Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  The British continued to treat Robeson as a beloved celebrity, not a potential subversive. The BBC decided to feature him in a series of ten Sunday-night radio broadcasts and also to offer on the Home Service “The Paul Robeson Story,” featuring Ronald Adam, Marie Burke, and Dame Sybil Thorndike (“The radio series is going like a house-a-fire,” Essie wrote Helen Rosen, “and the fan mail is fabulous”). On television, Robeson was first paired with Yehudi Menuhin for a conversation about music that The New Statesman, not given to overpraise, found so stimulating that it absolved television for the “hours of muck” that made up its ordinary fare (a gratifying dividend for Robeson was Menuhin’s apparent expression of interest in his musical theories). A second television program, with the British jazzman Johnny Dankworth sharing the billing, was not nearly so well received: “too many mutual compliments, too much nebulous waffle,” was the opinion of Variety. That one misfire aside, Robeson’s radio and television appearances produced so much favorable comment and such a deluge of fan letters that the BBC decided to schedule yet another series, for 1960. Essie periodically expressed concern that Paul might not be getting enough rest, but, after nearly a decade of enforced silence, he seemed willing to run the risk. Although white America rarely reported on Robeson, the Pittsburgh Courier headlined to black America, “Paul Robeson Great Success in Britain.”41

  On October 13, 1959, Essie wrote Claude Barnett of the Associated Negro Press, asking for accreditation as a roving reporter so she could cover Khrushchev’s planned visit to Africa in January. “Have had quite a struggle with my health,” she wrote Barnett, “but am finally beginning to get back my energy.” Barnett immediately sent her a press card, but soon after, she came down with “terrific and blinding pain”—and Essie was not a complainer. She wrote the truth to Sam and Helen Rosen, whose discretion and intelligence she had come to trust (though, given Paul’s involvement with Helen, a certain distanced politeness remained the rule). To the Rosens she confessed that she had “pain everywhere,” but begged them to “keep mum, please, please,” since “Paul has no idea how very bad things are with me.… He already has his own affairs to cope with, and there is nothing he could do, anyway.” Essie feared that her cancer had recurred, and the Rosens recommended that she see J. B. Blaikely, a leading gynecologist who had headed a team of British doctors cooperating with Soviet physicians on radiation treatment. Blaikely put her in the hospital for exploratory surgery. He found no sign of a recurrence and assured Essie that the doctors in Moscow had “done a wonderful job.” Her pain, he decided, was from an ulcer on the front wall of the rectum, a common aftereffect of radiation therapy, and advised her that if she maintained a bland diet it would heal itself within six to nine months.42

  Paul took Essie home from the hospital on November 14, and she arranged for her friend Peggy Middleton to come in twice a week and help with her letters. Essie reported to Freda Diamond, “Paul is so relieved and happy that it isn’t cancer, that he is quite thoughtful and useful.” To the Rosens she sent a less glowing version of domestic life: “I give him full run of the living room and his bedroom, while I have my bedroom and the dining room. It works out very well.” On November 26 Paul made his last appearance as Othello and was called back for ten curtain calls. He had not missed a single performance in seven months, but the grind had been far more difficult than he publicly acknowledged. “It’s been wonderful but a constant hazard,” he wrote Helen Rosen near the end of the run, “the going has been tough—and I’ve resorted to all means of self hypnosis between performances—languages—music—sleep—investigation of the ways of various nationalities—travel.… Have done fairly well in some regions.” Yet at one point, he confessed, he had become so lonesome for her that he had “debated flying over (really) in between engagements.” When his old theatrical friend Flora Robson came to see his performance, he confided to her that he was having great difficulty remembering the lines and had to have a prompter on hand all the time. With the show now finally closed, he decided on a complete rest before beginning a three-month British concert tour with Larry Brown in mid-February.43

  In January 1960 Paul and Essie went for a three-week stay in Moscow to complete their rest cure and to have medical checkups. The Moscow doctors put Essie in the hospital to evaluate her continuing pain and to give her a blood transfusion. After a week of exhausting procedures, they told her the location of the ulcerated area, high on the wall of the rectum, made it difficult to treat, but assured her they could help; she settled in for a period of outpatient therapy that would continue long after Paul had returned to London. His health was found to be “very fine.” Essie reported home that “he is in excellent shape, considerably overweight, and a little tired. No exhaustion as before and they are all very pleased with him.…” She also reported that he was “very happy.” He made radio and television appearances, spoke and sang at a mass meeting in his honor at Ball Bearing Plant No. 1, attended the Chekhov hundredth-anniversary celebration, met with the Izvestia staff, participated in sessions of the World Peace Committee, and in between took out a week to rest at the Barveekha Sanatorium. He is “having a ball,” Essie wrote, though “nobody likes his [Othello] beard and mustache, which he still wears and still likes—says it makes him look Abyssinian!” The U.S. Embassy in Moscow also reported on his activities: his “television appearance and press statements were notably uniform in including laudatory mention of the Soviet troop reduction announcement, in mesh with the current Soviet propaganda exploitation of this item.”44

  Paul returned to London on February 7, while Essie remained for additional treatments. John Pittman, a black American Communist who had come with his family to live as a correspondent in the Soviet Union, had an apartment a few doors down from Essie, and the writer Albert Kahn was also nearby. “So between her American and Russian friends,” Paul wrote Helen Rosen, “she’ll be all right.” He, however, was far less resourceful than Essie about ordinary daily matters and within a few weeks of returning to London was writing to Helen, “The apartment is rather lonely these days. No one to get breakfast and no peanut brittle.” The new British tour, beginning on February 21 and lasting until May 15, took up the slack.45

  He had avoided giving concerts in the Soviet Union because the sound arrangements were rarely adequate, but in England most of his concerts were booked in acoustically sophisticated cinemas. Nor did he have to worry about the provincial reception. In a thirty-two-city tour that led up to Manchester, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen and back down through Hull, Liverpool, and Birmingham, he was greeted with nearly unanimous praise, though the actual turnout proved disappointing (he grossed about eighty-five hundred pounds). Bob Rockmore, who had been expecting substantial sums from Paul’s overseas earnings to pay off his commitments at home and to provide a nest egg for later years, began to complain again about “the expenditure of too much money by everybody concerned,” and was hardly appeased when Paul cabled him to give the proceeds of his share ($1,650) from the sale of some property to his brother Ben.46

  In talking with reporters during his tour stopovers, Robeson struck something of a valedictory note: having succeeded at Stratford, he said, “I can now relax, feel that my artistic life has been fulfilled and hope to continue at a good level without any startling plans.” Though he pretty much avoided discussing politics with the press, he didn’t hesitate to attend the thirtieth anniversary of the London Daily Worker or to celebrate May Day with the Scottish miners, telling the assembled crowd, “You will need all the strength you have got to see that you who create the wealth of the country have a chance to enjoy it.” But even in Glasgow, with people calling out warmly on the streets, “Paul, stay with us!,” he continued to show signs of erratic mood swings. One man who had known him before couldn’t get over “how much he’d aged and how tense he was,” once losing his temper with his well-regarded accompanist Harry Carmichael—a lapse in courtesy unthinkable for Robeson at any previous point in his life.47

  On his return
to London, Robeson spent most of the next month making a second series of radio broadcasts for the BBC to release the following year, and then, on June 18, went to East Berlin for two days to participate in the third annual press festival sponsored by Neues Deutschland, official organ of the Communist Party. It was a considerable gesture, with the GDR unrecognized in the West and thought to be near collapse (soon after, the Berlin Wall went up). In appreciation, the East Germans built Robeson a special bed big enough for his huge size, and assigned him both a private doctor and a bodyguard (he was a small man, but he reassured Robeson, “Never mind, Paul, I can just cover your heart”). Robeson appeared as the featured artist during the ceremonies officially opening the festival and held a press conference at which he said that in the autumn he hoped to make an extended visit to the East European socialist countries; he also said he planned to return to the United States. Indeed, his homesickness had been growing. During the run of Othello, Andrew Faulds had sensed “a keen desire on his part to get back to America,” to “get back with the folks”—though his wish to be part of the burgeoning civil-rights struggle he had helped to inaugurate alternated with the realization that the NAACP and even Martin Luther King, Jr., would be reluctant to share a platform with him.48

  Otto Nathan saw him in London and reported to Robeson’s lawyer Leonard Boudin that he “is not very happy, he does not look well.” Paul himself confessed as much to Helen Rosen. While still on tour he had written her, “… desolate without you—crying for you—Got de Blues and too damn mean to cry—No! I’m almost weepin—Tell Odessa [the Rosens’ housekeeper] to come over here and get me and bring me back.… That’s the ‘blues’ or ‘secular’ side of my personality talking.…” Five days later he wrote her that everything was going “fine” but that it “all gets a little desolate now and then—no matter how wonderful things are in general.” Then he uncharacteristically spelled out his new priority of needs: “… I never thought that friends would one day out-weigh the seemingly all-powerful social and political drives.… All the slogans in the world can’t replace even hours of concern and tenderness—let alone years and years. Funny how that complete ‘inner security’ springs up when surrounded and ‘encircled’ as in Katonah … somehow loses some of its power when surrounded without question by the respect and deep affection of thousands and thousands. Strange but true.”49

  Two months later he was still writing Helen frequently and still sounding the same desolate themes: “I’m so lonely. Doesn’t seem to improve at all … Suppose you’ll head to the country [Katonah]. Boy! What a few weeks there would do! What you say!” “If only those ‘blokes’ could improve the atmosphere,” he wrote her yet another time, “a trip [home] might be possible.” American artists like Nat King Cole, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Diahann Carroll were “jumping back and forth” from the States to England—“Why can’t I do the opposite? … makes one really homesick.” (While making a speech during these same months in which he referred to “my country,” Robeson blurted out, “… any time my folks say they need me, if it’s tomorrow morning, I’ll get back there don’t worry, bet your life I will.”) Helen was startled to get Paul’s letters: both their frequency and their content were highly atypical. It made her wonder what special pressures might be working within him. At just this time, ironically, the FBI was reporting that Robeson “has taken up permanent overseas residence,” and the Washington Post headlined a rare U.S. report on him, “Robeson Tours as ‘Exile’” (self-exiled, the article went on to claim).50

  As much as Robeson yearned for home, the signals he got from the States were mixed. Old friends like Earl Robinson wrote that “the climate really does seem more favorable than negative for peace and progress.” Daily headlines described the spread of sit-ins and the birth of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), marking a more militant phase in the black struggle and generating, in the growing circle of liberal, labor, religious, and campus support, a more sympathetic Northern white response to it. By 1960, too, a dozen African nations had gained independence, led by Ghana’s successful revolution in 1957. Yet the newspaper accounts also made clear that the actual pace of progress in the white South remained slow and uncertain. Six years after the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision, only 6 percent of Southern schools were integrated, and the rate of compliance in ending disenfranchisement was still so glacial that fewer than one in four blacks of voting age in the South could register.51

  When the Democrats named John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to head their 1960 presidential ticket, some saw it as harbinger of vigorous federal commitment to civil-rights legislation, but Essie and Paul were not among them. The ticket “is really American,” Essie sarcastically wrote Freda Diamond. “Millions, Irish Catholic Boston background, and the South. What a combination. I will be deeply interested to see if Negroes will vote for THAT combination. If they do, shame on them. I also will be interested to see what The Left will do in this dilemma: they simply cannot vote for Kennedy-Johnson, equally they simply cannot vote for Mr. War Tricky Dicky [Nixon], so perhaps, if they have any principle at all, they will just NOT vote. I wouldn’t pollute my vote by casting for either of that stink.” Just before Kennedy narrowly won the election, Robeson was asked at a press conference in East Berlin whether he thought the Democratic nominee represented “the other America.” “Maybe you’d better define what you mean by the other America,” Robeson replied. “The other America for me is Jefferson, Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Kennedy is just about as dangerous as anybody else. He does not represent the Democratic Party’s great traditions, but is, like Nixon, a firm supporter of NATO and he wants more bases, not fewer.”52

  Essie, unlike Paul, felt no particular pull to return to the United States. After four months of treatment in Moscow, she arrived back in London in May, but her recovery continued to be erratic—“just when I think I’ve turned a corner for the better,” there is “blood, pain, etc.” She tried to live from day to day and characteristically pushed herself to maximum activity with minimal self-pity. She had hoped to attend the African Women’s Conference in Ghana, but had to forgo the trip. Paul, on the other hand, was again feeling energetic, and accepted a new batch of invitations to attend functions on the Continent. But before embarking on yet another round of what Essie called his “rat race” of commitments, he decided to take off some weight. He had gone up to 282 pounds, and Essie alternately described him as a “walking mountain” and an “over-stuffed divan.” Taking an injection of gonadotropine every morning to “break up the entrenched fat,” and sticking to a diet of five hundred calories a day, he lost forty pounds in forty days. He “looks and feels like a million dollars,” Essie reported.53

  In his trim new appearance, his mood swing once more heading upward, Robeson set off for Paris early in September to participate in a festival for the fortieth anniversary of the Communist paper L’Humanité in the working-class suburb of La Courneuve. The huge throng that turned out for the festival gave him a thunderous greeting, and privately he was entertained by L’Humanité editors Etienne Fajon, René Andrieu, and André Carrel, who brought him together both with French Communist officials and with visiting Soviet artists. From Paris he went to Budapest (the State Department had recently made travel to Hungary legal for American citizens) and then, after a two-week break back in London, returned to East Berlin for a four-day visit. Feeling much improved by then, Essie accompanied him to the GDR for what proved a series of stately ceremonials.54

  At Humboldt University’s 150th anniversary celebration, Robeson was awarded an honorary Doctor of Philosophy degree. After the ceremonies, standing on a balcony overlooking the massed crowd on Unter den Linden, Robeson sang “John Brown’s Body” and “Ol’ Man River”; the stiff German professors surrounding him on the balcony, as a gesture to their honored guest, broke uneasily into their own very special accompaniment version of “John Brown’s Body.” Aware that the evangelist Billy Graham was c
onducting meetings across the border dividing East and West Berlin, Robeson commented, “Why doesn’t he go down to Alabama instead and preach about brotherhood?” Later in the day the Robesons were individually awarded prizes by the East German peace movement. That evening the honors were completed at a gala that called for “full medals.” Surveying his assorted awards, Robeson asked Franz and Diana Loesser with dismay which one he was supposed to wear. “I’m afraid all of them,” Franz said. Robeson grimaced and said he would wear only one—picking out a handmade medal given him by the students of Humboldt. At the Central Youth Club that same night a performance of folk songs and dances was put on in his honor in a hall jammed to capacity with five thousand people and graced by the presence of Walter Ulbricht and Otto Grotewohl, leading members of the government. Robeson spontaneously joined a group of African students from Leipzig in a dance, then later spoke and sang to the crowd. It was, he told them, “one of the most moving days of my sixty-two-year-old life.” As the climax of the evening, Helene Weigl, the widow of Bertolt Brecht, presented Robeson with a silk cloth bearing a reproduction of Picasso’s peace dove—symbol of the Berliner Ensemble—and Chairman Ulbricht pinned on him the Order of the Star of International Friendship; Robeson was the first person given the award.55

  “In a socialist country,” Robeson told a reporter on his return to London, “I give my services free. In a capitalist country I charge as much as I can.” He put that principle to work in deciding whether or not to take up a lucrative offer to tour New Zealand and Australia for ten weeks. He didn’t want to go; he was tempted to visit Ghana instead, and was also homesick for the States. Offered more than a hundred thousand dollars for twenty concerts in Australia and New Zealand, with additional sums to be added for television appearances, Robeson reluctantly decided to accept. For two or three months’ work, Essie wrote to Freda Diamond, they could “clean up some fast money, and then he can retire, and do only what he wants to do, when he wants to. Which means television, radio, and occasionally a concert. And some writing.” (Paul still hoped to do a book about his musical theories.) With Essie and Larry Brown, Robeson arrived in Australia on October 13.56