Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  The same tactics failed to work on Helen Rosen. Receiving a note from Essie on July 31 that the doctors were “VERY much pleased with [Paul’s] progress” and that they would be at the Barveekha Sanatorium for another month or so to consolidate his improvement, Helen and Sam decided to have a look for themselves. They were already in nearby Rumania to attend a medical conference. (Sam’s now renowned stapes surgery had brought him international attention, and Helen had trained in audiology in order to assist him in the operation; they were traveling widely to demonstrate the procedure.) In mid-August they arrived at Barveekha for a four-day stay. Helen was appalled at what she found. Paul was utterly lethargic and passive, as if drugged, and Essie’s singsong attempts to rouse him—“Let’s show Helen and Sam how nicely we do our exercises”—only added to the poignancy. “They gave one look at him and guessed,” Essie reported back to Paul, Jr., and Marilyn—that is, guessed “SOME of the story.” Essie encouraged the Rosens to believe that the breakdown had happened only after the second trip to the Moscow hospital, that it duplicated “the 1956 experience” (his first breakdown), that it was the byproduct of “nervous exhaustion and tired heart”—and said nothing at all about “the ideas” (as she cryptically referred to them to Paul, Jr.) he had expressed during his least lucid days. The Rosens resented not having been told the truth before, but after Essie assured them that Big Paul had been “adamant” about not letting anyone but himself tell his story, they said they “understood.” When they left, four days later, Essie wrote home that Paul was “so sad … I may have to bury him tomorrow.…”8

  By the second week in September, after a three-month stay, Robeson was again improved, and the Barveekha doctors decided to risk letting him go back to London, urging that if all went well he should eventually return to his own country. “So hold onto your hats,” Essie wrote the Rosens just before boarding the plane for London. Her augury proved all too apt; Robeson had barely been in London forty-eight hours when he again relapsed, this time suffering his most serious episode yet. The usually unflappable Essie put in a panic call to Helen Rosen in New York: could she come at once to London? Helen dropped everything, took the next plane, and arrived in London the following morning. She found Paul huddled in a fetal position on the bed, tangled up in the bedsheets, “positively cowering” in fear. Essie, in consultation with Paul’s agent Harold Davison, made arrangements for Paul to enter the Priory, a private facility that had the reputation of being the best psychiatric hospital in England.9

  The Priory sent out a five-passenger car and two orderlies, one of whom, a Mr. Williams, “beguiled and soothed” Paul into the back seat, with Essie and Helen on either side of him. They drove out from London toward the Priory in Roehampton, hoping he would stay calm during the half-hour trip. But when the car approached the Soviet Embassy and Paul (according to Helen) “thought we were driving in there,” he started muttering, “You don’t know what you’re doing, you don’t know what you’re doing”; then, as they drew opposite the Embassy, he frantically signaled them to “get down!!”—implying, Helen felt, “that great danger was at hand.” He pushed her down on the seat, leaning over her with his body as they drove past. “He was frightened,” Helen recalls, “cowering himself and trying to protect me.” She didn’t know which building they were passing until Essie told her it was the Soviet Embassy, without adding any other comment. To this day Helen remains “astonished” that Paul knew where he was, given the terrible shape he was in—“He just suddenly came to.”10

  At the Priory he was put under the care of Dr. Brian Ackner, assisted by Dr. John Flood, both highly regarded specialists. Ackner, co-author of a classic paper on insulin coma, has been described by a contemporary specialist as “a first-line authority” on mental illness at the time. It was Ackner’s view that Robeson suffered from “one of those somewhat rare chronic depressions which fail to respond to any therapy or continue to relapse but which in the long run have a good prognosis.” He was supported in that view by Professor Curran of St. George’s Hospital, who was later called in for consultation, and by Dr. Flood, who chose the words “endogenous depression in a manic depressive personality” to describe Robeson’s underlying condition. Examining Robeson on the day of his admission, September 15, Ackner found him “in a depressed, agitated state with many ideas of persecution,” expressing “ideas of … unworthiness which, although they may have had some basis of reality in the past, were quite delusional in the degree to which they were held.” Ackner decided to begin a course of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)—brain seizures triggered by electric currents—immediately. In Western medicine in the early sixties, ECT was the preferred treatment for “major depressive” illness. Twenty-five years later, it remains a standard weapon in the medical arsenal, but the doubts of some experts about its possible culpability in memory impairment and even brain damage have made ECT more controversial than it once was; the development of alternate drug therapies since 1965 has further reduced it to the status of one among several possible—and hotly debated—treatment options.11

  Essie did not tell Paul, Jr., home in New York, about the decision to give his father shock treatments. When he later learned about them, he was outraged, insisting that if he had known at the time he would have raced to Europe and brought his father home. Essie, accustomed to “sparing” her men, believed she had to shield Paul, Jr., from the news, given his own recent breakdown. Paul, Jr., believed she acted to deceive him, concerned only to prevent interference with her own willful plans. He believed, too, that there had been “foul play” at the Priory and that the “wrongly administered” ECT treatments had “damaged his father’s brain.” Once aroused, Paul, Jr.’s suspicions of his mother were never to quiet.12

  Helen Rosen, who was on the scene, does not doubt that the decision to proceed with shock treatments seemed inescapable, given the lack of medical options at the time and Paul’s desperate condition. Even today, after the development of a much larger arsenal of drug therapies than existed in 1961, several specialists have suggested that, should a “Robeson” arrive at their offices with his presenting symptoms, he would still be a likely candidate for ECT. But it is also almost certain that today they would first attempt to treat his symptoms with medication, probably a course of lithium (which first came into use in some research centers in the late 1960s). If any criticism can be made of the way Ackner and his staff at the Priory treated Robeson, it would center on the speed—two days after his admission—with which they moved to ECT. Eventually, in the course of Robeson’s long stay at the Priory, he did get a full course of treatment with the few drugs then available, but “without much benefit” from any. To the criticism that this drug therapy should have preceded the ECT series, Ackner would probably have responded that Robeson’s suffering was too acute to await a delayed and problematic response to a limited arsenal of chemicals. Besides, Robeson did respond well enough to ECT—at least in the immediate aftermath of treatments—to reaffirm Ackner in his choice of therapy and in the cautious optimism he had felt from the beginning about Robeson’s long-term prognosis. The positive short-term effects of ECT treatments in bringing Robeson out of a “down” cycle encouraged his doctors to continue with them even though in the long term the treatments provided no cumulative benefits.13

  Helen decided to stay on in London until the initial crisis had passed; in the end she stayed a month, living at the Connaught Square flat with Essie, joining her on the daily trek to the Priory. The difficult trip required a change of buses—not made easier by Essie’s insistence on carting out the meals she prepared at home for Paul after he felt well enough to start complaining about the Priory’s food. Of an evening, the two women were often exhausted, which precluded the probing exchange of intimacies neither wanted. Helen mostly read and Essie mostly kept up her voluminous correspondence. One evening Helen blued Essie’s hair for her and brushed and combed it into a chignon; Essie had long since given up taking fashionable care of herself, lapsing into
dowdy overweight and practical Murray Space Shoes; after the hair styling she expressed delight at her improved appearance. The two women went to bed early almost every night, Helen in Paul’s bedroom. She found it almost impossible to sleep, because his bed was next to the elevator shaft and the noise was horrendous. She couldn’t understand how Paul could have abided such discomfort on a regular basis.14

  Once again, explanations—or, rather, a formula for avoiding them—had to be made to friends. Most seem to have accepted Essie’s blandly reassuring words about “recurrent exhaustion … improving steadily … is now really recuperating … real progress … well on the way to recovery.…” But Clara and Bob Rockmore continued to protest Essie’s vague and (as they wrote her) “transparently not valid” descriptions. Essie placated them with a few additional details, yet basically held them at bay with abstractly rounded phrases like “Everything is going VERY well.” She wrote to Paul, Jr., that Rockmore “is furious because he does not know everything,” and barely concealed her satisfaction at turning the tables, at being able to write to the man who in her view had kept her under patronizing financial control for years, “You will know everything in due course.”15

  She told Paul, Jr., in New York very little more. He did know the truth about the suicide attempt and the actual depth of his father’s depression, but, fearing that he would overreact, Essie kept him only partly informed about the course of his father’s treatment and progress. She filled her frequent bulletins to him and Marilyn with reassuring generalities, relaying details about the “up” cycles, avoiding news of the down side (“Progress, real progress, is being made,” she wrote three weeks after Paul had been hospitalized; “It was quite a business, to make an understatement”). Instead of lingering on negative or uncertain medical developments, she chatted on about how Shirley and W. E. B. Du Bois had visited the flat; how Helen had made a “great success” cooking breakfast for them all; how Larry Brown had “dropped by to pay his respects”; how Martin Luther King, Jr., at a reception in London that she attended, had had “very warm and sweet and respectful” things to say to her about Paul.16

  In mid-October, Helen Rosen returned to New York; two weeks later Sam Rosen looked in on Paul. After talking with the Priory doctors, he came away feeling that they “were taking good care” of him. By November, Dr. Ackner decided to allow Robeson an occasional day visit back to the Connaught Square flat: “He watched rugby on TV,” Essie reported, “we had tea, he had a nap, then supper, then watched [on] TV the Gracie Fields show, which was a marvellous half hour and just the kind of thing he could do.” To Paul, Jr., and other family and friends, Essie continued to send these vague, generally upbeat reports, sometimes in the form of daily diary “entries.” But to Helen and Sam she sent a considerably more complicated set of truths about Paul’s condition. When he had a setback in early December, she reported to the Rosens that Dr. Flood says “it is a chronic depression”; when Paul rallied, she wrote, “IF he were a radio set, we could say he is now RECEIVING, but not yet SENDING.”17

  In a separate letter to Helen, Essie confided—perhaps because Helen had been present when Paul got frightened riding past the Soviet Embassy—that he “is back on his round of thoughts, which worry him.” Harry Francis—the British trade-unionist who was the only person besides Essie allowed to visit Paul on a regular basis—“insists,” Essie wrote Helen, “that none of his thoughts have foundation, none whatever, and is going to try to persuade him so. H. says everyone is shocked that he should have such ideas, and just cannot understand why. Except that he is exhausted and ill.…”18

  Essie never specified the contents of Paul’s “thoughts,” and Helen has never understood his fear while passing in front of the Soviet Embassy. According to Paul Robeson, Jr., “the ‘thoughts’ were of suicide.” But the fact that Harry Francis was made privy to them and passed them on to “shocked” others—who could only have been people as politically reliable as himself—also suggests that the “thoughts” may have related, too, to some subterranean fears Robeson had regarding the U.S.S.R., or possibly his own standing with the Soviets. There is no surrounding evidence for believing that those fears centered concretely either on dismay at the course of Soviet history or, oppositely, on concern that he himself, or someone close to him, might be thought to have done harm to the Soviet cause—or even some murky combination thereof of treachery and disillusion. In an interview ten years later, Harry Francis recalled that he had spent “many hours with Paul during the period that he was in the nursing home and we used to discuss all manner of subjects. The propaganda that was put around that he had become disillusioned with the Soviet Union was completely without foundation.… Our association was such that if he had had doubts, he could have expressed them to me. Paul was certainly convinced that the reports that we had all had about the Stalin regime were justified—as big a shock to him, of course, as they were to all of us who had gotten no idea of what was happening. But he did not accept it in any sense of disillusionment with socialism or the Soviet Union as such.” If the fantasies Robeson manifested when acutely ill did reflect some interior reality (in however distorted a form) that he otherwise repressed, the road map for understanding it is lost.19

  Essie also conferred with the Rosens about the advisability of letting Paul, Jr., come over to London to see his father. Helen sent Essie some details about Paul, Jr.’s emotional state, which so upset Essie that she was sick in the bathroom. She successfully discouraged her son from making the trip to England, but she knew that would increase his resentment of her, and she warned Helen that he would also be angry at her and Sam for having spent time with his father when he could not. “Yours has been help,” she wrote the Rosens, “when help was desperately needed.”20

  Early in February, Essie confided to the Rosens that Paul had become “VERY depressed” and had begun talking again of finding a “short, fast way OUT.” The doctors decided on a second series of eight ECT treatments (completed in mid-April) to add to the sixteen he had already had. “I have said nothing about treatment to anyone else, to NO ONE,” Essie wrote the Rosens. “You understand these things, but there’s no point in alarming or confusing the others—Bobby or Pauli, or anyone.” To the Rosens she gave a full account, repeating a conversation with Paul in which he insisted “it wasn’t worth it. Nobody could help, they tried their best, but he was sick to death of the struggle. If I was loyal, I would help [him die]. I agreed, but said first I must be sure there is no help. We must be sure we have tried everything. He agreed to that.…”21

  The second series of ECT treatments did again produce momentary relief. Within ten days the improvement was so pronounced that Paul was asking for the newspapers, sleeping better, and once more eating the filet steaks Essie brought out on the bus. He told Essie he was glad to read in the paper that Jackie Robinson had been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. He himself wrote a note to the Rockmores to say he was “feeling much much better … might jump over that way soon … have turned the corner—am sure will be all right from here on in.” By early March he was feeling so much better that, when Essie told him she was going to see Ella Fitzgerald’s show with Coleman Hawkins at the Hammersmith Gaumont, he surprised her by saying he would like to go along. Harold Davison managed to come up with a second ticket at the last minute; the two seats were separated, but had a clear view of each other in case a problem developed. Along about her third song, Ella Fitzgerald came forward and quietly announced that she wanted to dedicate her next number to “her fellow-artist and a very great man, Paul Robeson, wherever he may be sitting.” There was a hush, and everyone strained to locate Paul in the audience, but thanks to the darkness of the house only his immediate neighbors recognized him (he surreptitiously gave them the autographs they asked for). With the aid of ushers, he was quickly removed from the auditorium at the end of the concert, before a crowd could gather around him. He then asked, to everyone’s renewed surprise, to go backstage to greet and thank Ella Fitzgerald. El
la, according to Essie, was “thrilled,” hugged and kissed him, said it was “a big day” in her life, and expressed joy that he seemed to be so much better. Davison got the Robesons into a car back to the Priory. Since he had had “no bad reactions” to the outing, they repeated it four days later with a trip to the Aldwych to see Peggy Ashcroft and John Gielgud in The Cherry Orchard. Paul again went backstage; Peggy cleared her dressing room of other visitors and they caught up on news, promising to do a poetry reading together the following year. Paul was especially touched when the stage-door man, an old acquaintance, told him “the whole of the theatre world would be glad to hear he was up and about and getting well.” He told Essie that, although he felt fine, he wanted to go back to the Priory—he didn’t want people to think he was again “available,” or everyone would start “having plans for him again.”22

  The pattern of shuttling back and forth between the Connaught Square flat and the Priory was to go on for many, many months, with the time spent at the flat lengthening during periods of apparent improvement—and also varying with Robeson’s tolerance for being cooped up with Essie. Her unlimited presence was at times a contributing source of unease. Devoted to him she undoubtedly was, but it was devotion encased in control. To be dependent on Essie for his daily needs was a lifetime habit, but to be confined to her was a lifetime’s nightmare; the man with “a thousand pockets” had been slipped into a thin topcoat, and Essie held out the sleeves. For thirty years he had avoided being locked away with her, had strained against any arrangement that threatened to curtail his need for a rich variety of contacts. Now, in his sixties and desperately ill, he had to rely on her judgment about the advisability of a nap. He was lucky to have her—yet on another level this was his definition of defeat. Open antagonism between them, however, was on a back burner; sick and dependent as he was, being “cooped up” with Essie was no longer the worst imaginable fate. She was devoted to his comfort and did everything in her considerable power to prevent any demands from being made on his limited ability to cope, turning away callers and telephone calls, rejecting all requests on his time. But in fact the demand for his public services had become negligible, and Essie strictly limited the private traffic in friends to Harry Francis, occasionally Harold Davison, and rare, select visitors from overseas like the Rosens, the Du Boises, the Rockmores, or an old political chum like John Abt or Charles Howard.23