to feel perfectly at home and at ease, in any company … to consider myself a pretty swell human being, and to look for human beings everywhere, in any walk of life … to open up my mind and to think with it … to do impossible things … to be as good as I could … never … to think I am being looked down upon. I unconsciously feel I’m top dog. That’s the reason I am at home in any society. I want Paul to have that. It saves a lot of hurt feelings, imaginary slights, etc.26
To Pauli, Essie tried to convey egalitarian values she wasn’t always able to live up to in her own life, cautioning him against snobbism in any form, and encouraging an effort at self-assertion she herself had never needed. She did not want him deferring to any authority, including that of parent or teacher, or ever obeying without question (“if and when he comes under my control,” she wrote her mother, “[I] will teach him to question everything and everybody”; she wanted him “to speak up for his rights”). She especially did not want Pauli internalizing any disparagements thrown at him as a black child. Hearing that a classmate had called him a “nigger,” Essie wrote him a long letter about the importance of being proud of his color:
We, too, were called “nigger” when we were young. But we didn’t mind very much.… I honestly think that white people call us all niggers, because they are jealous of us. They only call us nigger, when we do something better than they do, or when they are angry.… All white people, or nearly all white people, have no colour at all. They are just white. Some of them have rosy cheeks, but that is all.… We think the colour is beautiful, and much more interesting than just plain uninteresting white.
Hearing that Pauli had called another boy a “sissy,” Essie chastised him for indulging in equally unjust name-calling: “There are a lot of very nice children who are not well and strong, and who cannot play games. It may not be their fault at all. I don’t want you to hate them, and fight them. That is horrid.… I’d much rather you didn’t hate anybody. Hating people makes you nasty, yourself. Don’t hate him, don’t fight him. If you don’t like him, just leave him alone.” Along with the detailed comments on his behavior, she reassured Pauli that “It is a great sadness to us that we cannot have you with us to live,” promising that “some day, soon, I hope we will all settle down together.”27
The Robesons also stopped for a brief time in New York—to take in some theater, to see the Van Vechtens and other friends, and to confer with Oscar Hammerstein II about the Show Boat film. Then they headed out to the coast, stopping off in Chicago so that Essie could interview Joe Louis (who had recently defeated Max Baer) for a collection of “Negro portraits” she hoped to do as a book. “I found him charming, and very very simple and natural,” she wrote back to the Van Vechtens. “He only goes clam when you take him out of his field. He’s as sweet as he can be, and crazy about the RACE.” What with Joe Louis’s victory and the arrival of Robeson in Hollywood, Van Vechten predicted to Alfred Knopf that “there is going to be a great deal of talk again about Negroes this winter,” citing Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia and the premiere of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess as two additional reasons. By November the Robesons, along with Larry Brown, were settled in a “grand flat” in Pasadena, each of them in his or her own bedroom “so we can all live happily and comfortably, without getting under each other’s heels,” lemon trees in the backyard, orange trees outside the kitchen window, and enormous poinsettias lining the walk from the street to the house. “Its all rather picture post cardy,” Essie wrote Hattie Boiling, “and you’re never quite sure its real, but its lovely.”28
The filming proved a happy experience; the relationships were good all around (possibly excepting Allan Jones—“If you saw the Four Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera,” Essie wrote home, “you have seen our Ravenel, who is Allan Jones”). Robeson especially liked Helen Morgan, who played Julie, and was delighted with James Whale’s direction. He felt he learned a great deal from Whale about how to work in front of a camera and how to use his vocal strengths to maximum advantage. He was in marvelous voice and spirits throughout the filming; when he finished singing “Ol’ Man River” through the second time, the members of the orchestra applauded, and members of the technical crews frequently crowded the set to watch him (“We are proudest of the enthusiasm and interest of the property men and the electricians,” Essie wrote. “If you can interest them, you’re good”).29
The shoot was condensed into a two-month period so Robeson could get back to London in time for rehearsals of C. L. R. James’s play about Toussaint. Given Show Boat’s cast of three thousand and the lavish production settings, that meant hectic scheduling; Whale shot nearly two hundred thousand feet of film in little more than six weeks. Essie had no trouble keeping busy on her own, spending much of her time wandering around the film sets and reporting back impressions to her friends (Carole Lombard—who was shooting Spinster Dinner with Preston Foster—is “a gorgeous bitch … and as unrestrained as the air”). Newly trained in anthropology, Essie regaled Hattie Boiling with the strange customs of the natives: “The former studio manager of Universal City made it a rule that the employees who punched a time clock had to get off the sidewalk when stars, or people who ‘Got screen credit’ came along. They were just like the niggers of the place.”30
When the shooting was over, James Whale wrote Robeson to say, “Your ‘Joe’ is really magnificent,” and to express the hope that “I will have the pleasure of directing you in a starring vehicle soon.” The likely vehicle for a time seemed to be the C. L. R. James play, Black Majesty (it had the same title as Eisenstein’s proposed film). Whale, as well as Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, became excited about the script after Robeson showed it to them, and they immediately bought the film rights. “What we all three want to do,” Whale wrote Robeson, “is to get you going in ‘BLACK MAJESTY,’” and Hammerstein thought the film “must be done on a very broad scale or not at all.” The picture would cost less to make in England, and Hammerstein (perhaps momentarily forgetting Sanders of the River) felt “such an unusual undertaking will have a better chance with Korda who is a man of taste and courage, untrammeled by the superstitions and the conventional convictions of Hollywood producers.” Besides, Hammerstein wrote Robeson, “Popular as you are here, you are even more popular in England.” But three months later, Hammerstein’s interest had waned, and he wrote Essie that “it would be better to keep BLACK MAJESTY in abeyance.” The postponement became permanent.31
While the film languished, Robeson tried out the stage version. Arriving back in London late in January 1936, he went directly into rehearsals for the James play. (For the unknowing, the Sunday Times identified Toussaint as “the subject of one of Wordsworth’s sonnets.”) Sponsored by the Stage Society, the play was given on several Sunday evenings in March 1936. The critics thought Robeson made the most of his material but didn’t think much of the material, denigrating it as a “careful prose record” while elevating his performance above it. “By the rules that apply to others,” The Times wrote, his acting “is clumsy, but his appearance and voice entitle him to rules of his own.” The critic on the Evening Standard lamented that “Japhet in search of a father was not a more forlorn figure than Mr. Paul Robeson in search of a play.”32
Still, it was an experience Robeson valued, not least for the opportunity it gave him to broaden his friendship with C. L. R. James. The two men had been acquainted before the production, but they got to know each other much better during it and remained in contact over the years. James recalls that Robeson’s power onstage was primarily due not to his acting skills per se but to the immensity of his personality: “He was a man not only of great gentleness but of great command.… The moment he came onto the stage, the whole damn thing changed. It’s not a question of acting.… The physique and the voice, the spirit behind him—you could see it when he was on stage.… But he wasn’t a John Gielgud. No. And I say that not with any desire to discredit him but to place him historically.”33
James ha
d the impression that Robeson was a man of deep “reserve” and was “detached” from any interest in the glamour or material rewards of a theatrical career—though not, in James’s opinion, because it had as yet been superseded by any profound political commitment. James—who was himself a committed Trotskyist—never felt that Robeson became political “in the sense that Richard Wright did”—that is, “a revolutionary political person, whose whole life was spent, wherever possible, in striking blows at capitalist society.” James felt that Robeson came to be “on the side of the revolution; he was on the side of black people; he was on the side of all who were seeking emancipation. But that wasn’t his whole life.” Where Richard Wright, in James’s opinion, “would have stopped doing anything to strike a serious political blow,” Robeson “was not that type.” He was, rather, “a distinguished person giving himself to revolutionary views”—which was why George Padmore, “a hundred-percent Marxist,” always felt “a certain reserve” toward Robeson, even while he “admired and thought very much of him.”34
Because Robeson kept his own counsel until he had taken whatever amount of time he needed to digest a given issue, his behavior could be characterized from the outside according to the viewer’s own script. At exactly the time when James was doubting Robeson’s temperamental ability to commit himself to Marxism, Emma Goldman—who as an anarchist had as early as 1922 expressed her disillusionment with the Soviet system as a betrayal of the Revolution—was expressing concern that he might have already overcommitted himself. In response to a letter from Essie describing how happy her brothers were in Russia, Emma replied that the Soviets might have done away with “the barbarity of racial differences,” but much else in their system was deplorable. She had heard “the claims of the Communists that Paul has become a full fledged Communist,” but whether the reports were true or not, and she hoped not, “I love and admire Paul’s genius so much that [the claims] … could have no effect on me.… Politics and politicians come and go, they rarely leave a ripple on the surface of the human struggle. But creative genius goes on for ever. Besides, I never believe what the Communist press writes about anybody.” Emma’s long-standing commitment to anarchism and Paul’s growing attachment to socialism did not get in the way of their cherishing their relationship. According to Freda Diamond, Paul told her that Emma once picketed a political event in which he was participating; he walked off the platform, took Emma’s sign out of her hand, gave her a hug, handed her back the sign, and then returned to the platform.35
Robeson, meanwhile, continued to educate himself. Essie reported to the Van Vechtens that Paul had become so excited over Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s 1935 book, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (a work full of glowing predictions and devoid of criticism), that he read bits aloud to her, “marked it all up with pencil marginings,” and “turned down pages everywhere.” He also read most of the leading Africanists of the day—Westerman, Oldham, Willoughby, de Groot, Soothill, Levy-Bruhl, and Hornbustel—and he wrote Melville Herskovits, the pioneering anthropological authority on Africa, with whom he had briefly roomed in the early twenties when both were graduate students at Columbia, asking for additional reading suggestions; Herskovits sent a long bibliography and a large envelope full of reprints. Robeson joined Jomo Kenyatta, Z. K. Matthews, and other guests at gatherings at the West African Students Union, receiving “prolonged applause” when he spoke, at one such event, about the need for Africans to “wake up and do something for themselves.” He asked Langston Hughes for some of his “left poems” for possible conversion to songs, and Hughes sent him three about lynching and four about the Revolution (“Breaking the bonds of the darker races, Breaking the chains that have held for years …”). When Mei Lan-fang, the famous male interpreter of female roles for the Peking Opera, arrived in London, Robeson sought him out to discuss Chinese culture. When Charles Spurgeon Johnson, the Fisk University sociologist who had been one of the guiding spirits of the Harlem Renaissance, came to London (he had written ahead to ask Paul about hotel accommodations, wanting, for the sake of his wife, to avoid “embarrassment”), he and Robeson had a long talk about the prospects of “race war.”36
Robeson also sought out Norman Leys, a white doctor and a committed socialist who had lived in various parts of East Africa from 1902 to 1918, written the influential book Kenya, and spent a lifetime pleading the African cause in Britain. Leys recognized the cultural richness of the African past but felt that colonialism had already destroyed its most vital aspects and that traditional African institutions had not, in any case, reflected an intrinsically different set of human needs and aspirations. He saw African tribalism as a source of weakness, a hereditary form of division that had facilitated European exploitation, and he believed Africa should modernize along Western lines. He and Robeson disagreed on many matters, yet respected each other’s opinions. Leys thought Robeson judged “aesthetically rather than morally or rationally”—admitting he was “a Westerner” even while claiming that “all American Negroes have kept much of their inherited African culture.” In his view, Robeson wished to keep alive “a specifically African philosophy and way of life” where it existed and revive it where it did not, even while recognizing that he “is a heretic, for his own people want to be 100% Americans and deny their possession of racial characteristics” that he asserts they still have—and although, further, he recognized that “Negrophobes are delighted with the doctrine of a special racial character” (which didn’t in itself disprove its existence). Leys was putting his finger on real ambivalences within Robeson’s evolving views. Even in his own notebooks for 1936, Robeson continually veered back and forth, now emphasizing that the Afro-American was “essentially decadent” and would be “happy if tomorrow he could disappear as a group into the American conglomerate mass,” now emphasizing instead that, “emotionally, the modern American Negro would find himself quite at home in Africa,” insisting that “the bond is one not only of race but more important of culture—of attitudes to life, a way of living.”37
Robeson attempted to resolve his own ambivalence by thinking of the assimilationist black as “deluded” in insisting upon his “European heritage to the exclusion of his African one”—in ignoring the “fact” that “in every black man flows the rhythm of Africa; it has taken different forms in America, in the Caribbean, in South America, but the base of all these expressions is Africa.” The assimilationist was also deluded, Robeson believed, in thinking that the way out of bondage lay in “deliverance by some act of a God who has been curiously deaf for many centuries; for certainly if prayer and song and supplication could effect a release, the Negro in America would long ago have been free.” Robeson offered as his “humble opinion that we can get nowhere until we are proud of being black—and by the same token demand respect of other people of the world. For no one respects a man who does not respect himself.”38
When talking to Leys, Robeson spoke repeatedly of his belief in some unique essence that blacks carried with them from their African past. Finding his ideas “vague and confused,” Leys pressed Robeson as to whether he thought this “essence” was inherently racial or traditionally cultural in origin. He could not extract an answer that satisfied him. (Perhaps because Robeson did not wish to give it. In his private jottings at just this time, he wrote: “I base nothing on distinctions of race. They are too vague. But color distinctions cannot be avoided. Neither can cultural differences.”) If African “differentness” was inherently racial, Leys was prepared to agree with Robeson that some tangible basis existed for asserting the future possibility of unifying all Africans under one cultural banner. But Leys found “no evidence extant so far to prove the existence of special racial mentalities.” If, on the other hand, Robeson believed the African was different because of his special tribal heritage, Leys was prepared to argue that the past had no automatic claims on our loyalty: “If there is such a thing as a body of African tradition, I see no reason to think it deserves a higher place in African li
fe than the O.T. [Old Testament] or the Sagas or the Vedas.” He deplored the destruction by foreigners of Kikuyu or Zulu social life, but not when the abandonment of old values resulted from exposure to new ideas: “No-one of us has the right,” Leys argued, “to keep others away from the fruit of that tree” from which they had themselves imbibed, with the usual mixed results of bringing death in one hand and abundant new life in the other—“they have the same right to face the danger as we have.”39
As against Robeson’s wish to preserve and foster the African “essence,” Leys protested that such “deliberate exaltation of a group is bad” in the same way nineteenth-century nationalism was bad: it sanctioned and glorified “exclusiveness.” It did so, moreover, on the assumption that the exposure of Africans to Western ways would inescapably result in a diminishment for Africans. But Western scientific thought—the great bugaboo—was not, in Leys’s view, inherently evil, and could only be portrayed as such when science was misconstrued as mere information rather than a process of discovery; the study of scientific “truth itself cannot be other than a wholesome discipline.” Just as Leys claimed his own “right to the full human heritage,” so he claimed it for Africans:
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