Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  Anna Louise Strong, the eighty-year-old radical firebrand, then residing in China, was one of many refusing to believe that the oaken warrior they had earlier known could have any organic disorder, or at least not one that couldn’t be set to rights. “I personally have always felt,” Strong wrote Steve Fritchman, “that Paul’s trouble had a deep psycho-somatic cause in the shock and trauma he suffered from the Sino-Soviet split [of 1957].… Paul had a very deep love and devotion both for the USSR and for China’s revolution and … consequently the split must have been especially hard for him, since his devotions have always been through passionate allegiance rather than through theory.” He must come to Peking, she urged—with the simplistic vigor that had always been part of her charm, and her limitation. She had “made inquiries”; Paul would be “extremely welcome,” surrounded by love, soon made well again.5

  Caught between the needs of a dependent father and the demands of growing children, Paul, Jr., and Marilyn began to feel the strain. But Paul, Jr., was unwilling to accept defeat; if the experiment at Jumel had failed, perhaps in another setting they might all be able to live together. He took Big Paul back to Marian’s in Philadelphia temporarily in the late spring of 1966, while he and Marilyn set about finding and then refurbishing an apartment that might meet all their needs. A spacious place on West Eighty-sixth Street in Manhattan seemed to fit the bill, and they spent the summer of 1966 renovating it so that Big Paul would have a separate suite of rooms within the larger space of the apartment. In the fall of 1966 he was again collected from Philadelphia to make another effort at togetherness in New York.

  This one, too, proved short-lived. In Marilyn’s words, “Life very much centered around Big Paul and his needs.… He was almost wholly gathered up into himself.” He had always taken for granted that others would provide for his practical daily needs—but now he could no longer reward them with warmth and charm. He stayed very much to himself in the private little wing Paul, Jr., and Marilyn had constructed for him within the larger apartment, but was not notably more present when he joined the rest of the family. Marian, up from Philadelphia for a visit, was “shocked” that he had become “so withdrawn he couldn’t understand what I was saying.” “I’ll never understand what happened,” she wrote Lee Lurie. “He was in fine condition when he left here with Paul Jr. to go to New York.” She strongly suggested he once more come and live with her. Dr. Alvin I. Goldfarb, a Mt. Sinai geriatric psychiatrist, concurred: since he was not “impressed by any organic component to the illness,” Goldfarb believed “Mr. Robeson’s condition can be controlled” and “he will ultimately be responsive to therapeutic efforts”—but advised that “at present residence with his sister … is indicated.” Paul, Jr., acknowledged that the experiment in living together had failed, and only a few months after it had begun, Paul was back with Marian in Philadelphia, this time to remain.6

  Just a little vain about her own superior nurturing skills, Marian was immediately reporting back to New York that Paul “is getting better.… He is eating and sleeping well and most of the time relaxed. He is talking a little, understands what you say and answers your questions though not initiating conversation.” Marian secured part-time help (Lee Lurie sent seventy-five dollars a week to cover all expenses), took Paul around with her to the bank to open an account, went with him to his new doctor and had a piano-teacher friend of hers come in on a regular basis to try to rekindle his interest (“I think it will help him with his speech and get him to talking again,” Marian wrote Lee Lurie). She was confident that “Paul is well taken care of and has very little to annoy him.” By the spring of 1967 she was reporting that he had been taking walks in the neighborhood and had “really enjoyed” an outing to see the film The Taming of the Shrew. “Weather permitting,” she expected to “really have him stepping out” before long. In August 1967 the house at Jumel Terrace was sold for a little under eighteen thousand dollars.7

  Paul now settled down to the life of a cherished—and haunted—invalid. His every need was attended to with devoted alacrity, his every momentary sign of vivacity greeted with hope and applause—yet the gigantic figure remained a shadow behind the arras, obscurely brooding on the perplexing continuation of his own days. Word arrived late in 1967 that Who’s Who in American History had finally deigned to include his biography and that a student group at Rutgers had pressed the university, after fifty years of omission, to submit his nomination to the National Football Hall of Fame. Told the news, Robeson smiled and shrugged.8

  In December 1967 he was admitted to University Hospital in Philadelphia. The Evening Bulletin reported that he was suffering from “a skin ailment.” The FBI’s informants were closer to the mark, reporting that he “had been very ill and has been inaccessible to anyone for the last couple of months.” Yet, only a few weeks after that, Peggy Middleton, on a trip to the United States, impulsively put in a phone call to Paul at Marian’s house and “He sounded so like himself that I became tongue-tied.” It was one of those occasional “good days” that continued unaccountably to occur.9

  Robeson was now approaching his seventieth birthday, and preparations for the event took on considerable proportions, particularly in Britain and in the GDR (where Essie, in the last few months of her life, had managed to help arrange for the establishment of an official Paul Robeson Archive). The Worker devoted a five-column spread to detailing the celebrations, and an FM radio station in New York kicked off the festivities with a two-hour tribute to Robeson on April 9, 1968. Speakers at the Moscow affair included Robeson’s old friends Boris Polevoi and Mikhail Kotov, and the CPUSA celebration featured an address by William L. Patterson. In advertising it, Claude Lightfoot and Charlene Mitchell of the Black Liberation Commission of the CPUSA noted that “The white power structure has generated a conspiracy of silence around Paul Robeson. It wants to blot out all knowledge of this pioneering Black American warrior.… Because of this there exists a young generation of freedom fighters who are unaware of this great man and his outstanding contributions to their struggle.…”10

  In the GDR, the elaborate celebration spread over several days (at one point the participants stood at their seats out of respect for the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4). In London on April 8 an evening of music, poetry, and drama was staged at an annex of the Royal Festival Hall, with a number of distinguished artists participating. Comedian Bill Owen shared his anecdotal memories of days at Unity Theatre in the 1930s, old friends Alan Bush and Bruno Raikin contributed their musical talents, and Robeson’s two British Desdemonas, Peggy Ashcroft and Mary Ure, read in tribute to him (as did Peter O’Toole and Michael Redgrave). Many who could not attend sent in moving recollections of earlier, happier days—Marie Burke, Sybil Thorndike, John Dankworth, John Gielgud, Yehudi Menuhin, Flora Robson, André Van Gyseghem, Alfie Bass, and Elizabeth Welch. Speaking for the new generation, Oliver Tambo, who would one day serve in exile as leader of the militant African National Congress, wrote in honor of “a universal idol and a friend dear to all who know him or have only heard his priceless voice.”11

  As the days and years of being out of the public eye lengthened and the world inexorably changed its shape, as Kennedy gave way to Johnson, then Nixon in the White House (and sectors of the white working class rallied to the banner of George Wallace, whose antiblack campaign amassed ten million votes), as SNCC declined into warring sects and then disappeared, and the police brutally dispersed poor people encamped in protest of their plight on federal property, Robeson became a faded memory to one generation and an unknown name to another. People over forty wondered what had ever become of him (the rumor spread that he had gone into self-exile in Russia), and many people under forty had no idea he had ever existed.

  But old devotions did not entirely die, and in the early seventies it was even possible to think that a Robeson “boomlet” was on the horizon. In 1970 Rutgers dedicated a lounge—and then in 1972 elevated the honor to a s
tudent center—in Robeson’s name; the New York chapter of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History gave him its coveted Ira Aldridge award; the radio station WQXR devoted several programs to Robeson’s records; Canadian Broadcasting, as well as the PBS station in New York, aired programs on his life; and the Black Academy of Arts and Letters cited him for his “immeasurable contribution to our society.” In alone, Freedomways devoted an entire issue to him (“The Great Forerunner”), the GDR held a two-day symposium in his honor, and Beacon Press reprinted Here I Stand. In 1972 the boomlet looked as if it might escalate into a full-scale boom as the number of awards mounted—the Association of Black Psychiatrists cited him as “a model and inspiration” to black youth, the New York Urban League gave him its Whitney M. Young, Jr., Award, and the Hollywood NAACP added an Image Award for his contribution to “brotherhood”; as well, he was designated in the first group elevated into the Theater Hall of Fame. Press attention also grew: Sports Illustrated carried a story about his athletic prowess, Ebony named him among the “10 Greats of Black History,” and the Sunday Arts and Leisure section of The New York Times, daring to ask the question “Time to Break the Silence Surrounding Paul Robeson?,” answered “Yes.”12

  The public’s interest, though, was occasional, erratic, and confined to limited circles. Yet if Robeson’s name did not evoke the instant recognition that had once greeted it, he did not cease to be deeply loved and attended by those who had been closest to him. The number of people who wanted to visit Paul was always greater than the number who were allowed to. Paul, Jr., asked even intimate friends to check with him before going down to Philadelphia, but basically people like the Rosens, Lloyd Brown, Clara Rockmore, and Freda Diamond had unimpeded access—limited only by their own sense of appropriateness. The same was decidedly not true of everyone else. Paul, Jr., and Marian made a combined and largely successful effort to bar visits from mere acquaintances and to hold at fierce bay the idly curious. In taking on the role of public protector, Paul, Jr., proved at least as adept in guarding his father’s seclusion as Essie had earlier been. He, again like Essie before him, thereby opened himself to accusations of being overprotective and to the resentment of those who thought of themselves as Robeson intimates and who, in their anger at not being confirmed as such, spread a host of tales about the son’s “devious” purposes. Paul, Jr., was alternately denounced as his father’s jailor, censor, and uncrowned surrogate, his motives variously ascribed to the demands of politics (to prevent word from getting out of Big Paul’s purported change of heart about the Soviets) or personality (to come at last into uncontested control of his father’s legacy).13

  Robert Sherman of WQXR, for example, once drove his aunt Clara Rockmore down to Philadelphia and came away from the visit with the impression that physically Robeson was “stronger, healthier” than the rumor mill suggested. But Sherman thought his “mental condition” was abysmal. Although he seemed glad to see them, there were long gaps in the conversation—“We were under injunctions from Paul, Jr., not to talk politics of any remote stripe”—and Sherman was stunned that a man of such diverse intellectual interests, and such a fabled commitment to engagement with the problems of the world, now seemed content merely to sit. Nothing seemed to interest him: “He just didn’t care.” Sherman acknowledged that it was probably Robeson’s own choice to live in complete isolation, but he nonetheless blamed Paul, Jr., for cooperating with his father’s wish, for not surrounding him with more stimulation. Going still further, others concluded that Paul, Jr., had his own reasons for letting his father remain in near-total seclusion: he did not want it known that Paul Robeson the legendary fighter had lost interest in the world; he did not want his father’s historic image compromised or shattered. “I think Paul, Jr., was ready to go to any lengths,” as Robert Sherman puts it, “to preserve the image that he wanted, of a politically active man,” to allow him to go on saying, “No, he didn’t recant anything, he didn’t regret anything, he was politically concerned till the very end.”14

  Helen Rosen, who went to Philadelphia with Sam about once a month, confirms that Paul did not want to see most people, that often he was “sort of sleepy,” but that on his better days she and Paul talked theater and he and Sam talked football—“and he’d come alive.” His main physical problem, “heart block,” with its attendant symptoms of dizziness and lethargy, was essentially solved by the installation of a pacemaker in the early seventies (though he did have to enter the hospital several times so it could be adjusted, and one time replaced). A steady and mild maintenance dose of a mood elevator (Tofranil) further reduced his symptomatic discomfort. Nonetheless, his internist, Dr. Roger Good, described him in 1970 as “semivegetative,” and when the cardiologist Dr. Herbert E. Cohen took over Robeson’s case in 1973, he found him “in sad shape, not a normal seventy-five-year-old,” but a man “extremely withdrawn.” On the other hand, only once in all the years Robeson lived in Philadelphia with Marian did his doctors consider him severely enough withdrawn to weigh the advisability of yet another set of electroshock treatments (ultimately they decided against it), and on that occasion, following the familiar alternating pattern of his illness, Robeson soon improved. Visiting him in the hospital several weeks after his admission, Lloyd Brown “found him to be more like his old self than at any time since he returned ill from California” in 1965.15

  But Robeson’s doctors, unlike some of his friends, did not mistake temporary improvement for any prospect of permanent rehabilitation, nor did they recommend a reinvigorated routine as a first step toward some imagined notion of ultimate recovery. He would not recover; he could only be made comfortable. And, to that end, Paul, Jr., and Marian’s prescription for limiting visitors seemed a humane design for keeping demands from being made on Big Paul that he could not meet, and which would only reawaken his sense of inadequacy. Marian took care never to discourage his interest in the world—indeed, she would eagerly report whenever he felt “more alert,” up to talking on the telephone, taking a walk, occasionally even writing a note—but neither she nor Paul, Jr., would allow any mistaken notion to develop that Paul Robeson—if only encouraged to try harder—could yet make a significant public contribution.16

  Marian and Paul, Jr.’s overriding concern was to safeguard Big Paul’s privacy, to prevent a mischievous reporter or ogling sightseer from disturbing the regularity of a daily routine that had created at least a semblance of serenity, minimizing his mood swings, keeping him safely this side of heroic medical interventions. In his zeal to be protective, Paul, Jr., now and then did overstep the line, did reject supplicants roughly. “He was a dictator, he had to have control,” one woman has indignantly remarked. Still, it was difficult to strike the right balance—to ascertain the exact extent of a potential visitor’s previous connection, the precise degree of Big Paul’s receptiveness on a given day, the definable effect on him of an effort at conversation. Marian’s impulses were more elastic. Now and then she would even allow some friend passing by to come inside for a brief visit; visitors would then trumpet the news of having gained access (sometimes trumpeting as well what “wonderful shape” they had found Robeson to be in, not realizing Marian had only decided to admit them because he was having one of his uncommonly good days), thereby further feeding the rumor mill that had put Paul, Jr., down as arbitrary and even malignant in his choices.17

  As Robeson’s seventy-fifth birthday approached, Paul, Jr., worked around the clock for months on a Carnegie Hall event that would simultaneously serve as a salute to his father and as a benefit to help establish a Paul Robeson Archive in the United States. The response was gratifying, the hall jammed on the night of the gala, April 15, 1973. Yet, in the absence of the guest-of-honor himself, grounds were again found for faulting the son; his father had been up to attending, the malcontents insisted, and should have been encouraged to make the effort (“Paul, Jr., didn’t want him at the concert,” is how one of them puts it, “didn’t want them to see a thin and weak
ened man”). Robeson’s taped message to the gathering seemed to some to strike one suspiciously false note after another: his insistence that “I am the same Paul, dedicated as ever to the worldwide cause of humanity,” sounded to them like mere bravado, uncharacteristic self-puffery; and his devoting a full minute on a mere two-minute tape to a series of exaggerated political greetings to colonial liberationists, socialist “partisans for peace,” and heroic anti-imperialists seemed outlandishly unconnected to the actual insularity of Robeson’s life and his steady drift away from polemical involvement. When Angela Davis hailed Robeson as “above all, a revolutionary,” “a partisan of the Socialist world,” the largely middle-class, middle-aged crowd (of both races) joined the malcontents in responding with merely tepid applause.18

  Still, for most of the evening and for most of the audience, the Carnegie Hall celebration of Robeson’s seventy-fifth birthday was a joyful occasion, a chance to express admiration and affection for the man and to draw symbolic sustenance from his life. A multi-media scripted show with live actors integrated with recordings, slides, and movies depicting highlights from Robeson’s career met with tumultuous applause; Ramsey Clark, the former Attorney General, drew a few tears when he spoke of Robeson’s embodying “the grace and beauty” that America was “afraid of”; Pete Seeger got the crowd singing along with him on “Freiheit” (one of the Loyalist songs from the Spanish Civil War that Robeson had often performed); and Dolores Huerta, vice-president of the Farm Workers Union, elicited roars of “Viva Robeson!” and “Viva la causa!” when she linked his name to the cause of migrant farm laborers.19