Paul Robeson
Page 11
But Paul was still sufficiently concerned six months later to tell Opportunity magazine (the organ of the National Urban League and chief purveyor of the New Negro movement in literature) that he read Chillun as the story of “the struggle of a man and woman, both fine struggling human beings, against forces they could not control, indeed, scarcely comprehend, accentuated by the almost Christ-like spiritual force of the Negro husband—a play of great strength and beautiful spirit, mocking all petty prejudice.…” He argued that the negative reaction to the play among some blacks was one of “the most serious drawbacks to the development of a true Negro dramatic literature. We are too self-conscious, too afraid of showing all phases of our life—especially those phases which are of greatest dramatic value. The great mass of our group discourage any member who has the courage to fight these petty prejudices.” He acknowledged “being damned all over the place for playing in All God’s Chillun,” and also acknowledged feeling annoyed at the criticism: “Those who object most strenuously know mostly nothing of the play and … in any event know little of the theater”; nor did they seem to recognize that O’Neill is “a broad, liberal-minded man” who “has had Negro friends and appreciated them for their true worth. He would be the last to cast any slur on the colored people.”54
Chillun had a profitable run, playing alternate weeks with The Emperor Jones through June, then alone through July, and reopening for yet another two months, this time to nonsubscription audiences and standing-room-only crowds in mid-August; it finally closed on October 10, 1924, after a total run of one hundred performances. Robeson’s double success had propelled him into the tiny front rank of Afro-American artists, more universally applauded by white intellectuals than by blacks but recognized even by dissenting blacks as superbly gifted. As Augustin Duncan, who had directed him in Taboo, wrote to Robeson, “I know you will go on now from one big success to another,” adding prophetically, “and I believe your successes will be more than personal successes.”55
The great point now was, What next? Paul had earned a total salary of only $1,782.15 from Provincetown for the entire year of 1924—and no attractive new vehicle for him was immediately forthcoming. Essie’s salary from her job at Presbyterian was still their chief source of income, but she was “sick to death of the Lab,” and wrote in her diary in mid-August, “do hope I won’t have to go back.” Paul began to show renewed signs of restlessness, and began to express anxiety about whether it might not make sense, after all, for him to return to the law. He told a newspaper interviewer in June 1924 that he himself preferred the stage—feeling “as if I were already much farther along in that line than in the lawyer’s career” and feeling “sure that I would have more opportunity on the stage to benefit my race.” But he acknowledged that many friends, convinced he should be the next Booker T. Washington, had continued mildly to rebuke him for deserting the law, and that he had not yet definitely decided which career choice to make. Essie encouraged him to give the theater another five years before making a final decision, though it would not take that long. In the interlude, the Robesons were able to distract themselves with the assorted pleasures of his newfound celebrity.56
CHAPTER 5
The Harlem Renaissance and the Spirituals
(1924–1925)
Antonio Salemmé, a promising young Italian-American sculptor, was at work in his Washington Square studio in Greenwich Village one day when a friend dropped by to tell him he had to see “this black actor” doing Emperor Jones at a theater only two blocks away. Tony went to a performance the next day. “It was just a little basement theater,” he remembered many years later. “And for the first time I see this Paul Robeson, sweating, running away from the drums.… I was terribly impressed. I thought, ‘My God, this guy is not only a great actor but he’s beautiful.’ I mean, I saw a statue. All I could think of was a statue.”1
Salemmé went backstage after the performance, asked Robeson if he would pose for him—and offered him 25 percent of the sale price if he sold the statue. Robeson “was very businesslike, because he needed money” (when Tony later met Essie, he found her “twice as businesslike”—“hard-boiled, absolutely adamant and independent. Drove a hard bargain and didn’t make friends”). Robeson said he’d change clothes and go around to Salemmé’s studio for coffee with him and his wife, Betty Hardy. “He arrived as if he’d been there a hundred times before. You could see he was collegiate, perfectly dressed, and you could never guess that he’d been sweating, doing Emperor Jones less than an hour before. He had this presence, which was both dignified and disarming at the same time. He was very much himself, a very strong presence, but not a presence that would embarrass you or that would make you nervous. He made you feel at home. He himself was at home. That’s the point. He had no need to impress, and if he was impressed with you, he didn’t show it, didn’t make any fuss over it. You knew you had met somebody unusual. There was no mannerism of any sort. Absolute authenticity. He spoke slowly, and he took his time about everything. He never looked at his watch. Paul had this air of not going anywhere, and yet he traveled very fast. That’s one hell of a trick to pull off.… He was a born gentleman … deeply a man of good will.”2
Before the first visit was over, the two men had agreed to begin work immediately, and Paul came to pose for two hours nearly every day for months. Tony placed him in a standing position, with his hands upraised (“He has wonderful spiritual qualities.… His hands upraised [represent his] great healing qualities”). “Now, all right, Paul,” Tony would say, “just think of ‘Deep River.’” Paul would slowly raise his arms, lost in concentration, and then would start to sing. The voice was so beautiful, Tony didn’t know whether to work or just to listen. His first impression held—Paul was a man of dignity, patience, and humor, a “self-contained man, highly evolved, a beautifully clear person, withdrawn in the true sense but without being moody. If there was nothing to say, he wouldn’t say anything.”
The intermittent sittings ultimately spread over a two-year period due to Paul’s other commitments. When the larger-than-life-size statue was completed in 1926, its “spiritual” qualities were not widely appreciated, though Salemmé considered the work “the highest achievement of my art.” Philanthropist Otto Kahn came to his studio and sent him a check for five hundred dollars—but did not make an offer for the statue. Ruth Hale (Mrs. Heywood Broun) dropped by and thought the statue so beautiful she cried. The official art world was less enamored. The nude figure stood for a year in the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, and in 1930 the Sculptors’ Committee of the Philadelphia Art Alliance asked Salemmé to submit it for exhibition. He did—and all hell broke loose. Some worried souls on the executive committee of the Alliance were filled with alarm at the prospect of a naked black man going on public display; the statue was recrated and returned to Salemmé along with a letter explaining that it could not be exhibited because “the colored problem seems to be unusually great in Philadelphia.” Asked by the press to comment, Salemmé said, “We sculptors don’t sell many statues in Philadelphia.” Asked by the Alliance to submit another work in place of the Robeson figure, he sent a plaster Venus.3
While the sittings were still in progress, Paul and Tony would sometimes take a break by going off to see an art exhibit together. Tony became something of a guide to Paul in the unfamiliar areas of painting and sculpture, making distinctions that were new for him between work that was “modernist,” “realist,” or (the term Salemmé preferred for his own art) “classical contemporary.” He found Paul “a quick study”—in art and in everything. According to Essie, Paul, on his side, “always remembered those afternoons in the cool quiet galleries. Pictures began to mean something to him.” He absorbed additional ideas from the many artists and critics who periodically dropped by Tony’s studio—like the sculptor Arthur Lee, who had just won the Widener Medal, or the painter Niles Spencer, or Monroe Wheeler (future curator of the Museum of Modern Art) and his lover, the writer Glenway We
scott.4
Before long, the Salemmés and the Robesons began to socialize. Betty Salemmé and Essie became friendly, but Tony never grew close to Essie, continuing to find her too much “on guard” for congeniality—she had “no light touch, no give and take. You didn’t become fond of Essie. You became fond of Paul. You got to love Paul.” Yet Tony, at least in retrospect, was somewhat sympathetic to Essie’s wariness: “Paul was adored by all the women he ever met. Women absolutely swooned over Paul. Paul was pursued, and sometimes caught. You’d have to be a saint not to fool around with a few women who absolutely adored you. And Paul was a saint, in a way. He was never boastful. He was never a show-off. If a woman made it possible for him to go to bed with her, you never heard anything about it. You only—you had to see it. If you didn’t, you’d never know it.”5
Salemmé did see it, and did know it: not only did Paul and Niles Spencer’s wife become lovers for a time, but so did Paul and Betty Salemmé. Tony and Betty (who was a famed beauty) had always agreed on an unconventional marriage—indeed, another of her lovers had bought Tony his studio. The couple’s close friend Monroe Wheeler sixty years later described Betty Salemmé’s enthusiasm for Paul as “boundless,” and Wheeler came to share her view, growing “terribly fond” of Paul (on the other hand, he was put off by Essie’s “extreme ambition”).6
While recognizing that Paul would never be confined to a monogamous union, Tony Salemmé nonetheless believed he could not have found a more suitable wife than Essie. “Paul spent money easily, he wasn’t penny-pinching, and money went right through him. And so Essie had all the difficulty. She was almost motherly toward him. She fed him. She defended him. He needed Essie to protect him, to sign papers and to call up somebody and make a loan or something like that. Essie didn’t make him famous. She merely did some of his business … and she was very patient, because she must have guessed that he was attractive to a lot of women. So that was a lot for Essie to bear, wasn’t it? She had her dignity. She didn’t want to fuss about it enough to lose face. And Paul appreciated Essie. He wasn’t going to give her up. He was very smart. He knew people and knew values. And he had a steadiness in himself, which was automatic. He wasn’t flighty. I don’t think he’d be secure with another woman. He was secure with Essie. That was where he was smart.”7
Paul and Essie took their new white friends up to Harlem and introduced them to their new friends among black movers and shakers. During the summer of 1924, the Robesons became friendly with Gladys and Walter White (the zesty, charming NAACP officer), who were themselves moving to the center of an interracial network of artists, cultural brokers, partygoers, and political activists. Also part of that circle were Grace Nail Johnson and her husband, James Weldon Johnson, lawyer, songwriter, editor, diplomat, cultural critic, educator—and the NAACP’s executive secretary. Johnson held patriotic and integrationist views that put him at odds with the separatist black leader Marcus Garvey and his followers, and also with some of the attitudes of W. E. B. Du Bois, who placed more emphasis than Johnson did on the need to cherish what was unique in black life (rather than assimilate into white culture).8
Robeson would in later years move strongly in the direction of Du Bois, but in the twenties he found the sentiments of James Weldon Johnson congenial. Interviewed by the Herald Tribune in July 1924, Robeson told the reporter that he didn’t “in the least minimize what I am up against as a negro,” but nonetheless stressed opportunities rather than obstacles:
I may be a bit optimistic, but I think if I’m a good enough actor … I can go pretty far. All actors are limited by their physique. A slender five-footer can’t play a giant; a buxom heavyweight lady can’t play an ingenue. Well, I’ve got limitations, too—size and color. Same limitations as other actors have, plus …
For the present, Robeson believed,
I can do no better than to do my own work and develop myself to [the] best of my ability.… If I do become a first-rate actor, it will do more toward giving people a slant on the so-called Negro problem than any amount of propaganda and argument.
The Tribune, of course, was a white-run paper addressed to a white readership, and it might be assumed that Robeson tailored and toned down his views accordingly. Yet he sounded at least as moderate and optimistic when discussing his opinions with a leading black publication—A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen’s Messenger. On the subject of racial barriers, Robeson was quoted in The Messenger as saying, “What are the opportunities? Just what I will make them … I honestly feel that my future depends mostly upon myself.” And in an interview he gave the following year, he is quoted as saying:
The stories my old dad used to tell me [about slavery] are vivid in my memory; but—well, those bad times are over. What we have got to do is to go forward. There is still too much wild talk about the colour question; some of it wounds me deeply, but I don’t let myself get morbid about it. I conserve my energies for my work as an actor. I realize that art can bridge the gulf between the white and black races.…9
In stressing art as a solvent for racism, Robeson was articulating a characteristic position of Harlem Renaissance intellectuals: racial advance would come primarily through individual artistic achievement, not as the result of political pressure and polemics. As he emphasized in his interview with The Messenger, “it is by proving our artistic capacity that we will be best recognized … it is through art we are going to come into our own.” To the minimal extent he was political at all in these years, he looked to individual cultural achievement—not organized, collective action—as the likeliest channel for the advance of the race. As he told The Messenger, “So today Roland Hayes is infinitely more a racial asset than many who ‘talk’ at great length.” (Even Du Bois, who in the twenties was already growing disenchanted with the ideology of art and moving toward the vehicle of direct political protest, continued to sound this common renaissance note of cultural elitism, continued to stress the central role a “talented tenth” would play in advancing the fortunes of the race.) Yet unlike many renaissance figures, Robeson referred at least once in the twenties (as he often would ten years later) to “the culture of ancient Africa” as being, alongside contemporary black achievements, part of the proof of the “artistic stature” of black people—as indeed “above all things” something “we boast of.”10
Moreover, if he had decided not to “get morbid” about racial slurs, he did not deny that he had felt deeply wounded by them. He even occasionally acknowledged their toll to his white friends. Tony Salemmé recalls that Paul would “sometimes arrive looking depressed.” When Tony asked him what was wrong, Paul would quietly answer, “Oh,… I went to see an old friend of mine uptown, and I had to take the freight elevator.” Once in a while in the telling Paul would get “a little angry,” but he had long since learned to keep a lid on his feelings, especially in front of whites, and especially since Salemmé glibly counseled him to take “a philosophical attitude,” to “recognize” that little could be done at the moment about racial prejudice.11
The Robesons’ friendship with the Whites and the Johnsons soon deepened. On one of their evenings together, White confided that his new novel about racism in a Southern town, Fire in the Flint, might be filmed, and if so he wanted Paul in the leading role. Soon after, he sent them a copy. Ma Goode read it first and pronounced it “wonderful.” Essie came home the following week to find Paul “crying and cursing over Walter’s book … a supreme compliment, for Paul never cries except when deeply moved. He says the book is very fine and also thrilling.” Many literary contemporaries, including Sinclair Lewis, agreed, and Carl Van Vechten, the white writer who was rapidly becoming a spur and spokesman for the black literary renaissance, immediately asked Alfred Knopf, White’s publisher, for an introduction to the writer. After the two men spent several hours together, Van Vechten wrote a friend that Walter White “speaks French and talks about Debussy and Marcel Proust in an offhand way. An entirely new kind of Negro to me.” White reported to the Robesons
that Van Vechten and his wife, the actress Fania Marinoff, “both feel the novel will make a marvelous play, and suggested Paul would be the ideal man to cast as the hero.” “Things look interesting,” Essie wrote in her diary.12
In January 1925 the Robesons themselves met Van Vechten and his petite, vivacious wife (whom Van Vechten always referred to as “Marinoff”) for the first time at the Whites’, where the other guests included the Johnsons; Julius (“Jules”) Bledsoe, the young black baritone; James Weldon Johnson’s brother J. Rosamond Johnson, the musician and singer; and George Gershwin, who played Rhapsody in Blue and some of his songs for the group. It was a “wonderful time,” Essie wrote in her diary—the first of many with the Van Vechtens and their gifted circle. Van Vechten’s genius, disputed in all else, is unchallenged in his role as host; pink-faced and white-maned, exotically gowned in a cerise-and-gold mandarin robe—resembling, in the words of one frequent guest, “the Dowager Empress of China gone slightly berserk”—Van Vechten would pass happily from guest to guest, assuring them that he felt blessed by their talented presence. A shrewd estimate of Van Vechten comes from Lincoln Kirstein, who first met him in 1926: “Carl was a dandy.… He understood elegance, a contemporary elegance, in a way no American before him conceived it.… Carl saw the fantastic in the ordinary, discovered the natural flair, verbal brilliance, humor and pathos in the so-called ‘ordinary’ life of Harlem. He was of the tribe of Beau Brummel, of Byron, of Baudelaire, and of Ronald Firbank.… Carl adored cats. To me, he always seemed to be an enormous, blond kitty; sometimes he purred; he could scratch. Sometimes he just blinked like a cat whose mysteries and opinions are privately wise. Like a cat, he preferred the cream of life.… He did not mind being stroked.…”13