He also found strong sympathy for his own “national minority.” At dinner with the theater director Alexander Tairov, Robeson was impressed at how widely the talk ranged over African art, music, and culture. And when he went to see a Children’s Theater production, the play turned out to be about how life in an African village was disrupted by greedy white hunters. At intermission, a little boy rushed up to Robeson, hugged him around the knees, and begged him to stay in the Soviet Union—“You will be happy here with us.” Not surprisingly, Essie wrote the Van Vechtens that “We both love it here, and are profoundly interested in what they are doing.”10
The Robesons talked with some of the “minorities” themselves. They spent a lively evening with Jack and Si-lan Chen, whose father, Eugene Chen, had been the first Foreign Minister of the Chinese Republic under Sun Yat-sen, and whose combined ancestry of Trinidad black, Chinese, and English struck Robeson as an ideal blend of cultures. The beautiful Si-lan, a dancer married to Eisenstein’s American student Jay Leyda, did not at first take to Robeson: he went “rambling off on an endless comparison of Chinese and African sculpture,” seemed unsure of “the genuineness of his Soviet welcome,” and “determined to be cautious with all new acquaintances.” Si-lan was herself fierce in her devotion to the Revolution. Her art, she said, was designed to be “nationalist [Chinese] in form, and socialist in content”—a precise expression of Paul’s emerging wish to combine the integrity of ethnic cultural forms with a humane cosmopolitan vision, and after their first encounter, Si-lan found him “much more relaxed and normal.”11
Robeson also talked at length with American blacks resident in the Soviet Union. VOKS threw a banquet for the Robesons to which most of the black community in Moscow came; Robert Robinson (an Afro-American toolmaker who had come to the U.S.S.R. in 1930 in search of a job—but not out of any ideological sympathy) remembers the reception as excelling “by far” any such occasion he had attended—formal attire, “exquisite” food, elaborate entertainment. On another evening, the black community itself fêted the Robesons. Essie thought the expatriate Afro-Americans had chosen to marry “very third rate” Russian women; Robert Robinson, in turn, thought Essie more than a little vain and arrogant. According to Essie’s diary, all the black Americans expressed deep contentment with life in the Soviet Union, a society, they told the Robesons, that was entirely free of racial prejudice. Robeson became convinced that the Soviets had solved the minorities question—“in the only way it can be solved, by granting self-determination to all nations within its boundaries.”12
Robeson realized “how much my shy, sensitive Pauli would enjoy” the “sincere friendliness” of the Soviet citizenry toward people of color, and he and Essie began to consider the idea of resettling Pauli for a few years in Russia. He had occasionally stayed with his parents in the Buckingham Street flat in London, but essentially he had continued to live with and be raised by Ma Goode. Currently the two were living in New York, where Pauli, just past his seventh birthday, had finally found some children of his own age to play with. Essie was content with that arrangement for the time being, but she didn’t want Pauli to “get like those other niggers in New York,” and she warned Ma Goode not to take him “to any nigger beach” and “to keep him up to scratch”—“The more careless his surroundings are, the more sloppy the children, the more important it is to keep his manners perfect, and charming.…” For his part, Paul had paid scant attention to his son’s upbringing (“I have no fatherly instincts about him at all,” Essie quoted Paul as saying; “I’m busy with my work and he has people to look after him”), interfering only when he felt Essie and Ma Goode were too incessantly drumming “manners” into the boy—“The poor little fellow has enough to learn, anyway, without being taught a lot of unimportant stuff.” But Paul did want his son “to go to America at regular intervals, so he will know his own people.… I want him to have roots. I want him to know Negroes.… I don’t want him to be prejudiced. I want him to know and feel that he is a Negro.” Yet for now, having had the idea of placing Pauli in a Soviet school for a few years, Paul actively investigated the possibility. He decided that, if a spring concert tour in the U.S.S.R. worked out, they (in Essie’s words) would “go thoroughly into the question of living conditions here” and, if those passed muster, would bring Pauli and Ma Goode over for two years. They felt Pauli would adjust easily, since he was already fluent in German, a language widely spoken in the Soviet Union.13
During his two weeks in Russia, Robeson saw more of Sergei Eisenstein than anyone else. The two men were together on nearly a daily basis. Eisenstein arranged introductions, accompanied the Robesons on visits, took them on a tour of the film institute (GIK) where he taught, and introduced Paul to a packed audience of artists at a special party for him at the Dom Kino. Essie reported home that Eisenstein was “marvelous company”—“He is young, and great fun, with brains and a sense of humor.” Eisenstein also screened his own films, General Line and Potemkin, for them—Robeson later told a reporter that he thought General Line “easily the finest film I’ve seen”—and many a time the two men talked far into the night about the possibility of working together on a picture. Eisenstein had been trying for a long while to make a film about the Haitian revolution, and he had tentatively entitled it “Black Majesty” (earlier he had offered it to Paramount but was swiftly turned down). At the moment, Shumyatsky was considering the proposal, and if it went through, Eisenstein hoped to cast Robeson as Christophe (or possibly Dessalines) and the Yiddish actor and director Solomon Mikhoels as Toussaint. Eisenstein hoped to use Robeson in several other projects as well—over the next two or three years, they would consider doing a film together based on a Pearl Buck novel, a stage production of the American working-class play Stevedore, and, after civil war broke out in Spain, a film on that conflict. All these projects would have to wait for official approval from the Soviet authorities.14
Toward the end of his stay, Robeson sat down beside Eisenstein and talked quietly about the gratitude he felt for the warmth of his welcome. He had hesitated to come, he said, had not really been convinced that the Soviet Union would be any different for him from any other place. But he was leaving filled with enthusiasm for what he had seen and heard—and deeply moved at his personal reception, at “the warm interest, the … expression of sincere comradeship toward me, as a black man, as a member of one of the most oppressed of human groups.” In the Soviet Union he had felt “like a human being for the first time since I grew up. Here I am not a Negro but a human being. Before I came I could hardly believe that such a thing could be.… Here, for the first time in my life, I walk in full human dignity.”15
Still, Robeson was not yet ready entirely to commit himself to a socialist—or, indeed, any other—political vision. Soon after he returned to London, he told a reporter that his interest in the Soviet Union “was, and is, completely non-political,” perhaps deliberately exaggerating his lack of interest in public so that in private he might be better able to mull over options. Three years later, after he had become fully engaged politically, Essie wrote William Patterson that “Paul, in his quiet easy way, has apparently been fundamentally interested for a long time, but has been taking it easy,” delaying overt public commitment until his instincts and his understanding could become consonant. Robeson’s deeply disturbing exposure to fascism in Berlin had been immediately followed by his strongly affirmative exposure to communism in the Soviet Union. (Stalin’s forced collectivization programs were already well advanced, and famine was already raging in the Ukraine—but of all this Robeson saw and heard nothing.) Emotionally linked in his experience, they would thereafter be centrally connected in his psyche. Nazi fascism and Soviet communism became opposite, symbolic representations of evil and good, shorthand explanations ever after for opposing forces in the universe. The Soviets, understandably, helped along the courtship; Ivan Maisky, the Soviet Ambassador in London, henceforth regularly invited the Robesons to Embassy events, including lunc
h with George Bernard Shaw.16
“Paul is extraordinarily happy these days,” Essie wrote her mother in February 1935, a month after their return, “and it seems permanent.” Fania Marinoff lunched with them at the fashionable Ivy and reported to Carlo that “they both looked marvelous and Essie seems very happy,” though “Paul was full of himself as usual.” Part of his new agenda was to earn enough money in the next eighteen months to free himself from financial worry, allowing more time for political activity. The plan was straightforward: a two-month concert tour of the English provinces, then tryout openings in small theaters for two new plays with politically promising themes: Basalik, about an African chief who resists white encroachment, and Stevedore, a play of racial and trade-union conflict that had already successfully debuted in New York. If the two plays went well, Robeson planned to tour them in repertory theaters for six months in the provinces. Having “made a fortune,” he would then take a year off and go to Africa and back to the U.S.S.R. Not everyone, however, was prepared to believe in Robeson’s conversion to a more politically conscious role. When Nancy Cunard heard that he had agreed to appear in Stevedore, she wrote Arthur Schomburg, “The news that Robeson wants to act in it is encouraging. But there, between you and I, my dear Arthur, with R. it is more uncertain. It is a strange ‘case,’ in fact. He has given his talent for the German victims of Hitler; he has never, as far as I know, done a thing for his race, anyway in England. So, we shall see.”17
The concert tour went according to plan. In February and March, Robeson sang seventeen times in the English provinces, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. He drew large crowds everywhere, despite the economic depression and even though he essentially sang his old program, making few additions to his repertory from that body of world folk music to which he had recently felt drawn. Perhaps he recognized that his ability to hold a popular audience hinged to some extent on the familiarity of his offerings. In any case, the warm welcome reassured him that his recent political outspokenness had not cost him his audience. After two standing-room-only concerts in Belfast and Dublin, Essie wrote her mother, “Everybody tells him he mustn’t say this, and he mustn’t say that, or the public will be angry with him and desert him. Well, see how they desert him.”18
The critics, recognizing that he had become a popular idol in Britain, tended to applaud the charm of his personality, his modesty, deep feeling, simplicity, and sincerity of manner—rather than to belabor technical points of musicianship. Where they did, the advice offered was contradictory. Some of the critics continued to express the hope that Robeson would expand his repertory; others chided him for the songs he had already added, finding them unsuited to his “Negro” voice. Robeson paid the press scant attention. The distorted newspaper accounts of his trip to Russia had taught him to discount the accuracy of their coverage. “They have twisted what I say about the Soviet Union around so badly that now I give them written statements,” he told a reporter from Soviet Russia Today.19
The three-performance tryout of Basalik (step two of Robeson’s agenda) faltered at the Arts Theatre Club. The play’s strong ideological appeal to Robeson was not buttressed by much artistry. Basalik, chief of an African country bordering on a British protectorate, carries off the British governor’s wife as a hostage—treating her subsequent sexual advances with royal disdain—in a successful effort to extract a promise that his people will be left in peace. The formula of the Noble Savage dictated that Robeson, as Basalik, would do little more than stand around in regal silhouette, making majestic, monosyllabic noises. The critics handled him sympathetically, commiserating with his inability to find a vehicle suitable to both his gifts and his political integrity, but they gave no encouragement to any notion of extending the play’s run beyond three performances.20
The following month, May 1935, Robeson appeared in the play Stevedore, directed by André Van Gyseghem (who had directed the London production of All God’s Chillun in 1933). Stevedore had had a considerable success the year before in New York at the Theatre Union (a group which had come together to stage plays with working-class content and at inexpensive box-office prices): Brooks Atkinson had hailed it in the Times as “a swift and exciting drama of a race riot seasoned with class propaganda.” In London the play was performed mostly with nonprofessional actors; Mrs. Marcus Garvey and George Padmore (the influential West Indian Marxist) helped recruit black cast members from various social strata, ranging from medical students to African seamen recently departed from their tribal villages. Robeson’s old friend John Payne supervised the singing in the play, and Larry Brown appeared in the supporting role of Sam Oxley. The script exemplified Robeson’s hope of fostering socially useful art. It tells the story of Lonnie Thompson, a black worker falsely accused of raping a white woman, who eludes a lynch mob, rallies his fellow blacks, wins the support of a group of white union members, and routs the rampaging mob—though Thompson himself is shot dead. Frankly propagandistic, the play combined the theme of the oppression of American blacks with a message of hope: the ability of a confederation of like-minded workers of every race and creed to unite against injustice.21
The play’s good intentions were embedded in a melodramatic structure that lent it a certain vigor, but at the cost of complexity. As James Agate complained in the Sunday Times, the play “presents an ungraded picture of the virtuous savage and his vile oppressor,” useless as a contribution toward solving a social problem because “its simplistic stereotypes did not match up with real life.” Some of the other critics were more impressed with the play than Agate was, but almost all (including Agate) applauded Robeson’s performance. Given the handicaps of an obvious script and an overcharged production, the consensus was that his “extraordinarily vivid and arresting personality” had been shown to advantage. Nancy Cunard, who had been skeptical of Robeson’s intentions, not only liked the play (“extremely valuable in the racial-social question—it is straight from the shoulder”) but also wrote in The Crisis that Robeson “is much more real than in such other parts as ‘Othello’ (which does not suit him).”22
Because the play did not draw enough of an audience to extend its run, Robeson’s plans for doing both Basalik and Stevedore in repertory for six months in the provinces had to be canceled. He continued, though, to get a variety of attractive offers. Soon after Stevedore closed, the German director G. W. Pabst offered Robeson the leading role of Mephisto in a film adaptation of Gounod’s Faust. “This picture will be in no sense a Hollywood picture,” Pabst wrote him, but, rather, “an attempt to make [an] artistic product of the highest kind.” To that end, he had asked George Antheil to arrange the score and Fritz Reiner, director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, to conduct it. Antheil, who knew Robeson, also wrote to urge him to accept the role (“I am sure that it will be a great production”). But he decided to pass on the offer, shying away from European opera, which he felt ill-suited to his voice and unsympathetic to his temperament. Pabst let him know that he thought he’d made a mistake—“I am sure we could have done a marvelous thing together.” The previous year Robeson had turned down an opera closer to his vocal and personal needs—Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Gershwin had offered Robeson the part of Porgy and told him he was “bearing in mind Paul’s voice in writing it.” But, despite additional pleading from DuBose Heyward, who was doing the libretto, Robeson decided against the role.23
He also declined an offer of quite another sort that came to him from a group of students at Edinburgh University. They wanted to nominate him for the Lord Rectorship, an honorary position decided upon by student election and involving no obligation other than a speech at investiture. It was, one of the students wrote him, “a gesture toward yourself and toward your race which for its national and international importance, ought to be encouraged.” Robeson declined with “grateful thanks,” saying that he expected to be spending a great deal of time abroad during the next three years, “some of it in Africa and some in Asia.”24
He did accept two othe
r offers: to portray Toussaint L’Ouverture in a stage play by the radical Trinidadian C. L. R. James, then residing in London, and to re-create his role of Joe (for a forty-thousand-dollar salary) in the film version of Show Boat. Having been unable to combine socially significant work with commercial success, he temporarily split them apart: the Toussaint play would satisfy his political needs, Show Boat his financial ones. (He had hoped that by now Sergei Eisenstein would have succeeded in pushing through their proposal to do a film on Haiti together, but Eisenstein’s letters contained no encouragement.) Show Boat was first up. At the end of September 1935, the Robesons left for Hollywood.25
They stopped on the way in Pittsfield, Massachusetts to see Pauli. He had remained under the tutelage of his grandmother, to whom the Robesons sent eighty pounds a month. Ma Goode’s own theories on childraising included the peculiar notion that touching or cuddling a child was tantamount to spoiling him. Essie attempted at least indirect supervision through long letters—of instruction to her mother and of exhortation to Pauli (Paul occasionally appended for his son a brief “Hello Fellow!” note, and at one point wrote him, “… I love you very, very much and I’m making a New Year’s resolution that I’ll see a great deal of my boy the next year and all years thereafter”). Essie commented to her mother at length about everything from Pauli’s schooling to his wet bathing suits. She wanted Pauli brought up, she wrote, in the same way she had been:
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