Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  15. Seton, Robeson, pp. 94–95 (“human dignity”). In the Daily Rundschau (Berlin), June 17, 1949, PR refers to his 1934 visit as the first time he felt “the sympathy of a whole people for me, a Negro.” The notion that Robeson may have been bisexual, and had an affair with Eisenstein, has gained some currency (see, e.g., WIN magazine, Sept. 1, 1981). I have found absolutely no evidence to support these suggestions, and my sources have included an interview with a gay man, Bernard Koten, who lived in Moscow in the thirties and knew Robeson there. Eisenstein’s sister-in-law, Zina Voynow (interview Feb. 1987), also scoffed at the idea of Robeson having an affair with Eisenstein—though she did not deny Eisenstein’s homosexuality. (Si-lan Chen and Jay Leyda, as well as Herbert Marshall and Fredda Brilliant, have also confirmed that Eisenstein was homosexual—contrary to Marie Seton’s wholly unpersuasive argument that he was not in her Serge M. Eisenstein.) Also utterly without corroboration is the rumor that Guy Burgess once “revealed” that PR had had affairs with men. My futile efforts to trace it led me to this passage from a BBC TV show (aired in New York City, April 14, 1983, script courtesy of PBS): “‘Now listen Guy,’ he said, ‘when you get to Washington, remember three things: don’t be too aggressively left wing, don’t get involved in race relations, and make sure there aren’t any public homosexual incidents.’ ‘I see,’ [Burgess] said, ‘what you mean is I mustn’t make a pass at Paul Robeson.’”

  16. Record (Glasgow), Feb. 1, 1935; ER to Patterson, March 22, 1938, MSRC: Patterson. In an unpublished interview enclosed in a letter from J. Steinberg to ER, Jan. 23, 1936 (RA), PR is said to have deplored violence against blacks and to have commented that “Even Soviet-Russia which is now connected with America economically and politically will not protest either against these murders”; the quote seems garbled, yet does convey another instance of Robeson’s continuing to express doubt in 1935 about Soviet intentions. The New York Times published a curious article (Jan. 2, 1935) reporting that “high officials” in Soviet radio had been dismissed for broadcasting a Robeson recording of “Steal Away to Jesus.”

  Maisky to PR, Jan. 6, 1936, RA. For a lively picture of Ivan Maisky and his “gay, confident” wife, Agnes, see Victor Gollancz, Reminiscences of Affection (Gollancz, 1968), pp. 132–33. As for Stalin’s forced collectivization programs, the Soviet expert Edward Allsworth has put it to me this way: “In 1934 almost anyone would have missed what Robeson did.”

  17. ER to Ma Goode, Feb. 8, 1935, RA; FM to CVV, June 3, 1935, CVV Papers, NYPL/Ms. Div.; ER to CVV and FM, Feb. 17. 23, 1935, Yale: Van Vechten; Cunard to Schomburg, Aug. 4, 1930, NYPL/Schm.

  18. ER to Ma Goode, Feb. 21, 1935, RA.

  19. Soviet Russia Today, Nov. 1935. The concert manager in Belfast reported that in “thirty years experience he never remembered such a pressing demand for seats at any celebrity or other concert” (Belfast Telegraph, Feb. 16, 1935). As for audience response, there are newspaper reports of enthusiastic calls for encores, favorites being shouted up from the crowd, cheering applause, and half the audience staying to clap twenty minutes after the last encore (e.g., Manchester Daily Dispatch, March 4, 1935; Aberdeen Press and Journal, March 26, 1935). A different, politically noteworthy kind of reception was the party thrown for the Robesons by some twenty-five black university students in Dublin (Irish Press, Feb. 21, 1935), during which Robeson talked about the problems of race. To whites as well, Robeson reiterated his intertwined new themes of racial and musical integrity. He told reporters that his recent studies had further convinced him that the “basic melody” of all national folk music was the same, that “peasants and labourers of all races and nationalities think alike up to a point, and this brings about a basic similarity of their music, which is their form of self expression. If the Hebridean fisher folk and the African fisher folk are doing precisely the same work, under conditions which are very similar, they express themselves similarly” (Northern Whig, Feb. 8, 1935; Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, March 16, 1935). His contention was that “differences between civilisations disappear in folk-music,” and that folk music, “being melodic, is also particularly congenial to his race, to which melody has always meant more than harmony” (Manchester Guardian, Feb. 31, 1935).

  As an example of the contradictory critical reception, The Scotsman (March 18, 1935) complained that “this born artist” did not extend “the bounds of his repertory,” while the Evening Express complained that, when he moved beyond the black spirituals, his “inimitable genius” failed him (or, as the Birmingham Post declared, “Mr. Robeson thrilled us with familiar echoes rather than with new tunes” [March 21, 1935]). Similar comments are in the Belfast News Letter, Feb. 18, 1935; the Glasgow Bulletin, March 19, 1935; and the Northern Whig, Feb. 19, 1935. More technical criticism of Robeson’s musical qualities mentioned a “phrase-moulding” that was “too level in tone-amount” (Glasgow Herald, March 19, 1935), “a slight break in his voice,” an occasionally unattractive “tremolo” (Glasgow Times, March 19, 1935), and a tendency to be “over-weighted with considerations of tone-quality and sostenuto” (Leicester Mercury, March 22, 1935).

  20. Margaret Webster was in the cast of Basalik and came away with the best set of reviews (e.g., the Morning Post and the Daily Sketch, April 8, 1935). Coral Browne, as the governor’s wife, also did well, winning applause for her “cool and stylish” performance (The Observer, April 14, 1935). In calling the play “thin and unsatisfying,” the Daily Telegraph (April 8, 1935) struck the representative note. The contract for Basalik in RA reveals that the author was an American woman, Norma Leslie Munro (she adopted the pseudonym Peter Garland, and her identity was kept secret). She granted Robeson exclusive rights to the play for six months.

  21. The New York Times, April 29, 1934; Seton, Robeson, pp. 99–101. Just before opening night, Essie wrote Ma Goode, “I think it will be a success, and am only worried for fear they will get riled over its revolutionary speeches” (ER to “Mama,” May 6, 1935, RA). Both the secretary for the Theatre Union, Margaret Larkin, and the director of its Stevedore production, Michael Blankfort, wrote Robeson prior to his opening in the play in London. Blankfort sent him general enthusiasm and good wishes; Larkin sent him photos, prompt script, staging and light cues, music, and reviews of the New York production (Larkin to PR, Aug, 8, 1934, Blankfort to PR, n.d., Herbert Marshall Papers, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, henceforth SIU).

  22. Sunday Times, May 12, 1935. Several critics singled out Van Gyseghem’s production as misguided (e.g., New English Weekly, May 16, 1935; The Observer, May 12, 1935). The Tory press expressed some fear that the play was an inflammatory bit of Bolshevik propaganda (Daily Herald, May 10, 1935). Nancy Cunard’s review is in The Crisis, Aug. 1935. Larry Brown also got good reviews (e.g., West Africa, May 11, 1935).

  23. Pabst to PR, Aug. 6, 1935; Antheil to PR, Aug. 6, 1935; Pabst to ER, Oct. 3, 1935; Antheil to ER, Oct. 3, 1935, RA. Munsell, business manager of Theatre Guild, to PR, Feb. 21, 1934; Gershwin to ER, April 25, 1934; Heyward to PR, June 21, Aug. 19, 1935, RA; ER to CVV and FM, April 5, 1935, Yale: Van Vechten. The role of Porgy went to Todd Duncan.

  24. The half-dozen telegrams and letters relating to the Edinburgh offer are in RA.

  25. James’s play was one of four on various aspects of the Haitian revolution that Robeson had been considering (ER to CVV and FM, Feb. 23, 1935, Yale: Van Vechten; Carl Laemmle, Jr., to ER, Oct. 8, 1935, RA). The novelist Waldo Frank sent Robeson an outline for yet another possible play about Toussaint and, when Robeson didn’t respond, sent Essie a testy letter, complete with a glowing account of having met Richard Wright: “Beautiful deep brilliant … You two dont know what you’re missing spending your life in a stagnant eddy (swiftly turning into a sewer) like England. Yes, there is struggle here, and hope—and beauty. And a whole younger generation of Negroes second to none in value. I am happy to find these young men close to my own work” (Frank to PR, Sept. 18, 1935; Frank to ER, Dec. 4, 1935, RA).

  26. ER to Ma Goode, Feb.
14, March 29, 1935; there are some dozen other letters from Essie to her mother in 1935, all in RA. There is also a typed ms. by Ma Goode of roughly twelve thousand words in RA entitled “The Education of My Grandson,” in which she details her strict theories of pedagogy, as well as numerous anecdotes about Paul, Jr.’s upbringing—and especially the kind of incidents involving racial discrimination that contributed to the decision to educate him in the Soviet Union.

  27. ER to PR, Jr., April 20 (“sissy”), Sept. 14 (“nigger”), 1935, RA. There are some half-dozen other letters from ER to PR, Jr., during 1935.

  28. ER to CVV and FM, Nov. 21, 1935, Yale: Van Vechten; Hammerstein to PR, Oct. 17, 1935, RA; CVV to Knopf, Sept. 30, 1935, UT: Knopf (Van Vechten also passed on the rumor that Robeson was to do Green Pastures); ER to Hattie Boiling, December 12, 23, 1935, RA.

  Along with her series of portraits “of interesting Negroes wherever we go,” with an eventual book in mind (ER to Harold Jackman, July 23, 1935, Yale: Van Vechten), Essie had a variety of her own projects. She continued her studies at LSE, where Bronislaw Malinowski was one of her professors, and in the summer of 1935 had enrolled in a six-week course of theater studies at the Malvern Festival (ER to Harold Jackman, March 9, 1935, Yale: Van Vechten; Malinowski to ER, March 13, 1935, RA; ER to Jackman, July 23, 1935, Yale: Van Vechten). She greatly enjoyed the drama-school course at Malvern: “It is giving me exactly the kind of information and experience I need,” she wrote her mother, still hoping and intending to apply the knowledge toward forging a career as actress and playwright (ER to Ma Goode, Aug. 12, 16, Sept. 12, 1935, RA). In addition, in line with her temperamental drive to keep busy, Essie had a two-hour massage every other day, did fifteen minutes of exercise every night and morning, attended dancing class once a week, and took up horseback riding (ER to Ma Goode, Feb. 8, 1935, RA).

  29. ER to Hattie Boiling, Dec. 12, 1935, RA; ER to CVV, Dec. 17, 1935, Yale: Van Vechten; ER to Jackman, Dec. 26, 1935, Yale: Van Vechten. Robeson apparently surprised the sound engineers by moving in from the standard ten-foot distance to less than two feet from the microphone, singing in an intimate, less-than-full-volume style, which allowed him to keep his voice projection even and unstrained and to repeat a song twenty-five times with the same phrasing—which in turn allowed for nearly perfect synchronization (Los Angeles Times, Jan. 1, 1936; The Referee, March 8, 1936; Picturegoer Weekly, Jan. a, 1937).

  30. For the elaborate and hectic logistics: New York Evening Journal, May 9, 1936; Sidney Skolsky in the Daily News, May 16, 1936; Picturegoer Weekly, Jan. 2, 1937; New York Herald Tribune, May 24, 1936 (which reports on special makeup problems in “aging” Robeson). The Robesons nonetheless managed to get to Mexico for Thanksgiving, and Paul also found time to do a radio broadcast for Alexander Woollcott (Woollcott to Robesons, two telegrams, Dec. 25, 30, 1935, letter to ER, Dec. 18, 1935, RA); ER to Hattie Boiling, Dec. 12, 23, 1935, RA; ER to CVV and FM, Dec. 30, 1935; ER to Jackman, Dec. 26, 1935, Yale: Van Vechten.

  31. Whale to PR, April 28, 1936; Hammerstein to PR, Feb. 25, 1936, RA; Hammerstein to ER, May 25, 1936, RA.

  32. Sunday Times, March 1, 1936 (“Wordsworth”); The Observer, March 22, 1936 (“careful”); Daily Herald, March 17, 1936; The Times, March 17, 1936; Evening Standard, March 17, 1936.

  Before beginning rehearsals, PR gave a few recitals, including one at the Albert Hall. The most significant element in the critical response was the nearly uniform opinion that the group of Russian songs he offered was unsuccessful. Robeson’s voice, the Manchester Guardian wrote, “has nothing in it of the real Russian sonority and dark timbre,” and his singing of Gretchaninov’s songs deprived them “of what little national character they possess” (Jan. 20, 1936). The same opinion was echoed in the Daily Telegraph (Jan. 20, 1936) and the Morning Post (Jan. 20, 1936).

  Robeson continued to consider material about the Haitian revolution as a vehicle. A year after the James play, Essie wrote an aspiring writer that they had read fifty books and some hundred plays and scenarios about Christophe, Dessalines, and Toussaint. “All have been strangely disappointing save one, which we actually did produce here in London at a special experimental theatre. Even that didn’t prove good enough. We feel the history, and the characters are too good to spoil in a poor play, and so we are continuing to read manuscripts” (ER to Downing, Oct. 23, 1937, UT).

  33. Interview with C. L. R. James, Nov. 1983 (the interview was conducted by Jim Murray, then assisting James in archival work, after I first forwarded a set of questions to James for his consideration). The single line about “great gentleness” is not from the interview, but from James, “Paul Robeson: Black Star,” Black World, Nov. 1970, p. 114.

  34. James interview, Nov. 1983; Seton, Robeson, pp. 75–76 (detachment). Elaborating further on Robeson’s “reserve,” James described him as “a figure, but Padmore was a reality.” PR and Padmore were acquainted, but no more than that. On the ms. of Seton’s book on him, PR wrote in the margin at one point, “I never talked with Padmore & would not know him if I saw him” (ms. courtesy of Seton).

  35. Emma Goldman to ER, Dec. 16, 1935, IISH (courtesy of Richard Polenberg); multiple interviews with Freda Diamond. By 1937 Goldman did believe that Robeson had committed himself to the Communists; commenting on the political mood in Britain, she wrote Rudolf Rocker that “95% of the intellectuals have been caught in the Communist trap including so great a mind as Paul Robeson” (Dec. 30, 1937, as quoted in David Porter ed., Vision on Fire: Emma Goldman on the Spanish Revolution [Commonground Press, 1983], p. 306). In his note 51, p. 326, Porter reports that Robeson appeared at a fund-raising event Goldman organized (even though the Communists “had organized a competing affair for the same date”) and also gave a strongly supportive public statement to a meeting Goldman and others sponsored that same year (even though the Daily Worker had refused to accept an advertisement for the event). Porter confirmed this information in a letter to me of Sept. 23, 1982. Moreover, Richard Drinnon, one of Goldman’s biographers, reports that earlier, in 1933, when the English edition of her autobiography, Living My Life, appeared, Robeson had sung two songs at a “literary luncheon” in her honor (Drinnon, Rebel in Paradise [Beacon, 1961], p. 274); that event is confirmed in Daily Sketch, March 2, 1933. Three years later, however, when Goldman asked PR to appear on a platform with her, Essie wrote back, “… his managers have forbidden him by contract to speak about anything, even vaguely connected with politics, etc.” Goldman replied, “Indeed I understand Paul’s position, Not for worlds would I ever want to embarrass him” (ER to EG, March 6, 1936, EG to ER, March 8, 1936, IISR).

  36. ER to CVV and FM, April 27, 1936, Yale: Van Vechten (Webbs); Herskovits to PR, Nov. 11, 1935; ER to the Herskovitses, Dec. 1, 1935, NUL: Herskovits. Jean Herskovits, their daughter, is the source for her father’s and Robeson’s having roomed together; Herskovits’s biographer, however, makes no mention of the fact, printing instead a recollection by Margaret Mead in which she recalls that the sociologist Malcolm Willey was Herskovits’s roommate before his 1924 marriage (George Eaton Simpson, Melville J. Herskovits [Columbia University Press, 1973], pp. 2–3). The Robesons and Herskovitses stayed in touch and occasionally socialized at least through 1938, judging from the additional correspondence between them in the Herskovits Papers, NUL (Melville J. Herskovits to ER, Dec. 11, 1935; ER to Herskovitses, n.d. [1937]; MH to ER, Aug. 18, 1938). In the late forties, however, there seems to have been a polite political falling-out. PR invited Herskovits to join the National Non-Partisan Committee to defend the rights of the twelve leaders of the CP under indictment. Herskovits replied that the request “leaves me cold” (PR to Herskovits, July 26, August 31, 1949, Herskovits to PR, July 28, 1949, Herskovits Papers, NYPL/Schm); West Africa, Nov. 7, 1936 (“applause”); Charles S.Johnson to PR, June 21, Sept. 27, 1935; Hughes to PR, Jan. 7, 1936, RA; ER to? (“race war”).

  37. Leys’s Kenya was first published in 1924 and reissued in its fourth edition in 1973 (Frank Cass [London], with an in
troduction by George Shepperson). For a full discussion of Leys’s life and work, see the Introduction by John W. Cell to By Kenya Possessed: The Correspondence of Norman Leys and J. H. Oldham 1918–1926, ed. John W. Cell (University of Chicago Press, 1976). Robeson’s remarks about “decadent,” etc., are from PR, Notes, 1936, RA. Leys sent a copy of his June 11, 1935 letter to Leonard Barnes (PR ambivalences) to the Robesons as well (June 14, 1935) to be sure he hadn’t misrepresented their views. There is no evidence that they found Leys’s characterizations of their opinions inaccurate (also Jane Leys to ER, March 9, 1935; Norman Leys to PR, June 12, 1935, RA). The Robesons stayed in the Leyses’ house in Brailsford, Derbyshire, “on a number of occasions” (Alan Newland to me, July 1, 24, 1988).

  38. PR, Notes, 1936, RA.

  39. Ibid.; Leys to Barnes, June 11, 1935, copy to the Robesons (RA). Leys’s remark about “vague and confused” is repeated in a letter from Winifred Holtby to William Ballinger (the 1935 letter, undated, is in the Ballinger Papers, University of Cape Town Archives, courtesy of Tim Couzens, African Studies Institute, University of the Witwatersrand). For more on the interaction of these people with PR, see p. 205.