Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  Robeson may have been misled in part by the Edgar Wallace book from which Sanders had been devised. In Wallace’s original story, the English District Commissioner is no mere benevolent despot, but a calculating martinet who controls his black subjects through flogging, irons, and hanging. As the Kordas moved gradually away from Wallace’s scenario, the changes may have seemed incidental and insignificant—until their accumulated impact was finally felt. It’s worth noting, in this regard, that Jomo Kenyatta seems to have felt no qualms about the direction the film was taking, expressing “delight” in “the music and the spirit of the African scenes.” Even after its completion, Kenyatta joined in the presentation of a cigarette case to Korda, adding his name to the inscription inside (“With deep admiration and gratitude”), and no one has ever accused Kenyatta of insufficient dedication to the cause of African independence and the integrity of African culture. Kenyatta never again spoke of the film, and Robeson was to speak of it disparagingly; “It is the only one of my films,” he said in 1938, “that can be shown in Italy and Germany, for it shows the Negro as Fascist States desire him—savage and childish.” In all likelihood, both men were too immersed in their particular segments during the actual filming to get any perspective on the whole—and too emotionally invested in the film’s initial promise to see in time that its negative potential was being realized instead.54

  Most of the leading white critics and nearly all of the black ones had no such trouble. Even those white reviewers who found the paean to British colonialism welcome recognized the picture for what it was. The New York Daily News characterized it as “a film glorifying the heroism of one of Britain’s noted Empire builders,” and the London Sunday Times noted, with no trace of irony, that Sanders provided “a grand insight into our special English difficulties in the governing of savage races”—it “could not be improved upon for the respect it displays to British sensibilities and ambitions.” (The London Times daily reviewer added, “… it will bring no discredit on Imperial authority.”) Less jingoistic critics complained that the film was merely “an imperialistic melodrama,” a full-throated panegyric to “the sacredness of British colonial rule,” “punctilious in upholding the dignity of the Crown.”55

  Nina Mae McKinney, Robeson’s costar, took a particular drubbing. A marvelous talent who as a sixteen-year-old had made a huge hit in the 1929 film Hallelujah, she was woefully miscast in Sanders—that is, if one assumes the Kordas had ever intended portraying an African woman rather than a commercialized Harlem transplant. Light-skinned, Occidental in features and mannerisms, eyebrows plucked, the sleek, glamorous, American-accented McKinney was disastrously wrong in the role of Bosambo’s native wife; as one critic put it, she was far “too cool and sophisticated a figure ever to suggest that she had really lived in the African bush.” Robeson himself fared better with the white critics, especially those taken with the film’s antiblack theme, with its portrayal of blacks as—at their best—childlike and superstitious. But he was roughly handled by several reviewers, with special mockery made of his “authentic” African singing in the film. The “war-song” reminded one critic “irresistibly of the famous marching song from The Vagabond King,” while another dismissed his performance as “half Wallace Beery–Pancho Villa, half concert singer in undress.” “Here we have the pathetic spectacle,” wrote the American film critic Robert Stebbins in New Theatre, “of one of the most gifted and distinguished members of his race placed in a position where in actuality he is forced into caricatures of his people.”56

  During the filming, McKinney and Robeson became, briefly, lovers. The fact was well enough known to reach Ma Goode, who wrote to tell Essie—who already knew. “It all may or may not be true as the stuff Nina Mae said about Paul being her man,” Essie wrote back to her mother, and added an elaborate, unconvincing anecdote about how she had decoyed Paul away from seeing McKinney off at the boat train by getting her hair and nails done and putting on a dazzling new outfit for a cocktail party at the Kordas’, where she was “an immense success,” was asked out to dinner by Robert Donat, and so excited Paul’s attention that he took her out for dinner himself instead of going to see McKinney off.57

  Sanders of the River made money; perhaps because it glorified the white man’s Empire, it became a popular success. But for Robeson himself it proved an embarrassment. The black press, and even a few friends, took him to sharp account for having lent his name and prestige to a work that disparaged and patronized Africans. According to Frances Williams, the politically active black actress who was working for Katherine Dunham at the time, the two women protested Sanders to Essie, who purportedly replied, “Look, we have to make money. And when we’re millionaires, the people will notice us”; Williams, in disgust, described Essie as “full of phoneyness.” Given Robeson’s idealistic intentions, the press indictment was a terrible irony, and a source of grief. In self-defense, and deeply hurt, he lashed back both at his black critics and at the white sponsors who had led him astray. “To expect the Negro artist to reject every role with which he is not ideologically in agreement,” Robeson told an Amsterdam News reporter—ignoring the fact that when he accepted the role he thought he was in ideological agreement with the filmmakers—“is to expect the Negro artist under our present scheme of things to give up his work entirely—unless, of course, he is to confine himself solely to the Left theatre.” But subsequently Robeson made a clean break with Sanders, accepting full responsibility for his own miscalculation: “I committed a faux pas which, when reviewed in retrospect,” he told a black-newspaper reporter fifteen years later, “convinced me that I had failed to weigh the problems of 150,000,000 native Africans.… I hate the picture.”58

  But in 1934–35 the reorientation in his values, though proceeding rapidly, was still incomplete. He could not disentangle himself from the Western precepts in which he had been reared simply by wishing, or even determining, to do so—certainly not overnight, and never fully. But his experience with Sanders helped propel him further in that direction. The white world of filmmaking had proved impervious to his bright new dream of African liberation, but that did not mean to him that the dream had been wrong. On the contrary, given what he had begun to recognize about the world and its ways, it probably proved it had been right; henceforth he would look elsewhere for its fulfillment. In his continuing search for alternatives to a Western culture for which he felt mounting distaste, the next opportunity came from an unexpected source—the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein.

  Using as a go-between the English journalist Marie Seton, whom he had met two years before in Moscow, Eisenstein sent Robeson a letter inviting him to the Soviet Union as the guest of the Administration for Films, to discuss making a picture together. “I never had an opportunity to meet you and I was allways [sic] sorry of it,” Eisenstein wrote Robeson in his rudimentary English, “because you are one of the personalities I allways liked without knowing them personally!” He went on to say that he was

  extremely pleased to hear from Mary [sic] that you get really interested in our country and the problems which run around it all over the world. And I am enthusiastic to see you here. As soon as you’ll be in this country we will have an opportunity to talk (at last!) and we will see if finally we will get to do something together.59

  Eisenstein had long been an admirer of black culture and interested in making a film about Toussaint L’Ouverture, the liberator of Haiti, and his successor, Christophe, a subject long dear to Robeson’s heart as well. Eisenstein had already talked over the project with Boris Shumyatsky, whom Stalin had appointed head of the Soviet film industry. Shumyatsky was a man of little experience with cinema, and he had already begun “disciplining” Eisenstein by refusing to allow the completion of his Mexican film, Que Viva Mexico. Still, he let Eisenstein feel somewhat encouraged about the Haitian project, going so far as to list it in the export catalogue of Intorgkino. And so, accompanied by Marie Seton, Paul and Essie left London for Moscow on December 20, 19
34.60

  CHAPTER 10

  Berlin, Moscow, Films

  (1934–1937)

  Because there was no through train to Moscow, the Robesons and Marie Seton had to lay over in Berlin for the whole day of December 21. It proved to be a nightmare. Berlin was not the city Robeson remembered from almost five years before, when he had played Emperor Jones there and marveled at its vivacity and freedom from color discrimination. The Nazis were now in full charge, and he felt the change immediately. On the walk from Friedrichstrasse Station to the hotel, his dark skin drew instant attention—surreptitious glances from passers-by, contemptuous stares from storm troopers. On arriving at the hotel, he turned silent, lying on the bed and staring at the ceiling. Essie put in a call to a Jewish friend they had known in 1930, a “highly-cultivated” man they had liked. He came by the hotel, furtive and frightened, and told them of the horrors of the mounting persecution. He looked like “a living corpse, skeleton head, haggard eyes,” Essie wrote in her diary; he was “terrified.” After the man left, Paul, upset and angry, decided they should stick close to the hotel until time for the train departure.1

  When they made their way to the station that evening, Paul and Marie went to find the train while Essie went to look after the luggage. An older woman stared in angry disbelief at the sight of a black man and a white woman together, then took her complaint to three uniformed men standing on the platform. When they looked over in Paul’s direction, he “could read the hatred in their eyes”; it reminded him of a lynch mob. He had been conditioned all his life to maintain a calm exterior, but he also remembered what his brother Reeve used to tell him: “If you have to go, take one with you.” “I took a step forward,” Paul told a reporter many years later, and “they could read something in my eyes.” For whatever reasons of their own, the men moved off. When Essie joined them a few minutes later, there was still (as she wrote in her diary), “a terrible feeling of wolves waiting to spring,” but they managed to board the train without further incident. “For a long time after the train moved out of Berlin,” Marie Seton later wrote, “Paul sat hunched in the corner of the compartment staring out into the darkness.”2

  A very different reception awaited them in the Soviet Union. At the frontier, the customs house walls were covered with the slogan “Workers of the World Unite!” (in several languages) and with huge murals of scenes from farm and factory. The customs inspectors, enchanted with Paul’s fluent Russian, let Essie through with all her trunks and bags. (“Paul’s Russian is even more practical than he had hoped,” Essie wrote the Van Vechtens, “and everyone is astounded and delighted when he speaks. I do what I can with my German, and get pretty far with it.”) On the train that night they contentedly drank wineglasses full of vodka before dinner, watched a heavy moon rise over the steppes, and listened to “some lovely gypsy music” on the radio. Next morning, at the Moscow railroad station, an entire delegation greeted them—Sergei Eisenstein and his cameraman, Edward Tisse; the head of the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS); the Soviet playwright Alexander Afinogenov (whose Fear had recently been a sensation) and his mulatto American wife, Genia; and several black Americans living in the U.S.S.R., including Essie’s two brothers, John and Frank Goode. The Goodes, sympathetic to the Soviet experiment, had decided to try living in a socialist land and thus far were enthusiastic over the experiment. John had gotten work as a bus driver at the Foreign Workers’ Club garage, and Frank, more recently arrived, had—as a towering, powerfully built man—the prospect of being billed as a “Black Samson” in a wrestling troupe tour of circuses and carnivals. He “is already acclimated,” Essie wrote her mother, but she didn’t like the looks of John—“cold, and worn, and old.” During their stay, Essie loaded him up with warm underwear and a heavy leather coat, paid rent for six months on a room he could have to himself, and left him enough foreign money to buy scarce eggs, meat, and vegetables till spring (while they were still there, John turned “from gray to pink,” Essie contentedly reported to Ma Goode).3

  Following their initial reception at the railroad station, the Robesons were taken to their suite in the National Hotel near Red Square. They found a “magnificent” set of rooms, four huge windows overlooking the square, parquet floors, fine, heavy furniture, a marble bath, a white bear rug—and a grand piano. Interviewers and reporters poured in as soon as the Robesons arrived. “I’ve come to the USSR on a holiday,” he told them, to visit the theaters (“the most interesting in the world”), hear the opera, see the country. His chief interest, he said, would be to “study the Soviet national minority policy as it operates among the peoples of Central Asia.” (As he told the London Observer in the spring of 1935, “I’m not interested in any European culture, not even the culture of Moscow—but I am interested in the culture of Uzbekistan.”) Eisenstein stayed for lunch that first day, and he and Paul quickly discovered that they liked each other immensely.4

  The next two weeks were a whirlwind of activity and of rising enthusiasm, Robeson for the Russians, the Russians for Robeson. Nights at the theater and opera, long talks with Eisenstein, gala banquets, private screenings, trips to hospitals, children’s centers, factories—events tumbled one after another, a heady mix of new, confirming experiences, all in the context of a warm embrace (“The people have gone mad over him,” Essie wrote home). Christmas Eve was spent at the home of Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, and his English wife, Ivy. The Robesons drove out to the Litvinovs’ with Eisenstein, Marie Seton, and the conductor Albert Coates along the Leningrad Highway, the air bitterly cold, the roads full of ice, the car skidding from side to side. On arriving, they found a broad white-columned house set in the midst of a stunning pine forest, a feast complete with chocolate ice cream—and two Red Army generals for dinner companions. The redoubtable and cultivated General Tukhachevsky (executed in 1937 for “plotting” against Stalin) sat next to Essie, and the two chatted along amiably in German.5

  After dinner there was exuberant dancing; the Foreign Minister cut up with something that resembled an Irish jig, and Eisenstein demonstrated—to general hilarity—the dance steps he thought he had learned at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. After exhaustion set in and the guests had been refortified with a monumental Russian tea, Paul, simply and gently, said he wanted to sing some of his people’s songs. When he finished, Litvinov put his hand on Robeson’s arm and told him how glad they were he had come to the Soviet Union, that they understood the plight of blacks in the United States and “were one” with them. Litvinov, Essie wrote Ma Goode, was “grand” (though she thought Ivy “extremely ordinary and disappointing”—“Don’t repeat this, for heaven’s sake”). She also described to her mother, offhandedly, how at one point during the day she had “cried with the cold.” Marie Seton remembers the tears, but accounts for them differently:

  Paul got such intense warmth and affection from everybody.… She didn’t get the same enthusiastic love and affection. And it’s the only time I ever, ever saw her break down and cry.… I think Sergei [Eisenstein] and I were the only two people who actually saw her.… She defended herself by saying it was the cold.6

  Back in Moscow that evening, the Robesons went to spend an hour with William Patterson, whom they had known from the early twenties, when he had been married to Essie’s closest friend, Minnie Sumner. In the interval Pat had become a committed Communist, and was deeply involved in political work, most recently with the International Labor Defense organization that was spearheading protest against the imprisonment of the Scottsboro boys (the nine black youths accused in the South of raping two white women). Worn down by his efforts, and suffering from tuberculosis, Pat had come to Moscow for treatment and lay seriously ill. The Robesons found him in bed in a dingy, sparsely furnished room—but talking “as enthusiastically as ever.” Essie and Pat had never liked each other, and four days later Robeson went back to see him alone. Pat later told Marie that on the second visit he encouraged Paul to return home and participa
te actively in the black struggle, but that Paul, though fully agreeing with the importance of the struggle, simply could not see himself living in the States.7

  On New Year’s Eve, the great filmmaker Pudovkin collected the Robesons for a private showing of End of St. Petersburg and Storm over Asia. That was followed by a midnight celebration with Eisenstein at Dom Kino, the House of the Cinema Workers, where the revelries got boisterous and the dancing frenzied—Essie, uneasy at the “brutal kicking and knocking about,” decided that the Russians “are a rough people.” That impression was confirmed the following day. Stopping off briefly during their New Year’s Day rounds at John Goode’s garage, Paul sang and got a raucous welcome—but Essie was a little put off by the “vicious shoving” and the “sickening smell of cabbage” everywhere. Still, Essie was on the whole impressed with what she saw in the Soviet Union—with the improved status of women, the quality of care in the hospitals, the diet and preventive injections given the children in nurseries, and the psychology of childrearing Alexander Luria expounded on during the private tour he gave her (and the visiting left-wing American Muriel Draper) of his Twin Nursery Kindergarten (Luria also told them there was “no room” for psychoanalysis in the Soviet Union—“everyone was too busy”).8

  Paul was more impressed still, above all with what he found out about “the minority question.” Far into one night, he and Eisenstein discussed the so-called primitives of Central Asia—the Yakuts, Nentses, Kirghiz, Tadzhiks. Eisenstein said he disliked the unfair implications of inferiority which the term “primitive” conveyed—which was why, he explained, the Soviets had preferred to use the phrase “national minorities.” On another day, Eisenstein came by with Alexander Luria, who told Robeson that one of his best students was a Yakut, a man who performed “magic rites” alone in his room, yet had “no difficulty whatever” with scientific and conceptual ideas. On a visit to the Technical and Theater School of the National Minorities, the Robesons were intrigued at the mix of faces and colors, at the excellence of the work produced, and at the declared purpose of the training—to send graduates back to their own peoples to form theater groups. Nearly thirty years later, Robeson himself referred, in a speech, to coming in contact during his 1934 trip with “a people called the Samoyeds.… They had come from the northern country, from the so-called Eskimo peoples. ‘Samoyed’ in Russian means ‘self-eater.’ ‘Self-eater,’ that was their own name in 1917, which certainly presumed that they were a backward people.… In 1934 I found out, in the Soviet Union, that there was no such thing on earth as a backward people.”9