Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  Barry Baruch was friendly but not close to Paul. They shared an enthusiasm for sports, played chess, and occasionally argued about politics. Barry was a political liberal, not a radical, and as Paul’s public commitment to the Soviet Union grew during the forties, their discussions sometimes turned to serious disagreement. Paul and Freda were much closer in their political identification; indeed, one of the strengths of their long-standing relationship was its political aspect, with Freda an active participant in several organizations—particularly, in the postwar years, the American Labor Party, the Progressive Party, and the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship—with which Paul was affiliated.

  Even though Paul and Barry were less politically sympathetic, the two men were friendly enough to take a studio together briefly in the early forties in Greenwich Village (Paul rehearsed, Barry sculpted). Soon after, Paul came to live with Barry and Freda. For the better part of three years in the early-to-mid-forties, first in a townhouse on Charlton Street in the Village and then in Murray Hill, Paul had his own separate floor within their household, which he occupied between his travels. Freda prided herself on making it a genuine home for him—“We didn’t use Paul as bait,” she later said, “or as a social lion around which to build our lives.”

  Freda also became a good friend to Essie, listening to her troubles, encouraging her to believe in her own gifts and to become independent. Early on, Essie was describing Freda as “very lovely. I always thought she was attractive in the old days, but now she seems to have ‘jelled.’” By the fifties, she was introducing Freda (in a letter to Nehru) as “a very dear friend of ours.” And she was. Over the years, Essie grew genuinely fond of Freda and appreciative of her friendship—even though, in the forties, she still suffered periodic alarms that Freda might someday officially displace her. “If Essie had these qualms,” Freda has since said, “they were completely unfounded because she knew first-hand that I would never divorce Barry. Once, when the subject came up between us, I assured her that as far as I was concerned she would always be Mrs. Paul Robeson—and she knew I meant it.”20

  Essie, for her part, had learned to compromise since the stormy scenes over Peggy Ashcroft and Yolande Jackson a decade earlier, and to adopt tactics more commensurate with worldly-wise middle age. If Essie wanted to remain Mrs. Paul Robeson (and she did), she had to accept—not only tolerate—the needs of Paul’s nonmonogamous nature. If she felt reassured that her marriage would, formally, be maintained, she continued to feel dismay at the erosion of her actual role within the partnership. On returning to the States, Robeson gave his lawyer, Bob Rockmore, complete control over the management of his affairs, removing business and artistic matters alike from Essie’s jurisdiction. He had steadily grown to trust Rockmore, even though the lawyer’s politics leaned to the conservative side. Valuing Essie’s opinion, Paul sometimes still consulted her, but she felt this transferral of power as a wounding and humiliating blow, one she would thereafter periodically protest. The blow struck her the harder because her own attempts at a separate career were not going well. Her novel, Black Progress, had still failed to find a publisher, and her screenplay, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, had failed to interest a film studio. Never one to accept defeat, Essie gamely tried other career options. During the spring term of 1940, she registered at Columbia for courses in radio writing, film writing, playwriting, and elementary Russian, and worked at them with her usual commitment and intensity, enjoying especially her work with Erik Barnouw, the well-known radio figure. To pursue her interest in photography, she went off in August 1940 on a trip to Central America, vowing, “I will make the most of myself these next six months and see what happens.” An admiring Nehru wrote her, “Your mental energy is something amazing.”21

  Paul, meanwhile, continued his occasional concertizing, interspersed with considerable political activity. He agreed to serve on a board of eight (including Richard Wright, Edna Thomas, Max Yergan, and Alain Locke) for the Negro Playwrights’ Company, launched in the summer of 1940 to help fill the void left by the demise of the Federal Theatre, and he sang at an inaugural celebration for the company that drew five thousand people (three-fourths of them white; Ben Davis, Jr., ascribed the lack of attendance by blacks to the high admission price).22

  Additionally, Robeson went on the radio to introduce songs of the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War, appeared at a rally in behalf of the China Defense League, helped to dedicate the Children’s Aid Society in Harlem, and, along with a host of other celebrities, appeared at a mass meeting sponsored by the Committee to Defend America by Keeping Out of War, to protest conscription and other preparedness measures. There he argued, yet again, that under their present leadership Britain and France were essentially engaged in a struggle to protect the profits of plutocrats, not the rights of the people. As late as March 1941, Robeson told a reporter that he was against aid for Britain because he believed the mobilization was primarily aimed at saving the British Empire. According to the reporter, Robeson spoke “angrily” and “stormed” over the refusal of the British ruling class to do anything “about giving India and Ireland and Africa a taste of democracy.” But after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the war would become, in Robeson’s eyes, an unimpeachable and united struggle against fascism.23

  Starting out on another concert tour in the fall of 1940, Robeson took along with him as “associate artist” Clara Rockmore, the pert, feisty, attractive second wife of Bob Rockmore, and the world’s leading theremin player (an instrument whose tone and dynamics are created by the juxtaposition of the hands in an electromagnetic field). Clara Rockmore had begun her musical life as a prodigy (as had her pianist sister, Nadia Reisenberg), winning admittance at the unprecedented age of five (Heifetz had been eight) to the conservatory in Petrograd to study violin with the famed Leopold Auer, teacher of Heifetz, Zimbalist, and Elman. An injury to her arm forced her, at age nineteen, to give up the violin and turn to a career with the theremin. She and Paul were already good friends before their tour together in 1940, when they became “just good friends,” affectionately addressing each other as “Clarochka” and “Pavlik.”24

  They were to do three tours together in the forties, and during their long months on the road Paul would sometimes confide in Clara, shedding the everyday cordiality that had become second nature to him (and which, along with being an expression of his genuine warmth, had long served as protective coloration as well, as a guard against unwanted intrusion). Paul’s generosity of spirit showed itself, Clara Rockmore recalls, in his delight at her success with the reviewers. It was not some undefined “charisma”—so often remarked upon—that set Robeson apart, in her opinion; it was “a weight of concern”—the sense he transmitted of concentrated interest in others.25

  He also let Clara see more of the depth of his hurt and anger in the face of racial discrimination. When they played the college towns there was rarely a problem, but elsewhere racial incidents did occur, despite Robeson’s celebrity and his presumed immunity from discrimination. Clara Rockmore recalls “the indignity of having to go through a different door than Paul and Larry did, of coming into a railroad station with signs marked ‘For Whites Only.’” She remembers, too, once impulsively throwing her arms around Larry in public, only to have him gently reprove her: “I’d better teach you the facts of life”; when she persisted—“I don’t care what they think”—Larry replied, “I know you don’t care, but do you want to get me lynched?” To deflect intrusion—and hostility—Paul and Clara would usually talk to each other in Russian when in public places, amused at the stupefaction on onlookers’ faces at the sight of a giant black man and a diminutive white woman chatting away in some unintelligible tongue. (She found his Russian “beautiful”; he spoke it “almost too well,” having learned, from his reading, the literary language of Pushkin and Dostoevsky.)26

  Following a concert in San Francisco one night in November 1940, famished after the performance and high-spirite
d from its success, Clara and Paul (still dressed in evening gown and tails) went with friends to get some food at Vanessi’s, a well-known spot in the cosmopolitan North Beach area. Their party included Revels Cayton, the black labor leader (then an official of the Maritime Union of the Pacific), who was becoming a good friend of Robeson’s; his wife, Lee; Louise Bransten, the wealthy white left-wing supporter (a devoted friend of Robeson’s, and a sometime lover); and John Pittman, black foreign editor of the San Francisco People’s World. The light-skinned Pittman, first to enter the restaurant, was told by the headwaiter that he was welcome but that big guy behind him—pointing to Robeson—was not. They left quickly and went back to the Fairmont Hotel, “made quite a joke” of the incident, ordered food in the room, and had a party. On the surface Robeson reacted “philosophically”—but he was angry. Friends of his in San Francisco subsequently brought suit against Vanessi’s for discrimination, but it never came to trial.27

  The episode, including the way Robeson handled it, was characteristic. His polite exterior was no accurate gauge of the intensity of his inner feelings—and now and then the geniality gave way and his rage poured out. Once, in the privacy of the Rockmore living room, he stormed around in such indignation over a racial slur that Clara, in alarm, tried to soothe him with some folksy parable about “being careful when cleaning a chicken not to let the bile touch the sweet meat, because just pricking that bile would embitter it”; Paul laughed and allowed himself to be mollified. But, as Clara herself recognized, “When he was insulted, he knew he was being insulted. When he wasn’t, he knew that he wasn’t. He knew where he was welcome, and why, and for what reason. Or not. He was a very wise man who would not only hear what you asked, but would know why you were asking it.” (However, a close friend describes him as being, by the end of the decade, in a controlled rage “most of the time.”)28

  Paul also confided to Clara his doubts about the quality of his musicianship. He worried about his lack of training and the fact that he had never led a musician’s life—he did not go frequently to concerts, did not travel in musical circles, was not familiar with various instruments and with musical literature, was not able to sight-read. These were serious deficiencies, he told Clara. His sense of inadequacy in part reflected his high regard, as an instinctive scholar, for those who had thoroughly mastered all aspects of a given subject over those who proceeded on the basis of natural gifts alone. But he “made too much of it,” had, in her view, “an exaggerated respect for musicians who were trained classically.” She would scold him for belittling himself, for internalizing a negative, patronizing evaluation of his gifts by musicians who were in fact envious of the unique quality of his voice—a specialness their academic training had failed to provide. Besides, Clara did not believe that his lack of training had actually hampered his development. Even with the requisite background, he would not, in her opinion, have wanted to perform operas or oratorios. She never sensed a strong temperamental inclination on his part toward opera, or any significant frustration at being denied (as a black singer) the opportunity to perform it. “He was not dreaming about operas. If he had all the equipment under the sun, I doubt that he would want to sing opera. It didn’t make him less, it didn’t make him more. He was what he was. He was an actor-singer, carrying a message in the song. I don’t think that with some training he would have been any greater a Paul Robeson. He might have been less. There will not be another Paul Robeson. There’ll be people with as good a voice, but they won’t have as much heart.”29

  While Paul, Clara, and Larry toured, Essie was not thriving. Her weight soared to 153 pounds; her socializing narrowed to a few old friends like Corinne Wright and Minnie Sumner; her writing was still unpublished, her photography unrecognized. She turned her restless energy to attending parents’ functions at Pauli’s school and to taking lessons in jiujitsu. She sent letters to Paul reporting her prowess in learning the hip throw and—in pointed detail—her excursions with Pauli, such as buying him his “first young man’s clothes” at De Pinna’s (“I said they were your present, because you had always said YOU were going to give him his first grown up clothes”). Her efforts at retaliation—“Pauli was thrilled with your wire. I’m so glad you did send it. It was a little confusing, with the signature Paul Robeson. Pauli could not understand why it wasn’t signed Daddy?”—did nothing to narrow the growing gulf between them.30

  In the early spring of 1941, bowing to Essie’s importunities, willing to indulge her stylish fantasies if simultaneously they would serve to remove her and her overbearing mother from his proximity (and give him, as well, the tax advantages of an out-of-state residence), Paul agreed to purchase an imposing two-and-a-half-acre, twelve-room Georgian-Colonial house in Enfield, Connecticut, for nineteen thousand dollars. Complete with servants’ quarters, a swimming pool, and a separate recreation building that had a bowling alley and billiard room, the house was so large and in such disrepair that one of the workmen hired to fix it up told a reporter, “He’s gonna hafta sing alotta songs to heat this place.” Essie did some of the manual labor herself, including painting much of the house (Freda’s brother, on a visit, was “shocked to come upon her balanced on a scaffold while putting a coat of paint on the staircase ceiling”)—though Bob Rockmore’s sense of fiscal propriety was nonetheless jarred by her expenditures. On May 1, 1941, Essie, Pauli, and Ma Goode were able to move into the Enfield house. “We are all simply crazy about the country,” Essie wrote the Van Vechtens, adding that “Big Paul loves the quiet and low gear of the place, and flies home for every moment he can spare even when on tour.” She was adamantly putting the best face on it, as her concluding comment—“it is all much too good to be true”—inadvertently acknowledged. Paul did occasionally spend time there, but his primary residence alternated between the Freda Diamond/Barry Baruch household and the McGhees’, and the focus of his life was in New York, not at Enfield. Which is not to say Paul did not still have an occasional burst of affection for Essie. While in Los Angeles in August 1941, he wrote her a letter that began, “I miss you terribly and would so like to nestle [you] on my nice shoulder and be patted and called Sweetie Pie and oh so many things,” went on to give her news of mutual friends, and then teased her good-humoredly with having met Hollywood celebrities:

  And most exciting of all, at a British benefit (swanky) I met all the stars, and had a special chat with—breathe hard—Mr. Charles Boyer.… I told him of you and he’s waiting, he says. He came to my recital and told Morros [the producer] that he has all my records. So the ground is laid. I said the ground! I feel grand, completely relaxed and am sleeping thru anything.

  He then went on to ask about Pauli: “… How’s my boy. Everyone, everywhere asks about him and I tell them how sweet, intelligent and thoughtful he is, what an athlete—and a few other things. They conclude I like him enormously and am very proud of him. I think they are perhaps right about that.” He ended the letter with as sweetly tender a message as any he ever sent her: “I love you very, very much and miss you until it hurts. I do like my place so much both in Conn. and in your heart—and I feel I’m camping out until I get back to both.” Although Paul was capable of dissembling, this does not seem such an instance. More likely, this complicated man was having a genuine spell of nostalgic affection for Essie. On her side—never one to indulge introspection or wallow in self-pity—Essie plunged into the maelstrom of painters, plumbers, and pipe fitters with renewed zest (Freda Diamond visited her frequently and helped her choose furnishings), establishing a home in which she knew she would, for the most part, live without Paul.31

  The years from 1935 to 1939 had been the heyday of the Popular Front, a time when a substantial consensus was reached internationally on the left. The Communist Party/USA (CPUSA) refocused its sights away from revolutionary bellicosity and toward cooperation with mainstream liberalism in a combined effort to resist the rise of fascism abroad and to work at home in behalf of trade-unionism and racial equality. CP leader Earl
Browder’s declaration in 1936 that “Communism is 20th Century Americanism” plausibly affirmed this solidarity—and also signaled the marked influence Communism had come to have in American life: CP membership rolls dramatically lengthened, hundreds of new Party units formed, and Communists were welcomed to affiliate in large-scale coalitions with “radical democrats.” The Nazi-Soviet pact in August 1939 effectively ended this antifascist unity.

  In the two-year period following that pact, and until Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Robeson took his position on the CP side of the sundered left-wing coalition. He sounded the themes and advocated the policies simultaneously being endorsed through the linked voices of the Communist Party, the newly powerful National Negro Congress (NNC), and some of the left-wing unions in the recently emergent Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The particular fortunes of the National Negro Congress illustrate the shifting general pattern of left-wing alliance and Robeson’s own role within it.32

  The Communist Party had played a prominent but not a controlling role in the creation of the NNC, joining forces with a diverse spectrum of black-activist organizations and leaders. At the first NNC convention, in 1936, eight hundred delegates representing a wide range of civil-rights organizations, church groups, fraternities, and trade unions gathered to form a broad coalition dedicated to struggling against fascism and for civil rights and unionism. John P. Davis, a black economist and Harvard Law School graduate (and possibly a secret CP member), was the leading figure in the NNC from the beginning, but its notable supporters initially included Ralph Bunche, A. Philip Randolph, Lester Granger of the Urban League, and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. This pluralistic combination held at the NNC’s second convention, in 1937, but strains had already appeared. The affiliated mainstream liberals were beginning to be unnerved by the fact that increased funding for the NNC was coming from the Communist Party and from the left-wing unions. When John P. Davis launched an antilynching drive in 1938, the coalition was further rent: the leadership of the NAACP had been working for years on securing federal antilynching legislation and deeply resented this “encroachment” on its territory. The Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939 drove off additional legions, and by the time of the NNC’s third convention, in April 1940 (it had held no national meeting either in 1938 or 1939), numerous non-Communists had drifted away. After a blistering speech to the 1940 convention, in which he equated the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany, A. Philip Randolph resigned the presidency and was succeeded by a rising figure in left-wing circles, Max Yergan.33