Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  31. ER, Ms. Auto., RA; ER Diary, April 19, 1925, RA; Frank B. Lenz, “When Robeson Sings,” Association Men, July 1927 (sixteen songs and encores); PR to Van Vechten, postmarked Oct. 21, 1927, Yale: Van Vechten (“unselfish interest”). Monroe Wheeler gave it as his opinion that Van Vechten and Donald Angus were lovers (interview with Wheeler, Nov. 12, 1985). The program for the concert is in RA. It was repeated twice more—on May 3, in the same Greenwich Village theater, and on May 17, in the 48th Street Theater. Three drafts of a blurb Van Vechten wrote for the second concert are in Yale: Van Vechten; in it he hailed Robeson and Brown for having restored “the spirit of the original primitive interpretation to these Spirituals … which apparently no other public singer has hitherto entertained.…”

  32. Van Vechten, draft of a blurb for the second concert (“wistful,” etc.), Yale: Van Vechten; New York World, April 20, 1925 (“infinite”); New York Evening Post, April 20, 1925 (“luscious”); The New York Times, April 20, 1925 (“conviction”); Edgar G. Brown in New York News, April 25, 1925 (Caruso); Du Bois to PR and Larry Brown, May 4, 1925, U. Mass.: Du Bois. (Du Bois attended the second concert.) Essie, Paul, and Larry wrote and thanked both Walter White and Van Vechten: “Your untiring work in our interest certainly brought very tangible results” (April 25, 1925, Yale: Van Vechten). White, who went along with them when they made their first test record for Victor (ER Diary, April 21, 1925) two days after the concert, wrote back (April 28, 1925, RA): “I have never in my life been so pleased—and moved—as I was by your joint letter of thanks.… You can always count on me to the limit. The best of all thanks and the thing that’ll make me most happy will be an overwhelming success which will come and which the three of you so richly deserve.” PR had in fact given several earlier concerts devoted mostly to Afro-American music. Accompanied by Louis Hooper, he performed such a program on Nov. 2, 1924, in Boston, to warm praise from the reviewers (Boston Transcript and Boston Post, both Nov. 3, 1924), and again (still accompanied by Hooper) at Rutgers on Dec. 17, 1924, and at the Highland Park Reformed Church on Jan. 9, 1925 (the latter two programs are in RUA).

  33. Interview with Percy N. Stone in New York Herald Tribune, Oct. 17, 1926. The remark linking Hayes and PR is in the New Orleans Item, an article by Hudson Grunewald on Edna Thomas (a friend of Robeson’s) lauding her, in contrast to the two men, as a purveyor of the real thing. Sandburg’s remarks are in the Chicago News, Sept. 29, 1926.

  34. Carl Van Vechten to ER, Oct. 9, Nov. 19, 1925, RA; ER to Van Vechten and Fania Marinoff, Oct. 8, 20, Yale: Van Vechten; ER to James Weldon Johnson, Nov. 1, 1925 (“pore”), Yale: Johnson. In his Oct. 9 letter, Van Vechten reported that H. T. Burleigh, the black composer and arranger of some of the songs Paul and Larry had used, “is in a frightful stew and does not hesitate to show it. Meeting Larry and Rosamond on the street he abused them roundly, saying that neither of them knew anything about Spirituals or even music itself and that the book was a botch.… He threatened to talk to certain critics and promised them bad notices. ‘If you knew anything about Brahms and Debussy,’ he added, ‘your harmonizations would be far different.’” In his Nov. 19 letter, Van Vechten reported that “Bledsoe recently sang to a half-full listless house. He will not put his very real personality into his concerts and he sings Spirituals worse than any one I know.”

  35. New York World, May 3, 1925 (“anything more”); James B. Pond to PR, May 29, 1925 (two separate letters), RA; ER Diary, May 4, 23, 26, 1925, RA. The contracts with Victor are in the RA. ER Diary, April 21, July 16, 27, 30, Aug. 4, 1925 (recordings); May 11 (Vanity Fair); May 7, 11, 21, June 1 (Alda); May 3 (Equity); May 25 (Jewish Committee); June 19 (St. Philip’s), 1925, RA. At the private program sung for Mrs. W. Murray Crane and her guests, Essie seemed inordinately pleased that they “were all asked into the drawing room and introduced to everybody” (ER Diary, May 11, 1925, RA). The photo of Robeson appeared in the July 1925 issue of Vanity Fair. In the issue of Feb. 1926, Van Vechten, in his article “Moanin’ wid a Sword in Ma Han’,” wrote: “Paul Robeson is a great artist.… I say great advisedly, for to hear him sing Negro music is an experience allied to hearing Chaliapin sing Russian folksongs.”

  36. ER Diary, May 10 (Chaliapin); May 1, 2 (Hurston); June 8 (Savage), 1925, RA. Claire and Hubert Delany, the lawyer, were also part of the Robesons’ party at the Opportunity dinner. Essie and A’Lelia Walker were more than acquaintances, less than friends; they occasionally corresponded, and in the twenties occasionally played bridge together (ER to Walker, April 8 [1930], courtesy of A’Lelia P. Bundles). Chaliapin’s daughter, Marfa Hudson Davies, later wrote Robeson to tell him “how much my father in turn admired you” (Davies to PR, Oct. 8, 1960, RA). Hurston’s views on black spirituals are in Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, pp. 54–55. Hemenway (pp. 54, 184–85) quotes from a comment Hurston made in 1934 specifically on Robeson as a singer of spirituals: “‘Robeson sings Negro songs better than most, because, thank God, he lacks musical education. But we have a cathead man in Florida who can sing so that if you heard him you wouldn’t want to hear Hayes or Robeson. He hasn’t the voice of either one. It’s the effect.’“ In 1933, at Rollins College, Hurston produced a successful concert that implemented her view of the proper uses of folk art. Though the evidence is limited, it’s possible to argue that Robeson’s views on the spirituals in fact coincided with Hurston’s. On the occasion of the Hampton Singers’ performing in England, Robeson is quoted as telling a reporter that they would demonstrate “how Negro spirituals should be sung. I cannot possibly interpret them properly … when I sing them as solos. It is not recognized in Europe that singing spirituals is a social act, a group affair, in which there must be both the solo and the chorus. There are many spirituals such as ‘Go Down, Moses’ which I absolutely refuse to sing alone, for it is nothing without the rolling refrain, ‘Let my people go’” (The New York Times, April 26, 1930).

  37. New York World, April 30, 1925 (the New York Sun also carried an article about the incident on April 30); ER Diary, Feb. 18 (Algonquin); April 28, 29, 1925, RA. Fifteen years later Robeson was involved in a second incident with the Dutch Treat Club. The New York World-Telegram reported (Jan. 20, 1940) that he had failed to appear for an engagement at the club and had “deliberately” not notified it—retrospective retaliation for his mistreatment in 1925. Essie wrote to the club denying that his action had been deliberate, but the possibility nonetheless remains. (Ray Vir Den, vice-president of Dutch Treat, to ER, Jan. 25, 1940, enclosing copy of his letter of protest to Roy W. Howard, president of World-Telegram, also dated Jan. 25, 1940, RA).

  38. “Ned” Sheldon was also famed for the remarkable serenity of spirit with which he dealt with his illness, continuing to receive friends in the confines of his apartment—among them many of Robeson’s previous theatrical associates, Emilie Hapgood, Hoytie Wiborg, and Mrs. Patrick Campbell (and, back in 1922, at the behest of H. A. Murray, Robeson himself—see note 16, p. 570). ER Diary, June 12, 1925; Johnson, Black Manhattan, pp. 205–6. Charles MacArthur later apologized to Robeson for some of the language used in the play—like “tarbaby,” “musta’d colored snake charmer,” and “real nigger style” (Jhan Robbins, Front Page Marriage: Helen Hayes and Charles MacArthur [Putnam’s Sons, 1982], p. 37). At the time Robeson told an interviewer, “There is a wealth of material in the Negro’s past,” and he feared “the stereotyped format of plays that will imitate ‘Lulu Belle’ and even the play he now appears in”—meaning Black Boy (Wilmington, Delaware, Press, Oct. 4, 1926). Though Robeson turned down the role in Lulu Belle and had let his disapproval of its stereotypes be known, Essie records a pleasant evening spent with Ned Sheldon six months after the play opened: “Dined with Edward Sheldon.… He is fascinating. The dinner was delicious. Paul sang for Sheldon, and read some scenes from ‘Emperor Jones’ and ‘All God’s Chillun.’ We stayed three hours, and enjoyed every minute of it” (ER Diary, Aug. 5, 1926, RA).

  39. ER Diary, June 17, 1925, RA; Van Vechten to Blanche Knopf, Jun
e 30, 1925, UT: Knopf. Van Vechten to Ettie Stettheimer, June 18, 1925, NYPL Ms. Div.: Van Vechten; “I want to raise $5,000 (or at least $3,000)—not for myself!—as a loan, to be repaid with interest in one or two years for an extremely worthy cause.… I might add, however, that it is not for starving Belgian babies, but would constitute you a patron of the arts!” In his catalogue for this NYPL collection (p. 37), Van Vechten later wrote, “The request for money was in behalf of Paul Robeson. I secured the full amount for him from Otto Kahn.”

  40. ER to Otto Kahn, no date but filed June 22, 1925, PU: Kahn.

  41. Van Vechten to Kahn, Sept. 9, 1925 (“‘gimme’”); Kahn to Van Vechten, June 19, 25, 1925, PU: Kahn.

  42. ER Diary, June 28, 1925, RA; Kahn to ER, June 29, 1925; two letters, ER to Kahn, filed July 3 and July 30, 1925—all in PU: Kahn; Van Vechten to ER, July 1, 1925, RA. If Van Vechten did write the suggested letter to Kahn, it is not in PU: Kahn. In a draft legal agreement (RA), Robeson agreed to start repaying the loan by Jan. 1, 1926—two thousand dollars during the first year, three thousand during the second.

  43. ER Diary, July 13, Aug. 2, 4, 1925, RA.

  44. ER Diary, July 4–6 (Peterborough), July 15 (quiet), July 18–19, July 21–24 (Provincetown), Aug. 3 (Spring Lake), 1925, RA; ER postcards to Carl Van Vechten, July 6, 19, 24, Aug. 4 (plus one undated), 1925, Yale: Van Vechten. Rita Romilly, “Concerning a Singer and an Actress,” New Age, Sept. 10, 1925. ER Diary, July 24, 1925 (Taylor)—also March 15, 1926, RA for another visit to him.

  45. ER Diary, July 3, 13, 19, 26, Aug. 2, 4, 1925, RA. Van Vechten was currently trying to persuade Alfred Knopf to publish Stein’s Three Lives. Knopf wrote Van Vechten (May 18, 1925, UT: Knopf) that he was “entirely willing” to publish her book “if you feel sufficiently strongly about it but there is no use my trying to read this lady for I simply can’t in my present mood at any rate, get through more than fifty to a hundred pages.”

  CHAPTER 6 THE LAUNCHING OF A CAREER (1925–1927)

  1. ER to CVV and FM, Sept. 7, 1925, Yale: Van Vechten; ER Diary, Aug. 13, 14, 15, 1925, RA.

  2. Louis Sheaffer interview with Sue Jenkins (courtesy of Sheaffer); ER, Ms. Auto., RA; Ruth C. McCreary to me, June 11, 1982 (restaurant discrimination). When performing in Black Boy on Broadway in 1926, Robeson and Horace Live-right (producer of the show) attempted to lunch at the Café des Beaux Arts in New York City, but were turned away at the door (Cleveland Plain Dealer, Oct. 17, 1926). Robeson had even had trouble getting his teeth fixed. After several dentists had refused to take him as a patient, Lewis Dicksteen (contacted by an artist friend in Greenwich Village) agreed to treat him. In gratitude, Robeson sent the Dicksteen family free tickets to Emperor Jones. (The incident was related by Lewis Dicksteen’s son, the Queens Democratic committeeman Abbott Dicksteen, to Jules Cohen, who passed it on to me.)

  3. ER, Ms. Auto., RA. ER’s views on race in this period are further set forth in PR, Negro, pp. 52–63.

  4. ER to CVV and FM, Oct. 8, 1925, Yale: Van Vechten; ER Diary, Aug. 13, 14, 17, 20, 24–27, Sept. 1, 4, 15, 28, Oct. 10, 1925, RA. ER took a brief side trip to Paris with Bert McGhee and reported to the Van Vechtens on her theater adventures there. She singled out Racquel Meller as “a great artist,” deplored the Follies Bergère (except for Benglia), and thought the show at the Casino de Paris “terrible” (ER to CW and FM, Aug. 28, 1925, Yale: Van Vechten). She expands on her Paris impressions in her diary for Aug. 24–27, 1925, and later wrote a set piece about the trip (Jan. 29, 1931, RA).

  5. Essie was intrigued with John Payne’s home (“the electric light Buddha in his drawing room is weird and beautiful”), but disliked a recital of his that she and Paul heard (“His Negro songs were his worst. He got a sort of Charleston rhythm into them, that was jazzy and terrible”) (ER Diary, Sept. 19, Oct. 2, 1925, RA). ER to CW and FM, Sept. 7, 1925, Yale: Van Vechten.

  6. ER Diary, Aug. 22, 1925, RA; Emma Goldman, Living My Life (Knopf, 1931; Dover reissue, 1970), vol. II, p. 980; EG to Alexander Berkman, Feb. 5, 1933, Feb. 28, 1936, Berkman Archive, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam (courtesy of Paul Avrich), hereafter IISH.

  7. ER Diary, Aug. 22, Sept. 5, 10, 13, 23, 25, Oct. 5, 15, 1925, RA; ER, PR, Negro, p. 93 (“disheartening”); ER to CW and FM, Sept. 7, 1925, Yale: Van Vechten; CW to ER, Sept. 27, 1925, RA. In another letter to the Van Vechtens (Sept. 28, 1925, Yale: Van Vechten), Essie wrote that Emma “is another real person to add to our short list. We see her very often and like her more and more.”

  8. ER Diary, Sept. 10, 1925, RA; ER to Otto Kahn, Sept. 17, 1925; Kahn to ER, Sept. 29, 1925, PU: Kahn.

  9. Statesman, Review, and Africa are Sept. 19; Weekly, Sept. 26; Tatler, Sept. 30, 1925. A dozen other reviews were raves. The sole negative seems to have been from the American correspondent from Billboard (Sept. 19, Oct. 31, 1925), who found Robeson merely “talented.” Robeson, retrospectively, agreed: “I knew nothing about the technique of acting” (Seton, PR, p. 40). ER Diary, Sept. 23, 1925, RA; ER to CW and FM, Sept. 28, 1925, Yale: Van Vechten (“Star”).

  10. The effects of the tom-tom came in for considerable discussion (e.g., Cicely Hamilton in Time and Tide, Sept. 25, 1925). The negative comments on Light’s production are in G.K.’s Weekly, Sept. 26, 1925, and The Saturday Review, Sept. 19, 1925. Seton, quoting from an interview with Jimmy Light, refers in her book (PR, p. 38) to the African members of the cast being dockworkers and some of them “illiterate.” In the ms. of her book, Robeson had crossed out “illiterate” and substituted “uneducated in English language.” Curiously, the printed version retains “illiterate,” though in most other cases Seton adopted Robeson’s corrections. Negative comments on the play are from the Daily Sketch, Sept. 11, 1925; the Birmingham Post, Sept. 12, 1925; Vogue, early Oct. 1925; The Outlook, Oct. 3, 1925; and The New Statesman, Sept. 19, 1925. ER to Countee Cullen, Nov. 22, 1925, ARC: Cullen.

  11. ER to CW and FM, Sept. 28, 1925, Yale: Van Vechten; ER to Otto Kahn, Oct. 9, 1925, PU: Kahn; ER to J. W. Johnson, Nov. 1, 1925, Yale: Johnson; ER Diary, Oct. 17, 1925, RA (closing). The comments about “a negro play” are from the Birmingham Post, Sept. 12, 1925, and The Gentlewoman, Sept. 26, 1925. Alan Bott, in The Sphere, Sept. 19, 1925, is the one reviewer to discuss “the tragedy of the negro.”

  12. ER Diary, Oct. 14, 15, 18, 19 (Aldridge), 20 (Quilter), 24, (Campbell), 26, 30 (Eastman), 30 (Taylor), 1925, RA; Jessie Coleridge-Taylor to ER, Oct. 13, 1925; Athene Seyler to ER, Oct. 9, 1925, RA. PR probably met Quilter through Larry Brown, who had earlier become his friend. There are several letters from Quilter and three from Miss Ira Aldridge from this period in RA (“magnificent,” etc., is from the Aldridge letters). In the Ira Aldridge Collection, Northwestern University Library (henceforth NUL: Aldridge), there are two letters from Paul to Miss Aldridge and one (signed in Paul’s name) from Essie. In Essie’s letter to Aldridge (Oct. 19, 1925) she asked for a copy of “Summer is de Lovin’ Time,” which Aldridge had played for them that afternoon, for possible use in concerts and recording. Sixty years later Athene Seyler recalled “one intimate conversation” with Essie: “I asked her if there was any real difference between black people and white, as I felt one could talk to her freely on any topic and would respect her opinion. She replied that there was no essential difference at all—but that black men found white women irresistible. This was said quite impersonally but with perhaps a hint of wistfulness” (Athene Seyler to me, Jan. 1, 1983).

  13. ER Diary, Aug. 9, Sept. 30, Oct. 6, 1925, RA; ER to CW and FM, Aug. 10, Sept. 7, Oct. 8, 11, 20, 1925, Yale: Van Vechten.

  14. ER to Otto Kahn, Oct. 9, 1925 (“very tired”), PU: Kahn. She was explaining “all this” and their plans for a recuperative vacation, Essie wrote Kahn, “because I don’t want you to think we are being extravagant. I do hope you will approve of my plans.” He did, writing back to assure her that it was “quite right” to take a rest before returning to America and expressing the view that, although the play was closing prematurely, “the main purpose of your
European adventure has been fully achieved, and its effects ought to be of lasting value” (Otto Kahn to ER, Nov. 4, 1925, PU: Kahn). Otto Kahn is “awfully nice,” Essie wrote to Carl and Fania (Oct. 11, 1925, Yale: Van Vechten). ER Diary, Aug. 28–29, Nov. 2–8 (Paris), Nov. 7 (Matisse), 8 (Beach tea), 1925, RA; ER to CW and FM, Sept. 7, Nov. 16 (Beach, Matisse), 1925, Yale: Van Vechten; ER to Otto Kahn, Nov. 17, 1925, PU: Kahn. Sylvia Beach to her mother, Oct. 30, Nov. 10, 1925, PU: Beach. Robeson’s visit to Sylvia Beach was duly noted in “Latin Quarter Notes” for Nov. 13, Dec. 11, 1925, in the Paris Tribune (Hugh Ford, ed., The Left Bank Revisited: Selections from the Paris “Tribune” 1917–1934 [Penn State University Press, 1972], p. 103). The Tribune also quoted Robert Schirmer as announcing that “in all likelihood” he would issue “an edition of spirituals as interpreted by Robeson.” Essie may have met Beach earlier, when she and Bert McGhee dropped into her bookstore on an excursion to Paris, to purchase a paperbound copy of Ulysses for Paul. It had cost her sixty francs (three dollars), and she had smuggled it back to London “between my bath towel and my douche bag—I figured no gentleman would rummage thru these 2 articles—not even a customs man”; they hadn’t, and Paul had been “tickled to death” with the gift (ER Diary, Aug. 28–29, 1925; ER to CVV and FM, Sept. 7, 1925, Yale: Van Vechten).

  15. ER to Gertrude Stein, two undated notes (Oct. 1925) referring to the enclosed letter of introduction and the date for the tea, Yale: Stein. CW to GS, June 30, July 10, Aug. 1, 1925, printed in Edward Burns, The Gertrude Stein-Carl Van Vechten Letters: 1913–1946, 2 vols. (Columbia University, 1986), originally a 6-vol. dissertation at CUNY.

  16. Stein to CW, Nov. 9, 1925, Aug. 11, 1927, printed in Burns, ed., Letters of GS and CVV; Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Vintage, 1933, 1960), pp. 237–38 (spirituals; Southern woman); in her memoir, Alice B. Toklas supplies her own version of the initial meeting with the Robesons and the encounter with the Southern woman, both very close to Stein’s recollections (What Is Remembered [Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963], pp. 117–18). In the same passage of the Autobiography cited above, somewhat repeating what she had privately written to Van Vechten in 1925, and prefiguring what Ralph Ellison was to say about “invisibility,” Stein “concluded that negroes were not suffering from persecution, they were suffering from nothingness. She always contends that the african is not primitive, but he has a very ancient but a very narrow culture and there it remains. Consequently nothing does or can happen.”