Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

Peggy Middleton—according to her account—had been protesting for some time against Paul’s ECT treatments at “a rich man’s hideout where,” she felt, “the emphasis was on the social situation and not on general health.” Her constant needling, in combination with the growing length of Paul’s stay at the Priory and the uncertainty of his progress, lay the groundwork for doubt that an unexpected arrival further activated. Claire (“Micki”) Hurwitt, wife of the New York surgeon Elliott Hurwitt and herself trained in psychiatric nursing, had known Paul a little from Progressive Party days, and when she arrived with her two small children in England, she dropped off an introductory note from Helen Rosen at the Connaught Square flat. Essie invited Micki up for tea and took an immediate liking to her (as did Micki to Essie), finding her combination of left-wing and medical credentials irresistible. When Essie told her about the course of Paul’s treatment at the Priory, Micki expressed surprise at the large number of shock treatments—by then a documented fifty-four—confessing an instinctual distrust of ECT. Essie suggested she come out to the Priory and have a look at Paul directly.40

  Micki did not like what she saw. As soon as she walked into Paul’s room, she was overwhelmed by the smell of paraldehyde, a “knockout” drug she associated with only the most desperate and uncontrollable psychiatric cases. A nurse at one point beckoned Micki aside and showed her Paul’s medication chart; Micki was horrified at the number and high dosage of drugs he was getting every day—“enough to kill a horse,” she told Essie. “Get him out of there,” she said. Her husband arrived from New York several weeks later and agreed with her estimate. Peggy Middleton had recently spent a day at the famed Buch Clinic in East Berlin and had been particularly impressed with Dr. Alfred Katzenstein, an American-trained clinical psychologist who had served with the U.S. Army during World War II and had experience dealing with survivors of the concentration camps. Essie flew over to Berlin to have a look around, was impressed with what she saw, and made preliminary arrangements for a September 1 consultation for Paul, if he was willing.41

  Initially he was not. Then he said he would go, but only if he could go at once. Franz and Diana Loesser, who several years before had initiated the Robeson passport campaign in Manchester and now lived in the GDR, were enlisted to make quick arrangements. A flight on Polish Airways was booked for its regular nonstop Sunday flight to East Berlin on August 25. Somehow the British press got wind of the plans, and several reporters congregated outside the Connaught Square flat and rang Essie’s phone at all hours of the day and night. Peggy Middleton advised a statement to the papers, but Essie felt “there was always the chance that he would refuse to go at the last minute” and feared most of all that if Paul himself was accosted, he might break down. Determined to avoid the press, she hit on an elaborate set of ruses worthy of Agatha Christie.42

  Late Saturday night, Peggy Middleton, Diana Loesser, and other friends collected eleven pieces of baggage from the Robeson flat and deposited them at Paddington Station. Sunday morning, the Telegraph hit the stands with an article reporting that Robeson, who had “broken with Moscow,” was about to be spirited behind the Iron Curtain to keep him silent, and that his wife was denying all access to him in the interim. “Paul is no longer a public figure,” the Telegraph quoted her as saying over the phone, “He is not in the public domain.” The article set the press to salivating, and a horde of reporters now moved into Connaught Square. Essie was ready for them.43

  While Harry Francis got Paul out of the Priory—on the floor of a car under the noses of reporters waiting at both entrances—Essie concocted a scheme for getting herself out of Connaught Square. She enlisted Micki Hurwitt and another friend, Nick Price; Nick collected Micki in his car and parked it near the Robesons’ flat. Micki got out, casually strolled past the reporters, rang the Robesons’ doorbell, and was admitted, Essie having been watching from the window. Essie gave her the key to the flat, a piece of hand luggage, and her big traveling purse; with Essie’s two overcoats draped over her arm, Micki went back out into the street, trying to appear elegantly calm. When she’d gotten a block away, one of the reporters ran after her and asked if she was Mrs. Robeson; Micki gave him “a withering stare” and he backed off.44

  On returning to the car, she gave Nick Price the apartment key, and he in turn went up to the flat, casually letting himself in as if he lived in the building. Essie gave him the rest of the hand luggage, draped Paul’s overcoats over his arm, and arranged to meet him and Micki at the Lancaster Gate underground stop. Nick got back to the car without incident, but when Essie prepared to leave the flat herself, she discovered she’d sent off all her money in the handbag with Micki. But her luck held. Though it was a Sunday in the summer, she found one neighbor at home and borrowed ten shillings. Taking a deep breath, she then stepped out of the building, a plastic cover over her hair, a pile of letters in her mouth for posting at the corner (Punch later had a good time with the letters, recommending them to its readers as the latest word in ingenious disguise). No one recognized her; a heavy rain and her lack of luggage helped. She made it safely to the Marble Arch underground and within minutes met Nick and Micki at Lancaster Gate. Nick had already picked up the heavy baggage from Paddington.45

  They made it to the Priory in twenty minutes. If they had been daring, Paul had been lionhearted. After being removed from the Priory, he had remained in the hands of Harry Francis and the “British left” (Hurwitt’s phrase) in a car parked in the nearby woods, awaiting the rendezvous with Essie. He had not been in the best of shape recently, but somehow held together—“He had all kinds of guts,” was Hurwitt’s laconic summary. After speeding to the airport, they found the director of the Polish airways waiting for them, apprehensive at the lateness of the hour. Having cleverly directed the press to the VIP lounge, he quickly led the Robesons and Hurwitt through the regular gate onto the first-class section of the plane. The three other passengers in the compartment paid them no attention. Within minutes the plane took off, and they settled back with a sigh of relief. Essie, laughing, handed Paul the Telegraph article about his pending “abduction.”46

  At that moment, a pleasant-looking young man got up from his seat, came over to the Robesons, smiled, and handed Paul his card. Paul smiled back, read the card, scowled, and handed it to Essie. Printed on the card was “John Osman, Foreign Correspondent for the London Daily Telegraph.” (Reuters News Agency, they later learned, had planted a reporter in tourist class as well.) Essie jumped up and insisted Osman return to his own seat, eventually forcefully accompanying him, expressing her indignation that the British press would harass a sick man (“The thing I resented most,” she later wrote Marie Seton, “was that it was so American at its worst, and this I did not expect from the British. Well, we live and learn”). To make sure Osman would stay in his seat, Essie parked herself next to him and talked him right into Berlin.47

  To her surprise, he “seemed nice” and had been to Africa, so, as Berlin came into view, she agreed to let him ask Paul two and only two brief questions: What did he think of the Sunday Telegraph story, and what did he think of the recent March on Washington? Paul had been monosyllabic up to that point, but he somehow, remarkably, summoned up the energy to answer, and did so eloquently. He said the Telegraph article was vicious and, worse, wishful thinking—not having been able to establish that he had changed his political views, and disappointed that he was voluntarily returning to a socialist country, the press had decided to make a mystery of it. As for the March on Washington, Robeson called it “a turning point,” said he was proud of the black strength and unity it showed—and sent his congratulations. Osman tried to continue the interview, but Essie cut him off. In his article in the Telegraph the next day, Osman described Essie as “a formidable ‘protector’” who had threatened him with judo at one point. He accurately printed Paul’s replies to his two questions and described him as looking “haggard and worn. His features were thin and his stooping gait bore little resemblance to his public image.
”48

  The doctors at the Buch Clinic thought so, too. Dr. Katzenstein found him “completely without initiative,” his depressive moods “very low,” his ups “not high enough to be called manic”—the reverse of his breakdown in 1956. The doctors immediately took him off all sedation (though adding Librium subsequently) and expressed considerable doubt—even anger—about the “high” amounts of barbiturates and ECT that had been given him. “I don’t think anyone would have argued with ten or twelve ECT treatments,” Dr. Katzenstein said more than twenty years later, but fifty-four such treatments was not only “very unusual” but “a very doubtful procedure unless immediately followed by psychotherapy.” He believed fifty-four shocks could theoretically produce “considerable changes within the brain”; though in fact he found no such evidence, he felt that at the least they had shaken Robeson’s confidence—“just the process of being grabbed and hit, you lose the sense of being in control of your own life.” Katzenstein freely acknowledges, however, that “here in the GDR we generally consider British psychiatry to be superior to ours.” Indeed, the literature on ECT since the early sixties does not as a whole support Katzenstein’s views. For quick alleviation of acute depressive symptoms (as in Robeson’s case), ECT remains the preferred initial treatment. But disagreement does still exist about whether improvement from ECT is temporary and can or should be built upon with additional courses, and also about the extent to which psychotherapy can prove a useful adjunct for those who are severely disoriented. A successful outcome in the treatment of mental illness seems centrally to depend on careful adjustments tailored to the individual needs of the patient at hand. Such adjustments require intuitive skills of the highest order. Which is to say, one part of medical care, perhaps the greatest part, is an art. Robeson was not fortunate enough to have been treated by artists.49

  After a comprehensive set of tests, the Buch clinicians found a heart “insufficiency”—not unusual, they said, in a man of sixty-five—a slightly enlarged liver (possibly a toxic reaction to drugs), and “a secondary colitis with incipient ulceration,” perhaps also drug-related. Additionally (and peripherally), the GDR doctors diagnosed Paget’s disease, a condition—of unknown etiology and no psychiatric import—involving an abnormal amount of bone deformation and known to be fairly commonplace. Katzenstein did not feel he could rule out some underlying organic cause for Robeson’s condition—since little was (or is now, for that matter) known about the chemistry of the brain—but felt that ultimately the extraordinary pressures he had been under for a decade were themselves sufficient to explain his collapse. Castor oil with every meal quickly put Robeson’s digestive system in good order. And getting off sedatives not only made him immediately more alert and talkative but also improved his ability to sleep (as is now well known, a prolonged use of sleeping medication can produce a reverse effect). Passing through East Berlin two weeks after the Robesons’ arrival, Elliott Hurwitt was impressed with Paul’s improvement (as was Sam Rosen a few days later, though he was not impressed with Dr. Katzenstein himself). Hurwitt wrote Essie soon after that he felt sure “Paul is in what is, for him, the best possible medical environment that could be found.” Coming to the Buch Clinic has “turned out to be a very fine move,” Essie reported home. To Helen Rosen she wrote that Paul “now enters into discussion. He stammers, and is slow on the up-take, but on the beam, right on the beam.”50

  But she did not report that Dr. Katzenstein had suggested that “what is left of Paul’s health” would have to be quietly conserved. Nor did Essie tell anyone—including Paul—that she had been given bad news about her own health. Explaining why she was flat on her back in the hospital, she wrote home airily about “a bad flu,” “an infected gall bladder,” and “general exhaustion from the long siege.” But in fact the diagnosis was a good deal worse. Although the London and Moscow doctors had continued to give her a clean bill after her periodic checkups, the Buch doctors found evidence of recurring cancer and in fact told her it was terminal. Determined to live out her life at full tilt, Essie went off to collect a “peace” medal she had earlier been awarded; the ceremony had been delayed until she could appear in person.51

  Paul was not told about Essie’s condition, or about his own prognosis; he was encouraged to believe they were both on the road to full recovery. And certainly he seemed greatly improved, able to participate in more socializing within a period of a few weeks than had previously been possible over many months. It was protected socializing—a few friends, like Stephen Fritchman, Joris Ivens (the filmmaker), Earl Dickerson (the black executive and activist), Henry Winston (the CPUSA leader), Vladimir Pozner (of L’Humanité), and Helen and Scott Nearing, would drop by for carefully limited visits. Sometimes Dr. Katzenstein would take Robeson to feed the ducks in the park, or on supervised outings with himself and his wife to the park, the zoo, to shop, or to drop in briefly at the Soviet-German House of Culture. Diana and Franz Loesser visited Robeson at Buch several times, and had him out to their house twice for tea; Diana noted with delight the gradual improvement—when he first arrived in the GDR “he looked very strange and ill, burnt out,” but within a few months he “was talking to people and you got the feeling he could cope, though a very sick person.” A few expeditions were more elaborate still. Paul took an accompanied trip downtown to be measured for a new overcoat, and on one notable occasion not only took tea at the Soviet Ambassador’s residence but stayed for an extended chat about grandchildren, the “Negro Revolution,” and the hockey match between Russia and Canada. Essie described the visit (with her usual optimistic overelaboration) as fluent and light-hearted.52

  The Robesons had Thanksgiving dinner with Kay and Aubrey Pankey and their other guest, Ollie Harrington, the black American cartoonist, now living in Berlin. Pankey had left his singing career in the States in search of wider opportunities and had found them in Eastern Europe, regularly performing in concert and settling in the GDR. The Pankeys hadn’t seen Robeson in a dozen years, and Kay Pankey recalls her shock on opening the door: “I saw a tall, gaunt, thin man; he was all eyes. My heart just went out.” Ollie Harrington, who had also been living in Europe for a decade, was equally stunned at the sight of Robeson: “I’d never seen such a change in a man.” But Harrington, a warm and witty storyteller, decided to try to break through to Paul—“Intuitively I knew he was there, somewhere,” so “I started telling anecdotes we used in our ‘special times’ back in Harlem, tales about ‘the stupidity of Charley’ alternating with ‘the ridiculous reaction of the Brothers.’” Robeson slowly responded: his eyes gradually came alive, and he even laughed out loud a few times. “I haven’t seen Paul throw back his head and laugh so heartily for a very long time,” Essie later wrote the Pankeys in thanks. “It was like a visit home in the old days, with none of the bad past.” To Harrington, the evening showed that Paul “was there; he was not a brain-damaged individual; communication could be established—but on his terms.” On his way out of the door, having already lapsed back into melancholy, Paul impulsively grabbed Ollie’s hand. “Thank you, thank you,” he said over and over.53

  Yet Paul’s ability to go out more exacerbated his unease in one sense: the very fact that he could see improvement and enjoy himself unleashed deep fears of incompetence; the accelerated activity itself fed his anxiety about being once more asked to “perform.” Dropping in one day with Dr. Katzenstein to visit the Soviet-German House of Culture, he roamed around comfortably and had coffee in the restaurant, and was even able to tolerate a few people staring at him as if to say, “Is that Paul Robeson?” But then an official did recognize him, gathered others around and persuaded Paul to sign the visitors’ book. He seemed to take it all in stride, but the next day, according to Essie, “he was in a bit of a tizzy,” and she finally found out why: he was worried about whether he had written something “really adequate” in the visitors’ book. When he told Essie and Dr. Katzenstein what he had written, they assured him that it was fine and that, besides, nobody exp
ected instant wisdom on such an occasion. Paul seemed only partly comforted.54

  Essie, who was still keeping the outside world at bay, had withheld from Paul for months the sad news that his beloved brother Ben had died of cancer of the esophagus in July. She finally told him in November, after Paul had written his brother a little note. She left no record of how he took the news of the loss of someone who had been such a loving anchor to him. Probably it was without much outward reaction, for, as Essie had once written to Helen Rosen, “… nobody knows what is in … Paul’s mind.” However, in mid-November he headed into another down cycle, and Essie reported to the family that he told her he “just cannot make it any more.… I am too tired. I haven’t got the energy. Maybe the voice is still there, but I haven’t the energy, and it takes energy and nerves. And I just haven’t got them anymore.” He had felt “exhausted,” he told her, as far back as 1956, following prostate surgery, and had never really mended. He had been able to make a “supreme effort” now and then—California in 1957, Carnegie Hall in 1958, Othello in 1959, Australia in 1960—but only with “great fear and worry.” (During the run of Othello, he now confessed to her for the first time, “every performance was an ordeal”: he always expected to forget his lines and once did.) He dreaded any prospect of yet another “come-back,” yet at the same time he worried over the fact that he had never managed to get to Africa or China and still felt he “should make some kind of contribution and gesture of respect” to them. He told Katzenstein he had “failed” his own people, had been “unable to bring forth the victory,” “could not help them any more.” Essie conveyed his fearful questions back home to the family: “Will people understand? Will they think he has changed, as the Western Press insists? What can he say? What can he do???? And last and most important, he feels he should be home participating in the Negro struggle. But how??? He isn’t up to personal appearances.…”55