Though as an adult Robeson rarely attended church services and gave little demonstration of caring about any formal religious ties, he did, during this triumphal American tour, jot in his shorthand diary some thoughts on “a conception I’m getting about God. My career has been so strange and so seemingly guided by some outside influence. And to meet Essie who has so clearly guided my career—and to have all the teachers come to me at the right time and the right things to happen—it is simply extraordinary.” His renewed appreciation of Essie’s role in his success was a central ingredient in this meditation. “I had to leave Essie and how I hated to,” he wrote in the diary he briefly kept in 1929. “I wanted to talk to her and bring her home and love her—but I had promised to say hello to F. [Freda] who had come from Chicago for the concert. She was as beautiful as ever and very glad to see me.” Later, still gripped by his feelings for Essie, he wrote in his diary, “In bed and thinking how wonderful my Essie is. I can hardly realize how fine she is and how deeply I love her. If I were quite honest—I would say no one or ones ever meant ⅓ so much as she to me. She understands me so completely, and her love is so great. We will do great things together.” The presence of Essie in his life seemed part of the “higher plan” for him: “Have wife as scientist who holds me to truth necessary to create true beauty. So God watches over me and guides me. He’s with me but lets me fight my own battles and hopes I’ll win.…” Paul’s heightened serenity and renewed sense of gratitude were apparent to Essie. Not only was he “singing magnificently,” she reported to the Van Vechtens, but the tour had proved “an enormous success in many, many ways.…”44
CHAPTER 8
Othello
(1930–1931)
In the three months between his return to London and the beginning of rehearsals for Othello in April 1930, Robeson made two strenuous concert tours—one in the British Isles, the other in Central Europe—acted in a feature-length film in Switzerland, and performed The Emperor Jones in Berlin. All three ventures brought continuing acclaim, but only the film extended his range.
The majority of the critics continued to give him splendid reviews, but the sameness in his concert program of spirituals began to create some dissatisfaction. Robeson experimented with several devices for breaking up the format. In Paris he tried singing the spirituals to a full orchestral accompaniment (Pierre Monteux conducting), but it was generally thought—and Robeson agreed—that the effect was artificial, the simplicity of the Sorrow Songs injured, and their impact diluted in so elaborate a context. He also tried sharing the platform with another soloist: at different times the violinist Wolfi and the pianists Vitya Vronsky, Ania Dorfman, and Solomon performed with him. All were received well, but for some critics the problem of “monotony” in Robeson’s own program remained bothersome; they were alternately impatient with the “intrinsic” repetitions of the spirituals themselves or disappointed in Robeson’s own refusal to branch out beyond them.1
The Manchester Guardian’s critic, representing the one set of complaints, praised Robeson for his “ease and grace” but felt “the music itself is not inexhaustible in its appeal.… There is a family likeness about these melodies which reminds us that a small musical vocabulary and a strophic or folk-song style of composition are bound before long to tire the ear.…” The Glasgow Herald critic, representing the other set of complaints, suggested that Robeson “owed it to himself to embrace the wider field of serious bass music.” The demand that he “try something else” grew loud enough for his defenders to answer publicly. The Daily Express suggested, “We might as well rail at … John Galsworthy because he writes plays but refuses to write revues or musical comedies.… Mr. Robeson would not sing Negro songs so well if he had not concentrated all his heart and brain on them. Specialization … is the secret of achievement in art, as in other things.”2
At just the time some critics were growing tired of the spirituals, Robeson was finding new depth in them. His highly successful second tour of Central Europe, where he devoted his concert program entirely to the spirituals, helped further to convince him of their universal qualities: “Slav peasant music has a great deal in common with ours; and in the countries which have for centuries suffered under an alien yoke, I found a more instinctive response, in spite of the bar of language, than in countries like England, who have forgotten what it is like to be conquered.” Essie, who went with him to Central Europe, recorded in her diary his enthusiastic reception in Prague, Brno, Vienna, Dresden—everywhere but Bucharest; she thought the Rumanians “a surly lot” (by then Essie was understandably out of sorts, troubled again by a recurrence of phlebitis in her leg and angry after a long, bitter-cold train ride, when they could get a sleeper only for Paul, and she and Larry had had to sit up all night).3
Robeson’s “fascinating discoveries” about the spirituals during his two 1930 tours deepened his commitment to them still more. A Polish musician “proved” to him that “the melodies of Central Africa have also influenced European music” and “traced its descent through the Moors and the Spaniards until it reached Poland.” Robeson’s interest in Africa—soon to burgeon—had just begun to emerge, and he dismissed the recently advanced theory that the Afro-American folk song derived from the Scottish folk song—or, indeed, that it derived from anywhere other than Central Africa. He was delighted, in Paris, when talking with Prince Touvalou of Dahomey, to learn that in that land “whole families devote their lives entirely to song.” Becoming convinced that “we are on the eve of great discoveries with regard to Negro culture,” Robeson was heartened by reports from Germany that “magnificent sculptures” found in the heart of Africa heralded the recovery of “a great civilization.” He told one reporter that he hoped to go to Africa “whenever I can get a ‘break,’” to study the cultural background for himself; and he told another (who described him as having “the enthusiasm of the true student”), “It is one of my ambitions to make a talkie which will interpret fully the spirit of the Negro race.”4
At the completion of his two concert tours in March 1930, the Robesons, apparently as a diversion, agreed to spend a week in Switzerland acting in an experimental silent film called Borderline. However offhand the Robesons’ involvement, the film went on to become something of a classic in experimental cinema, continuing to the present day to have admirers. The so-called Pool Group produced the film: Bryher (Winifred Ellerman), her bisexual husband Kenneth Macpherson, and her lover (and Macpherson’s), the poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle). The Pool Group had previously made three short films. Borderline was to be the only feature it would complete before disbanding.5
In the film, Robeson plays the part of Pete, a black man living quietly in a shabby Swiss “borderline” town until the arrival of his sweetheart, Adah (played by Essie), ignites a tangled crosscurrent with a white couple (played by Gavin Arthur and H. D., billed under the pseudonym Helga Doom), disrupting the town and leading, ultimately, to Pete’s unhappy departure—a “plot summary” barely detectable when viewing the film and not much elucidated by the elaborate brochure H. D. prepared to accompany it. Macpherson—the film’s scenarist, cameraman, and director—concentrated not on narrative coherence but on cosmic psychological metaphors (greatly influenced by the speculations of Hanns Sachs, Bryher’s analyst) and on “advanced” experimental cinematic techniques employing complex montage (greatly influenced by the theories of Sergei Eisenstein).6
Macpherson meticulously planned camera angles and movement in advance of the Robesons’ arrival, hoping to make maximum use of their limited stay by completing enough “one-take” footage to permit later splicing. He spent far less time on the scenario. One did exist (cinematic historians have speculated to the contrary), but only in rough form; Macpherson talked over an early draft with Essie and promised to incorporate her suggestions, yet, when she asked to see the finished version prior to their arrival in Switzerland, Macpherson sent word that he “did not think it advisable to send the scenario as it is not like stage acting—not
sustained.” He promised to “discuss all the shots with you according as they are taken on arrival.” When Essie expressed hesitation about her ability to act, he reassured her: “It is not like the stage, where you simply have to go through with your part without a stop, but a series of, so to speak, snapshots, with waits in between—so that, as I say, the camera is in the end the real actor. Anyhow, I’m quite sure you have a very considerable talent.”7
The Robesons arrived in Territet on March 20, 1930, and left on March 30—filming completed and a fair amount of sightseeing gotten in on the side. Judging from the casual entries in Essie’s diary, the whole experience was in the nature of a lark for them, time out from the hectic pace of touring. They had “great fun,” in part because they liked everyone connected with the filming; when they were shooting the interiors, Essie wrote in her diary, “Kenneth and H. D. used to make us so shriek with laughter with their naive ideas of Negroes that Paul and I often completely ruined our make-up with tears of laughter, had to make up all over again. We never once felt we were colored with them.”8
They danced the tango between takes, and enjoyed the beauty of the countryside, though not the hike up the mountains outside Montreux to get exterior shots—“Paul and I were frightened out of our wits,” Essie wrote, although she was mollified by a picnic lunch. In the village of Lutry, they were followed by crowds everywhere they went, Robeson attracting children “as honey does bees.” The townspeople filled the streets and hung out of their windows to catch sight of “Monsieur le Nègre.” The café did unprecedented business. The fire brigade, alarmed at the new electric installation in the studio (the town hall) for lighting, held a special practice session. The Tribune de Lausanne arrived for an interview. Except for an electrician, no one was paid (the total cost of making the film was two thousand dollars), yet, in Bryher’s words, “extras had to be dispersed rather than sought, everybody wanted to be in it and every twenty minutes all the lights went out because the tram went by.”9
When they saw the first three days’ work on the screen, Essie reported to the Van Vechtens that they were “surprised to see how well we both filmed.” Paul “of course” looked “marvelous”—his “face is so big and mobile and expressive.” But Macpherson assured Essie that she, too, was “very good”—and, indeed, two months later, after they had had a look at the first reel of the film, Bryher wrote Essie, “You really are stealing the picture. One knew that Mr. Robeson would be good—every time I see the film it is your acting and your sense of movement that amazes me. Even more than his—if this is not treason.”10
The Robesons never expected wide distribution for the film. Essie categorized it as “one of those very advanced expressionistic things in the Russian-German manner, so it will probably be shown by Film Societies, etc.” She described it in a letter home to A’Lelia Walker as “futuristic”—“We made it up in the Swiss Alps” and “enjoyed every moment of it, though it was hard work.” “It’s a dreadful highbrow,” she confided to the Van Vechtens, “but beautifully done, I think.” G. W. Pabst, one of the heroes of the Pool Group—Bryher described his Die Freudlose Gasse (Joyless Street), starring Greta Garbo, as “the one film that we felt expressed our generation”—was given a private showing of the film and declared himself “very enthusiastic”; he offered the use of his own people “to stick the negative and make the exhibition positives”—and also expressed a desire to make a “talkie” with Paul. If the film “is to be ‘popular’ in the obvious sense, I don’t know,” H. D. wrote Essie. “It is without question a work of art and that satisfies us.”11
It had to. The film was not a popular success, and the critics, on the whole, did not think it art. As Essie had predicted, it was booked by cine-clubs and film societies in Europe, and in October 1930 had a showing at the Academy Cinema in London. The British critics were particularly harsh. The reviewer on the Evening Standard dismissed the film as “self-conscious estheticism,” and the critic in Bioscope called it “a wholly unintelligible scramble of celluloidan eccentricity,” although adding that it “stimulates one’s natural desire to see and hear Paul Robeson in a first-rate British ‘talkie’ made for the public.” That was still a few years off.12
The nine days of shooting completed, the Robesons went straight from Territet to Berlin, where Paul had agreed to do two performances of The Emperor Jones under Jimmy Light’s direction. Light was abroad for a year on a Guggenheim Fellowship, and at his persuading, Essie had “wangled and rearranged and quarreled” in order to piece together the needed three days in Paul’s schedule. The terms helped: the Deutsches Kuenstler Theater offered Light and Robeson together 50 percent of the gross receipts. Robeson trusted Light as a director and also liked him as a person, and the experience turned out to be a good one. Hooper Trask, the former actor and correspondent for The New York Times and Variety, was originally scheduled to play Smithers opposite Robeson, but in the end Light himself assumed the role. (Reviewing the production in the Times, Trask confined himself to praising Light’s work as a director; Essie described his acting as “not bad.”) Audience and critics alike received Robeson warmly, the play much less so. The Berlin critics had earlier seen the great German actor Oscar Homolka in the role, but preferred Robeson; they had unanimous praise for his “childlike originality and naturalness”—he succeeded, as one put it, in “showing the soul of his people to the audience,” which no white actor, Homolka included, possibly could. One reviewer congratulated Robeson for having done his best to help a “weak poet” like O’Neill, whose “flat, sociological” play (in the words of another) had little to reveal to “culturally conscious Europeans.” Though O’Neill had his defenders, Robeson, not O’Neill, emerged as the star attraction.13
The Robesons were “crazy” about Berlin. “It is a marvelous city,” Essie wrote home, and recounted the special pleasure they took in hearing, at the Berlin zoo roof garden, Sam Wooding’s Negro Band—“I can’t tell you how the good old home rhythm sounded to us.” There’s no evidence that either Paul or Essie saw anything disagreeable or threatening in the political climate during their stay in Berlin. Yet the year 1930 marked a turning point in German history, with massive Nazi rallies throughout the country, with Bruening, a Catholic conservative, succeeding to the chancellorship in March, and with the Nazis emerging in the September election as the nation’s second-largest party. All of this went unremarked by Robeson—in much the way he had made no public comment on such recent events as the general strike in Britain in 1926, the phenomenon of women under thirty voting for the first time in that country’s 1929 general election, and, in the United States, the Wall Street crash in October 1929. Even after Bruening had been elected in Germany, Robeson told reporters—he was, of course, thinking of the artistic experimentation of Weimar—that his “one great desire” was to return to Germany to study and perform: “Germany is the gateway now of all of Europe,” and “on the Continent the colour bar does not exist.” As further regards fascism, a reporter from the Jamaican paper The Daily Gleaner quoted Robeson as late as 1932 as saying, “If the real great man of the Negro race will be born, he will spring from North America. The Negro Gandhi or Mussolini cannot be begotten but in the land of ancient oppression and revolutionary emancipation.”14
But it would be a mistake to imply that Robeson was unconscious of or indifferent to political developments. He had long since developed a deep interest in Jewish culture. As early as 1927, to give but one example, he had performed a concert in New York’s Town Hall to aid the Women’s Committee of the American ORT (the organization devoted to teaching trades to young Jewish people in Eastern Europe seeking to emigrate to Palestine); and he had frequently expressed the view that enslaved blacks had derived inspiration from the Old Testament account of the struggle of the ancient Hebrews. As regards labor unrest in Britain, moreover, Robeson at least once spontaneously offered a gesture of support for the plight of Welsh miners doubly beset by wage cuts and meager unemployment relief, which a Labour go
vernment seemed unwilling to ameliorate. To be sure, his political consciousness in 1930 was not yet developed to nearly the extent it would later be, but it was already greater than his near-total silence on public events would suggest. He was inactive (as was his style while awaiting some clear purpose), not unaware, continuing to hold in 1930 to his long-standing view that he could best work against injustice by advancing his own reputation as an artist. But that stance was shifting. Within a few years, Robeson would no longer be content with the view that the enhancement of his artistic stature would somehow produce a generalized improvement for others; he would move instead toward direct participation in organized political efforts to assail oppressive conditions.15
The Robesons returned to London in early April, and Paul went directly into rehearsals for Othello. He had hesitated about signing on for the production—“Am still afraid of Othello but we can talk it over,” he had written Maurice Browne when first approached. Browne later commented, “For eighteen months I wrestled with him,” and “my persistence broke down his objections.” He overcame Paul’s qualms with promises of a first-rate director and a first-rate Iago. He got neither. Browne cast himself as Iago and gave the directing plum to his wife, Nellie Van Volkenburg. Both choices were self-indulgent. Browne had aspirations to act (“I had always itched to play Iago,” he later confessed) without being an actor, and Nellie had had scant directing experience since her days with Chicago’s Little Theatre, and none in Shakespeare. Robeson did get a first-rate Desdemona in the twenty-two-year-old newcomer Peggy Ashcroft. He had seen her in Matheson Lang’s production Jew Süss, her first major success, and because his contract with Maurice Browne gave him the right to decide who would play Desdemona, asked Ashcroft to audition. She was terrified: “I can’t sing in tune,” she remembered years later, “and I had to perform the Willow Song in front of Paul Robeson.” Nonetheless, he liked what he heard and she was offered the role. Ashcroft was thrilled at the opportunity; “for us young people in England at the time,” she later recalled, Robeson “was a great figure, and we all had his records, and one realized that it was a tremendous honor to be doing this.” The supporting cast was also well chosen: Sybil Thorndike as Emilia, the little-known Ralph Richardson as Roderigo, and Max Montesole, an experienced graduate of Frank Benson’s famed Shakespeare company, as Cassio. They would prove “supportive” in several needed senses.16
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