Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  4. ER, PR, Negro, pp. 82–87; ER Diary, Sept. 23, 1924, RA (Arthur Lee); interview with Monroe Wheeler, Nov. 12, 1985. Rebecca West, for one, thought Salemmé was a “very bad influence” on Robeson. She met them both in the midtwenties in New York through Walter White and decided Paul was “basically lazy,” unwilling to become “a dedicated musical worker”—for which she in part blamed Salemmé’s influence (interview with Rebecca West, Sept. 1, 1982).

  5. Interview with Salemmé, March 31, 1983.

  6. Interview with Monroe Wheeler, Nov. 12, 1985. John Hammond (interview, Aug. 8, 1985) is the source for PR and Betty Spencer’s being lovers.

  7. ER Diary, May 20, June 28, Nov. 12, Dec. 29, 1924, RA; interview with Salemmé, March 31, 1983. I’ve strung Salemmé’s remarks together, omitting some of the pauses and ellipses in our conversation; but I’ve neither invented any words nor rearranged them in a way that would change their essential emphasis and meaning.

  8. Among the large number of works on these and other renaissance figures, I’ve found the following especially useful (along with Levy, James Weldon Johnson; Huggins, Renaissance; Lewis, Harlem in Vogue; Johnson, Black Manhattan; and Anderson, This Was Harlem): Bruce Kellner, Carl Van Vechten and the Irreverent Decades (University of Oklahoma, 1968); James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way (Viking, 1933); Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston (University of Illinois, 1977); Lawrence Langner, The Magic Curtain (Dutton, 1951); Emily Clark, Innocence Abroad (Knopf, 1931); Edward G. Leuders, Carl Van Vechten (Twayne, 1955); Blanche Ferguson, Countee Cullen and the Negro Renaissance (Dodd, Mead, 1966).

  9. New York Herald Tribune, July 6, 1924; Messenger, Oct. 1924, p. 32; undated clipping [late 1925], RA (“morbid”).

  10. Messenger, Oct. 1924, p. 32; Journal News (Ithaca, N.Y.), April 23, 1926; Evening Globe, March 13, 1926. Lewis, Harlem in Vogue, pp. 192–93, plus his fine discussion, passim, of cultural elitism (see especially pp. 108–15, 157–62, 211–19).

  11. Once in a great while, Salemmé did hear Paul sound a more bitter, less resigned note—and when he did was quick to blame it on the baneful influence of Dr. Smith Ely Jelliffe, the well-known psychoanalyst whom Paul and Essie had met at Presbyterian Hospital (see note 12, p. 578), and especially on his Southern-born wife, Bea, who in Salemmé’s view “was very pro-Negro” and had “a chip on her shoulder.” She “wanted to help Paul, and she used … to sort of goad him into rebelling. She brought out the bitterness in him, and I told her she shouldn’t do that, but she did” (interview with Salemmé, March 31, 1983). Ten years later Essie was still in touch with the Jelliffes; she mentions dining with Bea Jelliffe in her diary for Feb. 16, 1933 (RA). During our interview Salemmé referred approvingly at one point to Ethel Waters’s autobiography, His Eye Is on the Sparrow, as another example of a black artist he had known who eschewed bitterness, but he showed no awareness of the actual depth of anger in her book. After Robeson became more political and more outspoken on racial questions, he let his friendship with Salemmé dissolve; when Salemmé was in Europe on a Guggenheim in 1934, Robeson failed to show up for a scheduled appointment and never got in touch to explain. Salemmé suspected that politics was at issue, but nonetheless resented Robeson’s way of breaking off (interview with Salemmé, March 31, 1983).

  12. ER Diary, July 27, Aug. 26, 29, 1924, RA; CVV to Edna Kenton (Aug. 1924), Bruce Kellner, Letters of Carl Van Vechten (Yale, 1987), p. 69 (hereafter Kellner, Letters CVV).

  13. ER Diary, Jan. 3, 1925, RA; Langner, Magic Curtain, p. 1964 (“Empress”); Lewis, Harlem in Vogue, pp. 180–89. Walter White had also been responsible for introducing Van Vechten to James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, “and ever so many more” (Carl Van Vechten to Alfred Knopf, Dec. 19, 1962, Knopf Papers, Ransom Humanities Center, University of Texas (henceforth UT: Knopf). The Walter Whites and the Knopfs had “drifted completely away from each other” (in Alfred Knopf’s words) by the late forties (Knopf to Van Vechten, Sept. 22, 1948, UT: Knopf). Lincoln Kirstein’s analysis of Van Vechten is from a five-page typed description of him headed “For Fania: December 23, 1964,” written by Kirstein on the occasion of Van Vechten’s death. The manuscript is in UT: Knopf and continues, in part: “I met Carl first in the Spring of 1926 at an evening-party in Muriel Draper’s old stable-loft on East Fortieth Street. He was wearing a red fireman’s shirt. I was a freshman introduced into New York’s High Bohemia, so it seemed perfectly natural that at Muriel Draper’s one would meet, along with Mr. Gurdgieff [sic], Edmund Wilson, Gilbert Seldes, Paul Robeson or Mary Garden, a fireman.… Carl made Harlem real to me; it was not the tragic Harlem we now know. It was a Harlem far more secret, parochial, more remote, less dangerous, at least seemingly, and in our ways of thought more Parisian.…”

  14. ER Diary, Jan. 17, Feb. 13 (Fania), 1925, RA; CVV to Scott Cunningham (circa Jan. 1925); CVV to Gertrude Stein, June 30, 1925, Kellner, Letters CVV, pp. 74, 80.

  15. ER Diary, Aug. 17, 1924 (Touvalou; Maran), Jan. 27, 1925 (Bynner), Feb. 12, 1925 (Anderson), March 25, 1925 (Brouns), April 5, 1925 (Dreiser), April 21, 1925 (Brooks), June 8, 17, 1925 (Nora Holt), RA; CVV to Mencken (circa 1925), Kellner, Letters CVV, p. 87. The Robesons saw Prince Touvalou several more times during the following month. He spent two afternoons in their apartment; during one they “had lots of fun explaining our American slang to him. He has a marvelous sense of humour” (ER Diary, Sept. 12, 1924, RA). On the second visit, the Prince told Essie she ought to study for the stage—she had “such an expressive face and such a mischievous manner.” “We’ll see,” Essie wrote expectantly in her diary—and told Paul the Prince wanted to “write something African” for him, since voodooism had “originated in Dahomey, his home, and he knew so many stories about it” (Sept. 16, 1924). The very next day, they bumped into Touvalou when they went backstage after seeing Chocolate Dandies to chat with its creators, Sissle and Blake (Sept. 17, 1924). There is a touching reminiscense of Robeson by Heywood Broun and Ruth Hale’s son, Heywood Hale Broun, in his memoir Whose Little Boy Are You? (St. Martin’s, 1983), pp. 55–57, in which he describes Paul as “the greatest container for love and affection” he had ever met: “After you had spoken with him for a few minutes you realized that he was finding your wonderful hidden qualities, and after a few more meetings you were trying to think of ways to tell him how much he meant to you.” In the early thirties, Robeson was involved, along with Walter White and Zora Neale Hurston, in an opera based on Maran’s Batouala, to be conducted by Leopold Stokowski (White to PR, May 31, 1932). Stokowski also approached Robeson about appearing with the Philadelphia Orchestra (Schang to PR, March 11, 1933). After the outbreak of World War II, Robeson lent his efforts to helping Maran and his wife get emergency visitors’ visas to the U.S. (PR to Jane Sherman of Exiled Writer Committee, Oct. 18, 1940; Rockmore to Walter White, Oct. 18, 1940; Sherman to PR, Oct. 23, 1940—all NAACP Papers, LC).

  16. ER Diary, Nov. 5, 24, 28, Dec. 2, 24 (Henderson), 1924; Jan. 4 (Toomer), Jan. 30 (Alabam’), March 11, 27, 29, April 10, June 10 (Cullen reception)—all 1925, RA. Johnson, Along This Way, pp. 378–81. Additional examples of PR singing at friends’ parties is in FM to CVV, Jan. 1, 14, 1927, CW Papers, NYPL/Ms. Div. The Robesons and Countee Cullen stayed in intermittent but peripheral contact. When Cullen came to Paris on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1928, he wrote Paul asking if it would be possible for him to arrange “a few reading and lecture engagements” to help “take care of my expenses,” and reporting that his father and Harold Jackman (the West Indian man-about-town rumored to be Countee’s lover), who had gone backstage in London after seeing a performance of Jones, “came back to Paris with glowing reports of your London success” (CC to PR, Sept. 5, 1928, RA). In 1940, Cullen tried to interest Paul in appearing in a play of his, but Essie responded, in one of her “brisker” notes, that she thought the first part “real, natural, moving in spots,” but the second “nagging, whining, uninteresting and depressing” (Cullen to ER, Feb. 5, 1940, RA; ER to Cullen, April 10, 1940, Cullen Papers, Amistad Research
Center [henceforth ARC: Cullen]). In a cryptic, handwritten note, n.d. (1956?) in his Music Notes, RA, PR refers to Cullen as “perhaps … closer than Langston [Hughes] to African bards.” The Robesons and Eric Waldron maintained some limited contact. When Waldron published an article, “Growth of the Negro Theater,” in Opportunity (Oct. 1925), Essie complimented him on it; Waldron replied that he appreciated her praise but he considered the article “a pot-boiler” and some time hoped “to have the poise and restraint and the power to say what I have in mind to say about goings on in the Negro Theater” (Waldron to ER, Nov. 15, 1925, RA).

  17. ER Diary, Aug. 28 (Minnie Sumner), Sept. 12 (Agnes Boulton), 26, 27 (Fischer), Nov. 4, 16, 1924, April 27, May 8, 10, 22, July 3, 21, Aug. 11, Sept. 11—all 1925, RA. They also saw something of May Chinn; when The Emperor Jones opened yet once more, this time for a brief run at a Broadway house, they took Chinn to the packed last showing in the old theater (ER Diary, Dec. 27, 1924, RA).

  18. ER Diary, May 15, 20, June 14, 22, 28, July 10 (O’Neill), 29, Aug. 23, Nov. 27, Dec. 4, 1924, and May 12, 30, 1925, RA. Isaac Don Levine records another “memorable night in 1925” when he, O’Neill, and Robeson went on a tour of Harlem. Levine had recently returned from the Soviet Union, and he claims O’Neill and Robeson “plied” him with questions about “the dramatic struggle for power then taking place in the Kremlin” (Isaac Don Levine, Eyewitness to History [Hawthorn Books, 1973], pp. 84–89). Gig McGhee had played Smithers opposite Robeson in the Peterborough, N.H., showing of Jones. On May 4, 1925, Essie and Paul had a party at their place for about thirty of the Provincetowners; the Walter Whites, the James Weldon Johnsons, Zora Neale Hurston, and a Mrs. Carson were, she noted, “the only colored guests.”

  19. ER Diary, Sept. 12, 28 (McGhees’ apartment), Nov. 4 (Glencairn), 11 (Desire), 1924, Feb. 6 (Patience), March 21 (Throckmorton), May 19, June 3 (Elms), 18, July 13, 25, 1925, RA.

  20. ER Diary, Feb. 12, 1924, RA; article on Bercovicis in New York Evening Journal, April 8, 1925; interview with the Bercovicis’ two daughters, Rada and Mirel, July 7, 1985. In his book, It’s the Gypsy in Me, Konrad Bercovici says that he and his wife Naomi were introduced to PR for the first time backstage after a performance of Emperor Jones, by director Jimmy Light. For background information on the family, I’m grateful to Rada and Mirel Bercovici for a variety of materials they shared with me. They credit their father with having originally suggested the use of a nonstop tom-tom beat in The Emperor Jones. In It’s the Gypsy in Me (p. 194), Konrad Bercovici recalls that when the Robesons first came to dinner “the colored maid shed her apron, declared that she wouldn’t ‘serve no “Niggers,”’” and left. When Paul came to see them again, “the colored elevator man refused to take him up.” Following those insults, “the agent of the house informed us that the other tenants threatened to cancel their leases unless I ceased having colored men go up in the same elevator with them.” At that point the Bercovicis bought the townhouse at 81st Street and Riverside Drive.

  21. Interview with Rada and Mirel Bercovici, July 7, 1985; ER Diary, Sept. 27, Dec. 28, 1924, Jan. 17, Feb. 1 (Zuloaga; Gorky), Feb. 5, 26, March 1, 6, April 12, 20, May 8, June 2, 9, 16, 20, 21, 1925, RA. Robeson often sang to the children of his friends, sometimes giving them private concerts. From some dozen people (including Peggy Dennis, Cedric Belfrage, and Rose Perry) I have heard near-duplicate tales of Robeson’s singing to their mesmerized offspring.

  Rada and Mirel Bercovici (interview of July 7, 1985) cast doubt on the accuracy of a few details in Essie’s diary. In regard to that diary, I’ve come to the overall conclusion that Essie is given to exaggeration and dramatic highlighting (though almost never to outright invention) and especially in one area—when recording the doings of “glamorous” people and events as they intersected with the Robesons’ own lives. Rada and Mirel Bercovici characterize her as more attracted to the “high life” than Paul (she tended to “costume things a bit,” as Rada put it) and was (in Mirel’s words) “posthumously conscious”—meaning she was self-consciously aware of posterity’s evaluations, and not likely to scribble away in a diary with entire spontaneity. She may have kept a diary in the first place in order to glamorize her life retrospectively. It’s significant, in this regard, that she started her diary only in January 1924—just as Paul was being catapulted to fame. Still, Essie’s pridefulness only occasionally comes across as wildly overblown; on the whole her diary remains a reliable, valuable resource.

  22. ER Diary, Feb. 2 (“honor”); March 26 (Junior Banquet), 1925; Dec. 17 (Rutgers concert; Gilpin), 1924; NAACP and Nazarene appearances from newspaper clippings in RA; Mary White Ovington to PR, Jan. 19, 1927, RA. The professor to whom ER made her remark (which is in the Sunday Times [New Brunswick], June 8, 1930) was Charles H. Whitman; for more on Whitman and PR, see note 16, pp. 573–74. The Jones revival moved—again for a brief run—to the Punch and Judy Theater on Broadway in mid-Jan. 1925.

  23. ER Diary, Aug. 25, Oct. 17 (Burleigh), Nov. 1, 2, 1924 (Copley), Dec. 12, 1924, Jan. 12, 1925, for other concerts; Mrs. C. C. Pell to PR, Oct. 15, 1924, RA; ER Diary, Dec. 6, 1924 (Pells), RA.

  24. ER Diary, Oct. 17, 1924 (Micheaux), Jan. 27, 28, 30, 1925 (Hayes), RA; Variety, Nov. 26, 1924 (Russell); Daniel J. Leab, From Sambo to Superspade: The Black Experience in Motion Pictures (Houghton, Mifflin Co., 1975), has more detail on Micheaux’s career. The film critic J. Hoberman has called Micheaux’s God’s Step Children (1938) an account of self-directed racism “as profound and powerful an embodiment of American racial pathology as D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation or John Ford’s The Searchers and as amazing a movie as either of them”; according to Hoberman, God’s Step Children was “temporarily forced out of circulation by the Harlem chapter of the Communist Party” (Village Voice, June 12, 1984). In her diary for Nov. 3, 1924, RA, Essie wrote, “Micheaux made storm scene out on Corona today. What with the wind machine, fire hose, etc., it was the most realistic thing I ever saw.” The day before Hayes appeared backstage at Jones, Paul had journeyed to Philadelphia to hear Hayes at the Academy of Music; and two days after Hayes’s visit, Paul and Essie again returned the compliment by attending Hayes’s concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as soloist with the Boston Symphony (Essie thought it “very fine” but “didn’t like the robust things he did”).

  25. ER Diary, Sept. 24, Oct. 2, 20, Nov. 12, 20, 22, 24, 1924 (Germany); Dec. 7 (Reiss), 8, (Bartholomew), 24; Jan. 23, 18, 1925 (Madden); Dec. 1, 8, and passim, 1925 (Dwight portrait); April 25, 1925 (radio), Jan. 28 (Hampden), Feb. 19, 22, March 4, 10—all 1925, RA. Marshall Bartholomew to PR, Dec. 24, 1924, RA.

  26. ER, Ms. Auto., RA; ER Diary, March 20, 24, 1925, RA; Seton, “Lawrence Brown” (“pondering”). Larry Brown’s father had also been born a slave. The contracts are in RA. Carl Van Vechten to ER, n.d. (1925), RA; ER to CW, Sept. 28, 1925, Yale: Van Vechten. The black singer Taylor Gordon is among those rumored to have been Van Vechten’s lover. A collection of nude photographs Van Vechten took of black men is in Yale: Van Vechten.

  27. ER, Ms. Auto., RA.

  28. ER, Ms. Auto., RA; PR, Music Notes (1956?), RA (Brown “guided”). For a fine background discussion of the spirituals, see Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (Oxford, 1977), pp.30–55 (and for the ambivalence some educated blacks felt toward the spirituals, pp. 167–69).

  29. ER Diary, March 27, 29, 1925, RA; ER, Ms. Auto., RA; Van Vechten to PR, March 30, 1925, RA; PR, Music Notes (1956?), RA (children; Brown “guided”).

  30. Heywood Hale Broun, Whose Little Boy, p. 56; Millia Davenport to me, June 7, 1982.