claimed, with perhaps a touch of wishful thinking, that black Americans “have closely watched the Indian struggle and have been conscious of its importance for us.”28

  Within a few days of the rally, the Robesons lunched with Nehru, accompanied by his sister, Vijaya Lakshmi—“Nan”—Pandit (she would remain a lifelong friend, particularly of Essie’s), and Essie followed up the luncheon by sending Nehru a copy of her book, Paul Robeson, Negro. He responded cordially (“It was such a delight to meet you and Paul Robeson. I am looking forward to a repetition of that experience”), and a friendship quickly blossomed. Within a few months of their first meeting, Nan Pandit was writing Essie to say “I feel as if we were old friends—it seemed so easy to establish contact with you,” and Essie was adding to Nehru’s reading list a gift of Richard Wright’s first (1938) published work, Uncle Tom’s Children (a book she and Paul were so taken with that he wrote a foreword to it when Victor Gollancz published it in England: “Wright is a great artist, certainly one of the most significant American authors of his time.… Would that everyone who has read Gone with the Wind would read Uncle Tom’s Children!!”).29

  The Robesons and Nehru began to meet frequently, and Nehru later remembered that Essie “would dash in occasionally into my flat and announce, in the American way, that she was feeling like a million dollars. I am sure she has that capacity of feeling that way whatever happens.” Nehru clearly became fond of Essie, describing her as “one of the most vital and energetic women I have ever met. She is overflowing with an exuberant vitality.” Essie, in turn, told Marie Seton that she thought Nehru immensely attractive. There is even a hint that she and Nehru moved to the edge of having an affair—and that Essie was the one who backed off.30

  When Plant in the Sun closed, Robeson and Larry Brown went off on a concert tour of the provinces while Essie made a brief trip back to the States to tie up some loose business ends surrounding the release of Jericho and to have a look at the successful WPA production of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Haiti as a possible vehicle for Paul in London (the decision was negative). Paul’s provincial tour was the most successful he had ever had. Far from abandoning him for his outspoken new political stance, audiences embraced him with fervor. At Eastbourne hundreds of would-be ticket purchasers were turned away; at Swansea a large throng waited to cheer him outside the theater after the concert; at Torquay police had to be called in to restore order when a “surging mass of people” carried Robeson into the concert hall “to the accompaniment of tremendous cheering”; and at Glasgow the papers reported “amazing crowd scenes”—people forming a line four deep and a quarter of a mile long outside the concert hall. Robeson had succeeded in his new aim of “reaching the people”—the “ordinary” people who sat in the galleries. They had always loved him—more uncritically than the professional arbiters of taste; now that he had become a self-identified “people’s artist,” they adored him. The London paper The Star reported that Robeson was among the ten artists whose recordings sold best, and in a Motion Picture Herald popularity poll he came in tenth among British film stars—though he did not place among the top ten in the United States.31

  Robeson, of course, had his detractors. Between 1936 and the 1939 signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact, criticism of the Soviet Union was rarely heard in Harlem intellectual circles—even among such bitter later critics as A. Philip Randolph and Roy Wilkins (the NAACP journal, The Crisis, edited by Wilkins, carried not a single article critical of the Soviets during this four-year period). Yet within black ministerial circles “anti-Communism” had already surfaced. Claude A. Barnett, director of the Associated Negro Press, wrote Robeson from Chicago to report a recent visit to his office “by the president of a great religious association,” bearing a huge placard designed to portray black celebrities in commemoration of the forthcoming seventy-fifth anniversary of emancipation. During the ensuing conversation, he told Barnett that Robeson’s name had been suggested for a place on the placard but the suggestion had led to “quite an argument” among members of the anniversary committee—one minister insisting that Robeson had made “a disparaging comment relative to the Negro church, which he attributed to certain acquired communistic views,” and another insisting “that no man who sang spirituals” as Robeson did could do so “without loving them or believing in them.” Barnett asked Robeson a few queries of his own: “Are you planning to relinquish your American citizenship? Are you planning to become a citizen of Russia? Would you be interested in making Russia your home?”32

  Robeson ignored the detractors. In his very next public statement, in September, soon after returning to London from his provincial tour, he further consolidated his populist image. In more forceful terms than ever before, he told the press about his disenchantment with commercial filmmaking. “I am tired of playing Stepin Fetchit comics and savages with leopard skin and spear,” he told one reporter. The film industry had refused to give him the kind of roles he wanted to play—the life of the black composer Coleridge-Taylor, say, or a film based on the Joe Louis story. As a result he was determined, he said, to try to make pictures independently—at the time he still hoped to do a film with Eisenstein—or to get a picture off the ground based on the life of Oliver Law, the black American soldier who had died in Spain. It was not an unrealistic path: documentary films had recently come into prominence, and such talented film personalities as Robert Flaherty, Paul Muni, and Leslie Howard had washed their hands of the film industry proper and gone their independent ways.33

 
Meanwhile, he agreed to sing as many as three shows daily in a few of the popular cinema palaces—Gaumont State, the Trocadero, the Elephant and Castle. He was willing to work harder and at reduced fees—eighteen performances at one of the giant cinema houses brought him a salary equivalent to the fee for one performance on the Celebrity Concert series at Queen’s Hall—in order to reach the people he now considered to be his “natural” audience, and at a price they could afford. But Robeson could never be a “pop” singer in the Frank Sinatra mode, and whenever he tried to stretch his voice and repertoire in that direction he invariably stumbled. Essie wisely counseled him to return to what he did best, the spirituals, and he quickly heeded her advice.34

  Simultaneously, Robeson maintained a hectic pace of political appearances, lending his name and presence to a plethora of organizations and events—the Spanish Aid Committee, Food for Republican Spain Campaign, the National Memorial Fund (for the British members of the Brigade), the Labour and Trade Union Movement, the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, the League for the Boycott of Aggressor Nations, the Coloured Film Artists’ Association, the Society for Cultural Relations, and, in December 1938, the Welsh National Memorial Meeting at Mountain Ash, to commemorate those “men of the International Brigade from Wales who gave their lives in defence of Democracy in Spain.”35